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De Palma a la Mod

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Recent Headlines
a la Mod:

Domino is
a "disarmingly
straight-forward"
work that "pushes
us to reexamine our
relationship to images
and their consumption,
not only ethically
but metaphysically"
-Collin Brinkman

De Palma on Domino
"It was not recut.
I was not involved
in the ADR, the
musical recording
sessions, the final
mix or the color
timing of the
final print."

Listen to
Donaggio's full score
for Domino online

De Palma/Lehman
rapport at work
in Snakes

De Palma/Lehman
next novel is Terry

De Palma developing
Catch And Kill,
"a horror movie
based on real things
that have happened
in the news"

Supercut video
of De Palma's films
edited by Carl Rodrigue

Washington Post
review of Keesey book

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Exclusive Passion
Interviews:

Brian De Palma
Karoline Herfurth
Leila Rozario

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AV Club Review
of Dumas book

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« September 2015 »
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Interviews...

De Palma interviewed
in Paris 2002

De Palma discusses
The Black Dahlia 2006


Enthusiasms...

De Palma Community

The Virtuoso
of the 7th Art

The De Palma Touch

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Carrie...A Fan's Site

Phantompalooza

No Harm In Charm

Paul Schrader

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The Master Of Suspense

Alfred Hitchcock Films

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a la Mod

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and the Infield
Fly Rule

Movie Mags

Directorama

The Filmmaker Who
Came In From The Cold

Jim Emerson on
Greetings & Hi, Mom!

Scarface: Make Way
For The Bad Guy

The Big Dive
(Blow Out)

Carrie: The Movie

Deborah Shelton
Official Web Site

The Phantom Project

Welcome to the
Offices of Death Records

The Carlito's Way
Fan Page

The House Next Door

Kubrick on the
Guillotine

FilmLand Empire

Astigmia Cinema

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Cultural Weekly

A Lonely Place

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italkyoubored

Icebox Movies

Medfly Quarantine

Not Just Movies

Hope Lies at
24 Frames Per Second

Motion Pictures Comics

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So Why This Movie?

Obsessive Movie Nerd

Nothing Is Written

Ferdy on Films

Cashiers De Cinema

This Recording

Mike's Movie Guide

Every '70s Movie

Dangerous Minds

EatSleepLiveFilm

No Time For
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The former
De Palma a la Mod
site

Entries by Topic
A note about topics: Some blog posts have more than one topic, in which case only one main topic can be chosen to represent that post. This means that some topics may have been discussed in posts labeled otherwise. For instance, a post that discusses both The Boston Stranglers and The Demolished Man may only be labeled one or the other. Please keep this in mind as you navigate this list.
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Ambrose Chapel
Are Snakes Necessary?
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Cop-Out
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Genius of Love
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Saturday, September 5, 2015


Posted by Geoff at 8:55 PM CDT
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Thursday, September 3, 2015
CARLITO MEETS TONY MONTANA IN MASHUP VIDEO
'HELL'S CLUB' EXISTS "OUTSIDE OF TIME, OUTSIDE OF ALL LOGIC"


In a new mashup video posted Monday on YouTube, titled Hell's Club, Antonio Maria Da Silva brilliantly blends nightclub footage from a range of films to create "a place [where] fictional characters meet. Outside of time, outside of all logic," as it reads in the YouTube description, which concludes, "TERMINATOR VERSUS TONY MONTANA VERSUS TOM CRUISE VERSUS CARLITO BRIGANTE VERSUS BLADE VERSUS JOHN TRAVOLTA VERSUS AL PACINO VERSUS PINEAD VERSUS THE MASK VERSUS ROBOCOP VERSUS DARTH VADER VERSUS MICHAEL JACKSON." As can be seen in the above screen shot, one part of the mashup has Carlito Brigante and Tony Montana staring each other down. Here's the video:


Posted by Geoff at 11:24 PM CDT
Updated: Thursday, September 3, 2015 11:25 PM CDT
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Wednesday, September 2, 2015
LINKS - ALEX ROSS PERRY'S 'QUEEN OF EARTH'
DP SEAN PRICE WILLIAMS CITES DE PALMA AS HE DESCRIBES SPLIT DIOPTERS USED FOR PAINTING SCENES
This past February, after Queen Of Earth screened at the Berlin Film Festival, we noted some links between Alex Ross Perry and Brian De Palma. As Queen Of Earth makes its way through U.S. theaters (and also currently available on demand), here are some links from the past week:

Moviemaker - Sean Price Williams on the tools used for Queen Of Earth
"We shot on an Aaton Super 16mm. I shoot on Aaton all the time if I can, because it’s a comfortable camera. We used some Zeiss 16mm lenses, different speeds. Then we had the Fujinon zoom lens that we relied on while we were outside, which is a fun lens. We also used those split diopters—Brian De Palma is known for using those split diopters in his films. They can look cheesy, but I love Brian De Palma, especially at his cheesiest. I thought it would make sense to use them for the painting scenes."

