While I know I’ve never discussed any direct adaptations of The Phantom of the Opera, I can’t wait much longer to talk about this 70s reimagination. I’ll admit, my only REAL experience with the original is the 50s Universal version, which is pretty but somewhat underwhelming to me. Jumping right to the beast that is De Palma’s version, it makes me so genuinely happy that he came up with this wacky concept for this story, blending genres and classic literature in the dna of this film. This early in his career, De Palma already has already instilled his own subversive eye into film history. Knowing so little about this going in, the opening with the Juicy Fruits’ performance was a fantastic way not only to make me intrigued from the juxtaposition of the promotional material and this upbeat 50s jukebox song, but a fantastic tonal precedent the film immediately decides on. Winslow Leach is our protagonist, a songwriter who is desperate to be heard. We meet Swan, the owner of “The Paradise” an elaborate theater that houses only the most popular artists of the time, portrayed by Paul Williams, who does an outstanding job. Him and William Finley fit the bill perfect for this Faustian Tale, as the two make a deal, not without Winslow becoming disfigured shortly after. As we see Swan pulling the strings to make the paradise follow a course he paves, we see it largely from Winslow’s new and twisted perspective. This lends itself to De Palma’s voyeuristic fascination, as Winslow is as curious about how evil Swan’s plan of intellectual theft is as he is infatuated with how perfect Phoenix (Jessice Harper) can sing his music. And I feel ya Winslow, Jessica Harper is a scene stealer for sure, and I was genuinely surprised to see her in this, and sing as well as she does. Anyway, Swan oversees Winslow’s complete disfigurement, and continues to use his music for his own gain in a foreseeable portrayal. Winslow’s voice and appearance is an awesome exaggeration of his fate, and fits perfectly with the style of this story. The music in this film is fantastic, which is of course pivotal to this kind of story.

It’s well written and is very pleasing to the ear. I’m not sure how involved in the screenwriting process Paul Williams was, but his soundtrack does a damn fine job of marrying Brian’s script. And man, “The Hell of It” is seriously the end credits song to beat. I love all of the horror references in here, from Phantom of the Opera, to Psycho, to The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, etc, it goes to show how immaculate of a melting pot this story is. Orgies, soft slasher vibes, rock and roll obsession, all De Palma at his zaniest. Scenes of lurid violence are rather elegant, with beautiful settings like a rainy window, and bursts of color like the paint-red blood. The production design is my favorite part of this film, it has some of the most gorgeous sets ever put to film in my opinion. Jack Fisk’s eye for the aesthetic of Phantom of the Paradise is near unmatched, and the set dressing was done by Sissy Spacek. It’s consistently spooky, but retains it’s all out climactic insanity until the very end, where all hell breaks loose, and the sheer loss of control of the Paradise is frightening on a deeper level. This has to be one of the best films of the 70s, one of De Palma’s greatest works, and an absolutely insane ride from start to finish.

“I sort of have this ongoing fantasy, like a lot of people do,” says Edgar Wright, director of Last Night in Soho. “And I don’t know whether it’s a fantasy or a malaise or something, where you just think about going back in the past, all the time. But then I think it’s always tempered with the knowledge that yes, it might be great to go back. But that doesn’t mean that everything was great then.”

As Thomasin McKenzie, who plays the protagonist of the film, puts it: “Nostalgia is a funny thing.”

It’s something Wright has always thought about, in 25 years of walking around Soho, seeing restaurants and clubs change even as the buildings stay the same. Strip clubs and dirty bookstores have given way to shoe-store chains. Packed record stores have turned into spacious restaurants. The Marquee, where Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin and David Bowie played early shows, has been converted into lofts.

“You can’t help but think about what these walls have seen in any building that you’re in, that’s 100 years old, or hundreds of years old,” says Wright.

Last Night in Soho is a grand, sweeping, elegant time warp of a film, set to arrive in theaters after many months of many people saying big movies are over. Wright began kicking around the idea for the film around 2013, then co-wrote the script with Oscar-nominated 1917 screenwriter Krysty Wilson-Cairns, and began shooting it before the pandemic. When the streets went silent for a while, Wright seized on the opportunity to photograph one of the most celebrated neighborhoods on earth in empty stasis. Then the film did reshoots, and theaters reopened, and Wright saw a film in a theater for the first time in months, but not a new movie: A 35mm screening of Brian De Palma’s 1981 Blow Out, inspired by Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up, a film set in a swanky-to-seedy 1960s London milieu similar to that of Last Night in Soho. Time keeps collapsing in on itself, never more than in the recent past. We look to the future and hope for the past. McKenzie turned 19 during filming, 20 during reshoots.

