The Palisades Fire roared through Pacific Palisades on Tuesday, and has burned more than 21,000 acres as of Friday afternoon.

Reports Tuesday night appeared to show Palisades Charter High School was engulfed in flames. A Los Angeles-based TV reporter and cameraman were fighting the fires as darkness fell. The cameraman, who went to Palisades High, said: "This is heartbreaking. This is my alma mater. The baseball field is totally gone, some of the buildings are gone."

Despite the carnage the Southern California fires have left in the surrounding community, there’s something the Pacific Palisades community can smile about — the home of the Dolphins is intact.

I went to the Palisades Charter campus on Friday afternoon to see what the status of the school was. What was left? What’s gone? How bad is it?

The answers: A lot. Not a lot. Not that bad — and that’s good.

The backside of the campus saw damage. A number of classrooms and some bungalow-type buildings burned down, but a majority of the campus is unscathed.

The football field and baseball field are fully intact. The front of the school, where a large grass quad sits, is as green as can be. The basketball gym is untouched. The aquatic center is in great shape.

"There’s no telling when students will be back on campus and in classrooms," Fattal writes. "It’s possible some athletic activity, like basketball and soccer practice can take place so those teams can play games, but the overall condition of the school is in good standing considering the apocalyptic images seen from this week’s wildfires in Los Angeles."

Casualties of War, Brian De Palma's devastating and brilliant 1989 feature film starring Sean Penn and Michael J. Fox, tells the true story of the rape and murder of a young Vietnamese woman by a patrol of American soldiers. "When you leave the theatre," wrote Pauline Kael in her review, "you'll probably find that you're not ready to talk about it. You may also find it hard to talk lightly about anything." De Palma himself said: "It's a film I still have a hard time watching because it's so disturbing. It's one of the most horrific stories you can imagine."

Drawing on a wealth of rare material, including military archives, correspondence and unpublished screenplays, Nathan Réra revisits the 1969 book by Daniel Lang that documented the actual events, examines two films from the early 1970s inspired by Lang's work, and analyses a series of unproduced scripts written over a period of many years, before exploring in detail the making and reception of De Palma's film. More than just a production history, Réra's text delves into the aesthetic, ethical and political issues surrounding screen representations of the Vietnam War, and violence against women in the context of armed conflict.

This fascinating and unusual book uses Brian De Palma's unappreciated Vietnam masterpiece as a portal into the collision of history, journalism, politics and the moviemaking process. Nathan Réra brings academic rigor and a storytelling gift to this intriguing investigation into the long and painful transformation of a horrific incident into art.

- Julie Salamon, author of The Devil's Candy.

What began in admiration of Brian De Palma's remarkable film Casualties of War became an intrepid, rigorous investigation for Nathan Réra: a probe into the original, horrendous Vietnam War incident, the extraordinary, journalistic book it gave rise to, and the many attempts (realised or not) to bring this difficult, confronting material to the screen in all its complexity. Ending on a note of autobiographical revelation, this book delves deeply, emerging with an abundance of rich insights.

- Adrian Martin, author of Filmmakers Thinking.

He’s really equally devoted to both camera and his actors. He loves actors. So you get that sense that you can trust him. Because I was a huge fan of Brian’s, I felt like with this character, I could really go for it and take chances and get kind of wild, and that he would use the right takes. So I felt safe with him. I also think he’s a very intuitive filmmaker, in that he tests the range of his actors. In the first few days that we worked together, he would, you know, do a lot of takes and see what the range of my instrument was. And he knew, like, what takes I was better at, or how long I could go before I lost my concentration or had peaked. And I remember I was doing a scene with Carla Gugino in the stairwell, and it never really felt a hundred percent. But he said, “All right, we got it,” you know, and it was lunch, and all right, we’ll go and do the other scene. So I’m at lunch, and I’m thinking about the other scene. We came back from lunch, and he said we’re going to do that scene again. And it was quite brilliant, because then we did it, and it was all there – it just came together perfectly. And it occurred to me that that’s a very intuitive filmmaker, that’s so in sync with his actors, that he knows when they’re going to be firing properly.

4K ULTRA HD LIMITED EDITION CONTENTS

4K (2160p) UHD Blu-ray presentation in Dolby Vision (HDR10 compatible)

Original lossless 1.0 mono soundtrack

Optional lossless 5.1 soundtrack

Optional English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing

Brand new audio commentary by critics Drusilla Adeline and Joshua Conkel

Audio commentary by critic Maitland McDonagh

Beyond Good and Evil, a brand new visual essay by critics BJ and Harmony Colangelo

The Empathy of Dressed to Kill, a brand new visual essay by critic Jessica Crets

Strictly Business, a 2022 interview with actress Nancy Allen

Killer Frames, a 2022 interview with associate producer/production manager Fred C. Caruso

An Imitation of Life, a 2022 interview with actor Keith Gordon

Archival interviews with actors Angie Dickinson, Nancy Allen and Keith Gordon, and producer George Litto

The Making of a Thriller, an archival documentary on the making of the film

Unrated, R-rated and TV-rated comparison featurette

Slashing Dressed to Kill, an archival featurette examining the changes made to avoid an X rating

Photo gallery

Theatrical trailer

Reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Gilles Vranckx

Collector's booklet featuring new writing on the film by Sara Michelle Fetters, Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, Matthew Sorrento and Heather Wixson

Charlize Theron just wowed Michelle Pfeiffer by dressing up as her iconic character in Scarface.

