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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
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De Palma/Lehman
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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
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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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Saturday, February 3, 2024
'BLOW OUT' MAKES FORBES TOP 25 MYSTERY MOVIES OF ALL-TIME
"JOHN TRAVOLTA DELIVERS A CAREER-DEFINING PERFORMANCE"
https://www.angelfire.com/de/palma/blowoutvictim45.jpg
"While both genres share the element of suspense, mystery and action/thriller movies differ in their focus and pacing," writes Travis Bean at Forbes, in his introduction to his list of The 25 Best Mystery Movies Of All Time. "At the core of a mystery film lies a web of enigmas," Bean continues, "typically untangled by a sharp-witted detective or keen-eyed amateur, leading to an unexpected twist that stuns both characters and audience alike. The journey to the solution is as important as the solution itself, with the audience invited to piece together the puzzle alongside the protagonist."

Beginning with Curtis Hanson's L.A. Confidential at #25, Bean heads toward David Lynch's Mulholland Drive at #1, with Brian De Palma's Blow Out at #7:

John Travolta delivers a career-defining performance in Blow Out, playing a sound technician who accidentally records evidence of a political assassination. Brian De Palma's direction melds suspense, political intrigue, and personal obsession into a tightly wound narrative that captivates and horrifies in equal measure. Audiences praise the film for its groundbreaking sound work, a gripping plot and an ending that haunts you well beyond the act of watching the film. If you're into mysteries and thrills, Blow Out will snag your interest. It mixes real-life scares with movie magic in a way that stands out. It throws you deep into a debate about what's real and scarily shows just how mighty the media can be in its depiction of truth.

Posted by Geoff at 9:12 PM CST
Updated: Saturday, February 3, 2024 9:13 PM CST
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Monday, January 29, 2024
BLOW OUT AT TRYLON CINEMA IN MINNESOTA FEB 4-6
ON THE CINEMA'S BLOG, CHRIS POLLEY WRITES - "JOYOUSLY VIBRANT" EVEN IN ITS MOST STRESSFUL SEQUENCES
https://www.angelfire.com/de/palma/iloveliberty1.jpg

Brian De Palma's Blow Out will screen February 4-6 at Trylon Cinema in Minnesota, as part of the cinema's 15th Film Noir Festival, which this year focuses on Neo-Noir. On the Trylon Cinema's Blog, Perisphere, Chris Polley delves into the film's paranoid trauma:
What would unfurl during the writing, casting, filming, and editing process would wind up not only cementing the auteur in suspense cinema history, but double as a diary entry of the damned. Blow Out isn’t just De Palma’s take on an age-old story of trying to do what’s right in the face of madness—it’s a crying out of contrition in the confessional booth.

What exactly De Palma winds up divulging in his taut genre exercise requires first breaking down what Hilary Jane Smith calls “the De Palma Gaze” in her 40th-anniversary retrospective on Blow Out: “a macho, threatening perspective [of the] unfiltered patriarchal mind that’s as primal as a cro-magnon man.” Basically, it’s Laura Mulvey’s foundational Intro to Film Studies term “the male gaze” without any of the subtleties. In nearly all of De Palma’s films, especially those from the early-mid 80s such as Dressed to Kill and Body Double, the camera’s eye both desires possession and destruction of the female form at the center of its iris. Blow Out is the filmmaker indulging in both of these tendencies while also attempting to wriggle out of them through meta-commentary on the production, assemblage, and distribution of movies as a downright sordid and perhaps even embarrassing business model.

The film opens in medias res with what unabashedly seems to be a nod to John Carpenter’s 1979 horror classic Halloween, replete with a roving POV shot of a slasher stalking coeds, only for De Palma to pull back the curtain. Here, it is revealed that the scene is nothing more than an exploitation flick in post-production being played back in a smoke-filled soundbooth by Travolta’s Jack and co. coming to a frustrating conclusion that the murder victim’s scream isn’t sufficient for a paying audience. It’s the kind of sardonic postmodernism that so effortlessly feels like what Hitchcock (whom De Palma is routinely criticized for aping) might have been capable of had he lived more than a few months past Reagan’s inauguration. But that’s arguably where the Hitchcockisms end for Blow Out. For Film Comment, storied critic Michael Sragow likens the 1981 film to a kind of reverse-Vertigo, saying, “De Palma and his hero don’t spend the movie creating an illusion but uncovering a reality moviegoers recognize.” What happens for the next 100 minutes is still all things De Palma/male gaze (prostitute with a heart of gold, serial killer of women thrown into the mix with graphic imagery, etc.) but with one hugely important distinction: the guy doesn’t get the girl, and he (spoiler alert) neither ends up vindicated nor released from his paranoid trauma.

