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AV Club Review
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Monday, December 9, 2024
'STEAL HER BREATH' IS INSPIRED BY DE PALMA, DEFINITELY
GERMAN PRODUCTION WRITTEN & DIRECTED BY ANDREAS KRONECK, CURRENTLY STREAMING


Premiering last week and streaming for free (with ads) on the Roku Channel and other outlets, the German film Steal Her Breath is a De Palma-inspired movie that you are definitely going to want to watch, possibly more than once. It's written and directed by Andreas Kröneck (a longtime reader of this blog), and watching his new movie (it's his second feature), you can see and feel that he has more than a superficial understanding of De Palma's cinema. Steal Her Breath nods to De Palma all over the place, and you will recognize these for sure: Mission: Impossible (there is a sought-after "Nox List"), Femme Fatale, Carlito's Way, Passion, Dressed To Kill, Blow Out, and even The Bonfire Of The Vanities. But the film also moves in much the same way a De Palma film will move. It's a loving tribute, and the actors are very good, as is the music. It's not pure De Palma - Kröneck does have his own way with things, as one would hope - but it's a delight and highly recommended.

See also: Variety - Embracing Pulpy Genre, Germany’s Hnywood Aims for the Stars


Posted by Geoff at 11:21 PM CST
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Tuesday, August 20, 2024
'ONLY THE RIVER FLOWS' IS 'A KNOCKOUT', WRITES CRITIC
FINANCIAL TIMES REVIEW MENTIONS DE PALMA
https://www.angelfire.com/de/palma/onlytheriverflows2.jpg

At Financial Times, Danny Leigh reviews Wei Shujun’s "eerie" Only The River Flows:
Fittingly, as pure cinema, Only The River Flows is a knockout: eerie and dreamlike. An overture of kids at play is a marvel. Another scene is a dead ringer for gaudy maestro Brian De Palma. And, oh: it never stops raining.

But Wei also tethers his film to everyday realities. China’s former one-child policy takes a key supporting role. If the movie is a philosophy lesson in unknowable truth, it also has cynical police chiefs who just want someone locked up fast.

Released in China last year, the film became a domestic box-office smash: no minor feat for an art-house movie shot on 16mm film that opens with a quote from Albert Camus. In the west, it might be tempting to see crowds flocking subversively to a portrait of flawed authority. But those flaws are safely three decades in the past. Anyway, a simpler pleasure may well have been more influential. Having seen the movie, Chinese audiences then thronged social media to debate the plot, a modern forum for an age-old question. No, but seriously, whodunnit?


Posted by Geoff at 11:06 PM CDT
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Thursday, June 27, 2024
REVIEWS FOR TI WEST'S MAXXXINE FIND DE PALMA IN THE MIX
"BRIAN DE PALMA'S TWISTY EROTIC THRILLERS SIMPLY INFORM THE MOOD"
https://www.angelfire.com/de/palma/maxxxine255.jpg

Kim Newman, EMPIRE
In Ti West’s 1979-set slasher movie X, Mia Goth played would-be porn star Maxine and elderly killer Pearl. Spinning the film out into a triptych rather than a trilogy, the 1919-set Pearl was about the younger days of the murderess, while MaXXXine is set in 1985 and catches up with what the final girl of the Texas Porn Star Massacre did next in her life. Eventual binge-watchers will notice the way elements recur with variations across all three movies — something Maxine does at the climax mirrors what Pearl did in her film.

In a moment of metatextuality which functions also as a scare scene, Maxine has her head coated with goo as a make-up artist makes an impression to be used to create a severed-head prop for a dream sequence. She is transformed by dripping white gunk into the ghost image of old Pearl, who actually told her she would end up looking like her. The fact that Mia Goth must have been through this process in real life to create the make-up mask which transformed her into Pearl in X adds a further layer to a film which is in some danger of becoming too clever by half, but consistently pulls back to deliver a cinematic coup or reveal another facet of determined protagonist Maxine. Goth’s not-exactly-admirable survivor-type is always centre-screen.

X was a homage to the grainy, gritty, sunstruck look shared by 1970s porn of the Deep Throat variety and the down-home horror-movies often made by the same film students at a different step in their careers. Pearl was a sumptuous candy-Technicolor recreation of the style of classic Hollywood melodramas, musicals and small-town nostalgia movies, with a lush, sweeping old orchestral score. It’s a risk to make a series where every instalment looks and sounds different, but West has been a master of evoking bygone styles since his homage to 1970s TV movies, The House Of The Devil.

