#tbt #carlitosway “Here’s looking at you kid” #alpacino #briandepalma #seanpenn #viggomortensen #luisguzman #ingridrogers Those were the days my friends! #blessed #grateful

J. Hoberman, New York Times

The 1973 slasher film “Sisters,” digitally restored and playing at the Quad Cinema, as well as streaming on services like FilmStruck, was Brian De Palma’s first homage to Alfred Hitchcock. Shamelessly lurid, it’s also his best.

“Sisters” boasts an angsty score by Bernard Herrmann, who wrote the music for a number of Hitchcock films including “Psycho,” from which “Sisters” borrows much of its plot. De Palma also drew on Hitchcock’s brilliant use of editing to generate suspense, augmenting conventional crosscutting with his taste for split-screen action.

Hitchcock’s “Rear Window” is another source, bolstered by De Palma’s own interest in voyeurism. Indeed, “Sisters” opens with an episode from a mock quiz show called “Peeping Tom,” which allows a meet-cute between Danielle (Margot Kidder), a model hired for the show, and a winning contestant, the advertising salesman Philip (Lisle Wilson, best remembered for his regular role on the mid-1970s sitcom “That’s My Mama”).

That “Peeping Tom” awards Philip, who is African-American, dinner for two at a tacky theme restaurant called the African Room suggests that, like De Palma’s early independent films, “Sisters” will have elements of social satire; that Philip invites Danielle to dine with him raises the ante, not least by introducing her creepy “ex-husband” (the frequent De Palma collaborator William Finley); that Danielle turns out to have a twin complicates everything.

Although some mistakenly credited a “rave” review of “Sisters” by The New Yorker critic Pauline Kael with launching Mr. De Palma’s Hollywood career, her notice was actually an unequivocal pan: “‘Sisters,’” she wrote, “is a long way from being the brilliant thriller the ads say it is, but its limp technique doesn’t seem to matter to the people who want their gratuitous gore.”

It was actually Vincent Canby who wrote a strongly positive review in The New York Times, calling De Palma, hitherto known for his anarchic comedies, “a first-rate director” and noting, with regard to “Sisters,” that “an intelligent horror film is very rare these days.” (Kael boarded the De Palma bus a year later with his rock extravaganza “Phantom of the Paradise.”)

Hitchcock was a master of dark humor. De Palma’s wit is more facetious and, one might say, lacerating. Presupposing the viewer’s knowledge of “Psycho,” “Sisters” is something like a jaded, politicized remake, reflecting post-1960s disillusionment. The film scholar Chris Dumas points out that De Palma’s substitutions are crucial. His psychotic killer is a white woman and, rather than the ambivalent adulteress of “Psycho,” the victim is a black man (a role De Palma optimistically hoped might attract Sidney Poitier). The only witness to the murder is a 25-year-old would-be muckraking reporter for a neighborhood weekly (Jennifer Salt), widely disbelieved by investigators because of her articles on police brutality.

Once this allegorical setup is grasped, the journalist’s fate, the disposition of the corpse and the movie’s final shot make for a thriller that, while lesser than Hitchcock’s, is more brutally cynical and despairing.

Herrmann’s score screams with the intensity of the emotions being savaged by the characters. There are no lows, only apocalyptic heights of ecstasy and revulsion. Yes, the restoration offers a classy, natural picture, but the uncompressed monaural soundtrack is enough to demand your dollars. Herrmann blares with the recognizable fervor of his Vertigo, but the New Hollywood aesthetic allows him to unleash whatever last drops of good taste he might be holding onto. The composer hits you with one fist while De Palma slaps you with another. Thank you, sirs, may I have another?

While De Palma had directed six films prior to Sisters, this is the first in his canon to be infused with a genuine sense of danger. It’s a risk that oozes from his twisted sensibilities, and the fear is that its toxicity is infectious. An inability to resist his deviant delights might transform you into a lifelong acolyte of the depraved. Commit or join the safety of the AFI approved films he’s riffing against.

