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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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De Palma interviewed
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De Palma discusses
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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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Sunday, September 26, 2021
'CARRIE' ON THE BIG SCREEN - FROM TODAY...
...AND ALSO OUTDOOR SCREENING HAPPENING OCT 1ST AT ARKEDON IN ST. LOUIS
https://www.angelfire.com/de/palma/carriefathom0.jpg
A sampling of today's Instagram posts above and below about Brian De Palma's Carrie, most of them thanking Fathom Events for bringing De Palma's classic to the big screen for its 45th anniversary. Meanwhile, Arkadin Cinema & Bar in the Bevo neighborhood of St. Louis plans an outdoor screening of Carrie on Friday, October 1st:
At once a searing supernatural shocker and a sensitive portrait of high-school loneliness, Brian De Palma’s Carrie shows that for a film to be truly terrifying, it helps if we actually care about its characters. And it’s impossible not to connect emotionally to burgeoning telekinetic Carrie White (a brilliantly affecting Sissy Spacek), a shy, repressed girl bullied by her classmates at school and abused by her religious-fanatic mother (Piper Laurie) at home. Faithfully adapted from Stephen King’s novel, the film focuses less on Carrie’s emerging supernatural powers than on her painfully awkward desire to fit in. Less visually extravagant than many De Palma films, Carrie is still stylish without being obtrusive. When the film finally explodes in climactic violence, the effect is both cathartic and horrifying, a teenage tragedy worthy of Greek myth.


Posted by Geoff at 12:01 AM CDT
Updated: Monday, September 27, 2021 8:23 AM CDT
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Saturday, September 25, 2021
MANY OF DE PALMA'S WORKS GIVE 'THAT MALIGNANT FEELING'
"BUT SISTERS FEELS THE MOST THEMATICALLY APPROPRIATE TO RECOMMEND", SAYS COLLIDER WRITER
https://www.angelfire.com/de/palma/sisterssecrets4.jpg

"So you just watched Malignant," begins Gregory Lawrence in an article posted today at Collider. "First, I'm gonna ask you to take some deep breaths and drink a glass of water; I have to imagine that after experiencing James Wan's utterly bonkers dive into some of the wildest horror ideas committed to cinema in recent memory, you're a bit tired out. And now that you're rested and hydrated... it's time for more." Adding that "Malignant is a film that celebrates the horror genre in all its excesses and successes," Lawrence offers up "seven movies to watch after Malignant to keep those adrenaline levels pumping." Presenting them alphabetically (and perceptively including Leigh Whannell's Upgrade on the list), here's what Lawrence has to say about Sisters:
Wan cited Brian De Palma as one of the key influences on Malignant, and it's not hard to see why. The provocative filmmaker has crafted several pieces of entertainment that gleefully mush art and trash together, backflipping off the diving board of respectability into a pool of excess with the craft of an Olympic diver. Many of De Palma's works will give you that Malignant feeling, but his 1972 Sisters feels the most thematically appropriate to recommend. A psychologically driven slasher, the film stars Margot Kidder as a pair of titular sisters, one who is fundamentally decent and trying to get by, and the other who may have some murderous impulses she needs to get out. This violent, perverse, Freudian-on-uppers thriller takes several large turns when we learn the real nature of Kidder's twins, and while even mentioning this in relation to Malignant likely gives you an idea, it's still a particular genre pleasure to see unfold (and an essential piece of horror history to understanding Malignant).

Previously:
James Wan says Malignant draws on De Palma's Dressed To Kill & Raising Cain

Posted by Geoff at 4:47 PM CDT
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Friday, September 24, 2021
LOVING THE 'UNLOVED'
SCOUT TAFOYA COUNTS 'THE BLACK DAHLIA' AMONG HIS FAVORITE DE PALMA FILMS
https://www.angelfire.com/de/palma/dahliastairs8.jpg

As we're still vibing on the 15-year anniversary of Brian De Palma's stunningly-personalized film adaptation of James Ellroy's The Black Dahlia, it's worth noting a mention of the movie from filmmaker and critic Scout Tafoya. Reviewing the new Apple TV+ sci-fi series Foundation for Cult of Mac, Tafoya delves into the backgrounds of its showrunners:

Foundation doesn’t prove as fearless about its antique roots. But in keeping the character of psychohistory alive (mathematics as a bulwark against religion, or at any rate a worthy twin), you can see Asimov with his sideburns and his new age techno-humanism in the great big towering storylines anyway. They’ve just been filtered through the aggressively middlebrow vision of showrunners David S. Goyer (Batman Begins, The Dark Knight) and Josh Friedman (Emerald City).

