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Recent Headlines
a la Mod:

Domino is
a "disarmingly
straight-forward"
work that "pushes
us to reexamine our
relationship to images
and their consumption,
not only ethically
but metaphysically"
-Collin Brinkman

De Palma on Domino
"It was not recut.
I was not involved
in the ADR, the
musical recording
sessions, the final
mix or the color
timing of the
final print."

Listen to
Donaggio's full score
for Domino online

De Palma/Lehman
rapport at work
in Snakes

De Palma/Lehman
next novel is Terry

De Palma developing
Catch And Kill,
"a horror movie
based on real things
that have happened
in the news"

Supercut video
of De Palma's films
edited by Carl Rodrigue

Washington Post
review of Keesey book

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Exclusive Passion
Interviews:

Brian De Palma
Karoline Herfurth
Leila Rozario

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AV Club Review
of Dumas book

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Interviews...

De Palma interviewed
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italkyoubored

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Entries by Topic
A note about topics: Some blog posts have more than one topic, in which case only one main topic can be chosen to represent that post. This means that some topics may have been discussed in posts labeled otherwise. For instance, a post that discusses both The Boston Stranglers and The Demolished Man may only be labeled one or the other. Please keep this in mind as you navigate this list.
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Ambrose Chapel
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Thursday, January 28, 2016
'CARRIE' ON IMAX AT GLASGOW FILM FESTIVAL
IMAX PRESENTATION CELEBRATES ANNIVERSARIES OF FOUR FILMS FROM 1976-1996


Brian De Palma's Carrie will be one of four films to get an anniversary IMAX presentation at next month's Glasgow Film Festival. Carrie, celebrating its 40th anniversary this year, will be screened on Friday, February 19th-- otherwise known as the day after De Palma's Obsession, which also turns 40 this year, will screen in Hollywood as part of a double feature in remembrance of Vilmos Zsigmond. The other film on that Zsigmond double-bill? De Palma's Blow Out, celebrating its 35th anniversary this year.

Two of the other four films in the Glasgow "Anniversaries at IMAX" series are James Cameron's Aliens and Tony Scott's Top Gun, both released in 1986. A 1996 film will be voted on and chosen by readers of The List from among three candidates: From Dusk Till Dawn, Scream, and Trainspotting.


Posted by Geoff at 9:49 PM CST
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Wednesday, January 27, 2016
'BLOW OUT' & 'OBSESSION' - FEB 18 IN HOLLYWOOD
PART OF AMERICAN CINEMATHEQUE TRIBUTE TO VILMOS ZSIGMOND AT THE EGYPTIAN THEATRE

Posted by Geoff at 9:56 PM CST
Updated: Wednesday, January 27, 2016 9:56 PM CST
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Tuesday, January 26, 2016
PODCAST COMMENTARY TRACK FOR 'DTK'
INFORMED DISCUSSION ENSUES
A Podcast titled Illusion Travels By Streetcar posted a commentary track yesterday for Brian De Palma's Dressed To Kill. The informed discussion/commentary is designed to run while you watch the film with the sound not-too-loud, and is actually pretty good. Near the beginning, Tom Sutpen shares the De Palma quote from early in his career about wanting to be the American Godard, and asks Jeremiah McNeil what he thinks of the idea that later De Palma films such as Dressed To Kill are seen "as an abandonment of that early intention."

"There is a critical misunderstanding in that assumption," McNeil replies. When asked to elaborate, he says, "There is no De Palma film that bears the mark of his authorship that is not in some way a comment on the film itself. And the fact that the person watching is committing an act of voyeurism, and is engaging with an art object. That kind of self-reflexivity is Godardian in its intention, or even Brechtian in some cases." And then the podcast is off to the races after that.

Posted by Geoff at 1:22 AM CST
Updated: Tuesday, January 26, 2016 1:22 AM CST
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Saturday, January 23, 2016
2 VIDEOS ABOUT FILM FROM CARL RODRIGUE
CLIPS FROM 'SCARFACE' & 'THE UNTOUCHABLES' INCLUDED

Our old friend Carl Rodrigue, who used to run the website "Le Paradis de Brian De Palma," got together with a friend to create the video above, which zips through 120 years of cinema in 120 seconds (and includes a quick clip from Brian De Palma's Scarface). That video was created to celebrate cinema's 120th anniversary a few weeks ago. Here's what Rodrigue has to say about the video:
After a brief overview of the processes that led to Cinema, from Nicéphore Niépce's oldest surviving photograph in 1826 or 1827 to Charles-Émile Reynaud's Théâtre optique in 1892, you'll find 75 movies by 75 different directors starting with La Sortie de l'Usine Lumière à Lyon (Workers Leaving The Lumière Factory in Lyon) which opened the first commercial public screening in Paris on 28 December 1895. Though the first film was an obvious choice, we don’t have the necessary perspective to choose the last one objectively. By selecting Avengers: Age of Ultron we simply acknowledge the fact that the comic book movies have dominated the box office in the past decade.