Theron, 49, threw a gangster-themed party she dubbed “The Godfatheron” and transformed into Pfeiffer’s Elvira Hancock, the wife of Tony Montana, played by Al Pacino in 1983's Scarface.

The Mad Max: Fury Road star also stepped behind the lens to do her own photo shoot while dressed up as the character and posted the stunning images on her Instagram on Dec. 11. The carousel featured nine shots of herself as Hancock followed by a still of Pfeiffer, 66, as she appeared in Brian De Palma’s classic gangster film.

“An ode to the best to ever do it. Love you @michellepfeifferofficial ❤️,” Theron wrote in the caption.

Pfeiffer responded, sharing her appreciation for the uncanny resemblance.

“WOW. Im speechless. Love you too❤️🔥,” she commented on the post.

Released on Dec. 9, 1983, Scarface — which is famous for the line, “Say hello to my little friend!” — turned 41 this year and is often cited as one of the greatest gangster films of all time. In addition to Pfeiffer and Pacino, the movie stars Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, Robert Loggia, Steven Bauer and F. Murray Abraham.

Theron invited a number of her celebrity friends to her Godfather-themed shindig, including January Jones and Kate Beckinsale, who both received “Godfatheron” makeovers of their own — albeit digital ones.

“Parties should have a theme and @charlizeafrica delivers every time. TheGodfatheron🕴️💃🏼🎲🃏,” wrote Jones, who posted two images on Instagram where she appears to have been given her own Old Hollywood/film noir looks courtesy of AI.

How did you decide on the visual language of the supernatural?

Koepp: I like the idea of an unsettling movie. And when you make them, it’s all about how well can you create an atmosphere. The more real it seems, the more unsettling it’s going to feel. The idea of having the kid start the movie talking to the presence was in the script. Brian De Palma, who I was working with a lot then, read the script and one of his first ideas was, “Why doesn’t he look right down the barrel of the lens whenever he is talking to the ghost?” And I knew enough to hear a good idea and take it when I was handed it. And then the rest was a collaboration between the production designer and the director of photography Fred Murphy. We just tried to really get everything very, very specific and accurate.

Were there other inspirations or influences from folks that you had worked with, be it De Palma or Steven Spielberg? I guess every filmmaker to some extent steals from Spielberg.

Koepp: They’re not that hard to spot. “Close Encounters,” obviously there’s a great deal in common — there’s something wrong with dad. He’s obsessed. He’s wrecking the house. There was a moment in “Poltergeist” where when the weird things first started happening in the house, Craig T. Nelson comes home and there’s JoBeth Williams on the floor with the kid and the football helmet and lets the kid slide across the floor and she whoops and jumps up and down. It’s fun at first, and I think it’s very true to human nature. If something extraordinary happens, it’s fascinating and exciting, you can’t leave that out just to have the spooks and scares and jumpstarts. So Spielberg, obviously not so much for visuals or shots, but for thematic things like extraordinary things happening to normal, regular people. And there’s some of “The Shining” in that.

As a writer of many stories full of fantastical ideas, what’s your barometer for storytelling where you give a character a choice that may not be the most believable choice, but you know that it serves a story?

Koepp: It goes back to Hitchcock’s thing — in every thriller, and ghost stories are thrillers of a different type — where you must answer the fundamental question, why don’t they call the police? And sometimes the answer is they do, and the police don’t do anything, or they do and that makes it worse. Before my first movie, as long as you’re encouraging me to name-drop, Bob Zemeckis had said, “You’ve got to read ‘Hitchcock/Truffaut’ twice before you do anything.” His other advice was, “Go stand in an airport for 12 hours. That’ll train you to be a director.” I didn’t do the airport one, but I read “Hitchcock/Truffaut” a few times and I picked that up from there. And in “Stir of Echoes,” I have [Tom’s wife Maggie] say, “We’re calling the police.” And he says, “And tell them what? Run it by me. I want to hear how it sounds,” which I thought adequately addressed that. But I also think the answer for Kevin’s character was because he’s compelled and he has to know.

This film comes after you’d worked on “Jurassic Park” and “The Lost World,” which used computer-generated effects in such an inventive and groundbreaking way. What was your experience like with CGI on this film?

Koepp: The CGI stuff we did was less fun, certainly, and less effective than practical solutions that we found. The thing where he pulls his tooth out was very old-fashioned kind of switcheroo makeup. And for the movements of the ghost, Fred and I watched this music video that we liked, and there was some very strange movement in it. So we shot at six frames a second whenever the ghost appeared, but we told the actress to move at quarter speed. So if she was walking across the room, it plays at apparently normal speed, but with a very bizarre shudder about her. Even when she’s just looking at him, there’s these tiny little movements in her face. And it was real, so that made it work better.

See also: Variety - Embracing Pulpy Genre, Germany’s Hnywood Aims for the Stars