Friedman has done some interesting work in his time. But you’d be hard-pressed to locate anything as concrete as a sensibility from his shows, beyond a sort of desire to build great big worlds out of existing IP. He wrote the movie The Black Dahlia, which ranks as nobody’s favorite adapted screenplay, though I confess it’s among my favorite Brian De Palma movies.

Goyer is more troublesome. Having written both the exciting and edgy Blade and Christopher Nolan’s baggy and self-important Batman movies, and helping ensure the enduring monopoly of DC and Marvel comics at the U.S. box office, he was then given free reign to do whatever he wanted. This despite his having directed the abysmal likes of Blade: Trinity and The Unborn.

I can’t fully bring myself to write off Goyer because he seems to want to make better films than he frequently produces. Plus, once upon a time he wrote the excellent Dark City, one of the great out-of-nowhere science fiction movies made during my lifetime. (That’s the kind of thing Asimov probably would have liked.)


Back in 2014, Tafoya created a video essay about De Palma's Phantom Of The Paradise for his video series, The Unloved. The series takes films that were received indifferently upon initial release and reveals the artistry that seemed to be overlooked in the critical and public dismissals of their time.

"Cult movies usually have to do something wrong in order to miss out on a first-run audience," Tafoya states in the video. "Idiosyncrasies and eccentricities pile up, and only a handful of people can see them as integral to the film's success as a crowd-pleasing oddity. In the case of Phantom Of The Paradise, the indifference that greeted it from critic and public alike seems much more baffling than its continued success in Winnipeg.

"It's easy to why Rocky Horror failed with mainstream audiences at first. It's entirely too pleased with itself, and features nothing in the way of sex or violence that audiences couldn't find in movies without self-conscious glam-rock all over the soundtrack. Phantom Of The Paradise had something to say, not to mention something to prove. Though it's rarely lumped in with many of its landmarks, the Phantom came out of the New Hollywood movement. By 1974, American artists were finally digging in and starting to take advantage of the creative autonomy offered by more adventurous studios. 1974 was a watershed year in particular, because it was when passion projects started flowing out of major studios. Directors were taking immense formal risks left and right, telling dark stories in daring ways, bowing to no one but their muse. There were huge successes, films that changed everything. And then there were films like Phantom Of The Paradise.

"Up until this point, Brian De Palma had been making bizarre little movies that mixed Godard and Hitchcock with abandon. Phantom Of The Paradise was his biggest film to date, and it remains his best. Perhaps sensing that he was the right man to make a crazed irreverent hash of classic literature, he grabbed his own pet influences to make a film that did for rock and roll what fellow enfant terrible Ken Russell had been doing for classical music."


Posted by Geoff at 12:01 AM CDT
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Wednesday, September 22, 2021
LABRUCE'S 'SAINT-NARCISSE' INFLUENCED BY DE PALMA
TWIN CHARACTER NAMES MIRROR THOSE OF THE TWINS IN 'SISTERS'
https://www.angelfire.com/de/palma/labruce.jpg

Martin Girard, the co-screenwriter of Bruce LaBruce's Saint-Narcisse, tells De Palma a la Mod that the film "is profoundly influenced by the cinema of Brian De Palma (my all time favorite director, I worship him). Saint-Narcisse that I have co-written with Bruce (another big fan) is about twins (named Dominic and Daniel) and so much more... I'm very proud of the film, of its mix of satire, melodrama, horror, mystery, subversion... and numerous hommages to the master." Girard adds that yes, "the names are a direct reference to Sisters, but you’ll see that there are also many themes close to Obsession and Carrie. After all, it’s a story about double and religious fanatism, among many other things..."

This week, Armond White reviews the film for National Review:

Saint-Narcisse, a place of the imagination, is an ironic destination for LaBruce’s protagonist, who loves to take pictures of himself. Duval looks like a Marvel superhero: curly hair, curious eyes, gym-fit body (part Chris Evans, mostly Sebastian Stan). His arrival in Saint-Narcisse evokes certain gay cultural signposts, from Aubrey Beardsley–style ink-drawing flashbacks to the erotic-art film Pink Narcissus. It’s a combination of myths — from mother dominance to same-sex narcissism — once used to either explain or represent homosexuality. LaBruce adds his own mythology, evoking Brian De Palma’s 1973 thriller Sisters (which starred Canadian actress Margot Kidder as twins Dominique and Danielle), playing with the idea of split personality to further tease queer pathologies that are either inflicted or alleged.