Keep in mind that it’s not a ranking of the best movies of all time by any means, but merely a celebration of cinema's 120th anniversary. Though we did include the best movies according to SIGHT & SOUND and THEY SHOOT PICTURES, DON'T THEY? such as Vertigo, Citizen Kane and Tokyo Story, we also considered BOX OFFICE MOJO's all time box-office movies like Gone With the Wind, The Sound of Music and Titanic, the INTERNET MOVIE DATABASE's #1 The Shawshank Redemption and other cult movies such as Blade Runner, Scarface and The Matrix.


Below is a newer video created By Carl and his friend, who go by the name Moon Film. This one looks at homages to silent film in more recent works, and includes De Palma's homage to the "Odessa Steps" sequence in Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin in The Untouchables.


Posted by Geoff at 5:43 PM CST
Updated: Sunday, June 17, 2018 9:45 AM CDT
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Thursday, January 21, 2016
'BLOW OUT' NEXT WEEK AT GABLES IN FLORIDA
35TH ANNIVERSARY SCREENINGS


Brian De Palma's Blow Out will play every night (except Tuesday) at 9pm for one week, beginning Friday, January 29, at the Gables Art Cinema in Coral Gables, Florida. "One of Brian De Palma’s greatest films and one of the great American films of the 1980s," states the Gables web site, "Blow Out is such a hallucinatory, emotionally and visually commanding experience that the term 'thriller' seems insufficient. De Palma takes a variety of elements - the Kennedy assassination; Chappaquiddick; Antonioni’s Blow Up; the slasher genre that was then in full flower; elements of Detective Bob Leuci’s experience working undercover for the Knapp Commission; the harshness and sadness of American life; and, as ever, Hitchcock’s Vertigo - and swirls and mixes them into a film that builds to a truly shattering conclusion. With John Travolta, in what is undoubtedly his greatest performance, as the sound man for low-budget movies who accidentally records a murder; Nancy Allen, absolutely heartbreaking; John Lithgow as the hired killer; and De Palma stalwart Dennis Franz as the world’s biggest sleaze. This was the second of three collaborations between De Palma and recently departed master DP Vilmos Zsigmond, in whose memory these 35th anniversary screenings are presented."

Posted by Geoff at 11:57 PM CST
Updated: Friday, January 22, 2016 12:01 AM CST
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Wednesday, January 20, 2016
'SISTERS' THURSDAY NIGHT IN ASHEVILLE, NC
THURSDAY HORROR PICTURE SHOW, HOSTED BY CRITICS KEN HANKE & SCOTT DOUGLAS
Brian De Palma's Sisters will screen at 8pm Thursday (January 21, 2016) at The Carolina, movie theater six, in Asheville, North Carlina. The screening is free, as part of the weekly Thursday Horror Picture Show, which also featured De Palma's Body Double last April. Thursday's screening will be hosted by Mountain Xpress movie critics Ken Hanke and Justin Souther.

"Sisters (1973) is by no means the first Brian De Palma film," states Hanke in his Mountain Xpress mini-review, "though it might fairly be called the first De Palma film as we know them. The theme is, in part, voyeurism — so we're right at home from the onset. The tone is set as much by Michael Powell's Peeping Tom (1960) as it is by Hitchcock, which is a pretty heady mix. The most surprising thing about the film, however, is not that it looks forward to future De Palma (he really lays on the split-screen), but that it has a distinct air of David-Cronenberg-to-come about it."

Posted by Geoff at 8:53 PM CST
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Tuesday, January 19, 2016
TWEET: 'BONFIRE' STAFF ASSISTANT