You want to look away, but his camera robs you of the option. There is no flight from the scene of the crime. When the plot demands the intrusion of another character, De Palma relinquishes only half of the screen. Jennifer Salt is running to the rescue on the left, but the split-screen gives no respite from the horrors on the right. You can’t turn away. It’s a trick he would later get lost within, but in his earlier efforts, the effect is just one of many sharp instruments in his toolbox.

Sisters relates like a kinky rendition of a Popular Science puff piece. An anecdote overheard by Hitchcock chewed on by Georges Franju and regurgitated by De Palma. Those that lap it up deserve the poisoning that results. Whatever demented gorgers that remain hungry afterward should seek out Carrie, Dressed to Kill, and Body Double.

Given his command of the craft and the trademark flourishes that define his oeuvre, including split-screen and split diopter shots, it’s easy to forget that Brian De Palma made a half-dozen pictures before “Sisters” would cement the style that would define his career. It’s unfathomable given the mechanics of today’s industry to imagine any filmmaker would be able to test out their talents on six features before finally scoring the hit that would propel them forward. However, the late ‘60s and ‘70s afforded filmmakers that luxury, and while all the aforementioned details are fascinating, the greatest pleasure in watching the new 4K restoration of “Sisters” is feeling like you’re in the hands of a master from the very first frame.

Borrowing liberally from the pages of Alfred Hitchcock — who was still very much alive at the time, with “Frenzy” and “Sisters” released the same year — you can already sense the torch being passed. Not only did De Palma manage to snare the scoring talents of frequent Hitchcock collaborator Bernard Hermann, but the film openly lifts from “Psycho,” “Rope,” and “Rear Window.” However, De Palma was no mere imitator. While you might see the faint fingerprints of Hitchcock on the scotch tape, De Palma’s approach moved beyond homage to transformation. Even more than 40 years after its release, “Sisters” feels thrillingly modern, and shaped with a sense of confidence that is simply awe-inspiring.

Sporting a ludicrous French accent that is nonetheless perfectly pitched for the film’s sensationalist storyline, Margot Kidder leads the picture as Danielle, a Quebecois model and aspiring actress trying to make it in the Big Apple. A chance meeting on a completely bonkers game show has her crossing paths with the handsome and kind Phillip (Lisle Wilson), and the pair goes out for dinner and winds up back at her place. However, the efficiently lean script by De Palma and Louisa Rose starts pulling the strings early. Danielle’s ex-husband Emil (William Finley) can’t stop hovering around the couple, and Danielle’s twin sister Dominique (also played by Kidder) arrives unexpectedly. Fast-forward a little bit and soon the cops and an investigative reporter, Grace (Jennifer Salt), are thrown into the mix and if you haven’t seen the picture, it’s best to experience the rest cold.

What’s most striking about De Palma’s film four decades later is its stunning composition. The director’s ability to frame and stage lengthy sequences — particularly when utilizing split-screen perspectives to ratchet up the tension — can still leave many contemporary filmmakers and audiences stunned. Of course, De Palma would employ this technique throughout his career with increasing complexity, and while on some later occasions the style tends to be a crutch for a screenplay that isn’t cutting it, with “Sisters” it’s all part of a seamless whole. The director clearly knows the material is tabloid level trash, but his audacity matches his accomplishment. “Sisters” never carries any feeling that De Palma is showing off or flexing his cinematic chops because he can, or is above the material. The film is utterly transfixing because it plays its schlock straight, and paired with Hermann’s hair-raising throwback score, the effect is giddy. The result is pure entertainment, and even though the film’s big twist can be seen coming with its first twenty minutes, you want to see how it gets there anyway. It’s worth the journey and it’s a helluva ride to take.

Particularly early on, De Palma’s films tended to orbit around freaks and outsiders — “Phantom Of The Paradise” and “Carrie” would be two of the next three pictures he would make following “Sisters” — but the sympathy he feels for these characters, even as they commit horrific acts, has always been notable. In “Sisters,” even as the blood starts to run, the filmmaker feels keenly for Danielle’s inability to cope with the rest of the world. With a background that forever marked her socially out of step, De Palma understands how that might motivate madness, but at the same time, refuses to allow that fact to forgive the choices Danielle makes.

