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Exclusive Passion
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Karoline Herfurth
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AV Club Review
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Sunday, February 18, 2024
LILY SULLIVAN DISCUSSES 'CARRIE' ON THE KINGCAST
https://www.angelfire.com/de/palma/kingcastlilycarrie.jpg

Posted by Geoff at 4:35 PM CST
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Saturday, February 10, 2024
ASKED TO NAME 4 FAV FILMS, DIABLO CODY STARTS WITH 'CARRIE'
VIDEO TWEETED BY LETTERBOXD, AS LISA FRANKENSTEIN HITS THEATERS
https://www.angelfire.com/de/palma/diablofav.jpg



Previously:
Karyn Kusama & Diablo Cody cite Carrie & Heathers among inspirations for Jennifer's Body

Posted by Geoff at 11:42 PM CST
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Monday, December 18, 2023
MONDAY TWEET - PEDRO, CARRIE, & CHEF-AT-HOME
https://www.angelfire.com/de/palma/tweetchefathome.jpg

Posted by Geoff at 10:17 PM CST
Updated: Monday, December 18, 2023 10:21 PM CST
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Monday, October 30, 2023
HARMONIOUS MARRIAGE OF FORMAL BOMBAST & TENDER HUMANITY
FLOOD'S GREG CWIK ON MOTHER/DAUGHTER RELATIONSHIP IN CARRIE
https://www.angelfire.com/de/palma/carriecareful.jpg

At FLOOD Magazine, Greg Cwik's essay "Mommie Dearest: On the Mother/Daughter Relationship at the Heart of Carrie" carries the subheadline: "The tragic undertones of Brian De Palma’s 1976 adaptation of Stephen King’s debut horror novel are anchored by a staggering performance by the late Piper Laurie." Here's a bit of it:
In Carrie, Brian De Palma flaunts his virtuosity as a filmmaker (is there a passage in ’70s Hollywood as elegant as Carrie’s long, slow walk to the stage, culminating in the fall of the blood bucket, at which point the somnolent slowness goes from lovely to agonizing?) as much as he displays his bone-aching empathy for the tragic Carrie White (Sissy Spacek). Adapting Stephen King’s debut novel at the advent of King’s reign in the book world and in Hollywood, on his way to becoming the most pervasive presence in pop-culture of the 1980s (it was his endorsement that helped bring Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead success), De Palma creates a harmonious marriage of formal bombast and tender humanity, capturing the panic spread by the unusual and the pain of the daily banalities of being a teenage girl in America.

“Virtuosity” and “humanity” also describe Piper Laurie’s staggering performance as Margaret White, Carrie’s mother, a fervid acolyte of some notion of Christ whose beliefs and implementation of punishment for minute sins are unorthodox, but she believes with all her heart. Her faith remains unwavering. The film’s cast is an eclectic array of characters with quirks and personalities, some modest and “realistic” (Amy Irving’s Sue, afflicted with guilt) and some decidedly villainous (Allen’s queen bitch and her thuggish, beer-swilling, swine-killing boyfriend played by John Travolta) in that distinct, classic way of the pre-slasher horror picture, a genre founded upon fear of the strange (Baudelaire’s affinity for the anomalous is very much relevant here).

Laurie’s God-fearing matriarch is outlandish, realized with some capital-A acting at the apogee of New Hollywood histrionics and opposite Spacek’s very internalized, kind-and-loving performance, emotions conveyed in meek terseness and downward-gazing eyes. With hair the color of sin sticking out all frizzy and unkempt, her makeup-less face wide in divine expression as she spreads the word of God translated into her own sui generis piousness, Laurie’s return to Hollywood after a 15-year absence (following her acclaimed performance in 1961’s The Hustler) is indelible and incendiary. Her presence in the film is exaggerated, a performance with an exclamation point, yet still steeped in humanity, strangled by the trauma of corrupted innocence and the desperation to make sense of one’s life. She had a kid and it ruined hers; you hear such stories all the time, hear the sanctimony of parents telling teens to abstain because the last thing they want is a kid too young.