Posted by Geoff at 10:12 PM CST
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Monday, January 18, 2016
'HOME MOVIES' CO-WRITER RECALLS DE PALMA
DIDN'T FREAK OUT AS MUCH AS OTHER STUDENTS WHEN HE WOULD TOSS THEIR SCRIPTS TO THE FLOOR
Gloria Norris was a student of Brian De Palma's at Sarah Lawrence College, co-writing the class project, Home Movies, and also working as De Palma's assistant on the film, as a student director. Norris has been promoting her new memoir, KooKooLand, in which she details the traumatic extreme violence of her childhood, centered around her abusive father, Jimmy. In a profile article of Norris from earlier this month, Broadly's Mitchell Sunderland writes, "While a student at Sarah Lawrence College, where she transferred from Bennington, Gloria learned to appreciate her background. There she also connected with the director (and Sarah Lawrence alum) Brian De Palma. The auteur would toss students' scripts aside, sometimes on the floor, Gloria says, and tell kids his treatment would prepare them for Hollywood. While Gloria's peers freaked out over his behavior, she felt she could handle it because Jimmy had toughened her up as a child. A few years later, De Palma recommended Scorsese hire his former student as an assistant on the set of a boxing movie. She scored the job, and it launched her career in Hollywood."

[Note: the boxing movie was, of course, Raging Bull, which would likely have started filming very shortly after Home Movies.]

Norris' own Bio states that she was Scorsese's research assistant on Raging Bull, and quotes Richard Schickel's 2010 "Making of Raging Bull" article:

De Niro suggested a period of total isolation and immersion—no phones, no distractions of any kind. They chose the La Samanna resort, on St. Martin, in the Caribbean—a complex of separate villas. They shared one of them and installed a young assistant in another nearby. She was Gloria Norris, a recent Sarah Lawrence graduate who had worked with Scorsese’s pal Brian De Palma on his early picture Home Movies. Better still, her grandfather had been a fight promoter in New England, so she was no stranger to the boxing world. She brought “tons” of books along to help them with research. She remembers De Niro rising early to run along the beach. She remembers him and Scorsese talking out the script scene by scene in the mornings. She remembers Scorsese writing up the new material on yellow legal pads in the afternoons. She remembers “his handwriting was bad, so he’d have to read some of it out to me. It was full of profanity, and he’d get embarrassed saying those words to me.”

After that, Norris would retreat to her typewriter, and De Niro and Scorsese would sometimes head out in their Jeep to dinner in one of the several extremely good restaurants on the island.


Posted by Geoff at 1:15 AM CST
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Thursday, January 14, 2016
RICHARD LIBERTINI HAS DIED
Richard Libertini, who had a brief role as a high school teacher in Brian De Palma's The Bonfire Of The Vanities, died January 7. He was 82. According to the Associated Press, Libertini's ex-wife Melinda Dillon said he'd had a two-year long battle with cancer. According to an obituary in the New York Times, Libertini began his career as part of the Second City improvisational troupe in Chicago, and went on to have memorable roles in films such as The In-Laws and All Of Me, as well as many roles on Broadway and TV. "Richard Libertini is a master of what could be called the comedy of madness," wrote Mel Gussow in a 1986 New York Times review of Neapolitan Ghosts on stage. "His funniest characters are furious and at least on the borderline of delirium. Those of us who have been enjoying his performances since he and MacIntyre Dixon first created the 'Stewed Prunes' comedy team in the 1960's - through his appearances in films such as The In-Laws - have been waiting to see him play a leading role in a classic farce..."

Posted by Geoff at 3:50 AM CST
Updated: Thursday, January 14, 2016 3:52 AM CST
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Tuesday, January 12, 2016
DAVID MARGULIES HAS DIED
CHARACTER ACTOR PORTRAYED DR. LEVY IN 'DRESSED TO KILL'
David Margulies, who played Bobbi's psychiatrist Dr. Levy in Brian De Palma's Dressed To Kill, passed away Monday afternoon, according to Deadline (and thanks to Ryan for the early word). He was 78. A New York character actor of the stage and screen, Margulies played the Mayor of New York in the Ghostbusters movies, and worked with Woody Allen on more than one occasion, including in Martin Ritt's The Front and Allen's own Celebrity. According to the Deadline article, he had "recently finished filming his role as Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel in the upcoming ABC miniseries Madoff with Richard Dreyfuss, scheduled to air February 3."

Margulies' psychiatrist in Dressed To Kill has an intense scene in a stairwell with Michael Caine's Dr. Elliott-- a scene that is perhaps even more intense, verging on the surreal and comic, upon repeat viewings when the viewer knows who's who and what's what. Margulies' other big scene in the film also plays with a subtle comic tension lying underneath, as his Dr. Levy explains to our characters, who are gathered in the police station, exactly how Bobbi's psychosis brings him to murder. The scene, of course, echoes and parodies the psychiatric explanation scene near the end of Hitchcock's Psycho, released twenty years earlier.


Posted by Geoff at 10:34 PM CST
Updated: Tuesday, January 12, 2016 10:39 PM CST
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