Yeah, needless to say, De Palma, I mean, you know, he pays homage to Hitchcock, and the visuals. But that was something interesting was that a lot of people had told me that he was such a visual director that he would really… that I would not get any acting direction. And he was absolutely a fantastic actor’s director, as well. I mean, Brian always said, he was like, you know, ‘All of my movies that now are considered classics were lambasted at the time.’ And he was like, “I’ve always been appreciated in looking back, never in the moment when it’s happened,’ you know. Which is interesting, how that is. And I’m a huge fan.

THE ORIGINAL ENDING
Back in 2001, "BWL," a member of the forum at Bill Fentum's currently defunct "Directed By Brian De Palma" website, was able to view an alternate version of the Snake Eyes ending on VHS, but with no sound effects or music soundtrack. Here is how BWL described that ending:

Also at the L Magazine, Matt Zoller Seitz put together an "End-of-Decade Clip Party" called We Love the Aughties, the first part of which included a scene from Mission To Mars.

Ryan Kelly, Medfly Quarantine
Kelly discusses Mission To Mars in his chronological list of "the movies that mattered most" to him during the decade in question. "For me, the first great movie of the decade, and also among its most reviled, though why I'm not exactly sure. But it's a wild, bold, and beautiful take on our place in the Universe, and the miracle and wonder of existence --- simultaneously sophisticated and pulpy." (There is more discussion of Mission To Mars in the comments section of Kelly's post.)

Rob Humanick, Slant Magazine
The Slant Staff placed Mission To Mars at number 80 on its list of the 100 best films of the decade. Of the film, Humanick wrote, "An argumentative line in the sand for what cinema means, Mission to Mars might be the greatest '50s sci-fi film ever, even if came half a century late. 2001 by way of irony-deprived B-movie euphoria, this wide-eyed space odyssey subverts big budget expectations with bigger feelings, actively and eagerly engaging one with expressionist emotion. Like Kubrick's masterpiece, Mars takes comfort in the probability of life elsewhere but more profoundly does it appreciate what human life means to itself. The film ponders and posits, elevating those thoughts to religious wonder. Where did we come from? We may never know, but we can always dance the night away." In the comments section, "dbe2101" wrote that "Mission to Mars is neither a good film nor a watchable one," which prompted Humanick to reply: "Well, dbe2101, gonna have to disagree with you... I for one am glad to be in the purported minority—not loving Mission to Mars seems like not loving life. But obviously, it's not that simple."

Chris Stangl, The Exploding Kinetoscope
Stangl went year-by-year as he began to build a list of 100 memorable films from the decade, placing Mission To Mars at number 6 for the year 2000. Stangl wrote:

"'Drifting through eternity will ruin your whole day.' So goes some wisdom from Brian De Palma’s marvelous spaceman thriller. Mission to Mars is practically a humanist retort to 2001: A Space Odyssey, its climactic moments dedicated to a pretty and inspiring filmstrip on biological evolution on Earth. Containing something to bewilder or sour nearly ever viewer, even the film’s final statement of wonder is marred by one badly designed transitional era CG alien effect. But all De Palma films have a little of this wonder, and no small amount of dread, as starry-eyed humans are ricocheted around a cosmic pool table along networks too daft to make sense of, dragged by forces they cannot see. Mission does, in its finale, marvel at nature, but until then it is variously spooked and awe-struck.

"The climax of physical action occurs in the black void, of course, stranded between heaven and earth (well... between spaceship and Mars), safe home and unknown adventure, chilly womb and blazing death. The suspense device is of properly calibrating jet pack thrusters and conserving limited fuel supplies; the moral questions are of the same stuff: applied force, inertia, impossible choice and aiming carefully while navigating through space.