When Margaret hurls her daughter into the closet for blaspheming, it’s not hatred of her daughter that has her quaking, but hatred of herself for birthing spawn that possesses the power of the Devil.


Posted by Geoff at 12:01 AM CDT
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Tuesday, October 24, 2023
DECIDER'S WALTER CHAW ON PIPER LAURIE IN 'CARRIE'
"A VOLCANO IN SHEEP'S CLOTHING"
https://www.angelfire.com/de/palma/piperincarrie335.jpg

"Piper Laurie Was A Volcano In Sheep’s Clothing," reads the headline at Decider, where Walter Chaw delves into three of Laurie's most well-known roles, including Margaret White in Carrie:
I first met Margaret White in the pages of Stephen King’s Carrie in elementary school and it was all because of a crush. After the release of Children of the Corn in 1984, I saw the prettiest girl in fifth grade carrying around Night Shift, the short story collection in which its source was anthologized. With no other way to get close to her, I got my parents to buy me the book and fast became obsessed by King and the illicit charge of what I’d read. Finished in a fever, I had gone in search of more King and landed on Carrie, his first book. King describes Margaret White in its first pages as a “holy roller” so obsessed by the notion of sin that she could not conceive she was pregnant until she birthed Carrie on her own on a blood-drenched mattress in an empty home surrounded by neighbors who hate her. The book, these stories and characters, have anchored themselves in me. The image of Margaret White — a person so pugnacious, so broken by experience and yet so resourceful, so driven and unknowable — immediately lodged itself in my imagination. When I finally saw Brian De Palma’s adaptation of Carrie on a VHS tape I wasn’t technically allowed to rent, the moment Piper Laurie appears on screen I knew immediately that this was Margaret White, a more-rounded, more terrifyingly human Margaret White: a volcano in sheep’s clothing.

What Laurie captured so well was not just the monstrousness of a woman who refers to breasts as “dirty pillows,” not the middle-distance gaze, the sense that not all was well with Margaret who had one foot in reality and the other with the cruel angels of her own divining, but the woman who had her own sad stories to tell — but no one to tell them to. King says Margaret believed her pregnancy was a rapidly-spreading “cancer of the womanly parts” and that she was going to die soon. I can see her belief manifested in Laurie’s performance: the fatalism and mortality, the surety that comes with ignorance and unquestioned faith, the beatific arrogance of the saved forged in the fire of ostracization and isolation. Margaret first appears ten minutes into Carrie, a witch from a fairytale all in black with black cloak, her red hair an untamed thicket come to call on a hapless neighbor with a poisoned apple of the Good News promising salvation in a Godless time. She proselytizes with orgasmic bliss to an increasingly unnerved neighbor before being sent away with ten dollars. She experiences the same kind of rapture when she’s beating her daughter, Carrie (Sissy Spacek), and forcing the child to confess to sins she hasn’t committed. She’s transferring the rejection of her evangelism into rage at a daughter whose budding sexuality she can’t stem. Margaret can’t save her. She’s failed as a parent. Margaret’s humiliation is Carrie’s fault, Carrie who is learning how terrible the world is for young women despite all the precautions Margaret’s taken. Margaret wants to protect Carrie from the rejection and humiliation that she, herself, suffers daily. She’s a terrible mother but what makes her indelible in Carrie is how Laurie makes us believe she has good intentions.

A lot of actors would be up to the task of playing unhinged, but few could also do what Laurie does later when Carrie, fresh from a round of punishments and forced isolation, kisses her mother sweetly on the cheek before bed. Laurie underplays the moment. Her Margaret has no shame for her behavior — why should she? just pleasure over how things have returned to her sense of normal. Laurie underplays it but if you look close, her eyes are glassy and ecstatic. Margaret isn’t sliding up and down an emotional scale, she’s burning at the same temperature whatever her outward expression. When she’s not in the midst of an eruption, she’s still vibrating, maniacally, dangerously in place. I think among Laurie’s peers in the Hollywood of the 1950s, where she got her start as a contract player for Universal, only Ida Lupino had the same quality of dangerous, even explosive potential in stillness. I don’t know that even Lupino could have played Margaret White as something other than a camp caricature, some “psycho-biddy” refugee from a Robert Aldrich exploitation film. As played by Laurie, Margaret’s story has the awful weight of history and melancholy: her story becomes a blueprint for suffering for her daughter, of trauma left to metastasize into madness and of mental illness shunned rather than treated.


