Bill Maher: What kind of movies do you hate? Like, is there a type or kind… like, for me, I will watch romantic comedies – sometimes I only want to watch a romantic comedy – but I do find them… [laughing] they try my patience. And I don’t have a lot of respect. It’s a very… I guess the old-school ones with, like, Spencer Tracy…

Quentin Tarantino: Right, with Claudette Colbert, or something…

BM: Katherine Hepburn…

QT: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

BM: I mean, were they great?

QT: Well, the ones that were really funny kind of fall more into the category of screwball comedy. Which is where the romantic comedies of today came from.

BM: But it’s always a man and a woman, right?

QT: Yeah. Absolutely, yeah. And there’s a flirtation and there’s…

BM: You mean, like, It Happened One Night, and…

QT: Well, that’s a good example of one. Bringing Up Baby is a good example of one.

BM: What is, the Streisand - Ryan O’Neal movie…

QT: What’s Up, Doc? Yeah.

BM: …is a great one. Is that a remake of a…

QT: No, it’s not a remake…

BM: But it’s a tribute.

QT: Yeah, it’s kind of a paraphrase remake. All right, umm.. a special genre unto itself. It’s a paraphrase remake of the movie Bringing Up Baby.

BM: Right – Cary Grant…

QT: Yeah, Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn.

BM: And Jimmy Stewart. Oh, no, that’s Philadelphia…

QT: That’s Philadelphia Story.

BM: Right.

QT: Okay, but the thing is like, a paraphrase remake is like the relationship that Dressed To Kill has with Psycho.

BM: Oh.

QT: Where it’s like, okay, so it’s not a remake of Psycho…

BM: I see…

QT: But…

BM: Right…

QT: There’s no way you’re watching Dressed To Kill and not thinking about Psycho.

BM: [Laughs]

QT: But the director knows that you’re watching Dressed To Kill thinking about Psycho, so he can actually hit Psycho points because you’re on the same wavelength now. And now he’s kind of remaking the movie without remaking it. Just doing his own twist on it.

BM: Right. I think it’s called a rip-off, but…

QT: No no no no, when it’s that done, when it’s done like that… okay, there’s “rip-off,” but Dressed To Kill and Psycho, no, he’s riffing.

Francis Ford Coppola has four films in the top ten: The Godfather (#1), The Godfather, Part II (#4), Apocalypse Now (#6), and The Conversation (#8).

Brian De Palma's Carrie makes the list at number 50, having appeared on ten of the individual lists. Nicolas Roeg's Don't Look Now also appeared on ten individual lists, but is ranked at #49 -- it seems mostly coincidence that #49 and #50 both feature scores by Pino Donaggio (three other films surrounding these two films in the ranking also appeared on precisely ten lists). Our old friend David Greven has Carrie on his list of 15 films, as well as three other De Palma films:

David Greven (Professor/USC)

THE GODFATHER, PART II
3 WOMEN
AUTUMN SONATA
DEATH IN VENICE
THE STORY OF ADELE H
CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND
KLUTE
TAXI DRIVER
THE EXORCIST
OBSESSION
CARRIE
THE FURY
SISTERS
IT'S ALIVE
DOG DAY AFTERNOON

Armond White (National Review)

Nashville
McCabe & Mrs. Miller
Last Tango in Paris
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
The Godfather, Part II
Mean Streets
1900
Taxi Driver
MASH
Ryan’s Daughter
The Warriors
The Godfather
Sounder
The Fury
Women in Love

Tina Hassannia (Slant Magazine)

Celine and Julie Go Boating
Still Life
F for Fake
Badlands
Don’t Look Now
The Brood
Solaris
California Split
Hi, Mom!
Real Life

Kevin Laforest (Extra Beurre)

Aguirre, the Wrath of God
Annie Hall
Apocalypse Now
A Clockwork Orange
The Godfather
The Godfather: Part II
Halloween
Jaws
The Long Goodbye
Phantom of the Paradise
Rocky
Stalker
Suspiria
Taxi Driver
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre

Raising Cain (1992)

De Palma has always known exactly what to do with the effete menace exuded by actor John Lithgow, particularly in early masterworks like Obsession and Blow Out. De Palma’s go-to tactic with Lithgow? Cast him as a bad guy, and make him as creepy as possible. In Cain, the veteran actor comes completely unglued, playing a respected psychologist who is revealed to be quite dangerous when he learns of his wife’s infidelity.

...to date, it is simultaneously one of the horniest and most elegant Hitchcock homages that this master craftsman has ever given us.