"One zero G setpiece alone sees the director pushing the cinematic apparatus’ ability to organize space and time to a new plane: it is a De Palma Future. As the ship is about to enter orbit around Mars, a micrometeorite barrage perforates the hull, one space suit helmet, and one astronaut’s hand: bam, bam, bam, these are the crises in poetic simplicity, tiny rocks hurtling through infinity just to fuck up four heroes. The ensuing repair effort is a suspense scene of elaborate construction without parallel... except in the De Palma canon. Beginning with the image of atomized blood globules swirling lazily about the pristine ship, the sequence expands and flows into airless abstract 3D museum diorama. As four crewmembers undertake separate tasks in different locations and the atmosphere rapidly suctions out of the craft, their work unites the action, a seamless vignette about punctured seams. The source of the first leak is detected via the floating blood droplets, the second by a serendipitous packet of Dr. Pepper. The pieces and particles flocking in one direction to create a whole, the scene snakes through space, inside and outside, perfectly oriented in a place where up and down do not apply and time is the crucial dimension. Linked in purpose, discrete no longer, like the chromosomes sent to a blue planet from a red one, like the astronaut’s DNA model built of M&M’s, like the Dr. Pepper and the blood, like the clouds of Martian dust. Like pictures threaded in sequence, moving in time together to tell a story."

Eugene Novikov, Cinematical
Novikov listed his favorite science fiction films of the decade, and included Mission To Mars and Lawrence Kasdan's Dreamcatcher under the heading, "Most Underappreciated," writing, "I will admit that my uncommon patience with De Palma's visual style and his starry-eyed desire to ape Kubrick may have contributed to my appreciation of Mission to Mars. Dreamcatcher I thought was mistreated -- the tonal shifts and occasional plunges into goofiness seemed like shrewd choices rather than mistakes to me. But I'm probably not going to convince anyone about either of these."

Tiago Costa, Claquete
After posting his top 20 of the decade in order of preference, Costa listed "the rest in any order"-- but that list begins with Mission To Mars.

Tom, I Hate Popcorn
Finally, in a blog post that has disappeared since it was posted December 24, 2009, Tom placed Mission To Mars at number 24 on his list of the 25 best films of the decade. I will post Tom's full list in the Femme Fatale post, either today or tomorrow.

Dealing was based on a book co-written by Michael Crichton and his brother Douglas Crichton under the pseudonym "Michael Douglas." It also featured De Palma regular Charles Durning, as well as Barbara Hershey.

After De Palma signed on to direct Disney’s Mission To Mars, he immediately asserted to his team of creators that the mysterious spherical artifact on Mars should be the Face on Mars, as it had become a part of popular culture. He told the design team he wanted it to look like a “sleeping goddess.” As can be seen in the montage of stills above, variations on the sleeping goddess would turn out to be the key visual motif of De Palma’s cinema for the decade.

As the decade began, the figure was an intimidating wonder, inspiring hope amidst its alluring aura of danger. By the end of the decade, she came to represent the tragic soul of the repressed, the redacted—her dead eyes open as if to remind us that our own eyes have been wide shut. In each film, the sleeping goddess silently calls out like a spiritual siren. The astronauts in Mission To Mars are initially and fatefully drawn to her anomalous mystery before learning how to communicate with her, ultimately to find that she has been lying in wait for them to arrive. In Femme Fatale, her sleep becomes a premonition to the dreamer, herself the sleeping goddess of her own dream, taking on the angelic form of the drowned, sleeping Ophelia to help guide the waking femme fatale to a less fateful moral decision. She appears again as Bucky sleeps during a stakeout in The Black Dahlia, the camera making a dreamlike move over the building he and Lee are watching to reveal that off in the distance, the dead, mutilated, posed-in-the-grass figure of Betty Short seems to summon Bucky’s subconscious. The shock of the sleeping Dahlia’s return at the end of that film was turned up to eleven one year later in Redacted, which powerfully concludes with a staged photo of the violated figure, her tortured sleep exacting a furious plea to the conscience of the mind’s eye. The film ends, the music quietly fades away, and De Palma leaves us with the terrible silence of death—a death that had been covered up. With its staged photo representing (imagining?) an image that might only exist in the mind’s eye of someone who was there, Redacted demonstrates that nothing stays buried forever…