After arriving in London ("there was a whole group of us," Rubin says in the book), Finley asked if Rubin would go to France with De Palma to pick up a light Eclaire sound camera, mentioning that he also needed another person to work on the film. Rubin had known Fiore from film school, and De Palma had known Fiore, as well. Fiore happened to be on a Fulbright grant in Paris, "and so he agreed to come back from Paris with us to work on the film," says Rubin, adding that they all had "an incredible two days" in Paris before heading back to London, where they worked on the film for two weeks, "through Christmas and New Year's."

Rubin continues in Humphreys' book:

"Bob Fiore and I went to Birmingham, I think... We drove up there and we went to the Beatles' Cavern (The Cavern Club in Liverpool] and there was a group showing there that night called Herman's Hermits. We got permission - I had a card that said I was from ABC News. I don't know how I got it but people thought that's who I was. They made a lot of things available. We went in and I had enough film to shoot one act of the concert. And it was Herman's Hermits, so I got the camera and Bob Fiore was my sound man at that point. I shot this amazing, exciting number using every element of the zoom lens. It was really very, early '60s exciting experimental cinema. I really shot a great roll of film of Herman's Hermits.

"And then, right after it was done, and we were out of film, the announcer onstage says, 'And, now, everybody - here's Herman!' I had shot the whole backup group without their leader, so I had wasted every bit of film of some of the most brilliant filmmaking of all-time.

"We were very ragtag as a group and we did what we could do. We did shoot some stuff of a group called The Who in a room in a hotel but nobody had ever heard of them, really, but people were saying, 'This is going to be a big group.' It was a small hotel performing area in a restaurant, like. I did shoot some of their performance."

Previously:
Big-Screen Blow out at BFI Southbank

So begins Daniel Hrncir in his review of Phantom Of The Paradise, posted the other day at Full Circle Cinema. After delving into the plot of the film, Hrncir continues:

I’ve probably already given you the wrong impression of what I think is Brian De Palma’s best. The plot itself may seem like a downer if it was not for the film succumbing to sheer excess. What a concept for our twentieth-first-century streaming age, where everything has a standard of quality, but not a twinge of soul. Hollywood, so wanting to please the greatest numbers, forgoes the opportunity to challenge its audiences. Meanwhile, De Palma spends every minute challenging his audience with a spectacular mess. And in doing so, Phantom of the Paradise becomes something truly great.

At one moment in the film, Winslow plants a bomb beside a performance of bikini-glad girls and beach boys to get back at Swan. And I tell you what, I laughed. Not because I condone terrorism, but that these surfer teens go up in flames and Swan does not even react. Once again, De Palma employs his split-screen technique in this scene and it’s chaotic, to say the least. Voices off-stage clash with the performance itself in a manner befitting The Velvet Underground’s ‘The Murder Mystery’. And even if you evenly split your eyes between both scenes simultaneously, you still wouldn’t be able to grasp the buzzing activity. You would have to split your ears to catch it all too. But that is okay. It is okay for a movie to trip you up, to confuse or confound you. More movies need to do that.

It would be remiss of me not to mention some of Phantom of the Paradise‘s sweeter moments. Yes, there are blood and guts for the hard rock fans, but much to be had for the sentimental Carpenter fans too. I must confess that I am a Jessica Harper fan, and some of my favorite moments come through with her performance as Phoenix. I had no clue that she could sing, and neither did Winslow and his discovery of her at an audition. Again, excess.

Her performances of ‘Special To Me’ and ‘Old Souls’ do nothing to further the plot, and yet I am so captivated by these moments. They remind me so much of why I fell in love with movies in the first place. I guess it all feels so real in its amateurishness. Nothing about her dancing or singing feels blocked or scripted to tedium like in a Lin-Manuel Miranda production. At the outro of ‘Special To Me’, Harper lets it all loose with a dance off-stage, only to walk back exorcised of her need to move and groove. I wouldn’t even call it particularly good dancing, but that is beside the point. Her sheer confidence makes it a higher art, with an authenticity that goes beyond what the written script calls for. Disney only wishes it could capture such magic.

"Benny's music, when it arrived from the sessions in London, was astounding to me. The main theme was based on the universal child's singsong playground taunt, nya-nya nya-nya nyaahh-nyaahh. His deranged version of this melody included metallic sounds; tubular bells struck with hammers, which suggested knives; and also Moog synthesizers howling a kind of demented accompaniment. The effect is immediately unsettling, even overwhelming. Variety's review of the film would later say that 'Herrmann's score would make blank film compelling.'"