The “Be Black, Baby!” sequence is an uncomfortable, barn-burning stunner, and almost surely one of the more purely provocative sequences that De Palma has ever committed to film.

Many day-one De Palma heads have this retro oddity in their personal top five, and for good reason: from a standpoint of pure visual technique and jaw-dropping cinematic invention, Phantom can feel, as you watch it, like nothing less than one of the coolest American movies ever made.

Body Double is, yes, vulgar, ridiculous, offensive, and pretty much every other pejorative you could think to throw at it. It’s also by far De Palma’s most under-valued work on the whole: a brutal vivisection of voyeurism, entitlement, male ego, and the pomposity of Hollywood, disguised as Dressed To Kill 2.0. Even when the movie’s heart is scurrilous and perverse, its technique is so assured as to be downright classical in its composition.

On March 18th, 1993, a group of young men from Lakewood, California, who collectively went by the self-bestowed name of the "Spur Posse" were arrested by the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department. Their crimes - and their response to it - would become major news in the United States at the time; charged with an array of sex crimes, these assaults were all linked to a 'game' the members had constructed which used a point system to create a competitive environment where these crimes garnered the assailant a numerical value, all leading up to the grotesque idea that there would be a 'winner'. The more rapes, the more points. Prosecutors dropped the case bar one single charge because they felt unable to prove these encounters were not consensual, and the police failed to pursue even statutory rape charges despite one of the survivors only being ten years old.

This was a long time before #MeToo, but there are echoes here of far too many future cases that we have seen since, and of course that existed long before this case itself. Why this particular news story caused such a storm is perhaps as much to do with the high class status of the Spur Posse - they were football players, the golden boys - as it did the horrific crimes they committed all in the name of this "game".

This might sound like a strange way to approach Katt Shea's The Rage: Carrie 2, but when you know this story, it comes as zero surprise to learn that the Spur Posse case was as much (if not more) an influence on the critically lambasted sequel to Brian De Palma's valorized 1976 original. That comparing the sequel to the original has remained the primary model for assessing this film is perhaps stating the obvious; if the title alone doesn't encourage us enough to do this, then the film itself goes to some pretty significant lengths to remind us of the original in some of its key moments, sometimes going a far as to replicate iconic scenes and images.

Original footage from De Palma's 1976 film of Sissy Spacek's famous Carrie even appears in The Rage, in a red-tinted flashback of the famous "plug it up scene". Spacek turned down an offer to appear in the sequel, but she did grant permission for this footage to be reused. However, Amy Irving does appear as a relatively central character, revamping her character, Sue Snell. Here, she now works at the school where the sequel takes place. A loose reconfiguring of Betty Buckley's gym teacher Miss Desjardin from the first film in many ways, she also differs significantly as she is much more overtly a champion for the victimized girls in the film, especially protagonist, Rachel Lang (Emily Bergl).

Rachel is Carrie's step-sister; they share the same father (who seems to have a thing for religious fanatics), which in itself is interesting because it renders Rachel and Carrie's telekinesis - a gift they both share - as not only hereditary, but passed down through the male family line. Violence, then, despite the centrality of the women characters here, is ultimately framed as inherently connected to the masculine. These girls have not just got enormous supernatural powers, but the violence intrinsic to that in both of their cases is something they literally got from a man; their propensity for violence, then, is deemed monstrous not only because it holds the potential for unrestrained destruction, but also because they are women who have what is biologically defined as being something emphatically masculine.

Rachel learns of her relationship to Carrie from Sue, whose guilt over Carrie's death and the carnage associated with it propel her to investigate Rachel's similar background with a demented religious kook for a mother. But Rachel and Carrie - and their stories - are as different as they are similar. Rachel's mother, for instance, is institutionalized very early in the film, leaving Rachel to grow up in an uncaring foster home (for the music fans amongst you, her stepfather is played by the iconic John Doe from the killer LA punk band X). While Carrie was meek and frightened, Rachel is tough; Pauline Kael once famously described Spacek's Carrie as looking like a "squashed frog", while Rachel is a tomboy (when one of the quasi-Spur Posse ringleaders invites her on a date early in the film, she unhesitatingly rejects him, telling him she's not interested "because I'm a dyke”. He doesn't pause to disbelieve it).

"Plenty of films are less coy about bloodshed and whole genres are built on gore. It would be easy to fill every spot on this list with slashers and gialli, creating a similar impression to the elevator doors opening in The Shining (1980).

"Although there does seem to be a theme of sadness, loss, violence and death to movies that make the most unabashed use of red, it is also the colour of passion. Sometimes primal feelings are too much for gentle or defeated people to confront. Pedro Almodóvar and Wong Kar Wai use red in their production designs to express what their characters cannot.