Posted by Geoff at 12:01 AM CDT
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Saturday, October 14, 2023
PIPER LAURIE HAS DIED, AT 91
"SUBCONSCIOUSLY I THINK I GAVE MYSELF PERMISSION TO BE OVER THE TOP & LARGER THAN LIFE"
https://www.angelfire.com/de/palma/piperlaurie1953.jpg

Piper Laurie posed for the photograph above in 1953, more than two decades before she so memorably portrayed Margaret White in Brian De Palma's adaptation of Stephen King's Carrie (1976). As The Hollywood Reporter's Mike Barnes reports, Laurie passed away earlier today:
Piper Laurie, the three-time Oscar-nominated actress known for her performances in The Hustler and Carrie and for her outlandish two-character, two-gender turn on the original Twin Peaks, died Saturday morning in Los Angeles. She was 91.

Laurie had not been well for some time, her rep, Marion Rosenberg, told The Hollywood Reporter.


Piper Laurie's early career in the 1950s included work in live television drama, directed by greats such as Sydney Lumet and John Frankenheimer (the latter for Days Of Wine And Roses). After starring with Paul Newman in Robert Rossen's The Hustler (1961), she made a decision to leave the film industry to get to know herself better. She got married, had a daughter, and didn't make another film for 15 years, until De Palma cast her in Carrie. She was Oscar nominated for both The Hustler and Carrie, and then again for her role in Randa HainesChildren Of A Lesser God (1986). She later worked with David Lynch, on the first two seasons of Twin Peaks (1990/1991). Through the years, Laurie appeared in many more films, including Walter Murch’s Return To Oz (1985), Norman Jewison’s Other People’s Money (1991), Dario Argento's Trauma (1993), Sean Penn’s The Crossing Guard (1995), and Robert RodriguezThe Faculty (1998).

In Lee Gambin's book, Like Being on Mars: An Oral History of Carrie (1976), Laurie says that she "absolutely used immense amounts of stagecraft with the role" of Margaret White. "I think it definitely needed to go there, to get to those operatic and grandiose theatrical levels. I watched Brian's movie Phantom Of The Paradise a few times before doing Carrie, and I saw how operatic and over the top that was! So subconsciously I think I gave myself permission to be over the top and larger than life. I think that benefits such a wonderfully operatic story. It is really an extension of a heightened reality!"

Regarding Laurie's time on Twin Peaks, Barnes writes:

After Laurie’s unscrupulous Catherine Martell of the Packard Sawmill presumably had perished in a fire during the first season of ABC’s Twin Peaks, series co-creator David Lynch called her and said he wanted the actress to return for season two — to play Martell disguised as a man.

“‘What kind of man is going to be up to you,'” she said he told her. “‘You could be a Mexican, a Frenchman, whatever you think.’ I was beside myself with the power to be able to pick my part like that. I decided I would be a Japanese businessman because I thought it would be less predictable.”

Incredibly, the cast and crew were kept in the dark about this. Laurie was told not to tell anyone — not even her family — that she was back on Twin Peaks, and her name was kept out of the credits. And so, sporting a black hairpiece, Fu Manchu mustache and dark glasses, Laurie arrived on the set as actor Fumio Yamaguchi, there to portray the character Mr. Tojamura.

“The cast would never come very close to me,” Laurie said. “They were told to be respectful to this actor who had come over from Japan specifically for the show and had only worked with [Akira] Kurosawa.”

She said that, eventually, some in the cast began to realize something was amiss — but Peggy Lipton, Laurie noted, thought Yamaguchi was actually Isabella Rossellini in disguise.

