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De Palma a la Mod

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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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« February 2017 »
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Interviews...

De Palma interviewed
in Paris 2002

De Palma discusses
The Black Dahlia 2006


Enthusiasms...

De Palma Community

The Virtuoso
of the 7th Art

The De Palma Touch

The Swan Archives

Carrie...A Fan's Site

Phantompalooza

No Harm In Charm

Paul Schrader

Alfred Hitchcock
The Master Of Suspense

Alfred Hitchcock Films

Snake Eyes
a la Mod

Mission To Mars
a la Mod

Sergio Leone
and the Infield
Fly Rule

Movie Mags

Directorama

The Filmmaker Who
Came In From The Cold

Jim Emerson on
Greetings & Hi, Mom!

Scarface: Make Way
For The Bad Guy

The Big Dive
(Blow Out)

Carrie: The Movie

Deborah Shelton
Official Web Site

The Phantom Project

Welcome to the
Offices of Death Records

The Carlito's Way
Fan Page

The House Next Door

Kubrick on the
Guillotine

FilmLand Empire

Astigmia Cinema

LOLA

Cultural Weekly

A Lonely Place

The Film Doctor

italkyoubored

Icebox Movies

Medfly Quarantine

Not Just Movies

Hope Lies at
24 Frames Per Second

Motion Pictures Comics

Diary of a
Country Cinephile

So Why This Movie?

Obsessive Movie Nerd

Nothing Is Written

Ferdy on Films

Cashiers De Cinema

This Recording

Mike's Movie Guide

Every '70s Movie

Dangerous Minds

EatSleepLiveFilm

No Time For
Love, Dr. Jones!

The former
De Palma a la Mod
site

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.
All topics  «
Ambrose Chapel
Are Snakes Necessary?
BAMcinématek
Bart De Palma
Beaune Thriller Fest
Becoming Visionary
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Bill Pankow
Black Dahlia
Blow Out
Blue Afternoon
Body Double
Bonfire Of The Vanities
Books
Boston Stranglers
Bruce Springsteen
Cannes
Capone Rising
Carlito's Way
Carrie
Casualties Of War
Catch And Kill
Cinema Studies
Clarksville 1861
Columbia University
Columbo - Shooting Script
Congo
Conversation, The
Cop-Out
Cruising
Daft Punk
Dancing In The Dark
David Koepp
De Niro
De Palma & Donaggio
De Palma (doc)
De Palma Blog-A-Thon
De Palma Discussion
Demolished Man
Dick Vorisek
Dionysus In '69
Domino
Dressed To Kill
Edward R. Pressman
Eric Schwab
Fatal Attraction
Femme Fatale
Film Series
Fire
Frankie Goes To Hollywood
Fury, The
Genius of Love
George Litto
Get To Know Your Rabbit
Ghost & The Darkness
Greetings
Happy Valley
Havana Film Fest
Heat
Hi, Mom!
Hitchcock
Home Movies
Inspired by De Palma
Iraq, etc.
Jack Fisk
Jared Martin
Jerry Greenberg
Keith Gordon
Key Man, The
Laurent Bouzereau
Lights Out
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Magic Hour
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Mod
Montreal World Film Fest
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Murder a la Mod
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Nazi Gold
Newton 1861
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Palmetto
Paranormal Activity 2
Parker
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Passion
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Paul Schrader
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Peet Gelderblom
Phantom Of The Paradise
Pimento
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Predator
Prince Of The City
Print The Legend
Raggedy Ann
Raising Cain
Red Shoes, The
Redacted
Responsive Eye
Retribution
Rie Rasmussen
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Rotwang muß weg!
Sakamoto
Scarface
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Sisters
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Taxi Driver
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Sunday, February 5, 2017
SUPER BOWL SUNDAY TWEET - OVERTIME RULES

Posted by Geoff at 11:31 PM CST
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Saturday, February 4, 2017
ALL-CAT REMAKE OF 'CARRIE' IS DREAM PROJECT
FOR MAIN CHARACTER OF BIZARRE 'SHE'S ALLERGIC TO CATS', NOW PLAYING SF INDIE FEST