But then in a comment below, Greg pointed out that neither Howard nor Zemeckis is looking directly into the camera the way the rest of the table is. Greg also noted that the tablecloth in the top photo looks photoshopped. Perhaps this is a minor experiment by Lucas, who, according to Mel Smith (talking to the Daily Mail), is said to be "buying up the film rights to dead movie stars in the hope of using computer trickery to put them all together in a movie, so you’d have Orson Welles and Barbara Stanwyck appear alongside today’s stars." (And, of course, Zemeckis' films are filled with similar trickery.)

The photo was taken on May 14, 1994, at Lucas' Skywalker Ranch, where he had invited his friends to come celebrate his 50th birthday. Incidentally, Zemeckis had worked with De Palma and Bob Gale circa 1986 on a screenplay for an idea De Palma had called Carpool, in which a murder is witnessed from a car's rearview mirror (shades of a scene in Body Double, made two years prior). De Palma has referred to this potential project as "Rear Window on wheels."

Meanwhile, the blogger at MovieShlep thinks Bonfire Of The Vanities deserves a second look.

Last week, Criterion released Del Toro's feature debut, Cronos, on DVD and Blu-Ray. One of the bonus features is called "Welcome to Bleak House, a video tour by del Toro of his office." According to Manekikoneko, the tour includes several mentions of Phantom Of The Paradise, with "models and everything." (Manekikoneko thinks Del Toro may have mentioned Phantom during the Cronos commentary track, as well, but does not remember for sure.) In any case, about a month ago, Del Toro moderated a discussion with fellow Phantom fan Edgar Wright, along with the cast and creator of Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World at Los Angeles' Egyptian Theatre. At one point, Del Toro and Wright agree that they share at least two very favorite films: De Palma's Phantom Of The Paradise, and Mike Hodges's Flash Gordon, both of which were among the cinematic influences on Wright's Scott Pilgrim adaptation.

Scott Weinberg, FearNet
"Perhaps it's just because I naturally look for these sorts of things, but throughout the whole of Aronofsky's piece I caught glimpses of the early thrillers from Nicolas Roeg, Roman Polanski, Brian De Palma, Dario Argento, and (yes) even some quick dashes of David Cronenberg."

Richard Brody, The New Yorker
"Black Swan calls to mind, more dramatically and more deeply than anything since the heyday of Brian De Palma, the work—and the life—of Alfred Hitchcock, all the more so since Aronofsky brings Natalie Portman’s naturally cold performance style to bear on the character of Nina in precisely the way that Hitchcock brilliantly employed Tippi Hedren, in The Birds and Marnie, to embody a porcelain perfection that was essentially the subject of both films. All three films are stories of possessive mothers and absent fathers."

Richard von Busack, Mr. MovieTimes
"The wildness of Black Swan’s color is a treat in a cinematic world where we’re putting up with the worst color since 1932, thanks to endless computerized twiddling. Some of the awed reception of Black Swan seems to reflect the need for a great movie this time of year—or is it mindfulness of Michael Powell’s broken-hearted ghost, grieving at those who couldn’t succumb to The Red Shoes? Black Swan is less like Powell and much more like a Brian De Palma film, anyway—it’s a film of technical virtuosity, shock and voyeurism, but without De Palma’s sense of play or wit."

J. Hoberman. The Village Voice
"Not body but ballet horror, Black Swan is a Red Shoes/Repulsion/Carrie mash-up, slathered with Dario Argento cheese."

Richard Corliss, TIME
"It's reminiscent of older, better movies: the late-'40s backstage dramas A Double Life (Ronald Colman plays Othello and becomes fatally jealous of his actress ex-wife) and the classic ballet melodrama The Red Shoes; and of films about tender, troubled psyches — I won't say which ones — by Roman Polanski, Dario Argento, Brian De Palma, David Cronenberg and David Fincher. Black Swan also takes a view of women that might kindly be described as old-fashioned."