In Maxxxine, the series moves away from the made-in-New Zealand Texas farmhouse with adjacent alligator lake of the first two pictures into a 1980s Hollywood which is at once scuzzy and vibrant. With perfect needle drops — Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s ‘Welcome To The Pleasuredome’, Kim Carnes’ ‘Bette Davis Eyes’ — and an array of authentic costumes and hairdos, this inhabits video-rental space with Abel Ferrara’s Fear City, Brian De Palma’s Body Double, William Friedkin’s To Live And Die In L.A. — not to mention a whole lot of non-auteurist exploitation pictures like the teenage-hooker classic Angel trilogy, the cult-of-killers cop flick Cobra and the extraordinary mad-movie-buff film Fade To Black. MaXXXine revisits the Hollywood locations of some of these VHS gems and is packed with film Easter eggs: an early alleyway threat comes from a stalker dressed as Buster Keaton, and a key backlot chase scene has Mia Goth chased by Kevin Bacon through the Bates Mansion created for Psycho II.

X and Pearl both take their time getting to the very gory horrors — that house façade isn’t the first reference to crime story-turned-gothic Psycho in the series. MaXXXine is more upfront and ’80s about things, with a simmering air of menace and regular atrocities as Maxine sticks to her plan of getting out of adult movies into mainstream cinema, despite bodies dropping all around and a sinister figure out to coerce her into appearing in yet another type of film with an even more twisted agenda.


Alison Willmore, Vulture
Where X riffed on The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Pearl was inspired by Sirkian Technicolor, MaXXXine owes a debt to Body Double, which was also set in the blurry borderlands between disreputable B-movies and adult film. As touchpoints go, it’s a pretty good one. Like Brian De Palma’s tawdry-gorgeous thriller, MaXXXine takes place in a city where seediness and luxury coexist, and where a mansion in the Hollywood Hills is just a quick ride away from the peep show where Maxine works when she isn’t shooting porn. The trick isn’t accessing those elite spaces — the women Maxine meets, played by the likes of Halsey and Lily Collins, are always headed off to parties in the hills — but proving you belong there as more than just a party favor for powerful guests. The first time we see Goth in the film, she’s a silhouette strutting through the massive doors of a soundstage: a literal gate, behind which are sitting the metaphorical gatekeepers for whom she’s about to try out.

One of them is Elizabeth Bender (an iceberg-lettuce-crisp Elizabeth Debicki), the director of the first Puritan, whose declarations about wanting to make a sequel that’s a “B movie with A ideas” are clearly meant to be self-referential, as well as self-deprecating. But that’s the irritating thing about West’s project — it’s not a compliment to say that it’s easy to imagine the three films being projected simultaneously on opposing walls of a museum display, because they feel more like an installation to be sampled than stories that need to be experienced one after another. West knows how to move a camera and light a scene, to be sure. When the lens glides from Maxine’s shitty apartment building to follow the departure of her best friend, Leon (Moses Sumney), on a skateboard, and then across the street to the figure staking her out in a car across the street, the sheer artfulness of the shot is its own satisfaction. But MaXXXine, like X and like Pearl, is more focused on being in conversation with the horror genre than it is on its audience. When the film arrives at the conclusion that being a star requires a helping of psychopathy, it’s Goth who’s able to make that feel like something other than a glib punchline.


Tim Grierson, Screen Daily
X paid tribute to horror films of the 1970s, while the 1910s-set Pearl slyly referenced live-action Disney pictures, but MaXXXine is not as entertaining an homage to its cinematic influences. Cinematographer Eliot Rockett and production designer Jason Kisvarday provide West with an appropriately seedy and sun-soaked L.A., but the film fails to cleverly embody 1980s’ cinematic hallmarks, its Brian De Palma allusions fairly obvious. Still, those who enjoy period hits from ZZ Top and Kim Carnes will be happy to hear them blasting on the soundtrack.

West seems more invested in the political forces at work during the era, noting the rise of religious conservatism in America which led to the entertainment industry being accused of promoting godlessness, even Satanism. No surprise, then, that the name of the film that will be Maxine’s big break is willfully blasphemous — and that the mysterious killer brands his victims with a pentagram, the mark of the devil. Incorporating archive clips of Ronald Reagan, MaXXXine seeks to spotlight a period in which horror stood in defiance of the Moral Majority, a reactionary movement that sought to demonise art it found abhorrent.

Unfortunately, that commentary is never especially insightful and, likewise, West has little success critiquing Hollywood (both the city and the industry) as a place that lures in aspiring performers only to exploit them. Maxine encounters cliched characters wherever she turns and, while some are meant to be parodies of specific types — such as Bacon’s no-good New Orleans detective — neither the script nor the performances contain enough wit to make the satire stick. Debicki plays a blandly intimidating film director, while Monaghan and Cannavale are one-note cops in search of the killer. (The meagre running joke about Cannavale’s character is that he wanted to be an actor, delivering every line with extra gravitas as a way to hold onto his thwarted aspirations.) Even worse, the film’s expected gross-out violence is subpar, rarely offering the liberating rebuke to the era’s uptight handwringing.