Stephanie Zacharek, The Village Voice
"There's a lot going on in this modestly scaled movie: It's a meditation on the rickety foundations on which even close friendships can be built, and on the notion of whether or not nature — even with all its soothing sounds and comforting greenery — is really our ally. It's also a teasing admonition that we shouldn't believe everything we see, as well as a stylish, whispery love letter to psychological horror studies like Repulsion, Persona, and possibly Brian De Palma's Sisters."

Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, A.V. Club
"In Queen of Earth, writer-director Alex Ross Perry—who does snippy black comedy better than just about anyone else on the current American indie landscape—dials down the humor that has defined his work to this point, and turns up the queasy psychological currents that have always gurgled underneath it. Walking a fine line between pastiche (think early Roman Polanski and Persona-era Ingmar Bergman crossed with the opening scenes of a backwoods grindhouse flick) and bona fide psychodrama, Queen Of Earth works much of the same subject matter—egoism, self-destruction, mutual loathing—as Perry’s earlier films; in fact, it’s not hard to think of it as a companion piece to last year’s superb Listen Up Philip, and not just because the two movies appear to share a fictional universe.

"And yet, there is an innate, affecting strangeness to Queen Of Earth, which is pitched somewhere halfway between actor’s showcase and creepy formal exercise, continually foreshadowing a burst of psychotic violence that never comes...

"Like all of Perry’s prior features, Queen Of Earth was shot on 16mm, though here he and his longtime cinematographer, Sean Price Williams, go for a slightly different, trickier formal palette. Both the director’s little-seen debut, Impolex, and his breakthrough feature, The Color Wheel, climaxed with talky, nearly-10-minute long takes that stuck the audience straight into the characters’ emotional trauma; here, he pulls one together early on, structured as a series of eerily intimate close-ups in which the slowly panning camera draws the viewer into Catherine and Ginny’s characters while establishing the connection (or lack thereof) between them. Brian De Palma-style split diopter shots—in which both foreground and background are in focus, separated by a fuzzy middle—recur, making for an effective visual metaphor for the central relationship."

Matthew Jacobs, Huffington Post
"Told in the vein of the classic genre that Perry describes as 'psychotic-women cinema' -- think Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? and Brian De Palma's Sisters with a touch of Rosemary's Baby and Woody Allen's Interiors -- Queen of Earth is an eerie look at the claustrophobia that sets in when childhood fixtures become relics."

Also note that for its cover story on Mistress America, the July/August 2015 issue of Film Comment includes an interview with Noah Baumbach conducted by Alex Ross Perry.


Posted by Geoff at 11:58 PM CDT
Updated: Thursday, September 3, 2015 12:20 AM CDT
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Tuesday, September 1, 2015
TWEET - VARIETY'S GUY LODGE IN VENICE

Posted by Geoff at 5:49 PM CDT
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Monday, August 31, 2015
TWEET: BRYAN FULLER - HANNIBAL MIC DROP
AND MATT ZOLLER SEITZ: 'HANNIBAL' REDEFINED HOW WE TELL STORIES ON TELEVISION



Vulture's Matt Zoller Seitz on Hannibal
"The sophisticated aesthetic developed by Fuller (and his many collaborators, whose ranks include a number of visually oriented directors and a few veteran cinematographers, such as Guillermo S. Navarro, who shot numerous Guillermo del Toro films and directed the 11th and 12th episodes of season three). The aesthetic is the reason why, despite being the most gruesome drama ever aired on network TV, Hannibal never felt unacceptably brutal to me. It is, no question about it, ultraviolent, but not in the manner of a cheap slasher film. It is ultraviolent in the manner of Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd, Brian De Palma’s Dressed to Kill and The Fury, and Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket and A Clockwork Orange (which Hannibal quotes by scoring Jack's beating of the doctor to Gioachino Rossini's 'The Thieving Magpie') and touchstones of religious painting, such as Tintoretto’s 1565 painting of Christ’s crucifixion. It is 'studied' in the best way, i.e., thoughtful, considered. It is concerned mainly with exploring what violent actions mean (to us, and to the story) rather than simply attempting to replicate the physical experience of suffering (although it does that, too; every wounding and death on the show is viscerally jolting and also often carries an emotional charge)."