Dann Gire, Daily Herald
"Black Swan effortlessly escorts us into Nina’s paranoia with living daydreams and nightmares, some violent, some overtly sexual. Aronofsky dabbles in the sort of hallucinatory sleight-of-narrative perfected by Brian De Palma, but never crosses into the realm of exploitation or cheap shock value."

Jeannette Catsoulis, npr
"Gorgeous and glacial, ecstatically photographed and wonderfully acted — Cassel's wordless play of expressions when Nina finally kisses him in character as the Black Swan is remarkable — Black Swan feels frustratingly incomplete. Obsession and repression are powerful themes, but you have to take them somewhere. It's not enough simply to emulate Dario Argento's glam-goth palette, David Cronenberg's bodily invasions, Adrian Lyne's softcore menace (a nightclub scene is right out of Jacob's Ladder) and Brian De Palma's demented sensibility. For all the influences on display, the one filmmaker who might have taken Black Swan from the lurid to the lyrical is Polanski: Take a look at Catherine Deneuve cowering in her apartment in Repulsion and tell me I'm wrong."

Al Kratina, The Montreal Gazette
"Darren Aronofsky's latest film is nothing if not filmic insanity, with all the showy formalism of a Brian De Palma film mixed with the delirium of Oliver Stone and a rotten batch of mescaline. But there's something so captivating about it's swirling, deliberate psychosis."

Jordan Hoffman, UGO
"Dario Argento's Showgirls goes Lincoln Center? Sure, why not? Argento is just one beloved auteur who may come to mind. This tale of a young ballerina descending into a self-designed madness as she strives for artistic perfection had me flashing on the Brian De Palma of Sisters and Carrie and the Polanski of Repulsion and Rosemary's Baby. One could also describe it as a feminine Fight Club. All of these analogies are valid (and all are comparisons to worthy films - even Showgirls) but what's most important (and what I hope doesn't get diluted amidst all the name-dropping) is that Black Swan is very much its own movie. Its balance of horror tropes and formidable performances against a high culture milieu is innovative and fresh and very, very watchable."

Lou Lumenick, New York Post
"This eye-popping, inspired and often-demented (in a good way) cross between The Red Shoes and All About Eve channels horror maestros David Cronenberg, Brian De Palma and Dario Argento. It’s also something of a companion piece to Aronofsky’s The Wrestler (the unsettling ending is very similar) but far surpasses the earlier film."

Benjamin Sutton, The L Magazine
"As for Hershey playing the mother of all mothering mothers, Brian De Palma’s Carrie repeatedly came to mind."

Damon Wise, Virtual Neon
"At the moment, the film, for me, is still too fresh to filter, but I suspect that once it has settled, and I've stopped wondering why it reminded me of films as diverse as Brian De Palma's Sisters, P&P's Black Narcissus and John Cassavetes' Opening Night, it will reveal itself as a film of great power and longevity."

Greg Christie, twitch
"Essentially, Black Swan is Repulsion & Perfect Blue by way of Showgirls with heavy influences of Brian De Palma & Kenneth Anger thrown in for good measure. In fact, I think I could easily liken this to the work of the Kuchar Brothers as well. With a combination like that, this should play like gangbusters for the cult set. The problem is that this isn't nearly as intelligent of a mindfuck as Repulsion or Perfect Blue. It tries to be a slow burn but comes across as just plain dull for the first hour. Until Natalie Portman starts to turn into a fucking Swan at the end of Act 2, nearly every line of dialogue and every character is about as cliché as they come. And for all of the hokey dialogue and sleazy sex, it lacks the guilty pleasure thrills of Showgirls or the full on psychedelic imagery of Mr. Anger."

Jesse Hawken, via Twitter
"Black Swan is Brian De Palma's first film since Redacted."