Hello and welcome to the unofficial Brian De Palma website.
Here is the latest news:

De Palma a la Mod

E-mail
Geoffsongs@aol.com

De Palma Discussion
Forum

-------------

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

-------------

Exclusive Passion
Interviews:

Brian De Palma
Karoline Herfurth
Leila Rozario

------------

AV Club Review
of Dumas book

------------

« June 2018 »
S M T W T F S
1 2
3 4 5 6 7 8 9
10 11 12 13 14 15 16
17 18 19 20 21 22 23
24 25 26 27 28 29 30

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

The Swan Archives

Carrie...A Fan's Site

Phantompalooza

No Harm In Charm

Paul Schrader

Alfred Hitchcock
The Master Of Suspense

Alfred Hitchcock Films

Snake Eyes
a la Mod

Mission To Mars
a la Mod

Sergio Leone
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

LOLA

Cultural Weekly

A Lonely Place

The Film Doctor

italkyoubored

Icebox Movies

Medfly Quarantine

Not Just Movies

Hope Lies at
24 Frames Per Second

Motion Pictures Comics

Diary of a
Country Cinephile

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
Love, Dr. Jones!

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.
All topics  «
Ambrose Chapel
Are Snakes Necessary?
BAMcinématek
Bart De Palma
Beaune Thriller Fest
Becoming Visionary
Betty Buckley
Bill Pankow
Black Dahlia
Blow Out
Blue Afternoon
Body Double
Bonfire Of The Vanities
Books
Boston Stranglers
Bruce Springsteen
Cannes
Capone Rising
Carlito's Way
Carrie
Casualties Of War
Catch And Kill
Cinema Studies
Clarksville 1861
Columbia University
Columbo - Shooting Script
Congo
Conversation, The
Cop-Out
Cruising
Daft Punk
Dancing In The Dark
David Koepp
De Niro
De Palma & Donaggio
De Palma (doc)
De Palma Blog-A-Thon
De Palma Discussion
Demolished Man
Dick Vorisek
Dionysus In '69
Domino
Dressed To Kill
Edward R. Pressman
Eric Schwab
Fatal Attraction
Femme Fatale
Film Series
Fire
Frankie Goes To Hollywood
Fury, The
Genius of Love
George Litto
Get To Know Your Rabbit
Ghost & The Darkness
Greetings
Happy Valley
Havana Film Fest
Heat
Hi, Mom!
Hitchcock
Home Movies
Inspired by De Palma
Iraq, etc.
Jack Fisk
Jared Martin
Jerry Greenberg
Keith Gordon
Key Man, The
Laurent Bouzereau
Lights Out
Lithgow
Magic Hour
Magnificent Seven
Mission To Mars
Mission: Impossible
Mod
Montreal World Film Fest
Morricone
Mr. Hughes
Murder a la Mod
Nancy Allen
Nazi Gold
Newton 1861
Noah Baumbach
NYFF
Obsession
Oliver Stone
Palmetto
Paranormal Activity 2
Parker
Parties & Premieres
Passion
Paul Hirsch
Paul Schrader
Pauline Kael
Peet Gelderblom
Phantom Of The Paradise
Pimento
Pino Donaggio
Predator
Prince Of The City
Print The Legend
Raggedy Ann
Raising Cain
Red Shoes, The
Redacted
Responsive Eye
Retribution
Rie Rasmussen
Robert De Niro
Rotwang muß weg!
Sakamoto
Scarface
Scorsese
Sean Penn
Sensuous Woman, The
Sisters
Snake Eyes
Sound Mixer
Spielberg
Star Wars
Stepford Wives
Stephen H Burum
Sweet Vengeance
Tabloid
Tarantino
Taxi Driver
Terry
The Tale
To Bridge This Gap
Toronto Film Fest
Toyer
Travolta
Treasure Sierra Madre
Tru Blu
Truth And Other Lies
TV Appearances
Untitled Ashton Kutcher
Untitled Hollywood Horror
Untitled Industry-Abuse M
Untouchables
Venice Beach
Vilmos Zsigmond
Wedding Party
William Finley
Wise Guys
Woton's Wake
Blog Tools
Edit your Blog
Build a Blog
RSS Feed
View Profile
You are not logged in. Log in
Friday, June 29, 2018
OZON - 'I REALLY LIKE DE PALMA'S FEARLESSNESS'
"HE'S NOT EVEN AFRAID OF BAD TASTE, NOT AFRAID TO GO FURTHER"
https://www.angelfire.com/de/palma/ozondepalmafearlessness.jpgFrançois Ozon's Double Lover was released on Blu-ray and DVD last week-- if you haven't seen it yet, I highly recommend it: a boldly stylish sexual thriller with some truly audacious images. The discs include a 17-minute interview with Ozon and lead actress Marine Vacth, conducted by Richard Peña at the Quad Cinema in New York. When Peña asks how Ozon became interested in adapting a novel by Joyce Carol Oates, Ozon replies:

"I've long read and been a fan of Joyce Carol Oates. Once, an article said even she had a double-- she wrote detective novels under pseudonym. I was very surprised. I wanted to see what she wrote. I finally found this book of hers, Lives of the Twins, translated as L'Amour en double (Double love). I read it as the perfect material for a psychological sexual thriller, a vintage Hitchcock or Brian De Palma. So, I got started working on it, and then learned that the rights were taken, so I stopped. Years later, my producer said the rights were available again, they were in the U.S. I worked and developed the adaptation. I changed a few things, preserving the toxic, perverse, and sexual spirit of Joyce Carol Oates."

Later on in the interview is the following exchange:

Peña: Were there other films that were coursing through your mind while you were making this film? Because it seems to me there are a number of different references, conscious or otherwise...

Yes, certain images do come to you working on a psycho-sexual thriller. First, yes, there's Hitchcock, my favorite filmmaker. I watch him regularly-- a master of narrative and also of manipulation. So, certainly, there are references to him. The same goes for Brian De Palma. He too replays along Hitchcock's lines. So, I fall in that line of art. As a filmmaker, I really like Brian De Palma's fearlessness. He's not even afraid of bad taste, not afraid to go further. He gets deep into his subject, in... in an extreme way. He has a very visual form. There's work behind it. I thought that this film, this story, would give me formal freedom.


Posted by Geoff at 11:58 PM CDT
Updated: Saturday, June 30, 2018 12:01 AM CDT
Post Comment | View Comments (11) | Permalink | Share This Post
Thursday, June 28, 2018
'PSYCHO' & 'SISTERS' DOUBLE BILL TONIGHT IN SAN FRAN
G. ALLEN JOHNSON: SISTERS SHOWED GLIMPSE OF KIDDER'S "POTENTIAL THAT THEN SEEMED UNLIMITED"
https://www.angelfire.com/de/palma/castrosisters2018.jpgTonight's double feature at The Castro Theatre in San Francisco has Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (at 7pm) followed by Brian De Palma's Sisters (at 9pm). San Francisco Chronicle's G. Allen Johnson says the latter screening allows viewers to glimpse the then-seemingly unlimited potential of Margot Kidder, who passed away last month:
No offense to Amy Adams, Teri Hatcher or the great Noel Neill, but Margot Kidder will always be my Lois Lane.

With her death last month — too soon at age 69 — another piece of my childhood was consigned to history.

The truth is, the Canadian-born Kidder’s career was both elevated and burdened by Lois Lane. She became famous, and the four “Superman” films she made with Christopher Reeve were her biggest, yet at the same time her promising career hit a speed bump (Karen Allen had a similar experience after “Raiders of the Lost Ark”).

Her potential is obvious in 1972’s “Sisters,” Brian De Palma’s early foray into Alfred Hitchcock’s turf, which plays — along with Hitchcock’s “Psycho” — at the Castro Theatre in San Francisco on Thursday, June [28].

Kidder plays Danielle Breton, a French-Canadian fashion model who has a night of drinking and passion with Philip (Lisle Wilson), whom she met on a “Candid Camera”-like game show. They are harassed on their date by her ex-husband, Emil (the creepy William Finley), but end up spending the night together at her place on Staten Island.

In the morning, however, things take a shocking turn when Philip is stabbed to death by Danielle’s separated Siamese twin sister, Dominique (also Kidder).

The murder is witnessed through a window by a neighbor, newspaper reporter Grace Collier (Jennifer Salt). But after a quick clean-up of the crime scene by Emil, Grace has trouble convincing detectives that she saw a murder. She hires a private eye (Charles Durning) to prove it.

Although Salt, who appeared with Kidder in De Palma’s earlier “Hi Mom!” (1970), has more screen time, it is Kidder who makes the big impression, with a complicated performance (or performances, if you like) that calls for both vulnerability and ferociousness, sanity and full-out bat-crazy.

With a score by Hitchcock regular Bernard Hermann and elements of “Psycho,” “Rear Window” and “Vertigo,” “Sisters” is a film buff’s delight.