In Michael Reich's autobiographical She's Allergic To Cats, Mike Pinkney plays a character whose dream project is a remake of his favorite horror film, Carrie, done with live-action cats. The film also stars Sonja Kinski, the daughter of Nastassja Kinski and granddaughter of Klauss Kinski. It is by most accounts a bizarre, surreal, and yet warm experience. It is playing tonight (February 4th) and February 9th at the SF Indie Fest, having played the Fantasia Fest last summer (watch the trailer on Vimeo). "Simultaneously bizarre and conventional," wrote Birth. Movies. Death.'s Andrew Todd last summer, "She’s Allergic is a paradox and a miracle: a film informed by (and part of) a dirty VHS aesthetic, without being subsumed by it, filled with surreal humour that’s not there by accident." Here's a bit more from Todd's Fantasia review:
The performances are aided by a directorial eye that lasers in on things most directors would gloss over. Mike’s job as a dog groomer is explored in lurid detail, his boss waxing poetic over lathering techniques and engaging in a lengthy diversion into the need for expressing dogs’ anal glands. A significant portion of the film’s running time is made up of investigations into the logistics of Mike’s Cat Carrie production. Another lengthy sequence involves the dissection of a stranger’s DVD collection, with prominent shout-outs to Congo and Howard the Duck that ride waves of audience laughter with ease. Even ordinary dialogue exchanges are frequently given subtle, unexpected twists that push them into the realm of the absurd.

Shot in 4K on Red cameras and downgraded through DVD players, MiniDV, and VHS tapes, She’s Allergic To Cats is a lo-fi fever dream that is at once grungy and conventionally well-shot, with a warmth to the image you don't see often in digital indie features. But while the film’s full of tracking errors and abstract video art, Reich doesn’t use VHS artifacts as an affectation, as many of his contemporaries do. Instead, it’s expressive, appearing at times of high emotion, representing Mike’s increasingly inner turmoil over his decidedly low-stakes situation. Scenes become degraded to varying degrees because of what the scenes need, not to satisfy some desire for retro-aesthetic wankery. Reich’s background in video art lends him a smart sense of when to use it and why.


(Thanks to Chris!)

Posted by Geoff at 2:01 AM CST
Updated: Saturday, February 4, 2017 7:40 PM CST
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Thursday, February 2, 2017
JUSTIN CHANG ON 'UNDERRATED' M2M
AND THE DISAPPOINTING 'SPACE BETWEEN US'


Count The Los Angeles Times' Justin Chang among those who feel that Brian De Palma's Mission To Mars is underrated. In the opening paragraph of his review of The Space Between Us, Chang cites several films as better space travel movies than the one that will be released tomorrow (Friday): 2001: A Space Odyssey, Solaris and Interstellar. Those three movies are examples "that seek to test the audience’s perceptual limits, altering our sense of time and place so as to usher us into the vast frontier of the unknown," states Chang. Meanwhile, The Space Between Us, he writes, takes "the vast frontier of the unknown and whittle[s] it down to something obvious, familiar and dispiritingly pocket-sized."

And then in his final paragraph, Chang states: "There’s nothing wrong with trying to give science fiction an accessible, emotional dimension: Ridley Scott’s The Martian managed it beautifully and so, for that matter, did Brian De Palma’s underrated Mission to Mars. But the clumsy, hurtling rhythms of The Space Between Us, much like its credulity-straining visual effects, betray a movie utterly disengaged from its own premise. Far from amplifying the human factor, it merely cheapens and diminishes everything it touches, not least the audience’s capacity for wonderment and surprise."


Posted by Geoff at 11:58 PM CST
Updated: Friday, February 3, 2017 12:16 AM CST
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Tuesday, January 31, 2017
FUQUA DROPS OUT OF 'SCARFACE' REMAKE
'ROGUE ONE' STAR DIEGO LUNA ATTACHED AS LEAD; UNIVERSAL WANTS TO START SHOOTING BY SPRING
Variety's Justin Kroll posted an exclusive last night about Universal's Scarface remake, indicating that, as the studio is eager to get the production up and running by this spring, Antoine Fuqua has decided to drop out due to scheduling conflicts with his Denzel Washington-starring sequel to Equalizer. "Sources say Fuqua very much wanted to do the film," states Kroll, "and that he and his team were still trying to figure out a way to make it work even as Uni was meeting with other directors. But ultimately, Fuqua had already spent so much time developing the script for the next Equalizer that he simply couldn’t move on from a project he had so much invested in." (Now would be a great time to see if Pablo Larraín is available again.)