"To lighten the mood: enter the scarlet seductress. 'She is always alluring,' says Catherine Bray in her Inside Cinema video essay, Women in Red. One such siren adds sparkle to this list: it’s Marilyn Monroe, the greatest bombshell who ever lived in her star-making role.

"The Red Balloon is a seemingly simple children’s film that won an Academy Award in 1956. Its use of red in both visual and emotional terms is the gold standard."

Kaufman's list is inspired by the 50th anniversary of Ingmar Bergman's Cries and Whispers. Brian De Palma's Carrie (1976) is included:

Pig’s blood, a red convertible, Sissy Spacek’s hair, wine-coloured candles and a pale pink dress seen as red through a fundamentalist mother’s eyes. These are some of the key ingredients of Carrie. Brian De Palma adapted Stephen King’s novel, which is one of the saddest horror tales in existence. Humiliation and rejection push Carrie White (white is an invitation to red), the shy loner with telekinetic powers, towards a finale of destruction. This bursts out of her as the culmination of feelings so powerful that they cause literal combustions.

Lured into a sweet and short-lived feeling of belonging at high-school prom, only to have pig’s blood poured on her during a moment in the limelight, Carrie snaps, pushed to the edge by her violent mother. Hers is not a maniacal-laughter mode of vengeance; it is grief-fuelled. The red that has dripped steadily since the opening scene, where she gets her period, erupts in a torrent that makes a mockery of the fire trucks that arrive on the scene too late.

As Brian De Palma would do later in Carrie (1976), Powell and Pressburger (the filmmaking duo known as The Archers) complement their use of visceral vermillion with the natural locks of a red-headed woman. Moira Shearer plays the ill-fated Vicky, an ingenue ballet-dancer beckoned under the oppressive wing of dance impresario Boris Lermontov (a brilliantly villainous Anton Walbrook, who is awarded the most memorable lines). Vicky is cast in the ballet of The Red Shoes, about a bewitched pair of ballet shoes that cause their wearer to dance themselves to death. The score is written by a young composer, also a redhead, and they fall in love, to the disapproval of Lermontov.

When Vicky is invited into a room to be offered the lead part, each figure of authority is surrounded by a splash of red, a portent of things to come. The Archers make a motif of red, white and blue, dressing Shearer, with her porcelain skin and auburn hair, in a colour wheel of blues.

This idea of sort of figuring-it-out-as-we-go-along seems to have stuck with Tom Cruise and his collaborators throughout the Mission: Impossible franchise. Today at The Hollywood Reporter, Kim Masters highlights the "perhaps surprisingly improvisational approach to filmmaking" taken by Cruise and writer-director Christopher McQuarrie:

M:I 7‘s release date has been pushed four times; it’s now set for July 2023. By holding on to the film as a work in progress while working on the eighth, Cruise and his writer-director, Christopher McQuarrie, ensure that Paramount won’t have much luck imposing budget restrictions on what is allegedly the final installment in the franchise. It also gives Cruise — who has creative control — flexibility with respect to the cliffhanger ending of M:I 7.

With hundreds of millions on the line, says a knowledgeable source, Cruise and McQuarrie take a perhaps surprisingly improvisational approach to filmmaking. McQuarrie first encountered Cruise on the 2008 film Valkyrie, which McQuarrie co-wrote and co-produced. He started collaborating on the Mission movies when he went to work on the script for the fourth installment, 2011’s Ghost Protocol, mid-production. He directed the fifth, 2015’s Rogue Nation, during which he figured out the third act only in the middle of shooting. The sixth installment, 2018’s Fallout, involved more of the same budget-fracturing spontaneity. This unpredictable approach is Cruise exercising the power he’s accrued from bringing in $3.6 billion in box office starring as Ethan Hunt over three decades.

The notion that a studio can control spending on a Cruise movie is dismissed by executives who have been in the trenches with him. One says a studio can only hope to “influence” Cruise and McQuarrie. “Tom looks at [the money] he delivers to the studio,” says another. “Why wouldn’t you go do whatever you want? Who’s going to tell you not to?” These executives say Cruise is driven by his own perfectionism. “It’s not always in the best interest of the budget, but he is incredibly detailed and willing to put in an enormous amount of time and effort on every aspect,” says a source on M:I 7. “The guy does give every ounce of his being to this endeavor,” confirms another.