When Jack unwittingly records the audio of a governor’s assassination while collecting ambient sounds for his job, De Palma isn’t shy to emphasize just how exhilarating it already is to witness the medium’s technological prowess as well as the simple beauty of a frog’s croak or the wind gently blowing. Then, a couple’s public displays of affection and ensuing skirmish catch our attention and suddenly all the quiet is left behind. And then after that, a gunshot immediately followed by a sedan careening into a creek and sinking fast. The equipment is temporarily abandoned and our hero is in the water attempting to save whoever may be in the vehicle. The natural world is long gone, and yet it’s also about to swallow up at least one innocent person whole. Jack’s rescue of Nancy Allen’s Sally proves the adage: No good deed goes unpunished. From then on, Jack and his audio reel are left to piece together who else was in that, who wanted him dead, and why. De Palma, a visual artist who traffics in the macabre, realizes that the same is likely true for him: he’s trapped himself in this scenario whether he meant to or not. As Michael Koresky says for Reverse Shot, the film “seems like penance for all of De Palma’s past and future cinematic crimes, as well as ours as viewers.” He is the Sisyphus of the moving image—forever fated to revel in the dark side of creation, only to let his creations inevitably tear him apart, just for him to start over again—and so are we.

Part of what makes the guilt go down the gullet with such ease is how joyously vibrant even Blow Out’s most stressful and problematic sequences are. Before John Lithgow shows up and dominates the narrative as a stoic, calculated killer who may be in on and/or working outside the story’s central conspiracy, the most rousing scene is when Jack is going through a tedious, laborious process of matching his audio to a spread of still images in a tabloid of the car’s swerve and descent off the bridge. Travolta is effortless when he feverishly uses a wide array of tools to splice photos and sound together, frame by frame. The film’s editor and longtime De Palma collaborator, Paul Hirsch, recalls in an interview with CineMontage, “I would be editing a piece of film showing Jack’s hand making a mark on the film with a grease pencil, and I would be looking at my own hand marking it with a real grease pencil.” He goes on to liken the experience to being inside an M.C. Escher drawing, alluding to the self-reflexive and labyrinthine works of the famous Dutch visual artist. It’s easy to imagine—and when watching or rewatching the film, it’s visceral—the kind of neurotic, obsessive energy this artistic ouroboros conjures up. On the other hand (no pun intended), another way to describe metatextuality is simple, beautiful, and healthy: it’s called reflection. Perhaps it’s okay to look deep into the photograph like Larrain did back in 1950s Paris, as long as you treat the gaze less like a window and more like a mirror.


Posted by Geoff at 10:47 PM CST
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Sunday, January 21, 2024
PURELY & POWERFULLY METAPHYSICAL
ADAM NAYMAN ON THE BEGUILING INFLUENCE OF ANTONIONI'S BLOW-UP
https://www.angelfire.com/de/palma/blowup29.jpg

At the Toronto Star, Adam Nayman writes under the headline: "Stylish and sinister, Blow-Up hits the Paradise theatre on Monday. Here's why you can't miss it" --
Existential uncertainty lurks in plain view in Michelangelo Antonioni's "Blow-Up," a time capsule of Mod-era London that, six decades later, looks like one of the signature movies of the 1960s.

Loosely inspired by the exploits of the celebrated British photographer David Bailey — a talented gadfly whose portraits of cultural icons from the Beatles to the Krays made him something like England’s shutterbug laureate — the film stars David Hemmings as Thomas, whose candid (and surreptitious) snaps of two lovers in London's Maryon Park end up being scrutinized for evidence of foul play. The more that Thomas — and the audience — examine the grainy snaps, the more it seems like something terrible has happened; although the details (and the reasoning) remain blurry, we watch in the hope that the off-screen murder (if there was one) will come into literal and figurative focus.

It’s a classic Hitchcockian premise, shot through with illicit tingles of complicity and voyeurism — prowling through the greenery with his camera, Thomas could be a Peeping Tom — curated for its particular social moment with generous helpings of sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll (the film includes a jangly concert performance by Jimmy Page’s band the Yardbirds). The atmosphere is one of chilly, free-floating dread; as seen through the lens of master cinematographer Carlo Di Palma, everyday locations become charged with mystery and menace.