It’s a surprising sensitivity to be found within the ingredients of a high-grade B-movie. However, De Palma has spent his lifetime pushing past and, at his best, transcending the limits of genre pictures. “Sisters” shows the director at a formative point in his career, taking the tools and experiments from his early work, and refining it into his first bonafide classic. However, you’ll probably be having too much fun to even think about that.

In the 2018 film, directed by David Gordon Green, Laurie’s a vigilante and a grandmother and Myers is up to the same shit. He’s escaped from the psychiatric hospital again. This is a return to basics, with a crucial and timely update: Myers will be hunting Laurie, but she’s hunting him, too. Their inevitable confrontation will be between two legendary characters and two resistant horror tropes: the “final girl”—or the teenage girl or woman survivor of a horror film—and this other relentlessly alive figure—let’s call him the “guy who won’t die.” Killing him, which Laurie hopes to do, likely won’t be that easy given his track record of being both elusive and durable. The homicidal maniac is a familiar figure in horror: He shows up, stalks female characters, murders with impunity, and usually tricks police departments, private detectives, and his victims’ trusted confidantes into thinking he’s a figment of the victims’ imaginations. He then makes it to the next film and does it all over again. His invincibility is helped along by an infrastructure that disbelieves women. Still we tend to focus on invincibility as a description rather than as a trait. We take the recurring horror psychopath for granted when we see him on-screen; he’s going to come back, so that the films can too.

The trope is recognizable to most anyone who’s seen a horror film since the late ’70s: For one reason or another (or for no reason at all), the killer is after babysitters (Halloween) or camp counselors (Friday the 13th), or a group of teenagers with insomnia (Nightmare on Elm Street). The victims fight back with an impressive array of weapons and DIY traps, but it’s never enough. He keeps rising. Every time you think he’s dead, he’s either playing possum or had actually died but was somehow resurrected. This maniacal dude is in diametric opposition to the final girl’s position: He’s engineered the series of torments he subjects her to, while she’s an unwilling participant; he is seemingly infallible while she’s very evidently mortal; he’s implacable, emotionless, and she wears her feelings on her sleeve (until it’s inevitably ripped off). If the final girl is “abject terror personified,” as film theorist Carol J. Clover wrote, this recurring psychopath is the institutionalization of that terror personified. The only thing the two figures have in common is their survival.

The guy who won’t die seems indestructible. Most often his continued reanimation defies logic. His death-defying Whac-A-Mole pop-ups are mostly meant to keep the jump scares going and lay the groundwork for his eventual reappearance in the series’ next sequel. But his indestructibility also, necessarily, serves as punishment. As Seth Grahame-Smith explains in the genre manual How to Survive a Horror Movie, “Horror movie characters aren’t killed by machete-wielding monsters or reincarnated psychopaths—they’re killed by ignorance. Ignorance of the mortal danger they’re in. Of the butcher lurking in every shadow. Of the new rules. Ignorance of the fact that they’re in a horror movie.” Frailty becomes a justification for his ongoing rage.

Fittingly, given how fatal ignorance can be in this medium, the final girl often survives because of her smarts, and—aside from deus ex machina plot machinations and the fact that he needs to survive to keep the story going—it’s not always easy to tell how the guy who won’t die persists. But much of his survival has to do with the fact that he has the upper hand—his victims are on his territory, and they’re playing the game he designed. If the final girl provides “a cathartic end to the gore and gloom,” as Erik Piepenburg’s writes in The New York Times, the guy who won’t die represents the opposite of catharsis. He is an open wound that never heals, a menace who survives from generation to generation, terrorizing a new breed of women and young people who have to learn the rules all over again.