Kidder would go on to make another cult horror film in Canada, Bob Clark’s “Black Christmas,” an IRA drama “A Quiet Day in Belfast” that won Kidder best actress at the Canadian film awards, and a nice turn as Robert Redford’s on-again, off-again girlfriend in “The Great Waldo Pepper,” her first role in a big Hollywood film.

Kidder’s biggest non-“Superman” box-office success was the 1979 supernatural thriller “The Amityville Horror,” and there were also quality performances in films such as “Willie & Phil,” “Heartaches” and “Trenchcoat,” but she never achieved A-list status and quality offers dried up even before her last turn as Lois Lane in 1987’s “Superman IV: The Quest for Peace.”

Sisters,” though, provides a glimpse of a talent and potential that then seemed unlimited.


Posted by Geoff at 7:23 PM CDT
Post Comment | Permalink | Share This Post
Monday, June 25, 2018
UPDATE - 'SWEET VENGEANCE' TO SHOOT NOV '18 - FEB '19
CASTING NOW, MAJOR MALE & FEMALE LEADS, U.S.-SET THRILLER TO FILM IN URUGUAY


El País' Pablo Staricco reported yesterday that Brian De Palma will arrive in Uruguay sometime in November to begin shooting his new thriller Sweet Vengeance. According to a June 26 article by La Diaria's Débora Quiring, the shoot, said to be 4-10 weeks, will last through February 2019 in Montevideo, the capital of Uruguay, and the east coast of the country. Sweet Vengeance is inspired by two true murder stories, and although it will be shot in Uruguay, it will be set in the United States. Two "front-line" international actors will play the male and female leads, according to Oriental Features' Santiago López and Diego Robino, although they could not yet reveal the actors' names, as casting and talks are still in progress. Quiring's article adds that some secondary roles and extras will be filled out by Uruguayan and regional actors.

"For 30 or 40 years," De Palma told the press in Paris earlier this month, "I have seen a number of true stories of crimes presented on television, as in the program 48 Hours. I'm interested in how they tell the story of the crime, so I'll do it the way they do it on television, based on two real cases."

Oriental Features, a division of Oriental Films, is the Uruguayan production company in charge of filming, in collaboration with Rodrigo Teixeira of RT Features from Brazil, and De Palma's own team. Here's more from Staricco's article, with Google-assisted translation:

The new project of the American director, who recently completed his last film Domino, reached the Uruguayans by the hand of Teixeira. The Brazilian, who has independent films such as Frances Ha, The Witch and the Oscar-Winner Call Me By Your Name, previously worked with Oriental Features on the filming of the series The Hypnotist (HBO), as well as the films The Silence Of The Sky and Severina.

Teixeira told the Uruguayans, two years ago, that he planned to produce the new De Palma film. After an intense search of locations, López and Robino managed to position Uruguay as the best place to shoot Sweet Vengeance. The inspection of the places was done with an assistant director of the filmmaker.

Robino described that search for locations as a "very strong" process. "There were very specific things that had to look like another place different from the Uruguayan architectural landscape," said the producer, under the halo of secrecy that surrounds all cinematographic projects in their initial stages. It will be filmed in Montevideo and in the east.

Of the plot of Sweet Vengeance it is known that it is based on two real crimes that took place in the United States, and its story will be set in that country. "It's a contemporary film," said Robino. De Palma "unites these crimes and builds a thriller under his own stamp," he added.

"It grabs us solid," López said about the challenge after reviewing the recent work of the producer, which includes the latest film by Federico Veiroj, "El cambista" ("It's spectacular", the producer said); and the Argentinean "El motoarrebatador" -which was premiered at the Cannes Festival- and "El otro hermano", by the Uruguayan Israel Adrián Caetano.

In addition, this will not be the first time that Oriental Features is under the command of a renowned director. In December of 2017 the producer filmed, during a weekend, part of the movie The Pope, of Netflx, directed by Fernando Meirelles (City of God) and which was photographed by the Uruguayan César Charlone. That creative duo had brought, in 2007, the shooting of Blindness, which had Julianne Moore and Mark Ruffalo filming in Montevideo.

With their future work with De Palma, Robino and López hope to continue opening the doors of Uruguay to the world of international cinema. They recognized that the challenge is great and that the director is not known to maintain a calm climate in his sets.

The pre-production will start in November, but both producers said they are ready. "It will be complex and to that we must add that it is Brian De Palma," said López. "It is a demand that we must have without hesitation."