For the critics who had anointed Antonioni as a major auteur based on his earlier, more austere Italian films, "Blow-Up's" surprising commercial success and breakthrough as a mainstream conversation piece was a vindication; for skeptics like critic Pauline Kael, the director was less a visionary than an opportunist, smuggling undergraduate pretentiousness into cinemas under cover of Pop Art. “Antonioni’s new mixture of suspense with vagueness and confusion seems to have a kind of numbing fascination,” Kael wrote in the New Yorker.

In 1974, coming off the world-beating success of "The Godfather," Francis Ford Coppola paid homage via the esthetics and plotting of "The Conversation"; in 1981, Coppola’s fellow New Hollywood innovator Brian De Palma — arguably Kael’s favourite American filmmaker — wrote and directed his own spiritual remake, "Blow Out," which melded Antonioni’s reality-versus-illusion themes with homespun political paranoia.

Antonioni would go on to experiment even more wildly through the home stretch of his career, but "Blow-Up" remains his most beguiling and influential feature: a thriller whose excitement is purely and powerfully metaphysical.


Posted by Geoff at 11:42 PM CST
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Tuesday, January 16, 2024
'A GIANT LOVE LETTER TO THE WORK OF BRIAN DE PALMA'
UPCOMING COMIC SERIES BLOW AWAY NODS TO CONVERSATION, BLOW-UP, BLOW OUT
https://www.angelfire.com/de/palma/blowaway1.jpg

Zac Thompson and Nicola Izzo's new comic book series Blow Away, debuting in April, is "an arctic neo-noir crime thriller," according to a news item by The Beat's Samantha Puc:
“Ever since I first watched Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation, I’ve dreamt of telling a paranoid thriller story. Blow Away is that dream made manifest through an incredible collaboration with Nicola,” said Thompson in a statement. “We’ve crafted a neo-noir mystery about obsession and the slippery and subjective nature of the truth. Really, it’s a big love letter to Brian De Palma and Alfred Hitchcock where suspense is the driving force on every page.

“But beyond all of that, Blow Away is the story of a wildlife videographer who may have recorded a murder,” Thompson continued. “We’re arguably living in the most obsessive, post-truth era where regular people are routinely turned into subjects of collective scrutiny. So what happens when you explore those ideas in a place that is entirely removed from that culture? Does something still bleed through? Can a person whose job it is to see patterns really trust their eyes?”



Posted by Geoff at 9:29 PM CST
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Sunday, January 7, 2024
'BLOW OUT' AT MUSIC BOX IN CHICAGO NEXT SATURDAY & SUNDAY
HITCHCOCK & FRIENDS MATINEE SERIES ALSO INCLUDES FINCHER, SCORSESE, DONEN
https://www.angelfire.com/de/palma/tweetmbblowout.jpg

Posted by Geoff at 10:20 PM CST
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Monday, September 4, 2023
'BLOW OUT OFFERS THE MOST UNSETTLING OF CONCLUSIONS'
COLLIDER'S PATRICK FOGERTY ON DE PALMA'S "UNIQUE & GRIPPING THRILLER"
https://www.angelfire.com/de/palma/pinpoint55j.jpg

Today, Collider posted an article by Patrick Fogerty with the headline, "The Best Scream on Film Wasn’t in a Horror Movie" --
What's so fascinating about Blow Out is de Palma's ability to take what can be considered the rather bland and mundane science of sound and use it as a frame for a thoroughly absorbing and gripping tale of conspiracy, deceit, and dirty tricks. Jack is shown in the Philadelphia night, equipped with headphones and a narrow boom microphone that he moves slowly through the nearly-still evening air, trying to record varied ambient noises. He picks up the conversation of a distant couple who wonder why Jack is looking at them, followed by a staccato-sounding thump. De Palma pulls close focus on a bullfrog on the river's shore, replaced shortly thereafter by the familiar sound of a hooting owl. What would normally be a dull montage instead becomes an engrossing glimpse into how those background noises audiences hear when they're viewing their favorite films come to be.