The actress earned Emmy noms in 1990 and 1991 for her work on the show.


From Dan Callahan's tribute to Piper Laurie at RogerEbert.com:

Thoughts about Piper Laurie must begin with the darkness and throatiness of her mature speaking voice and the frightening directness and strength of her gaze, which could seem nearly Satanic sometimes, as if she were intimately aware of all the worst that life had to offer. She had been born Rosetta Jacobs to Jewish parents in Detroit, and it was only after signing a contract at Universal that she got her new name. Laurie never thought seriously of discarding that name from her ingenue days, even when its incongruous birdlike cheerfulness became so at odds with the watchful quality she was so apt to offer to the camera, with its hints of unspeakable depravity.

In the 1950s, Universal put out lots of cockamamie press stories about its young starlet; in one of them, the young Laurie supposedly only ate flower petals. In her colorfully indiscreet 2011 memoir “Learning to Live Out Loud,” Laurie writes of how she lost her virginity to future-president Ronald Reagan after they starred together in a movie called “Louisa” (1950), and she is unsparing about how coldly technical and un-romantic this was (she claimed that Reagan even told her how much money he spent on condoms). Laurie made pictures with Tony Curtis and Rock Hudson and looked pretty in Technicolor, but only those watching very closely may have discerned that there was something more to her than what Universal required, something like a bomb that needed to go off.

By the late 1950s, Laurie was fed up with Hollywood and went to New York to study acting. It wasn’t easy to live down her past or get casting agents and directors to take her seriously, but Laurie made a serious impression on live TV when she played an alcoholic in “Days of Wine and Roses” (1958) for director John Frankenheimer. This eventually led to her getting the role of Sarah Packard in Robert Rossen’s “The Hustler” (1961) opposite Paul Newman, a performance that earned her an Academy Award nomination for best actress and put Laurie on a new level.

Laurie’s Sarah Packard is an alcoholic, and she walks with a limp. Any man with sense would know right away that Sarah is trouble with a capital “T,” and she tells Newman’s “Fast” Eddie Felson to his face that she is trouble, and a bad lot, and not worth bothering about. But Sarah Packard has a kind of allure in her consummate solitude; there is something somehow glamorous even about her self-loathing.

How does Sarah earn her living? Sarah tells Eddie that she is living off what the last rich man she was with gave her, and so she has been around the block more than a few times. When she was younger, Sarah had tried to be an actress, but that’s all finished; now she mainly drinks and broods. When she isn’t drinking, Sarah takes college classes, but without any ultimate aim in mind. The look on Sarah’s face is so isolated and so self-destructive that it is as if ultimate aims are beneath her. She hates herself so much that there is something untouchably romantic about her.

The Hustler” remorselessly charts the hopes that begin to grow in Sarah that she might actually deign to accept the love of another human being and then their final destruction when she enters the orbit of Bert Gordon (George C. Scott), a man who wants to exploit Eddie’s talent for pool playing and sees Sarah as an encumbrance. Bert says things meant to wound Sarah, and she begins to crumble away. There comes a point when Bert whispers something in Sarah’s ear, and we never find out what it was, but it is so bad that she is finished by it; she cannot go on any further.

Laurie’s Sarah Packard is a woman who once had many possibilities, and she still has them almost up to the end; all it takes is one more bit of deliberate cruelty to destroy her, and Scott’s Bert Gordon tips that scale for her. This is tragic, because Sarah Packard isn’t the sort of person who is a hopeless case, but she is too sensitive, and she is also perverse, and that is a deadly combination.

Laurie did not capitalize on her success in “The Hustler.” Instead, she married the film critic Joe Morgenstern and didn’t make any more movies until she was offered the role of the religious fanatic mother Margaret White in Brian De Palma’s “Carrie” (1976), in which she gives one of the campiest performances of all time even though Laurie plays it all with such a straight face. It was that poker face of hers that let Laurie get away with anything in this movie and somehow still seem serious and seriously scary, even when Margaret speaks of the “dirty pillows” of her daughter Carrie (Sissy Spacek) and runs around smiling with a large knife, her long, curly hair flowing behind her.