“Everyone despised us for what we did and what we were — your grandmother, the church,” Dominic’s witch-artist mother explains, defending her own transgressions. LaBruce’s post-Stonewall, post-Warhol sensibility never shies away from transgression, which is why he has made the bravest, most emotional films about gay experience by any artist in the Western Hemisphere. His only rival is Mexico’s Julián Hernández. In the sequence where the two suedehead twins confront each other in the woods, they share curiosity, frustration, and desire. Their yin-yang postures in postcoital Last Tango stills are daringly cinematic — like the montage of Sebastian reclining against a tree, which dissolves to a rippling lake, leading to the classical mythological image of Narcissus seeing himself reflected in water. These beautiful contemplative moments, more sensitive and sensual than in LaBruce’s 2017 film The Misandrists, are unexpectedly classical.

But LaBruce must interrupt classicism with agitation in the form of institutional critique: Brother Daniel’s sexual identity is derailed by the rapacious priest (Andreas Apergis) in an order of eccentric monks whose seclusion (“Evil grows in the dark,” by the Poppy Family) features S-M rituals and manic self-flagellation. Scenes of monks disrobing and swimming at a pond are like Claire Denis’s Beau Travail finally directed by a gay man, while the corrupt priest’s death is the payback François Ozon tastefully avoided in By the Grace of God.

In Saint-Narcisse, LaBruce works through decadent sexual identity by confronting its corruption. Critic John Demetry pointed out a connection to De Palma’s Carrie (a great movie not generally appreciated for its profound satire of sexual-social-religious guilt) in the scene where an arrow-pierced Saint Sebastian statue (often a gay objet d’art) looks down, comically condemning a perverse supplicant. LaBruce matches that with his own pop-culture jest: Sly and the Family Stone’s “It’s a Family Affair” (“Blood’s thicker than the mud”) during the climax which clears away sorrow, confusion, and narcissism. Saint-Narcisse doesn’t show De Palma’s mastery of suspense tropes but moves from obsessive self-regard to open embrace. Brothers Dominic and Daniel escape the high-priest hypocrite whose lust is stronger than his love, just like LaBruce’s honest, gay-identity horror-satire triumphs over the political blasphemy of Buttigieg’s lust for power.


Posted by Geoff at 12:01 AM CDT
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Tuesday, September 21, 2021
'CARRIE' - 2 PODCASTS AND A FLASHBACK
THE FINAL GIRLS / HOW I MET YOUR MONSTER
https://www.angelfire.com/de/palma/finalgirlscarriepod.jpg

In a repost from their "Female Monsters" series, The Final Girls podcast last week posted an episode in which host Anna Bogutskaya and film critic Kelli Weston go "for a deep, deep dive on the inimitable classic of horror cinema, Brian De Palma's Carrie (1976). We talk about the monstrous feminine, otherness, Sissy Spacek, period horror, who's the real villain in the film and so much more."

Five years ago, Bogutskaya and her Final Girls co-founder Olivia Howe hosted a screening of Carrie:

Flashback
Sunday, September 25, 2016
PANEL DISCUSSES 'CARRIE' IN LONDON
FINAL GIRLS U.K. EVENT AT SCALARAMA
The Final Girls (Anna Bogutskaya and Olivia Howe) hosted a screening last night of Brian De Palma's Carrie at the ICA in London. The screening, which was part of Scalarama film month, was followed by a panel discussion made up of Michael Blyth (BFI Festivals Programmer), Catherine Bray (Film4 Editorial Director and Producer) and Dr. Alison Pierse (Lecturer at York University). The discussion is summarized by Smoke Screen's Owen Van Spall:
Brian de Palma's films and his own statements have been controversial to say the least, something the Carrie panel tackled right from the start of their conversation. This is a film that begins with a tracking shot that has become somewhat notorious; the camera journeys through a steamy changing room as Carrie’s high school gym class are seen in various stages of nudity. This is far from the last time in the movie de Palma’s camera will linger on female flesh either: with female cheerleaders on the pitch and high school bad girl Chris’s bra-less torso getting plenty of screen time. This is also one of many de Palma films that put their female characters through the wringer, to put it politely.