The serenity of the scene is shattered when the sound of screeching tires is heard in the distance. De Palma's camera focuses on Jack's recording equipment, with Jack's modulometer quickly ticking upward. The camera zooms in on the boom microphone itself, then moves to Jack's left headphone as a growing roar, something like a strong breeze, becomes louder. A sense of anxiousness pervades the moment, even though audiences are seeing only pieces of hardware. A sudden bang like a gunshot rings out, the modulometer springs to its highest level, and for the first time, de Palma's visuals move from the tightness of the technical fixtures to the view of a car careening out of control, crashing into a wooden bridge barrier and plunging into a river.

Jack manages to rescue the passenger Sally, but the driver, the governor of Pennsylvania and a presidential hopeful, perishes in the accident. It turns out Sally was the governor's paid companion for the evening, and the City Hall "guys in suits" do their best to keep that aspect of the incident quiet. The accident is blamed on a blown out tire on the governor's car, but Jack the expert sound technician swears he heard a bang before the blow out. Having recorded the sound of the entire crash sequence, Jack becomes obsessed with proving that someone deliberately shot the governor's car tire, causing it to hurdle into the water. Leave it to de Palma to turn a simple search for a sound effect into an intricate political white-knuckler.

Once the plot gets going, the concept of Jack's search for the perfect horror movie scream seems to disappear, but de Palma maintains focus on how sound technology is the key to cracking the case. A magazine publishes a series of shot-by-shot pictures of the crash that a photographer with nefarious intentions (Dennis Franz) has captured, which Jack then splices into film format and syncs up with his sound recording, proving his theory that the car's tire was shot out by someone hiding in the nearby brush (a subtle nod by de Palma to the famous Abraham Zapruder film of the JFK assassination). Meanwhile, a hired hit man named Burke (John Lithgow) is dispatched to take care of Sally, the woman who knows too much, before the real story gets out. Burke dupes Sally into believing he's a local Philadelphia news reporter who wants to interview her about the car accident and the proof that she and Jack have about the truth behind it. Jack is suspicious, however, so for extra protection, he wires Sally for sound before her meeting to ensure her safety and to make sure he has documentation of the conversation should the reporter be up to no good.

Immediately upon Burke introducing himself to Sally, what Jack picks up on Sally's mic convinces him she's in danger. As Burke and Sally move through a busy Philly commuter station, Jack tries to pinpoint their location by listening to the surrounding sounds — approaching train horns, subway turnstiles, the whistling of the metal tracks. After a harrowing eight-minute sequence, Jack is finally able to locate Sally based on the booming noises from a nearby fireworks display. Sally lets out a horrifying scream, but it's too late. She's murdered by Burke before Jack can reach her. Blow Out ends where it began, with Jack and his director in the screening room watching a cut of their slasher film. But now, the showering coed's silly howl has been replaced by Sally's final, tragic scream recorded by Jack. "Now that's a scream!" the overjoyed director says to Jack. A despondent Jack mutters, "It's a good scream. It's a good scream." So it was Nancy Allen's Sally who provided the best horror movie scream that, ironically, occurred in a non-horror film. And it shook moviegoers to their cores.

Blow Out's shocking, grim ending was too much for audiences to handle, and the film was a rare flop for de Palma, earning just $12 million. Despite its poor box office performance, critic Roger Ebert gave it four stars and commended de Palma for his focus on the scientific aspects of filmmaking. "This movie is inhabited by a real cinematic intelligence. The audience isn't condescended to," Ebert wrote. "In sequences like the one in which Travolta reconstructs a film and sound record of the accident, we're challenged and stimulated." And in his review of the film, Vincent Canby of the New York Times understood what it was all about, writing, "If you insist that the story be plausible, you'll miss the enjoyment of the film. You'll also miss the film's real point, which is that recording of the perfect scream." Blow Out offers the most unsettling of conclusions — that the ultimate horror movie scream can only be obtained from someone who is truly experiencing the ultimate horror.


Posted by Geoff at 8:58 PM CDT
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Tuesday, August 29, 2023
'I GREW UP ON THE CONVERSATION & BLOW OUT'
DIRECTOR GUY NATTIV ON WHY HE USED REAL BATTLEFIELD AUDIO IN 'GOLDA'
https://www.angelfire.com/de/palma/goldaposter.jpg

Guy Nattiv discusses his new film, Golda, with The Hollywood Reporter's Mia Galuppo:
What did you want audiences to understand about Golda Meir that they may not have been aware of previously?