Posted by Geoff at 11:59 PM CDT
Updated: Tuesday, September 1, 2015 12:27 AM CDT
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Friday, August 28, 2015
TWEETS - MARIO TOSI & 'CARRIE'

Posted by Geoff at 11:58 PM CDT
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TWEET - DTK POSTER IN 'MISTRESS AMERICA'

Posted by Geoff at 11:52 PM CDT
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Thursday, August 27, 2015
JOE AHEARNE TALKS 'ONE WAY OR DE PALMA'
BLONDIE'S SONG & DE PALMA'S IMAGES "SHARE A CERTAIN OBSESSIVE QUALITY"

One Way Or De Palma from Joe Ahearne on Vimeo.

Rob Dean at A.V. Club asked Joe Ahearne about the creation of the excellent video he posted on Vimeo recently, One Way Or De Palma, in which he masterfully edited images from the films of Brian De Palma, setting them to a soundtrack of Blondie's One Way Or Another. Here is what Ahearne had to say to Dean:

I saw my first De Palma film when I was 17—Dressed To Kill—and that film taught me what it was a director does. It was only on repeated viewings that I realised what was happening with the slow motion (so gripped was I, I didn’t even realise the film had slowed down), the music, the colour, the editing, the framing, the camera moves, the story-telling (later on of course I realised what a superb director of actors he was too). And I hunted down all his films before and since (almost—haven’t seen Get To Know Your Rabbit yet!). I grew up on spectacle like Star Wars but De Palma showed me how a director could invest human scale drama with even more extraordinary emotion and intensity. Anyone who’s seen any of the stuff I’ve done who loves De Palma will easily spot the influences.

For a long time I’ve wanted to use De Palma’s images against Blondie’s “One Way or Another.” They share a certain obsessive quality. It was so great viewing De Palma’s last 22 films and appreciating him like a great composer, enjoying the reworking and recapitulation and reframing of themes - hearing his voice, I suppose. What really came home to me this time (I’ve seen them all many times) was what a master of colour he is. I tried to reflect that in the cut.


Ahearne said 22 films, but his video actually includes clips from De Palma's last 23 films, from Sisters on through Passion (with Home Movies and Wise Guys included in the mix).

Posted by Geoff at 11:50 PM CDT
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Wednesday, August 26, 2015
MUST-SEE VIDEO: 'ONE WAY OR DE PALMA'
EDITED BY JOE AHEARNE
Joe Ahearne, the writer/director whose Trance was recently made into an excellent feature film directed by Danny Boyle, edited together an amazing supercut of shots from Brian De Palma films set to Blondie's One Way Or Another. Titled One Way Or De Palma, the video was put together with great revelatory skill by someone who obviously knows these movies very well. This has to be the best "megamix" of De Palma's films I've seen yet-- it's a stunner, done with superb care and wit. Below is the tweet from Edgar Wright that brought my attention to the video (I cannot embed the video, so you'll have to watch it on Vimeo, where you can also download it).


Posted by Geoff at 11:50 PM CDT
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Tuesday, August 25, 2015
ITALIAN TV CINECHAT TRIBUTE TO DE PALMA SEPT 11
DISCUSSES HIS ITALIAN ROOTS, FILMS, ETC. - FOLLOWED BY 'CASUALTIES OF WAR'
Italian TV channel Studio Universal will present a tribute to Brian De Palma to mark his 75th birthday on September 11, 2015, according to TV Numeriuno. The Cinechat, which has already been recorded (with De Palma sitting in the yellow chair seen here), will be followed by a showing of De Palma's Casualties Of War. The TV Numeriuno article/press release includes several quotes from De Palma, pulled from the Cinechat:

"My Italian origin is rather rooted in me... it's a kind of baggage that I always carry."

"When I returned to Italy I was in college. I arrived in Rome with two friends and I bought a Lambretta. I will never forget the tours I made by Vittorio Emanuele... then I took a car and drove from Venice all the way to Paris. During the trip I saw the beautiful cities of Siena, Perugia, Florence with a sensation of how much beauty there is in this country."

"My experiences and my feelings are part of my films and the Italian cinema affected me very much. I remember Rossellini, Anna Magnani, and also the way in which Antonioni visually conceptualized his ideas. I will never forget movies like L’Avventura or Red Desert."

"In my opinion the best American film about Italy is The Godfather, and not because we talk about mafia, but because it tells us that the family is an integral part of Italian culture."


Posted by Geoff at 10:55 PM CDT
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