Carrie” brought Laurie another Oscar nomination, this time for best supporting actress, and Laurie obtained far more work now after this second comeback. She headlined a horror vehicle for director Curtis Harrington called “Ruby” (1977), played Judy Garland’s fearsome stage mother on television in 1978, and was flat-out terrifying as Magda Goebbels in “The Bunker” (1981), especially in the scene where she poisons her own children.

But Laurie gave maybe her most perverse performance of all as a well-to-do woman who develops a yen for a mentally handicapped young hunk (Mel Gibson) in “Tim” (1979), which is meant to be a sentimental love story but is steered directly into the most disturbing possible direction by Laurie from the moment her character first sets eyes on her young prey in his tight shorts (in her memoir, Laurie wrote that she slept with Gibson shortly after the shooting wrapped, for she wasn’t shy about detailing such perks of her profession).

Laurie worked quite a bit in the 1980s, getting one more Oscar nomination for “Children of a Lesser God” (1986) in the supporting category. But it was in 1990 that she received a role that will stand with her Sarah Packard and her Margaret White for her legacy: the authoritative Catherine Martell on David Lynch’s classic surreal TV series “Twin Peaks,” an unscrupulous lady who will stop at nothing to get what she wants, the inverse of the romantic loser Sarah Packard.


Posted by Geoff at 9:46 PM CDT
Updated: Monday, October 16, 2023 6:39 PM CDT
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Saturday, September 30, 2023
SCOTT TOBIAS ON THE POTENCY OF DE PALMA'S 'CARRIE'
AT TOP OF HIS NY TIMES "50 BEST MOVIES ON MAX RIGHT NOW" ARTICLE
https://www.angelfire.com/de/palma/carrieinrobesplit37.jpg

At the New York Times, Scott Tobias provides his selective list of "The 50 Best Movies on Max Right Now." "The list below," Tobias states in the introduction, "is an effort to recommend a diverse range of movies — old and new, foreign and domestic, all-ages and adults-only — that cross genres and cultures while appealing to casual and serious movie-watchers alike." That said, he begins with the 1976 film, Carrie:
Coming-of-age films are often about teenage girls making an awkward transition into womanhood, and the potency of Brian De Palma’s pulpy shocker, adapted from the novel by Stephen King, lies in its supernatural manifestation of familiar agonies. From the beginning, “Carrie” aligns itself with a misfit daughter (Sissy Spacek) of a Bible-thumping mother (Piper Laurie), who grows into violent telekinetic powers that she has trouble controlling, especially when prodded by classmates. When her anguish turns prom night into a gruesome affair, De Palma and Spacek pull off the neat trick of holding our sympathies as her psychic pain is unleashed.

Posted by Geoff at 5:34 PM CDT
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Friday, August 11, 2023
KATIE WALSH ON WHY 'CARRIE' MEANS SO MUCH TO HER
"THE COMBINATION OF IMAGE, SOUND, AND RHYTHM GRABS YOU WITH VISCERAL, RECOGNIZABLE POWER"
https://www.angelfire.com/de/palma/tweetkatiewalsh.jpg

L.A. film critic Katie Walsh tweeted today that she "will be introducing my very favorite movie tonight at @vidiots -- Brian De Palma's Carrie! So happy to see this movie on the big screen with a crowd and share why I love it so much." She followed up that tweet with a link to her editorial about the film, which was posted at Certified Forgotten in October, 2020. Here's a portion:
In high school, once I had read Carrie, I had to see the movie. I watched it with my best friend Kristen at, of course, a sleepover, and the split-screen moments in the prom scene were my first real “cinema!” moments, when the combination of image, sound, and rhythm grabs you with visceral, recognizable power. Prior to this, what I loved about movies like Scream and Clueless was the writing; I was somewhat unconscious to the ways they moved and looked and felt. But Brian De Palma will never let the audience forget for a second that the most important way a movie speaks is through the image, and its construction in time and space.