Sometimes making a movie is the best way to critique other ones. Brian De Palma’s Blow Out (1981), about slasher movies and political corruption, is one of the most incisive reviews of the slasher genre, its indomitable attacker, and the guy who won’t die outside of film. In Blow Out, a noir film about making films, John Travolta plays Jack Terry, a sound man for a production company that makes B-movies. When the film starts, Jack’s trying to place a scream in Co-Ed Frenzy, a low-budget slasher film. He ends up getting caught in a political quagmire when a presidential candidate dies in a car accident with a prostitute while he’s nearby recording sound. He rescues and then befriends the woman, Sally (Nancy Allen), who was in the car with the politician, but despite his best efforts to shield and protect her from harm, she dies wearing a wire for him. At the end of the film, still looking for the perfect scream, he uses the one Sally uttered before she died, which is captured on the wire. The last shot of the film is Jack covering his ears as he watches a new version of the film and listens to the overdubbed scream, the blue light emitting from the movie theater washing over him. The most brilliant and insidious thing about that movie is that despite Jack’s misgivings about Sally’s death and the trauma associated with it, he uses her scream anyway. He’s part of the system, and no matter how much he cared for his fallen friend, he chooses to keep making money and retaining his place within it. Despite his proximity to much of the same danger Sally faced, Jack survives, as do the slasher-film psychopaths he helps to foster into the world through his production work, and the political corruption the film critiques. He survives because of the system, which doesn’t explicitly target him. He survives because he knows the old and new rules. He survives because he knows he’s in a horror movie, to echo Grahame-Smith’s calculation.

Horror movies often anticipate our cultural acknowledgement of certain social issues, and in this case, Halloween and the psychopath were able to articulate some of our most common problems long before we had the language ourselves, or while we were developing it. The slasher film’s insistence on men who make rules and traumatize women, and who are still able to continue along in that way, has a brutal corollary in the real world. Men in power, from Bill Cosby to Harvey Weinstein to Les Moonves to Mario Batali and beyond, have consistently exerted their will over women who they think “don’t know the rules” or are ignorant of the fact that they’re in “a guy’s place,” or that they’re in a horror movie. What we as a society have finally begun to acknowledge is that they do know, and always have.

In an interview, John Carpenter explained that his task with the original Halloween was to make an “exploitation horror film,” and part of what makes Laurie Strode’s vigilantism in the 2018 version exciting is that it appears to play up the exploitative qualities of the original film as well as other ’70s movies across genres: the Blaxploitation revenge flicks, the Charles Bronson Death Wish–style swaggering vengeance. The textual elements of gender and violence were already there: the fear and craftiness of final girls and their ilk; the entitlement of the genre’s psychopathic male figures; the gaslighting done by male authority figures; the unfair playing field; the institutional nature of the villain’s terror, which is demonstrated in his continued survival. It will be interesting to see if this year’s Halloween will also exploit the tensions that have ramped up in the #MeToo moment, but which have been pronounced in the culture since at least October 2014, when the Cosby scandal first broke nationwide. In January 2018, Atlantic writer Caitlin Flanagan wrote that “female rage is the essential fuel of #MeToo. Unchecked it is the potent force that will destroy it.” She could have been talking about Carrie White, whom Carol J. Clover called a “female victim-hero,” an archetype who uses feminism and the rage Flanagan mentions to enact revenge on her tormentors. Jamie Lee Curtis draws different inspiration from #MeToo in her portrayal of Laurie, who moves from a quintessential “victim” to a hero in this new Halloween. On Halloween: Unmasked, Curtis talked about her most famous character’s importance in our moment, saying “Laurie Strode could be a #MeToo voice for people who have had violence perpetrated on them. … Laurie Strode’s violence is fake, it’s not real, but in a movie to see a character come around 40 years later and say, ‘No more, #MeToo,’ is powerful.” The patriarchy keeps showing up, like Michael Myers, and the countless copycat characters who have come in his wake. In Halloween, and in Supreme Court confirmation hearings, and in elevators outside the hearings, women aren’t letting these recurring villains thrive without a fight, just as the final girls don’t. But therein lies the biggest difference between the genre and real life: In horror films, there’s only one girl left standing.

Also worth noting: Order from ShoutFactory.com and get a free 18" X 24" rolled poster featuring the new artwork (available while supplies last), and they will ship to you two weeks early.

