Back when Roger Ebert started this festival back in 1999, he called it "Roger Ebert's Overlooked Film Festival," and focused on films that he didn't think had received their fair share of exposure or discussion. Blow Out might have fit that festival description quite well back then, even coming a few years after Quentin Tarantino brought renewed attention to the film by talking it up as one of his favorites and casting John Travolta in Pulp Fiction, etc., etc. These days, however (and thanks in no small part to Criterion), Blow Out is widely seen as De Palma's best film. Yet picking it for Ebertfest still highlights the fact that the film really does remain somewhat overlooked in the grand scheme of things, perhaps as a Travolta film (in the shadow of Pulp Fiction, Saturday Night Fever, Grease), and also as a De Palma film (in the shadow of more, shall we say, dazzling works such as Carrie, Scarface, or The Untouchables).

The blurb in the Ebertfest press announcement reads:

Roger Ebert considered “Blow Out” to be Brian De Palma’s finest film. From his review of “Blow Out”: “’Blow Out” stands by itself. It reminds us of the violence of ‘Dressed to Kill,’ the startling images of ‘The Fury,’ the clouded identities of ‘Sisters,’ the uncertainty of historical ‘facts’ from ‘Obsession,” and it ends with the bleak nihilism of ‘Carrie’.. But it moves beyond those films, because this time De Palma is more successful than ever before at populating his plot with three-dimensional characters.”

For the unforgettable final scene of Brian De Palma’s gangster epic, in which Prohibition agent Eliot Ness (Kevin Costner) brings Al Capone (Robert De Niro) to justice, Morricone presented nine possible options. As he remembers it, he hoped De Palma would choose any of them except the seventh—which, of course, is exactly the one the director wanted. “In the end, he was absolutely right,” the composer says. Celebratory music is a rare mode for Morricone, who favors more hypnotic, moody creations. “But De Palma chose the piece that was most like [the ending]—it showed the triumph of the police over the bad guys.”

With the latter scene mentioned above, I couldn't help but be reminded of Scorsese's mention about going to see Deep Throat with Brian De Palma in the 1970s. The following is from page 116 of Richard Schickel's book, Conversations With Scorsese, during a discussion of Scorsese's Taxi Driver:

Schickel: The woman—a society campaign worker—is attracted to Travis because he’s so out of her league, as it were. Her Junior League, I guess. Which makes this notion of taking her to a porn movie—

Scorsese: Oh! I know. Well, you have to remember, a lot of people don’t remember now, but at that time, they were trying to make porn acceptable, with Deep Throat and Sometimes Sweet Susan, and pictures like that.

Schickel: I went to a few of those.

Scorsese: It was okay to go with a girl. But Brian De Palma and I went to see Deep Throat, and he said, Look at the people around us, it doesn’t feel right. There were couples. I said, You’re right. We should be with all these old guys in raincoats. It was a wonderful kind of hypocritical thing that was happening—it opened up the society.

While Birks does not leave out mention of the use of dreams in De Palma's previous films, his focus on these three actually makes for an intriguing trilogy, each conveniently ten years apart (it is an odd recent phenomenon that a movie's film festival screening year has become its official year of release: Passion, which played several fests in 2012 but was not officially released in any country until 2013, is referred to in most cases, even the IMDB, as a 2012 film). Each of the three feature long, extended dream sequences in the middle of the film. The dream at the center of Femme Fatale is clearly delineated, yet the whole film comes to seem marked by a transcendent sort of dream logic that feels sprung from multiple dreamers. As such, it does make for a graceful centerpiece in a trilogy that would keep any audience on its toes, as the nightmares from Raising Cain and Passion keep the viewer guessing what is dream, what is real, and by the way, whose dream are we in now?

Birks continues, "Passion‘s centerpiece, at least from a De Palma obsessive’s point of view, is an extended split screen sequence that intercuts a ballet performance with a stealthy murder in the giallo tradition and culminates with Isabelle jolting awake in her bed just as Christine (McAdams) has her throat slashed open. For a time, it isn’t clear if the previous scene really occurred or was just a variation of what actually transpired. From then on the film becomes hyper-real, bathed in expressionistic shadows and Dutch camera angles that are at odds stylistically with the film’s rather composed first hour. Even the story becomes excessively nonsensical with twist piling on after twist to the point of absurdity. The 'it was all a dream' trope has become one of the most groan-worthy in cinema so De Palma’s commitment to it in both Passion and Femme Fatale is all the more daring and admirable. It’s as if he saw utilizing that twist as a challenge in itself and wanted to explore the possibilities. Perhaps if he was subtler about it audiences would have been more receptive (see Mulholland Dr.) but De Palma has never been about subtlety, which is actually one of things I respond to most in his work."