I became obsessed with Carrie. Obsessed with the line readings, especially anything that came out of Piper Laurie’s mouth – and especially the line, “I can see your dirty pillows” (my friend Gena embroidered a pillow with the phrase for one of my late 20s birthdays). I was obsessed with the ‘70s gym shorts and high socks, and P.J. Soles’ hat and the way Miss Collins wallops Chris across the face. Obsessed with the hazy cinematography and editing, the split screen and split diopter shots, the camera whirling around and around Tommy and Carrie as they dance at the prom. The extreme closeups of Nancy Allen’s mouth with her crowded front teeth as she licks her lips, tugging on the rope attached to the bucket of blood; the long, long, long slow-motion shot as Sue discovers the rope. I was obsessed with the way Carrie, covered in blood, whipped around in a crouch, her hands locked in stiff claws, and the camera rapidly jump-cutting in on her pupil as she sends the car flipping over and over itself. I was obsessed with recognizing a visual parallel in Margaret White’s crucifixion and the creepy Jesus figurine.

My senior year of high school, I decided to go as Carrie for Halloween. I found a cheap pink satin gown at a thrift shop and wore it all day at school, carrying a bouquet, wearing a tiara. That night, at a Halloween party, I made everyone gather in the driveway for my ceremonial blood drenching. I handed my friend Joanna a sauce jar filled with corn syrup and red food coloring as I had heard the Carrie blood was made of, and instructed her to pour it over my head. All I remember is that the drenching felt neverending. Not a shocking splash but a steady stream as she slowly poured it over me. I changed into gym shorts and a t-shirt, but the red corn syrup remained on my skin. My friend Andrew, who I’d known my whole life, licked my arm and was surprised it was sweet. A week later, he died in a drunk driving accident. That night was the last time I saw him.

If this all seems extra personal, it feels important to talk about why I connected with Carrie so much as a teenager, and its influence. What King and Brian De Palma understand and convey so beautifully is that high school is hard. It’s filled with blood, and sex, and death, all while fumbling through the figuring out of yourself and others, and yourself in opposition to others, including your parents. Plus, everyone hates gym class. All of that is amplified in King’s book, written just a few years out of high school himself, and working as a teacher. It’s a story about a bullied, abused girl with supernatural powers that’s grounded in a recognizable and terrifying reality, because King knows how terrifying high school can be. De Palma, on screen, makes it erotic, operatic, funny, scary, and tragic, every emotion deeply felt and deeply real. The movie is camp, but sincere.

I’ve seen Carrie dozens of times on VHS and DVD, my copy traveling with me during the ten or so times I’ve moved around the country since college, but the first time I saw it on the big screen was last year, at the American Cinematheque, in a screening series of Argento/DePalma double features put on by Cinematic Void. Even though I knew I would love it, it had been several years since I’d watched it in earnest. I was hoping I wouldn’t see something that I’d recognize now as problematic or exploitative.

This time around, nearly 20 years removed from being a teenage girl, I found it profoundly moving. Margaret White isn’t just a crazy, homicidal religious nut, she’s a deeply traumatized woman who has turned to fanaticism as a coping mechanism to deal with her repressed sexual trauma. Chris is trapped in a psychosexual abusive relationship with Billy and lashing out at those around her. Miss Collins is an imperfect ally because she doesn’t trust anyone, and Carrie, well Carrie shows what happens when pathological shame, abuse, and psychological torture combust, but in small moments, she owns her own power, her own sexuality. “It’s me, mama,” she pleads with her mother, who declares her remarkable gift the work of Satan. Even the infamous line I giggled at in high school took on a new tenor. “Breasts, mama,” she says, “they’re called breasts, every woman has them,” gently asserting her right to her own sexuality. The locker room slo-mo shot isn’t just a brazen display of the male gaze, it’s a comment on the male gaze, a sly bait-and-switch from sensual to savage.