Formed by a compilation of the material, property of the private collector Jordi Batet, the exhibition will exhibit, among other things, posters of all the director's films, photographs of shooting, costumes, figures of some of his characters, vinyl of his soundtracks, and the novels on which some of his films have been based. The visitor can also enjoy an audiovisual montage created for the occasion.

Exhibition 'Brian De Palma. The unfolded look ': October 26 to November 25 in Ca n'Ametller de Molins de Rei

During the period of the exhibition, several lectures will be held about the work of Brian De Palma and a commemorative book will be presented that explores the keys of his filmography. The celebration of this exhibition is part of the activities organized by the Terror Film Festival of Molins de Rei, whose next edition has as leitmotiv the great filmmaker, under the concept of De Palma Vs. De Palma.

Previously:
De Palma vs De Palma - Book & Fest in Spain, Nov 9-18; Book includes forward by Keith Gordon

COHEED AND CAMBRIA - "OLD FLAMES" & "UNHEAVENLY CREATURES"

Meanwhile, Coheed and Cambria premiered a new song today. "Old Flames" is the fourth track to be released from the band's forthcoming album, Vaxis – Act I: The Unheavenly Creatures. Last month, the band's frontman Claudio Sanchez told Rolling Stone's Ryan Reed that Phantom Of The Paradise was an influence:

I have to ask about “Unheavenly Creatures,” the title track. I can’t think of another band that mixes prog, metal, hard-rock, power-pop and post-hardcore in that way. Do you recall how you put that one together?
I wrote two songs together, “Old Flames” and “Unheavenly Creatures.” I think a little bit of “Old Flames” inspired “Unheavenly Creatures.” I was inspired by this Brian De Palma movie Phantom of the Paradise. It’s basically a Seventies version of Phantom of the Opera, a movie musical.

That makes sense. Several of these songs are super theatrical, like “Old Flames” and even “The Gutter.”
With “Old Flames,” I was trying to write something that sounded a bit more Fifties. I just sat behind my digital piano in my living room and constructed the opening piano sequence. I wrote it from there on piano — it wasn’t written on guitar. To me, it had a pretty powerful chorus. After writing that song, that put me in this mindset of writing that sort of material. I’d written “True Ugly” and “Black Sunday,” so I was in this Coheed pop idea. So when I started “Unheavenly Creatures,” I took out this Roland boutique one-oscillator synthesizer, the SH-01A — it’s a very easy-to-use synth that has a very fun sequencer on it. I just punched in a bunch of notes and created this very long sequence and played it back. It was just by chance. I was just trying to create something. Every now and then, I’d hit the wrong note and have to start over. It was fun to put together. When I played it back, it was like, “Oh, this is so magical to me!” And that’s how the chords started to come together. Those were the first two songs Atlas started to gravitate toward. He’s all about the record, but especially those two — with “Old Flames,” I played the chorus like three times, and he’s already singing it as I’m constructing it. I’m like, “Maybe I should go down this path.” He’s a kid! He doesn’t care about anything but whether it sounded good to him. Then I made my way into “Unheavenly Creatures,” and the same thing started to happen. I was like, “Are you telling me you want a production credit on this, son?” In a way, it was like entertainment for him. As I was constructing these songs that were a little more melodically friendly.

Herb Pacheco has passed at 88. If you saw Phantom of the Paradise you may remember him as Swan's bodyguard. For decades he had my back. Road manager, Security, babysitter. A former stuntman and gifted co-conspirator, he'd introduce himself as my fencing instructor. Loved him.🙏🏻

The book surveys the contemporary American sociopolitical landscape through a mordant, erotically charged tale of corruption and revenge inspired by the sex scandal involving ex-senator and presidential candidate John Edwards. Are Snakes Necessary? is rooted not in serious literary aspirations but in the sheer pleasure of its twisted conspiratorial world that ensnares the reader in an anxious web of doubt by constantly toying with the boundaries between artifice and authenticity.