Kroll also states that Rogue One-star Diego Luna is now attached to play the lead, according to "sources". The most recent draft of the screenplay is by Terence Winter.

Previously:

Terence Winter to tackle Scarface script
The Scarface remake just got a lot less interesting
Scarface remake is Larraín's dream project
The Scarface remake just got a lot more interesting


Posted by Geoff at 3:25 AM CST
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Thursday, January 26, 2017
TWEET - EDWARD HOPPER / 'THE UNTOUCHABLES'

Posted by Geoff at 11:58 PM CST
Updated: Friday, January 27, 2017 12:10 AM CST
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Wednesday, January 25, 2017
'RIVERDALE' EPISODE 3 IS CALLED 'BODY DOUBLE'
SHOWRUNNER ROBERTO AGUIRRE-SACASA EXPLAINS, IT'S "LIKE SOMETHING OUT OF A BRIAN DE PALMA MOVIE"


Riverdale premieres Thursday night on the CW network, and A.V. Club's Danette Chavez asked showrunner Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa about the show's influences:
When we originally developed the show, the show was a much more straightforward coming-of-age slice-of-life drama. It didn’t have the genre element, the mystery, the crime, the noir of it. When Fox bought it, it was that—it was just a high school show, and in the developing of it, they really pushed us to figure out how its voice would be different from Saved By The Bell or O.C. or Dawson’s Creek or things like that. One real touchstone for me and a couple of the other producers was Twin Peaks. What made it particularly germane to Archie was that the central mystery of Twin Peaks is what happens when a high school homecoming queen is murdered. That was like, “Wow, what would happen if one of the Riverdale kids had been murdered?” And rather than follow an F.B.I. detective through the investigation, you follow the ramifications of that through the points of view of the students.

Another big influence was—there was a great movie called Brick with Joseph Gordon-Levitt, which was a suburban noir. That was, I think, an early influence as well. The two other big touchstones for me were movies that I loved when I was a kid and that were coming-of-age movies. One was Stand By Me, which is, of course, about four friends who go on a journey to see a dead body, and River’s Edge, the Keanu Reeves movie, which is about these high school misfits that know one of their friends killed one of their other friends, and the body’s by the river’s edge. When the idea to make Archie more like River’s Edge or more like Stand By Me or more like Twin Peaks—really even more than Twin Peaks, Blue Velvet, which is one of my favorite movies—it framed every story we wanted to tell, but gave it a genre element, a genre twist to it. It really became a guiding principle, which was, every story we’ll tell on the show has to work as an Archie story, a high school story, but then also has to work as—there has to be some David Lynch element to it. So in episode three, there’s a slut-shaming story, but there’s a much darker solution to that story that’s almost like something out of a Brian De Palma movie. That’s why the episode is called “Body Double.” It became a way for us to be different from other shows. But you know, every show has a shorthand, and O.C. meets Twin Peaks is a great shorthand.

(Thanks to Frank!)


Posted by Geoff at 11:59 PM CST
Updated: Thursday, January 26, 2017 12:03 AM CST
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Tuesday, January 24, 2017
DE PALMA TO VISIT NY FILM ACADEMY WEDNESDAY


Previously:
De Palma speaks at class in New York


Posted by Geoff at 8:29 PM CST
Updated: Tuesday, January 24, 2017 8:45 PM CST
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CARLOTTA UNVEILS 'PHANTOM' ULTRA COVER ART
AND 'PHANTOM' TO SCREEN IN 35MM AT STOCKHOLM CINEMATEK MARCH 21


Two days ago, on its Facebook page, Carlotta Films unveiled the above cover for its upcoming Ultra Collector's Box of Brian De Palma's Phantom Of The Paradise, which will be available April 12th. The cover art was created by Matt Taylor. It sounds like more specs will be announced as we get closer to release date, but the set will include a brand new 2K restoration of the film, two hours of supplements, and a 150-page book that will collect articles and analyses, archived promotional materials, interviews, and more.

Meanwhile, on March 21st, Phantom Of The Paradise will screen in 35mm at the Stockholm Cinematek. The screening will be introduced by Ari Gunnar Thorsteinsson, a film critic who has written for IndieWire, among others.