Thus the panel agreed that at some point they had all been driven to ask themselves: “Is it cool to like Carrie [and de Palma]?” But the consensus was that, after repeat viewings and after taking a few steps back to reconsider de Palma’s career as a whole, rejecting Carrie entirely as mysoginistic felt too much like throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Alison Pierce for example praised the way the film - largely through Sissy Spacek’s intense performance - effectively transmitted the desperate sadness of the plight of this hapless but incredibly powerful young woman. You empathise with Carrie as almost a Frankenstein-like figure, a victim created by monstrosity. The panel also noted how both De Palma and King explored her victimhood in interesting ways - with the narrative and characterisation of Carrie seeming at times to provoke the viewer to almost want this pathetic figure to get tormented. De Palma arguably manipulates viewers to effectively swing between delighting in seeing Carrie suffer, and yearning to see her inflict terrible vengeance on her tormentors turn. The bucket of blood sequence, with its long, almost gleeful build up in slow motion, was much discussed as an example of this. Viewers might want to ask themselves; do you maybe sneakily want that rope to be pulled, and the bucket to fall, knowing both what the immediate humiliating result will be, and what will happen next?

Author Stephen King and de Palma also have an interesting kingship, as Catherine Bray noted: they are good at “serious fun” - taking a ludicrous concept and imbuing it with genuine terror and emotional weight. Of course, Carrie can simply be enjoyed as campy, shlockly fun, with Michael Blyth half-joking if you could convert this film easily into a musical given its tone and setting. Regardless, the panel noted that the film remains very striking from a cinematographic perspective, with a visual approach that teeters on the deliciously overblown at times. De Palma throws in a tonne of tricks that he would become well known for, including diopter lens shots, and the use of montage which really works well in the prom terror sequence, as Carrie starts to come apart, her attention and powers jumping to various points as she singles out her enemies for destruction. The Smoke Screen in particular was struck by the deliriously bold lighting throughout the film too. Much of the film’s early sequences seem drenched in a warm, apple pie glow, but in the prom night sequence sees de Palma start us off with a dreamy kaleidoscopic mix of purples and yellows that highlight how carried away Carrie is by her one moment of bliss, only to drench the entire affair in an insanely deep red shade once the psychic assault starts.



Posted by Geoff at 12:01 AM CDT
Updated: Wednesday, September 22, 2021 5:50 PM CDT
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Monday, September 20, 2021
RESTORED 'CASUALTIES OF WAR' BLU-RAY COMING IN NOV
BOX SET FROM FRENCH LABEL WILD SIDE
https://www.angelfire.com/de/palma/alittlepayback45.jpg

Thanks to Chris for highlighting a bit of news from le festival Lumière: Wild Side plans a previously unreleased and restored DVD Blu-ray box of Brian De Palma's Casualties Of War. According to Blu-ray.com, the street date will be November 24, 2021.

Posted by Geoff at 12:01 AM CDT
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Sunday, September 19, 2021
VIDEO ESSAY - HORROR OF 'PHANTOM' STEMS FROM PLOT

Posted by Geoff at 5:51 PM CDT
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Saturday, September 18, 2021
TORNATORE'S 'ENNIO' -HR REVIEW FROM VENICE PREMIERE
NEARLY 3-HOUR-LONG DOC INCLUDES ANECDOTE ABOUT SCORING 'THE UNTOUCHABLES'
https://www.angelfire.com/de/palma/ennioposter.jpg

Yesterday, The Hollywood Reporter's John DeFore posted a review of Giuseppe Tornatore's Ennio, the Ennio Morricone documentary that had its world premiere at this year's Venice Film Festival. Here's a portion of the review:
Of all the filmmakers who owe debts to the great Ennio Morricone, surely few owe as much as Giuseppe Tornatore: 1988’s Cinema Paradiso was a crowd-pleaser for many reasons, but would’ve had a harder time becoming a global hit without Morricone’s romantic, nostalgic score. Tornatore worked with the composer many times after that first collaboration, and is well positioned to offer the career-capping Ennio, which arrives barely a year after Morricone’s death.

Happily, the film is more than a greatest-hits rundown (and at nearly three hours, it had better be): In addition to nuts-and-bolts musicology, it offers real engagement with a complicated character, endearingly stubborn and self-effacing, whose inventiveness changed both his chosen field (“absolute” music) and the one, film scoring, he entered only reluctantly.

The maestro sits onscreen for much of the film, alert behind his giant spectacles, telling stories about a career he’d intended to be entirely different — even after he gave up a boyhood ambition to be a doctor. (His father, a professional trumpeter, insisted that little Ennio should follow the same path.)