Permeated with allusions to his filmography, De Palma's first novel is as much a thematic as a formal extension of his cinematic preoccupations. The fragmented, labyrinthine structure presents itself as a novelistic equivalent of split-screen: each chapter espouses a different point of view and drives the ensemble narrative toward a theatrically orchestrated, morbid conclusion whose swift perspective shifts echo the filmmaker's experiments with intercutting and the failed heroism of Blow Out (1981).

The storytelling efficacy of De Palma's project lies in its ability to intimately chart the characters' deteriorating inner lives as the lines between hunter and prey dissolve. This toxic duplicity is counterbalanced by Fanny Cours, a student videographer who emerges as the epitome of idealistic innocence in her efforts to unearth vestiges of purity within Lee Rogers, the rotten, adulterous middle-aged politician she falls in love with while working for his campaign. But when the masks come off, what remains beneath the comforting illusion of romantic symbiosis is the insatiable narcissistic yearning for adulation.

Armond White, National Review

Levinson surveys social and political controversies such as narcissism, waterboarding, and 4Chan extortion as sick jokes, but he fails to provide comic relief. A feminist gag about remaking Straw Dogs bombs: “Instead of Susan George being raped, it’s Dustin Hoffman.” “Hasn’t Nancy Meyers already done that?” It’s self-congratulatory and presumes Millennials’ unlikely cultural savvy. Through Levinson’s own cultural arrogance, the middle-class double standards look just like the banal American Beauty, and his vision of political turmoil turns into The Purge. Anarchists and lynch mobs wear masks atop masks, leading to the siege of a black family’s home staged in laughably blood-spattered imitation of De Palma’s Scarface. The capper is Lily’s declaration against hypocrisy: “Don’t take your hate out on me; I just got here!”

Eventually, and unconvincingly, they focus on Lily, and the second half of “Assassination Nation” becomes straight-on horror as Lily and her friends try to escape the vigilante mob and, eventually, turn the tables on them. Levinson shoots the violence with a lot of style and energy — there’s a brilliantly staged single-take shot of a house under siege, the camera panning from one window to another, that seems a clear homage to Brian De Palma’s “Blow Out.”

But under the style there’s not much to “Assassination Nation,” and the film’s attempts at making some larger point about mob mentality or the destructive power of social media — usually a speech by one character with an American flag strategically placed in the background — feel forced. Like in the “Purge” movies, “Nation” is a commentary on how horrible other people are, while reassuring the audience that we’re not anything like that.

The film’s attempts to tie its mayhem to the #MeToo movement at the end feel about as heartfelt as Kendall Jenner joining the protesters in that Pepsi commercial. Oh, and if you don’t know who Kendall Jenner is, “Assassination Nation” is definitely not for you.

Masked men are soon forming posses and hunting for fresh meat—female, in particular, which shifts Assassination Nation’s focus away from pricking modern online paradigms and toward cultural misogyny. Lily, Sarah, Em and Bex (who’s transgender) are cast as prey and, afterwards, as noble avenging feminist angels. Alas, their persecution at the hands of Charlottesville-esque white psychos (highlighted by a sub-Brian De Palma-style sequence shot from outside a home’s windows) might have had more bite had Levinson not first spent so much time depicting his heroines as thoroughly awful. As with an upside-down image of a bat-wielding girl standing on the American flag while stalking cheerleaders practicing an eroticized routine in a darkened gym, everything here is laughably underlined in a vain attempt to Say Something Meaningful about contemporary teenagerdom and America. The only thing conveyed by this wildly moralizing, exhaustingly edgy film, however, is its own shock-tactic self-love.

The red, white and blue split-screen that showcases the horny, house-partying girls of Assassination Nation is the first—and maybe best—bit of neo-Godardian gamesmanship in Sam (son of Barry) Levinson’s state-of-the-union horror comedy. Suffice it to say that there are more plausible candidates to make satire great again than the guy who directed The Wizard of Lies, to say nothing of the fact that this ostensibly anti-misogynist plunge into distaff objectification and abjection, with incessant sexual violence (and jokes about rape jokes!) is written and directed by a white dude—a well-meaning one, to be sure, one who has read his Arthur Miller and duly reduced its essence to emoji-style bullet points.