Previously:
De Palma designing complex drone shot for new film

Posted by Geoff at 3:15 AM CDT
Updated: Tuesday, June 26, 2018 7:11 PM CDT
Post Comment | View Comments (3) | Permalink | Share This Post
Friday, June 22, 2018
VIDEO LINK - DE PALMA DISCUSSES 'CASUALTIES OF WAR'
AT CINEMATHEQUE MASTERCLASS EARLIER THIS MONTH - CLICK ON IMAGE FOR LINK
https://www.angelfire.com/de/palma/artemasterclassjune2018.jpg

Posted by Geoff at 8:16 AM CDT
Post Comment | View Comments (2) | Permalink | Share This Post
Sunday, June 17, 2018
MARTIN BREGMAN DIES AT 92
PRODUCER OF 'SCARFACE' & 'CARLITO'S WAY' HAD LONG ASSOCIATION WITH AL PACINO


Martin Bregman, producer of the great Al Pacino/Brian De Palma collaborations Scarface and Carlito's Way, died Saturday of a cerebral hemorrhage. He was 92.

Bregman discovered Al Pacino in an Off Broadway play. "I think it was The Indian Wants the Bronx, one of the early plays by Israel Horovitz in the late ’60s," Bregman's son, Michael Bregman (a co-producer on Carlito's Way) tells Deadline's Mike Fleming Jr. Bregman signed Pacino and became his personal and business manager. At various times throughout his career, Bregman also managed Alan Alda, Barbra Streisand, Woody Allen, Faye Dunaway, Candice Bergen and Bette Midler.

According to a Variety obit by Carmel Dagan:

Bregman nurtured Pacino as the actor built his stage and then his film career, helping Pacino land his first starring role in a feature, 1971’s “Panic in Needle Park,” for which the actor beat out Robert De Niro.

Building film projects around the young Pacino, Bergman produced his first films in 1973’s “Serpico” and 1975’s “Dog Day Afternoon,” both memorably starring the actor [and both directed by Sidney Lumet]. The two would later reteam for 1983’s “Scarface,” 1989’s “Sea of Love” and 1993’s “Carlito’s Way.”


Pacino has always believably stated that a remake of Scarface was his idea to begin with. However, Bregman told Ken Tucker, author of Scarface Nation, that the idea "was mine. The concept was to do a film about the rise and fall of an American gangster, or the rise and fall of an American businessman. Or somebody with power. And that's what [excited] the audience for this. If you go into the hip-hop world, they consider it a story about coming up-- do you know what 'coming up' means? Coming from nothing. Which, let's face it, most of the people in this country-- in this world-- come from nothing. We weren't all blessed with rich fathers."

Talking to Tucker about changing the story from Chicago to Miami, Bregman said, "It was Sidney Lumet's idea. When I first went to Sidney, with whom I disagreed later on a political issue, in the initial discussion, he had a great idea. Sidney said, 'Well, liquor is no longer outlawed, there's no such thing as Prohibition, and why don't you look into the cocaine world,' which at the time was reaching epidemic proportions as an illegal import into the country, and largely through ports in southern Florida. And that was it. That was a brilliant idea of his."

More from Tucker's Scarface Nation:

While completing the editing of Blow Out, De Palma was approached by producer Martin Bregman about remaking Hawks's Scarface with Pacino as its star. De Palma was intrigued by Bregman's idea-- which at that point was Scarface as a period piece, set during the early 1930s-- and began working on a script with the playwright David Rabe. (De Palma had collaborated with Rabe off-Broadway, in a revival of the 1971 play The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel, and on an early version of Prince of the City, which, with a different script, would eventually be directed by Sidney Lumet.)

But De Palma and Rabe never found a way to do the story that pleased them, and so they bowed out of Bregman's project, which the producer then took to-- in a tidy coincidence-- Sidney Lumet. Bregman paired Lumet with Oliver Stone. "I brought Stone in," Bregman told me. "I'd known him for years. I'd once optioned a script he'd written that I couldn't get anyone to make and that film was Platoon." (Ah, the ones that get away, eh?)

"Oliver was a wonderful writer and had experienced the ups and downs of cocaine. I'm not telling you anything out of school, because he'd tell you the same thing." And indeed Stone has, to me and in numerous interviews...

Stone's druggy days are, even in his own mind, legion. "I'll admit that cocaine kicked my ass. It's one of the things that beat me in life," he's said. "Cocaine took me to the edge."

Stone ticks off this era of his filmography as something of a pharmaceutical event: "Conan was written on cocaine and downers. The drug period was from Conan through The Hand, and into my research for Scarface.