Two days ago, Meg Shields shared a few words about the title sequence from Sisters, as it was included at number seven on Film School Rejects' "10 Best Opening Credits Sequences in Horror Films"...

Featuring cinematography by accomplished Swedish medical photographer Lennart Nilsson, the opening sequence to Brian De Palma’s Sisters is an unnerving melding of the satanic and the sacrosanct: two fetuses, rendered alien, imposing, and devilish under Nilsson’s macro lens. As the titles roll and the embryonic humans loom, the aural anxiety is ratcheted up to a fever pitch thanks to the shrieking strings of Bernard Herrmann, whose plinking, swooping score endows each close-up image with an uncanny sense of monstrosity. A montage of sinister fetus close-ups is the perfect way to kick off a film at the intersection of Hitchcock, giallo, and the psychosexual sci-fi fare of David Cronenberg. Sisters embodies essential 1970s genre film wickedness. And what could be more wicked than endowing the unborn with a palpable sense of menace?

These two shots, Scarface on the left and Carrie on the right, move via slow zoom, from a seemingly positive atmosphere, into a face reflecting something dark on the horizon. Michelle Pfeiffer's Elvira comes at the end of the "Push It To The Limit" montage of Tony Montana making his moves - the music, which up to this shot has been upbeat, takes on an increasingly dark, ominous tone as the camera moves into Elvira's face, which may or may not be looking into a mirror. It will be Elvira who eventually says, "Can't you see what we're becoming, Tony? We're losers."

Meanwhile, Miss Collins is genuinely positive about helping Carrie envision herself going to the prom, and as the camera zooms past Carrie to focus on Miss Collins, there's a sense that she is also reflecting on her own days in high school, leading, finally, to concern - about Tommy and Sue's intentions in having Tommy ask Carrie to the prom. The scene cuts to Sue and Tommy in Miss Collins' office, and we hear Miss Collins' angry voice from there as we linger for a moment on this final reflection in the mirror.

More details were provided by Cine Series' Pierre Siclier, here with the help of Google Translation:

A newly restored Master on DVD and Blu-ray

Released in a 113-minute cinema version, Casualties of War also received a 121-minute Director's cut version. These two versions will be combined in a collector's edition Blu-ray / DVD, which will be offered on December 1st by Wild Side.

In a press release, the publisher writes:

From Obsession to Carlito's Way, from Blow Out to The Untouchables ... Haunted by their past or driven by their integrity, the heroes of Palmiens denounce crimes that others would like to keep silent and come up against systems that crush. Brian De Palma will have had to persevere to transpose to the screen this appalling tale recounted as early as 1969 by journalist Daniel Lang.

The box set, in addition to bringing together the two versions of the film, will offer bonuses that promise to be exciting. Including a twenty-minute interview with Michael J. Fox and a making of that we will scrutinize with attention. As said above, the shooting was quite complicated, in particular because of the difficult relationship between the two main performers. Along with these video documents is added a large-format 200-page book illustrated with rare photos and archives. An object not to be missed.

-FLASHBACK-

Thursday, January 17, 2019

DEL TORO DONATES 35MM 'PHANTOM' PRINT TO NEW BEV
RIAN JOHNSON & EDGAR WRIGHT POST RESPONSES TO GUILLERMO'S TWEET


Earlier today, Guillermo del Toro tweeted the image above with the following message:

I love this film (Phantom of the Paradise) so much that I bought a great 35mm print. I then donated it to the @newbeverly cinema. Hopefully they'll program it soon!

Rian Johnson then responded, "I have never seen this movie and am waiting until I can see it on the big screen. Soooooo....."

And then Edgar Wright jumped in: "But how many times have I gone on about?"

Rian Johnson: "I blame you for all of this."

Edgar Wright: "My first ever programming at the @newbeverly was a double bill of Bugsy Malone & Phantom Of The Paradise with a @IMPaulWilliams Q&A (and a secret midnight of Ishtar). I'm not sure I ever topped it."

New Bevery Cinema to Rian Johnson: "This is very exciting to hear! I can’t imagine a better way to see it for the first time."

(The New Beverly, of course, is owned by Quentin Tarantino, but I don't know who tweets on the New Bev's behalf.)

Aaron Stewart-Ahn, co-screenwriter of last year's Mandy, responded to del Toro's initial tweet, writing, "The Academy archival print is so effin gorgeous and such a highlight of how prints even of films from that era and stocks can hold saturation and inky blacks." Stewart-Ahn also retweeted del Toro's tweet, adding, "One of the most underrated movies ever."