The still-unfinished M:I 7 has already hit a breathtaking $290 million budget, with tax incentives. Cruise and McQuarrie did a little work on 8 as 7 got underway — enough to say they had started the film — but shooting on 8 is underway now. Sources say Cruise has persuaded Brian Robbins, the new president and CEO of Paramount Pictures, to give him more money to finish the seventh film and make the eighth, arguing (with some justification) that inflation has driven up expenses.

No one can be blamed for COVID-19, or for the lousy luck that had M:I 7 start its shoot in northern Italy, hit hard early in the pandemic. Ultimately, both Cruise and McQuarrie — neither of whom was believed to be vaccinated at the time — contracted the virus, according to sources. McQuarrie’s illness was so severe that he was hospitalized in London, a source says. (Why the two weren’t vaccinated isn’t clear, but in Cruise’s case, it apparently was not because Scientology has taken a position against it, as some in town have speculated. Sources familiar with the organization’s policy say it has left the decision up to members.) Neither Cruise nor McQuarrie responded to a request for comment.

In this episode of the show we continue our DEPALMARCH marathon also known as 4 DECADES OF DE PALMA by moving up a decade from the 70s to the 80s in order to talk about arguably one of Brian De Palma’s most controversial movies, Dressed to Kill. Over the course of our discussion you will hear us talk about how De Palma’s directorial prowess and a knack for crafting memorable set pieces elevate the movie, how much it owes to Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, how it is at its core a deeply personal movie, how it functions as an overt giallo film and much, much more!

Tune in and enjoy!

Hosts: Jakub Flasz & Nicolò Grasso

Featuring: Randy Burrows

Early reviews of Season 3 hint that Atlanta will extend its queasy fascination with racial masquerade even further than the dark conceptual jokes in “Helen”—in which Earn is mistaken by a partygoer for a white man made up as a Moor—or “Teddy Perkins,” with its disturbing, dessicated spectacle of whiteface. One possible primer for the show’s gutsy satire is Brian De Palma’s 1970 comedy Hi, Mom!, whose immortal centerpiece sequence depicts a group of bougie New York theatergoers attending an experimental performance in which they’re roughed up, slathered in grease paint, and subjected to racist abuse by Black performers hiding behind artificially pale complexions. The title—and devastatingly double-edged thrust—of the show is “Be Black, Baby!” and like all of De Palma’s finest provocations, the scene is designed to push characters and audience alike outside of their comfort zones and into the line of fire. The brilliant punch line: After being hectored, harassed, and threatened with arrest by real-looking cops, the patrons express gratitude for their fleeting glimpse at how the other half lives … before heading back to their brownstones.

After that introduction, the first film Rothkopf chooses to highlight is Body Double:

Body Double (1984)

Brian De Palma could have invented the erotic thriller on his own, and come to think of it, pretty much did with this synthy Hitchcock-a-thon that struck the mold: a seductive female lure (Melanie Griffith's savvy pornstar, the role that later landed her Working Girl), a ridiculous kill or two, and a stellar use of a pop song (Frankie Goes to Hollywood's "Relax"). Don't question how believable any of this is — you'll spoil the fun.

Advanced studies: Femme Fatale (2002), in which De Palma topped himself

See Also:
Den Of Geek - Deep Water: The Wildest Thriller Movies to Watch Next
HungerTV.com - ‘Deep Water’: 9 Erotic thrillers to watch next

I think that every director worth anything - I mean, a man that makes films, vs. a man that takes a job to make a film, you know, who directs - I don't think Marty is a director. He really is a person that generates the energy behind everything that is accomplished in a film. And I would think that a director of his stature only makes one film. So that Who's That Knocking, Mean Streets, and Taxi Driver, and Alice, are all part and parcel of one film, of the way one man feels. - John Cassavetes

Well, I think all of his films are very musical, all of them. Film is like operas. - Liza Minnelli, talking about Martin Scorsese

The very first full-length documentary on Scorsese offers an invaluable look at how he was perceived by his colleagues, and himself, in 1977. Catching Scorsese while while he was in post-production on New York, New York and editing The Last Waltz, British filmmaker Peter Hayden gets the manically hyper Scorsese to comment on his youth, his relation to his lead characters, and most importantly, his approach to direction. The doc doesn’t quite move at the pace of Scorsese’s revved-up speed-talking, but it does offer some real insight into his productivity in the 1970s, thanks to an impressive array of talking heads. Included are Scorsese’s collaborators Jay Cocks, Mardik Martin, Brian De Palma, Steven Prince (who co-produced this doc), and his mentor John Cassavetes. Also the performers, who discuss his working methods in detail — Jodie Foster, Liza Minnelli, and, of course, Robert De Niro.

Director: Peter Hayden.
Writers: Peter Hayden, Chris Ranger