Stone seized on Lumet's idea to transform Scarface from a '30s Chicago gangster to an '80s Cuban immigrant-turned-gangster. "Scarface grew out of this Lumet idea of the Marielitos coming to America, the brazenness, the drug trade, making it big, taking over from the old Cuban mob." Stone has said, "The Marielitos at the time had gained a lot of publicity for their open brazenness. The Marielitos were the 'crazies.' They were deported by castro in 1981 to America... it was perceived he was dumping all the criminals into the American system. According to the police enforcement in Miami Beach, they were the poorest people, the roughest people in the prisons, who would kill for a dollar. How could you get this outlandish, operatic character inside an American, contemporary framework?... That was the artistic challenge."

Stone did a lot of first-person research "in Florida and the Caribbean. I had been in South America [and] I saw quite a bit of the drug trade from the legal point of view as well as the gangster point of view... There's no law down there; they'll just shoot you in your hotel room. It got hairy; it gave me all this color. I wanted to do a sun-drenched, tropical, Third World gangster, sexy Miami movie."

Bregman told me that he, too, went with Stone on some of these expeditions: "We spent a good deal of time in Florida. Pretty much everything I saw was in the film. The way the big drug lords were depicted were [as] very successful businessmen, and their business was cocaine."

Stone lit out for Paris to complete the script. "I moved to Paris and got out of the cocaine world," he told Creative Screenwriting. "I was an addictive personality. I did it... to where I was stale mentally... I moved to Paris to try and get into another world... and I wrote the script totally fucking cold sober."

But when Stone turned in his script, Lumet balked, considering Stone's work florid, melodramatic, and simplistic-- more the blueprint for an exploitation film than the movie of ideas that Lumet had envisioned. He wanted to explore the politics and human plight of an immigrant who is forced by circumstance into crime. Stone says, "Sidney did not understand my script, whereas Bregman wanted to continue in that direction with Al."

Bregman put it to me more bluntly: "When I had completed the script"-- these producers, they take credit for everything, don't they?-- "Pacino wanted Sidney, okay? I had made two successful films with Lumet and Al, Dog Day Afternoon and Serpico, so I wasn't opposed to that. Sidney's a good director, and in my discussions with him, that's how the whole liquor [theme] changed to cocaine. But then Sidney said, 'I have a problem with this script. The problem is it's not political enough. I see the Reagan administration being heavily involved in the cocaine world.' Which is a crock of shit. There was nothing political about [the cocaine trade]-- it was a business."

For his part, Lumet says that he objected to "the corny elements" in the script, specifically the sentimental portrayal of Tony's mother and sister. "I also wanted to introduce political ramifications, exploring the CIA's involvement of drugs as part of their anti-Communist drive. I didn't want to do it on just a gangster or cop level. As it stood, it was a comic strip."

"And I wasn't about to do anything that would indict [then-President] Reagan, over something he had nothing to do with," retorts Bregman. "He wasn't involved in the cocaine world. At that point I said to Sidney, 'We're talking about a different film. Go make it. It's not this film.' So we separated.

As far as Lumet's dismissal of the script as cartoonish is concerned, Bregman has been quoted by writer Andrew Yule as saying, "De Palma and I had no intention of making a comic strip. We wanted to give the whole thing a larger-than-life, operatic quality." The italics [underlined] are Yule's; the "operatic" is, as I've said, the adjective that will be used by all principals in this production to give a high-culture gloss to its grand-grunge melodrama.


Posted by Geoff at 11:59 PM CDT
Updated: Monday, June 18, 2018 1:37 AM CDT
Post Comment | Permalink | Share This Post
VIDEO REVISITS LOCATIONS FROM 'MISSION IMPOSSIBLE'
FROM PRAGUE & LONDON WITH CARL RODRIGUE & MOON FILM

Carl Rodrigue, who used to run the website "Le Paradis de Brian De Palma," visited Prague and London this past spring with a friend, and revisited several of the locations used in Brian De Palma's Mission: Impossible two decades ago, in Prague and in London. The result is the video above, from Moon Film-- check it out!

