SEAN BURNS REVIEWS THE AMBROSE CHAPEL SCREENPLAY BOOK

At Boston's North Shore Movies.net, Sean Burns reviews the new Sticking Place Books publication of Brian De Palma's Ambrose Chapel screenplay. Here's the first three paragraphs:
There’s something cruel about Brian De Palma’s output being a strictly literary endeavor as of late. His films are such sumptuous visual experiences, as a critic I find it can sometimes be difficult to convey the intoxicating pleasures of their mellifluous camera movements and exquisitely-timed payoffs. There’s a musicality to De Palma movies and words don’t always do it justice. Alas, a new Brian De Palma film hasn’t opened in area theaters since his 2007 “Redacted,” with 2012’s lurid, underrated “Passion” and 2019’s budgetarily crippled, but not uninteresting “Domino” banished to straight-to-video bargain bins.Die-hard fans have had to content ourselves with the likes of “Are Snakes Necessary?” The director’s 2020 debut novel (co-written with Susan Lehman) reads like a De Palma movie you’re watching in your head, dense with allusions to classic Hollywood, extravagant, unfilm-ably expensive set-pieces and characters saying that they felt like they were seeing things in slow motion. It was a fun way to pass the time and somewhat frustrating as a substitute for a movie. AMBROSE CHAPEL is even more so. This unproduced screenplay penned by De Palma in the 1990s and recently published by Sticking Place Books is a glimpse of what might have been – the blueprint for a most eccentric thriller.
Hailed as “The Masterpiece That Wasn’t” in an introduction by the estimable film archeologist and Edward Burns superfan James Kenney – a heroic scholar who discovered Peter Bogdanovich’s discarded director’s cut of his final film on eBay – “Ambrose Chapel” was written between 1993’s “Carlito’s Way” and 1996’s “Mission: Impossible,” but finds the filmmaker in the playful, self-referential mode of his 1992’s “Raising Cain.” Kenney smartly cites the screenplay as the missing link between “Cain” and the filmmaker’s 2002 rapturously naughty “Femme Fatale.”
Updated: Saturday, May 31, 2025 12:07 AM CDT
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