So, sad face: after half the population of the city of Salem has its data hacked by an Anonymous-style e-terrorist, the men turn on the hot, horny high-school girls who’ve so shamelessly inflamed their desires via their Instagrammed existences. It’s a clever set-up, permitting the ticking of various politically correct boxes while exalting in all kinds of wretched excess, hence the entirely smug “trigger warnings” that frame the proceedings (an conceit worthy of Gaspar Noé, and all that that implies). But the more that Assassination Nation tries to be about everything—hysteria, hypocrisy, media hypnosis and, of course, Donald Trump—it sacrifices precious specificities of character and context. Plus, casting Joel McHale as the Purge-masked face of toxic masculinity isn’t as effective as, say, unleashing James Franco in Spring Breakers (yet another film that Levinson is chasing without quite catching up to). Everything you need to know about this film is contained in its most self-consciously bravura sequence, an extended, single-take home invasion that’s at once accomplished, self-impressed, sadistic, and redundant.

Throughout the scattered build-up and visceral release, Levinson has plenty of ostentatious touches, some of which work better than others. During a party, he breaks down the frame into a triptych in a perceptive comment on how what should be an intimate experience is distilled into vertically-oriented, social media-ready clips apt for public digital consumption. Less effective is a single take which floats around the house as the town zeroes in on their victims. By the fifth or sixth minute, it’s clear more tension would have been felt if this was simply a well-executed series of shots inside the home.

Ethan Alter: There is one scene that sort of summarizes the movie, to me, and what it does well and what it mostly doesn't, is there's a long set-piece, with a bunch of Purge-like points (where everything's broken down), the townspeople are attacking the teenage girls who are running. And they're attacked at their house-- the scene is done sort of halfway between Brian De Palma and Gaspar Noé, with a lot of upside down camerawork, trying to do all-in-one-shot Steadicam where you can sort of see where they cut, but they're trying to create the impression of it all being a single-take. It should be, again, a three-minute sequence. They drag it out for eight minutes. And at that point, at about the five-minute mark, you're like, oh, okay, they're just showing off.

Ricky Camilleri: Sounds like Brian De Palma.

Ethan Alter: Yeah, there is truth in that.

Karen Han: I love him, though!

Ricky Camilleri: I love Brian De Palma, but there is definitely a sense, of, you know... Raising Cain is a movie where there are some one-shot wonders in there. Like, this is about nine minutes of just floating through a police station for literally no reason, but... God love ya, keep it up, man.

Ethan Alter: Yeah.

Ricky Camilleri: And the thing with Gaspar Noé, I love Gaspar Noé, and I love the upside down camerawork, and I love when he shocks. Because I feel like all of the things that he is doing, is, he's not putting anything on, he's just naturally who he is, and he can't help it. Love him or hate him, that's what he's going to do. It's not like he walked into a room and said, "Oh, I'm gonna be like this director." Whereas this director seems like he may have done that, and said, "Gaspar Noé." Want to move onto the next movie, guys? What do you think? Got more about Assassination Nation? We good? You wanna just talk about Brian De Palma for a little while?

Ethan Alter: Yeah, we could do that.

Ricky Camilleri: What's your favorite Brian De Palma movie?

Karen Han: Phantom Of The Paradise. Absolutely.

Ethan Alter: Oooh, good choice. Good choice.

Ricky Camilleri: Okay, we'll throw some rocks right now. What's your favorite De Palma?

Ethan Alter: It's cliché, but Carrie. Carrie is just, proto-Stephen King, proto-seventies horror, it's great. It still plays well.

Ricky Camilleri: I'd go Blow Out. The fireworks sequence in Blow Out, with the camera going around, is incredibly beautiful. I saw it for the first time on the big screen and it blew my mind.

#tbt This used to be the longest steadicam shot ever. It’s since been eclipsed.Bonfire of the Vanities dir. By Brian de Palma.We shot All night in Twin Towers.So many rehearsals.I was 6 months pregnant.Amazing shot.