Morricone recalls the humiliation of playing for food during the occupation of Italy in World War II. His play-for-peanuts experiences may have left a visible mark, because when he entered a program to study composition, the young man was at first allowed to write only dance tunes. Morricone craved the approval of his mentor, the composer and teacher Goffredo Petrassi — he still remembers the grades he got on assignments — and he did make headway in the academic arena, eventually helping to form an avant-garde collective inspired by John Cage.

But he was always doing commercial work as well, staying up all night to crank out arrangements for TV shows that didn’t credit him by name. This led to arrangements for pop singers, and Tornatore shows us many enjoyable examples of what Morricone’s contemporaries are describing in interviews: Where previous arrangers simply wrote orchestral parts to follow a song’s chords, he was inventing something new, giving the orchestras much more to do, and adding elements no pop producer at the time would have imagined using, from tin cans to typewriters.

The film’s brief but delightful tour through these bing-bongy pop tunes, enriched by interviews with Italian stars like Gianni Morandi, suggests that a very enjoyable film (if one appealing to a more narrow audience) could be made on these years alone. But that’s not why we’re here, of course. It’s time to start whistling.

Morricone composed scores for two Westerns under a pseudonym, not wanting to be associated with the genre, before teaming up with Sergio Leone. (The two were surprised to realize they’d been classmates in elementary school.) The director took him to a Kurosawa picture to explain what he had in mind, and the rest is spaghetti.

The doc’s look at A Fistful of Dollars is the first of several places in which Morricone explains how he borrowed from his own work, repurposing an arrangement he’d done for a country song. His work on that movie is also a key example of his putting his foot down — though not the first, as we’ve already heard how he swore he’d quit his conservatory if they didn’t let him study under Petrassi. When Leone intended to use a Degüello from another movie in a key showdown scene, Morricone was so offended he threatened to quit. Leone backed down.

Morricone would lose some artistic conflicts, but it seems they were often occasions on which he underrated his own work. When he sent Brian De Palma nine ideas for a victory theme in The Untouchables, he told the director, “Please don’t choose number six.” But number six is in the movie, and it’s hard to imagine any music that would serve the scene better. He also initially refused to write music for The Mission, claiming that Roland Joffé’s images were so beautiful he could only make things worse. (Again, Ennio: Wrong.)

But for serious self-deprecation, you have to hear Morricone claim that he “hates melody.” Other composers interviewed here (tons of them, in the film world and outside it) are astonished at this idea, coming from someone who has created so many memorable melodies. But there are only so many ways tones can be ordered, and Morricone calmly says, “I think that we are out of melodic combinations.” Good thing he had so many other compositional tools to work with.


Posted by Geoff at 2:46 PM CDT
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Friday, September 17, 2021
THE FILMMAKING PHILOSOPHY BEHIND THE CONCORDE SHOT
IN NEW VIDEO, PATRICK WILLEMS DELVES INTO WHY THIS "MOST DIFFICULT SHOT" MATTERS

Posted by Geoff at 10:14 PM CDT
Updated: Friday, September 17, 2021 10:15 PM CDT
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Thursday, September 16, 2021
'CARRIE' IN THEATERS SEPT 26 & 29
45TH ANNIVERSARY SCREENINGS TO KICK OFF FRIGHT FEST 2021, VIA FATHOM EVENTS
https://www.angelfire.com/de/palma/carriefathom.jpg

At Pop Culture, Allison Schonter writes:
The final days of summer are here, and with spooky season just around the corner, Fathom Events is getting ready to celebrate the season with Fright Fest 2021. Lasting from September through November, the eight-week event will bring some of the most iconic horror movies of the past back to theaters nationwide for a limited time just in time for those Halloween film binges.

This year's Fright Fest will kick off on Sunday Sept. 26 with a night celebrating the 45th anniversary of Carrie, the 1976 Brian De Palma-directed horror film that is based on Stephen King's novel of the same name. The film has become a cult classic in the decades since its release and is notably a must-watch spooky season movie. Fright Fest will continue with more nights celebrating the anniversaries of other favorite horror flicks, including The Evil Dead, Scream, and The Silence of the Lambs. There will also be several nights dedicated to Studio Ghibli Fest 2021, as well as several other popular titles returning to theaters, before Fright Fest 2021 wraps on Tuesday, Nov. 16 with Paranorman, a family-friendly viewing option.


Posted by Geoff at 12:01 AM CDT
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