Golda, in Israel, was basically a myth. She was maybe a statue, but no one put her name on schools or parks. She was kind of the pariah of Israel because her name was connected to the failure of the Yom Kippur War. It was kind of easy to blame an older woman from Milwaukee who didn’t know a lot about the war regarding what had happened. The Israeli generals did not take responsibility, did not say, “It’s on us.” She said, “It’s on me. I’m resigning.” And that’s the narrative that we grew up on, that Golda was a failure and it was a horrible war, but no one spoke about it. It was kind of a hidden secret until 10 years ago when declassified documents got out from the state and the truth came out that the actual intelligence division fucked it up. So, it wasn’t only her, that was the face of this failure. When I read the script by Nicholas Morton, I felt that we could do justice to this pioneer lady who was not perfect, and who was a controversial character, but she was not the only person whom we could blame for this war. So when I read the script, this was basically 80 percent war, 20 percent Golda. I pitched my idea to do the opposite, to let’s focus on Golda and let’s have 20 percent war. I wanted to do a war movie with not a single drop of blood.

In the film, the audience isn’t shown much of battle or the frontlines but we hear battlefield audio as it is presented to Golda. What was the thinking behind depicting the war in this way?

I grew up on The Conversation with Gene Hackman and Blow Out, the Brian De Palma film where there’s a recording of a murder. I also thought of The Lives of Others, where he creates a narrative through sound. I thought about how Golda experienced the war, which was only through sound because she couldn’t go to the front. So [I thought] why don’t we bring the war into the war room rather than just spend all our money shooting war scenes with tanks? So, I got from Amnon [Reshef], who was a commander in Battalion in the south. He owned all those recordings. I showed him the movie, and I asked him if he can give these [recordings] to us. I was blown away by the number of recordings from 1973. It made me cry and I did put it in a movie. What you hear, a big part of it, is real sound from the front.

Was it a difficult decision including the real audio? I know your father fought in the war. It is one thing to portray war; it’s another thing to portray the war with real audio. What made you decide that the audio should be in the movie?

The cinema today is so blended, you have documentary and narrative together. Look at Oliver Stone’s J.F.K. He used real footage from the assassination. I thought this would add to the authenticity. I asked the veterans what they thought about it, and they said that it’s an homage to the people who really gave their lives to the war. And when we screened the film in front of 6,000 people in Jerusalem with war veterans, they just were in tears and felt it was a beautiful homage. And we also dedicated this film to people who lost their lives in the war.

Mirren’s casting as Golda has been criticized given that she is not Jewish. What do you want critics to understand about your casting choice?

When I came to the project, Helen was already cast as Golda. Gideon Meir, Golda’s grandson, said to the producers, “I look at Helen, I see my grandmother. That’s who I want to play my grandmother.” When I came [on], they told me, you got the job why don’t you meet with Helen? She came to my house in the middle of the pandemic, and we sat and talked for three hours. She told me that when she was 29, she toured [Israel] and went to the kibbutz and volunteered and fell in love with an Israeli man. They toured the country, they hitchhiked and they were staying there for three-and-a-half months. She was more than just a visitor. When I spoke to her at my house, I felt that I’m speaking to my mom. I felt that she’s someone from my tribe. I felt that she was someone who understands the bits and pieces of what it means to be Jewish. So I felt that she’d be an amazing option to play Golda, other than the fact that she’s one of the best actresses of our time in our time. I respect the discussion. I think that CODA 30 years ago would probably be cast differently. And when I see CODA with people with hearing difficulties, it makes it much more authentic. And I think that Rain Man would probably not have Dustin Hoffman today, or Dallas Buyers Club would not have Jared Leto. So I’m open to that, but I personally thought that Helen is perfect for this to play Golda, especially after we got the blessing of the family.


Posted by Geoff at 11:24 PM CDT
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Saturday, August 19, 2023
THE TOOLS OF THE EAVESDROPPER'S TRADE
DAN PIEPENBRING REVIEWS JAMES ELLROY'S NEW NOVEL, 'THE ENCHANTERS' - HARPER'S MAGAZINE
https://www.angelfire.com/de/palma/blowoutdioptertape55.jpg

Yesterday's post included Nope producer Ian Cooper stating that he developed an obsession "with movie sound design vis-a-vis De Palma’s foley-forward masterpiece," Blow Out. "I watched this film on VHS in early high school," Cooper continued, "and the boots-on-the-ground-artistry depiction of Travolta’s character concretized the marriage of pragmatism and creativity that is the bedrock of the BTS of filmmaking."