Previously:
Two videos about film from Carl Rodrigue

Posted by Geoff at 4:39 PM CDT
Updated: Saturday, July 29, 2023 9:23 AM CDT
Post Comment | View Comments (1) | Permalink | Share This Post
Friday, June 15, 2018
DREW BARNHARDT'S 'RONDO' INSPIRED BY DE PALMA, ETC.
WILL GET WORLD PREMIERE AT FANTASIA FEST IN MONTREAL THIS SUMMER
https://www.angelfire.com/de/palma/rondosmaller.jpgDrew Barnhardt, longtime reader of De Palma a la Mod, has a new film called Rondo, which will have its world premiere at the Fantasia International Film Festival in Montréal this summer. The festival runs July 12 – August 1. Bloody Disgusting's Brad Miska had the description from the Fantasia press release posted yesterday:
A neurotic, introverted young military veteran forces himself to go to a party to meet new people and finds himself plunged into a bizarre criminal underworld of sex and blood in Drew Barnhardt’s utterly mad RONDO (World Premiere). An exuberantly seedy, obsessively well-directed gonzo thriller that’s funny in the darkest ways, RONDO’s violent twists and genuinely uncomfortable moments will leave you breathless from gasping, laughing, and screaming – possibly at the same time. Oddly reminiscent of CRIMEWAVE-era John Paizs by way of De Palma, this is a squirm-inducing, one-of-a-kind exploitation oddity that even the most brazen viewers will never be able to unsee.

I had a chance to view Rondo a couple of months ago, and I would say that the film's website provides a perhaps more accurate description: "Paul, a troubled veteran, is given a special PRESCRIPTION that opens a door to a world of sex, murder, and revenge. Full of black comedy and violent twists, Rondo follows the young vet as he descends into bizarre criminal enterprises in the high-rises of Denver, Colorado." That synopsis adds, "In the tradition of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho and Brian De Palma’s Body Double, Drew Barnhardt's Rondo is a sexy, funny, and distinctly modern update to the suspense thriller."

I found Rondo to be a very vivid movie, in terms of image, story, style, graphic images/language, music, the whole shebang. The propulsive music, by Ryan Franks and Scott Nickoley, carries the film along through memorable chase and suspense sequences. The film features a narrator, and I was reminded of Alex Ross Perry's Listen Up Phillip (or, going back, Woody Allen's Take The Money And Run, perhaps, or even Kubrick...?). When I asked Barnhardt about this, he responded via email, "Stanley Kubrick has been my favorite director for ages and it is probably not possible for me to ever shed some of my Kubrick affectations (nor do I desire to). The narrator is one of those. However in Rondo, unlike my last movie where I used a Michael Hordern Barry Lyndon stand-in, my search for the narrator this time out was built on Peter Thomas and his voice work for both Forensic Files and Nova. So that's what all that is all about."

And of course there is plenty of De Palma influence in Barnhardt's new film: the change in protagonist halfway through, linked by the gaze into each other's eyes at moment of one's death (transfer of knowledge and narrative). An elevator sequence that brings the chase in Carlito's Way to mind. Barnhardt agrees there are echoes of De Palma, Kubrick, but also Buñuel and "even getting to play around with some Peckinpah stuff in the finale." He also mentions Verhoeven. However, Barnhardt stresses, "My hope is, that such a gumbo of influences has led to this picture kind of being its own spicy little monster. Or, at least, MY spicy little monster."

I would say it is that, for sure.


Posted by Geoff at 11:57 PM CDT
Updated: Saturday, June 16, 2018 8:15 AM CDT
Post Comment | View Comments (1) | Permalink | Share This Post
Thursday, June 14, 2018
'DRESSED TO KILL' AS 'DEFINITIVE AMERICAN GIALLO'
WRITER MAKES CASE THAT, INTENTIONAL GIALLO OR NOT, IT SURE STANDS AS SUCH
https://www.angelfire.com/de/palma/dtkgiallo.jpgYesterday, Bloody Disgusting's Patrick Bromley posted an editorial with the headline, "Brian De Palma’s Dressed to Kill is the Definitive American Giallo Film." In it, he states that Dressed To Kill is "a film that has always been accused of being slavishly imitative of Hitchcock’s Psycho but which owes a great deal more to the European gialli of the 1970s. As a filmmaker, De Palma has never been able to get out from under Hitchcock’s shadow. It’s a comparison he invites himself, as several of his ‘70s and ‘80s thrillers are reworkings of earlier Hitchcock films such as Vertigo, Psycho, and Rear Window – basically any of the films that deal at all with voyeurism or 'looking,' a common theme across De Palma’s work. And while Dressed to Kill certainly shares some elements in common with Psycho, both in the way it dispatches who we assume to be the leading lady at the end of Act I and in the cross-dressing reveal of the killer’s identity, it’s pure giallo through and through."

Here's more from Bromley's piece:
If the 1970s were the most fruitful decade for this particular subgenre of horror, it may be no coincidence that De Palma’s thrillers begin to draw from gialli closer to the end of the ‘70s. Dressed to Kill, released in 1980, represents the apex of this influence on De Palma’s work.