The tragedy of Carrie, which both King and De Palma treat with the gravity that it deserves, is the idea that in high school, the worst thing to happen to someone is shame, embarrassment and rejection. It taps into our most primal desire to be loved and accepted by the tribe, which translates into safety and nourishment. Carrie is denied that, again and again. She never receives the comfort that she’s craving, except in small doses, and conditionally, from Miss Collins, her gym teacher (played by the great Betty Buckley). In the opening shower sequence, she reaches out, vulnerable, for help. Blood is coming out of her body, she doesn’t know why, and she’s scared for her own safety. The girls turn to savagery in response to her off-putting plea, pelting her with sanitary napkins. When she pleads with her mother, “Why didn’t you tell me?” looking for some comfort, she’s hit with a book and lectured that her body is sinful. After the massacre at the prom, when Carrie returns home and seeks solace in the arms of her abusive mother, she says, “they laughed at me.” The trauma she experienced is not the blood or violence or fire she inflicted, but that they laughed at her, that they rejected her. Carrie is a heartbreaking and tragic victim who turns into a monster as her self-preservation instincts morph into total annihilation.

Watching the film now, I can see that what moved me when I was in high school, whether I knew it then or not (I didn’t), was that this was a film about the inner lives of women, who are allowed to be everything in this instance: the villains and the victims, the empowered and the disempowered, complex characters, with whom you can simultaneously empathize and condemn. Grappling with the film 20 years later, I realize that what Carrie articulated for me is that, yes, teenage girls, sometimes we are monsters–but we usually have a damn good reason to be.


Posted by Geoff at 11:33 PM CDT
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Tuesday, August 1, 2023
'IT ALL STARTED WITH CARRIE'
CLIP FROM KING ON SCREEN VIA BLOODY DISGUSTING - BLU-RAY RELEASE SEPT 8TH

Posted by Geoff at 10:54 PM CDT
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Sunday, July 9, 2023
'RIGHTEOUS GEMSTONES' ALLUDES TO DE PALMA'S 'CARRIE'
IN EPISODE 5 OF 3RD SEASON, ACCORDING TO DIRECTOR DAVID GORDON GREEN
https://www.angelfire.com/de/palma/righteousgem.jpg

Variety's Charna Flam interviews David Gordon Green, director and executive producer of HBO's The Righteous Gemstones, about the latest episode of the series:
David Gordon Green returned to direct the series’ third flashback episode, and once again brought the audience back in time, as the Gemstones entered the new millennium. While the episode is set in 2000, Gordon Green explained how he and [Danny] McBride try to reference film and television of the 1980s and 1990s.

As the show’s director and one of its executive producers, Gordon Green said he leans into melding genres, and called out this episode’s pop-culture references — allusions to Brian De Palma’s “Carrie,” Olivia Newton-John in “Grease” and the “Halloween” franchise, both the original John Carpenter movies and his revival of them.

“We’re not shooting it like a comedy,” said Gordon Green. “I think part of what gives it a little bit of scope, and an unlikely interest, is because it’s not just putting the camera in the comedy place and telling the joke.

“It lets something be unexpectedly exciting or unexpectedly dramatic, and not fall into the tropes of the genre,” he continued. “And then be able to be inspired by all genres and bring it into this, [rather than] make a show that could be formulaic and could be technically, traditionally executed.”

Gordon Green’s latest revision of typical tropes occurs in the episode’s final scene, when Peter attempts to rob a bank. Rather than following him into the bank, Gordon Green positioned the camera in the diner booth where Peter had sat moments before. With a protected barrier, the audience watches Peter unsuccessfully, and almost fatally, try to rob the bank to gain the funds he had poorly invested. Gordon Green explained how that final sequence involved Zahn, a stuntman and personal friend, to ensure the “Texas switch” went off without a hitch.

“We’re just trying to up the ante, and do something different,” Gordon Green said. “It was something you had to map out and choreograph and do safely, so nobody got run over. Then you hope that the lighting stays the same so you can do it all in one take.”

He added, “It was cool to end it [that way]. We always try to build it so that there’s a bit of a launch and a leap at the end of an episode, so that it has a bit of an opera to it.”


Posted by Geoff at 12:01 AM CDT
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