For today, Hugh has sent over a link to a review of The Enchanters, the new novel by James Ellroy. The review by Dan Piepenbring at Harper's Magazine includes mention of Blow Out:

As far as detectives go, Charlie Siringo walked so Freddy Otash could run, loot, and pop Dexedrine. He’s the Tinseltown private dick who narrates The Enchanters (Knopf, $30), James Ellroy’s lush, manic novelization of Marilyn Monroe’s death and all that was hushed up around it. The book contains more than a kernel of truth: Otash was a real fixer known for his A-list imbroglios and disreputable methods, including “cramming an unbelievable assortment of electronic gadgetry into an ordinary sound truck,” the Los Angeles Times wrote in 1971, describing what was then state-of-the-art surveillance. He met Ellroy a few times and bragged that he’d bugged Peter Lawford, JFK’s brother-in-law. He said he’d heard a tape of the president and Monroe having sex.

Ellroy called Otash a “bullshitter,” and The Enchanters runs on his bullshit—it embroiders an embroiderer. At the outset, Jimmy Hoffa hires Otash to spy on Monroe, mere months before her overdose, and generate a scandal sheet about her misdeeds with the Kennedy boys. Snooping around her Brentwood hacienda, he finds too many loose ends: forty grand in cash, a wardrobe belonging to a much larger woman, a list of her lovers alongside the main switchboard number for the sheriff’s office. There’s also a Jackie Kennedy voodoo doll rife with pins, and a secret compartment containing “fuckee-suckee pix” coated in semen. Underbellies don’t come any seamier than this. From there, the plot is off to the sordid races.

Ellroy’s last novel, Widespread Panic (which also starred Otash), has been described as “camp noir.” The Enchanters continues along the same lines and throws some erotic fan fiction into the mix. “We’re all fan-club fools run amok,” Otash says of himself and his fellow Monroe obsessives. Like Brian De Palma in Blow Out, Ellroy goes in for loving close-ups on the tools of the eavesdropper’s trade, the phone taps and hidden bugs. But they can’t compete with “scent and sensation,” Otash says: “I wanted to touch things that touched her. I wanted to be where she got lonely and cut loose.” When Otash has a porny nightmare about his tradecraft, Ellroy’s rat-a-tat sleaze is pitch-­perfect:

Wall wires, rug clamps, refitted phone jacks. They’re changing colors and starting to fray. They’re squirming. They’re untangling out in plain view.

They wiggle. Bore holes leak Spackle. Discolored Spackle—alive with a glow.?.?.?. Tap wires pop through handset perforations. Mike installations explode.?.?.?.

They’re moving. They’re pure combustion. They’re out to set me aflame.

 

The detective’s bag of tricks is all voyeurism, like Hollywood’s. The town that gave us the Western and the ­AR-15 was—is—overrun by profane megalomaniacs who had no business shaping the nation’s dream life, but did it anyway. Curious about the historical Otash, I dug up a fawning 1959 profile from the Los Angeles Mirror, which offered this choice detail: “The only item lacking to keep him from becoming a TV hero,” it reads, “is a gun strapped under his shoulder.” Riding high in his Cadillac Eldorado convertible, Otash had decided he didn’t need to carry one.

Posted by Geoff at 12:01 AM CDT
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Thursday, July 27, 2023
STEPHANIE ZACHAREK ON 'BLOW OUT' - TIME MAGAZINE
"NO MATTER WHEN OR HOW YOU'VE FOUND YOUR WAY TO IT, 'BLOW OUT' HAS ALWAYS BEEN GREAT"
https://www.angelfire.com/de/palma/blowoutwraptape.jpg