Then there are those aspects of Dressed to Kill that feel almost like a 1:1 adaptation of a giallo film. It begins with a woman in danger, as Angie Dickinson’s Kate Miller dreams of a long, hot shower, complete with lingering shots of her (body double’s) nude figure. Suddenly, she’s grabbed from behind by a stranger inside the shower with her; she calls out her husband’s name, but he can’t hear. She wakes up, having dreamed the whole thing, but De Palma has laid out his mission statement: this a movie about a woman who is not safe, just as Bava and Argento and Martino and Fulci had been making movies about women in danger for the previous decade. It’s not just the danger that makes Dressed to Kill a giallo, though, but rather the way it intertwines with a sexuality in a way that’s far more erotic than the hormonal teenage rituals of the slasher genre.

The movie’s biggest setpiece is an extended silent sequence during which Dickinson flirts with a man in an art museum (works of fine art are common signifiers of a giallo), then makes love with him in a cab, goes home to his apartment and makes love again, sneaking out after getting a bit of shocking news about him – the guilt of her marital transgression come to terrible life – and enters an elevator to leave the building and the memory of the mistake behind. This is pure visual storytelling, played out wordlessly across one nearly 15 minute sequence. Once Dickinson enters the elevator, everything changes: hiding in the corner is a blonde woman in sunglasses who begins to stab and slash her. We get an extreme closeup of her eye as the razor cuts her face; not only are shots like this closely associated with filmmakers like Argento, but with entire giallo genre – a genre obsessed with eyes as a function of “looking.” Black leather gloves, the light glinting off of a straight razor – De Palma’s camera fetishizes these hallmarks of the giallo throughout the murder. The killer’s reflection is glimpsed in a mirror by a bystander (a prostitute played by Nancy Allen), which should be familiar to anyone who has seen Argento’s Deep Red. More than any other, this is the scene in which De Palma confirms Dressed to Kill as an American giallo.

But it’s not just the elevator sequence that codifies the movie as a giallo, as De Palma embraces other tropes as well: we get our amateur sleuth in the form of Dickinson’s son, played by Keith Gordon, who becomes obsessed with solving his mom’s murder, enlisting the help of witness Allen along the way. We have the ineffectual police presence, here personified by De Palma regular Dennis Franz. We have a major red herring. We have the psychosexual motives of our killer, ultimately revealed to be the psychiatrist who was treating Dickinson’s character and played by Michael Caine. Aside from the murder of Angie Dickinson early on, this is De Palma’s most overt nod to Psycho, but it’s also totally in keeping with the traditions of gialli, in which repressed sexual desire and gender fluidity often drive the killers to kill, whether it’s Four Flies on Grey Velvet or Tenebrae or A Blade in the Dark or even, to a certain extent, Who Saw Her Die?. Murders are rarely random in gialli; they’re motivated by sex and psychology and, usually, some break between the two. Dressed to Kill fits this model completely.

I don’t know for certain that De Palma set out to make a giallo when he wrote and directed Dressed to Kill, but I do know that he has long been the sum of his influences as a filmmaker. He takes all of the movies he loves, all of the movies that have made an impact on him, then filters them through his own lens (believe it or not, Dressed to Kill is probably his most personal film) and executes them with a near-unparalleled technical precision. It’s hard to believe that a decade’s worth of Italian gialli didn’t play some role in shaping Dressed to Kill, though, given how many elements of the movie are so in line with that subgenre of horror. Whether intentional or not, Dressed to Kill still stands as the definitive example of an American giallo film. There are a few other instances of directors attempting to adapt the distinctly European giallo for American audiences – White of the Eye, for example, or 1994’s Color of Night – but none are nearly as successful as De Palma is here.

Dressed to Kill is a bottle of J&B and some dubbing short of being a perfect giallo.


BUNUEL, GODARD, BERGMAN, ANTONIONI

While Bromley's discussion of the giallo influence on Dressed To Kill seems dead on, his insistence on Hitchcock's Psycho as the main influence on Dressed To Kill overlooks not only Vertigo, but more importantly, the very Buñuelian elements ingrained within the film. Buñuel's Belle de Jour informs the structure of Dressed To Kill just as much as Psycho does, and it also informs the film's surreal sense of sexual fantasy.

Godard is also an influence here, as is Bergman (or maybe it is Bergman via Godard-- see the Weekend/Persona derived scene in which Liz, dressed down to her lingerie, tells Dr. Elliott explicitly about her dream). As Bromley suggests, none of these influences are likely the only ones, either. De Palma even finds room in Dressed To Kill to pull from his own life, Peter being a surrogate for a younger De Palma.