Posted by Geoff at 8:06 PM CST
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JOBLO'S FACE-OFF - 'PSYCHO' v. 'DRESSED TO KILL'
TURNS OUT TO BE RATHER DISAPPOINTING, SHORT-SIGHTED VIEWPOINT
With M. Night Shyamalan's Split released last week, there have been a lot of articles and reviews mentioning Brian De Palma and especially Raising Cain. JoBlo.com's Cody Hamman posted a "Face-Off" column pitting Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho opposite De Palma's Dressed To Kill, with disappointing remarks such as De Palma's main character, Kate Miller, not coming off as "very likeable, so her death doesn't have much emotional impact despite the fact that we've just spent more than 30 minutes watching her." (I am always flummoxed by criticisms that this or that character is not very likeable.) There's also this, regarding Dressed To Kill: "It's an interesting story of a psycho with multiple personalities, but the way the film mishandles the concept of gender reassignment surgery, treating it as a joke at times, can be rather cringeworthy when you look at it 37 years later."

And then Hamman completely lost me with this short-sighted gem: "De Palma takes wordless sequences to an extreme in DRESSED TO KILL. In the first 35 minutes of the film, the characters exchange maybe around 7 minutes of dialogue. The silent seduction at the museum takes up 10 minutes, and as the film goes on there will be several more lengthy stretches without dialogue. Composer Pino Donaggio plays some good music over these sequences, but that doesn't stop them from coming off as being painfully dull to me. Unable to connect with the characters, I don't care what they're doing when they're not speaking, so as these sequences drag on and on I struggle to keep my attention on the film."

Posted by Geoff at 8:10 AM CST
Updated: Thursday, January 26, 2017 12:08 AM CST
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Thursday, January 19, 2017
PASTE SUGGESTS 'THE UNTOUCHABLES'
"CHEERFUL CONTENT" TO HELP "FEEL BETTER THIS WEEKEND"
Paste today posted its "Official List of Cheerful Content," which consists of staff "suggestions for how to feel better this weekend." Staff writer Jason Rhode explains, "Paste friend Sean Doyle had a suggestion: during this highly fraught week, while Paste will certainly be publishing plenty of serious features, it might be helpful if we put together a list of light-hearted/cheerful/delightful media or ideas that we turn to in these moments; really, anything that keeps us sane during the next several days. I asked Paste staffers to compile a staggering list of heart-dazzling brilliance, so all may taste the rainbow. In this winter of discontent, we bring you the winners of this content."

Rhode himself begins the list with his choice of Brian De Palma's The Untouchables:

When I consider media which brings me good cheer, one movie immediately comes to mind. In any moment, for any reason, for any question, there is a single answer, and that is Brian DePalma’s The Untouchables. You know that movie you love? Well, all the movies you love secretly adore this flick, and have been writing fan letters to this piece of pure American kino. Oh, the greybeards and Philip Roth will say that this is not a cheerful movie. You know what makes me cheerful? Knowing when they go to sleep and wake up they are wrong, wrong, wrong.

The Untouchables is one of most encouraging movies ever made. I’ll spare you a recitation of the plot, since we have all watched at least five minutes of TBS in our lives and thereby absorbed DePalma by means of osmosis. What can account for the cultural cachet of this epic tale of brotherhood and bloodspill?

You know all of those empires which have fallen? Looks like they weren’t Untouchable. There are Oscar-winning movies that cover tweens learning violin, kids discovering that dinosaurs were just like us, and how the yam farmer is the noblest of God’s creatures … but they don’t have Kevin Costner pushing a Prohibition baddie off a roof and into a car. Does your beloved Jennifer Lawrence vehicle feature Sean Connery chasing an assassin out of his house in his suit-vest, only to be shot himself? No? Oh, how disappointing that must be for you.

Does your movie happen to be the most heartwarming bro-picture of all time? In the other movies, does an accountant discover in the moment of trial that he can go full truffle-shuffle and wreck shop on Capone’s illegal hooch empire with a gun in his hand, and an even bigger gun in his chest—his heart? Yes, the heart is a gun. The Untouchables teaches this lesson, and so many more. DeNiro’s Capone isn’t even acting; it’s as if the memes from all his Scorsese movies (“To-day! To-day! To-day!”) plugged into an feedbacking amp the size of the world. This movie does not chew the scenery, it devours the backdrop for the fuel to rise above the concept of scenery. That’s the Chicago Way.


Posted by Geoff at 11:50 PM CST
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