"The 100 Best Films of the Past 10 Decades" as chosen and described by TIME's Stephanie Zacharek includes Blow Out as one of the ten best films of the 1980s:
Brian De Palma came of age working in the New Hollywood of the 1970s, alongside peers (and friends) like Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, and Francis Ford Coppola. Yet his films, though often admired, weren’t treated as great feats of artistry, as theirs were. History, shifted by the enthusiasm of younger movie lovers, has changed that in the past few years—but no matter when or how you’ve found your way to it, Blow Out has always been great. John Travolta’s Jack is a sound guy, unambitious and stuck working on B movies, who’s collecting wind noises out in the field one night when he sees a car swerve off a bridge and into a creek. He dives in after it and rescues the woman trapped inside, Nancy Allen’s Sally, a makeup artist and sometime call girl who, it turns out, was consorting with the governor—he was at the wheel when the crash occurred. The governor’s associates rush to cover up Sally’s involvement; meanwhile, Jack begins to suspect that the crash wasn’t accidental. He listens carefully to the recording he collected that evening and clearly hears a gunshot—but the closer he gets to the truth, the more Sally is endangered, and his efforts to protect her backfire. Blow Out is a film filled with mistrust, one where the ghosts of Chappaquiddick and the Zapruder film lurk in the corners. No one, least of all those in positions of power, can be trusted. (The picture is set against a fictional, and garish, celebration of the Liberty Bell, as if to underscore how far the country has strayed from its original, not-yet-cracked ideals.) Allen and Travolta are wonderful here: Allen’s Nancy, naïve but not dumb, fills the movie with light—her description of “the no makeup look” is a marvel of airhead timing. But it’s Travolta, an actor capable of great vulnerability, who breaks you. The movie’s final scene sends you off feeling that nothing is right with the world. It’s the opposite of numbness; rather, a sense of being much too alive.

Posted by Geoff at 10:17 PM CDT
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Thursday, May 18, 2023
'BLOW OUT' KICKS OFF AN EVENING OF SOUND IN CINEMA
IN FRANCE, MAY 22, PRESENTED BY THIERRY JOUSSE; ALSO "SEE IT BIG" AT MOMA IN NEW YORK
https://www.angelfire.com/de/palma/jackwithtape.jpg

Film critic and filmmaker Thierry Jousse will begin an evening on the importance of sound in the cinema (May 22nd, at Cinéma Cinévals in Saint-Jean-d'Angély, France) with a screening of Brian De Palma's Blow Out, according to Sud Oest's Philippe Brégowy:
The association of local cinephiles Grand Ecran offers, on Monday May 22 at 8:30 p.m., an evening dedicated to the importance of sound in cinema. Thierry Jousse, specialized journalist but also film director, will discuss this subject after the screening of the film “Blow Out” by Brian de Palma. A great specialist in film music, he has written several books on this subject.

Thierry Jousse considers that sound and music are "essential" in a film. “They lead the viewer's gaze. But the sound – a little less the music – still remains a poor relation of cinema for the general public”, estimates the one who hosts a weekly program on France Musique: “Ciné Tempo”.

For Thierry Jousse, "90% of the best memories of spectators in dark rooms are related to music". Even if he does not consider himself an "ayatollah" of music and sound, he deplores the general public's ignorance of these essential elements of a film.

The evening promises to be exciting because the film was chosen by the speaker himself and has for hero... a sound engineer!


Meanwhile, at The Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, New York, a 35mm print of Blow Out has been arranged for upcoming screenings on May 27th and June 4th, according to Michael Gannon at Queens Chronicle:
The Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria always makes a splash with its annual “See It Big” film series.

And there’s no way to make it any bigger than this year’s lineup dedicated to summer blockbusters, dating back to when they were invented in the 1970s.

The promo on the museum’s website, movingimage.us, says it all:

“Kick back in the air conditioning and enjoy these summer movies the way they were meant to be seen.”

The series began May 5. “Jaws” (1975), the original “Star Wars” trilogy (1977-83) and “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982) headline the A-list offerings.

Edo Choi, MoMI’s associate curator of film, programmed the series alongside Curator of Film Eric Hynes and co-editors Michael Koresky and Jeff Reichert of MoMI’s “Reverse Shot” magazine

“We researched the summer movies from each year going back to the 1973 release of “American Graffiti” which we judged to be the historical, as opposed to the mythic (“Jaws”), beginning of the summer movie phenomenon,” Choi told the Chronicle in an email. “We then tried to achieve a selection that had a good mix of mainstream blockbusters, genre films and arthouse hits.”

Choi said “American Graffiti” was not available because the studio is planning a theatrical release around the film’s 50th anniversary. But he did receive a nice consolation prize

“I’m particularly excited that we managed to arrange the loan of a 35mm print of Brian De Palma’s “Blow Out” (1981),” he said. “The digital format (DCP) has more commonly circulated in recent years and this is certainly one to ‘See Big.’”


Posted by Geoff at 10:29 PM CDT
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