To bring things back to the Italian cinema, however, in his book Nightmare Movies, critic Kim Newman sees nothing less in Dressed To Kill than the influence of Michelangelo Antonioni:

With its dream-like atmosphere and Argento-ish insistence on the importance of wordless, apparently irrelevent sequences like the menacing/sexy gallery stalking, Dressed To Kill betrays its sources and suggests that Antonioni, not Hitchcock, is the real inspiration for much of De Palma's work. Ultimately, the film is only about psycho killings in the limited sense that L'Avventura is about missing persons.

Posted by Geoff at 4:02 AM CDT
Post Comment | Permalink | Share This Post
Tuesday, June 12, 2018
DE PALMA DESIGNING COMPLEX DRONE SHOT FOR NEW FILM
"I'M HAVING FUN IMAGINING IT, SO WHEN I SAW THIS FRENCH FILM, I WAS A LITTLE JEALOUS!"
https://www.angelfire.com/de/palma/goodbyeupthere.jpg

In the Les Inrockuptibles interview with Jacky Goldberg, Brian De Palma mentions his "current project" within a discussion about new techniques, and specifically, drone shots. We can guess that the current project would be Sweet Vengeance, a murder mystery that De Palma plans to shoot in Uruguay:
Are you interested in new cinema technical tools? The very high frequency camera (120 frames per second) that Ang Lee uses in Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk, for example?
Brian De Palma - It seemed futile, but I did not see it in the proper projection conditions; the film has good things otherwise, it's a good idea, but I didn't understand where Ang Lee was coming from. Otherwise, at this moment, it's the drone shots that interest me. In the plane that brought me here, I saw a French film with in-CRED-ible drone shots (he takes out a notebook from his pocket, opens a page where is written: "Goodbye Up There" , drone shots "- Editor's note). These shots have become a cliché, everyone does them because they're pretty, but it's very rare that they make sense. Last year, I was on a jury in Toronto, and I remember saying to my co-jurors: "At the next drone shot, I'm leaving!"

A detrimental consequence of digital cameras is that their extreme sensitivity means you no longer need to know how to light. We can film anything, anywhere, and we immediately have a satisfactory result - and too many people are satisfied. This is how the television style wins. I'm going to look old-fashioned saying that, but the photographic art of a Sternberg is lost, and I regret it. The low sensitivity of the film at that time required extremely complex lighting, so complex that nothing could be arbitrary. Every shot with Marlene Dietrich is a masterpiece in itself.

We can still do incredible things with digital cameras. Things that Sternberg, precisely, could not afford. There was this magnificent Chinese film this year in Cannes, Bi Gan's Long Day's Journey Into Night, with a one-hour clip shot, partly filmed with a drone.
Brian De Palma - Long Day's Journey Into Night ... Not easy to remember, but beautiful title. I'll take a look at it. New techniques interest me, don't get me wrong. But only when we use them wisely. Not to make your life easier. When the Steadicam came out, it was a revolution for me. I used it for the first time in Blow Out (in 1981 - ed), and it allowed me to design shots more and more complex. The one at the end of Carlito's Way, in the escalators, is another good example. At the moment, I'm working on a project that requires a very complex drone shot, and I'm having fun imagining it. So when I saw this French film, I was a little jealous (laughs)!


Previously:
Drones, Stampedes, Gunshots, and many 'oles' - as Domino films in Almería

Posted by Geoff at 11:59 PM CDT
Updated: Thursday, June 14, 2018 4:14 AM CDT
Post Comment | View Comments (2) | Permalink | Share This Post
Sunday, June 10, 2018
DE PALMA FURY w/RAW 'DOMINO' SUBMISSION TO CANNES
"THIERRY FREMAUX MUST HAVE ASKED HIMSELF, 'WHAT THE HECK IS THIS?'"


In this month's cover story of Les Inrockuptibles, interviewer Jacky Goldberg asks Brian De Palma about the rumors that Domino might have been headed to Cannes last month. "I'm furious," De Palma exclaims, "and you can print that! The film was screened without post-synchronization, non-mixed, non-graded, and without my consent, to Thierry Frémaux, who must have asked himself 'What the heck is this?' The producers eventually found the money and we finished it last week. I presume it'll soon be shown in some festival. But seriously, what a pain!"

(Thanks to Patrick!)


Posted by Geoff at 6:24 PM CDT
Post Comment | Permalink | Share This Post

Newer | Latest | Older