Damon Wise, Deadline
And now a public service announcement for the genre-savvy: know upfront that the trailer is something of a bum steer; Brian De Palma’s twisty erotic thrillers simply inform the mood, and you won’t get very far trying to guess who the teasingly little-seen killer is simply from their androgynous black get-up. In the same way, it’s really not an homage to Italian giallo; with the exception of one very bloody set-piece, this isn’t a murder-mystery in the usual sense.

In fact, the reveal is really quite disappointing after the hell-for-leather lead-up of X and Pearl, both of which freely experimented with storytelling techniques and film grammar to sell the sizzle as well as the steak. Surprisingly, despite an obvious nod to the Mitchell brothers’ 1972 porno-chic breakout Behind the Green Door, West is very traditional this time round, literally romping through the Universal studio lot in a journey that will take Maxine to the Psycho house and, well… is that really the Back to the Future town square set?

These incremental moments build up, because — and this may be complete conjecture — West doesn’t seem to be that interested in wrapping up his trilogy with yet another pastiche horror movie. Sometimes clumsily but more often not, MaXXXine has things to say about the objectification and humiliation of women in Hollywood, as actors and directors, and, alongside that, the belittling of horror as a genre too. As the figurehead for this, Debicki is a little on the nose with her delivery, demanding perfection while not exactly exuding passion, but it’s hard not to see where she’s coming from when she gives Maxine an on-set pep talk, insisting, “We’ll prove them all wrong together in a beautiful f*cking bloodbath.”


Christina Newland, i News
Tinseltown, 1985. Maxine Minx is a porn star who wants to be a legit movie actor, but this is a horror movie by the schlocky Ti West, so you ought to adjust your expectations accordingly. West – swapping mediums and using scratchy VHS to match the film’s period, as well as splashy cuts and Brian De Palma split-screens – leans heavily into the 80s setting. As an opening montage informs us, this is the era of the video nasty, evangelical boycotts of pornography, and a serial killer known as the Night Stalker haunting the streets of the city: Maxine (Mia Goth) is in a pressure cooker.

MaXXXine is the splashy third instalment in Ti West’s loose trilogy of self-conscious period-set horror flicks, following on from his slasher movies X and Pearl. It’s also the weakest of the three. Each film shares a lead actress – the alien-eyed, strange, baby-voiced powerhouse that is Mia Goth – and themes around stardom, sex, fame, violence, and the act of filmmaking. Each are glossy pastiches of movie history, which makes them both great fun and not particularly deep.

Here, Maxine is a self-invented star of the early home video porno craze, working out of Los Angeles after discarding a traumatic past back in the heartland. (We soon realise she is the previous protagonist of X, who was the sole survivor of a homicidal rampage).


Owen Glieberman, Variety
“X,” the first movie in Ti West’s grungy but elevated artisanal-trash horror franchise (it’s been billed as a trilogy but may yet produce further installments), was an unusually effective stab at recreating the ’70s farmhouse-turned-charnel-house vibe of “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre,” spiced with the fleshpot voyeurism of ’70s porn. For a retro slasher movie, it was a novelty and a curio. The insane killer was an old farm wife suffering from erotic frustration — played, under a ton of make-up, by Mia Goth, the same actress who played one of the film’s porn performers. The movie was leagues better than your average “Chain Saw” knockoff, yet it never quite transcended the slasher formula. It was a psycho thriller crafted with a fanboy filmmaker’s encyclopedic rigor.

But “Pearl,” a prequel that West shot directly after “X” (it was released just six months later in 2022), took a startling leap. It told the backstory of that ancient farm lady — who, in “Pearl,” was now an apple-cheeked lass living on her family’s Texas homestead in 1918, obsessed with becoming a star in the racy new world of motion pictures.

Goth played her once again, only this time the character was vibrant and driven, alive with aspiration — and the movie took us inside all that to the point that when she starts to kill people, you have the rare sensation of empathy for a demented slasher. Goth had a seven-minute confessional monologue in “Pearl” that was like something delivered by Liv Ullmann. And yet, wielding a pitchfork as a murder weapon, she was also terrifying. The movie was about madness, about the dawn of feminism, about “Carrie” and “The Wizard of Oz,” about the bloody horror of dreams denied. And Mia Goth proved that she’s a wonder of an actress. “Pearl” was a quantum leap over “X,” and it made you think: If this is Part 2, what does Ti West have up his sleeve for the third installment?

That movie, which opens July 3, is called “Maxxxine,” it’s set in 1985, and it’s named for the character Goth played in “X,” who is now a noted adult-film actress, Maxine Minx, in the halfway corporatized straight-to-video world of Los Angeles skin flicks. Maxine, like Pearl, longs to be a star. Early on, she auditions for a role in a horror movie called “The Puritan II,” which looks like “The Crucible” redone as a grade-Z blood feast. For her, though, it would be more than a step up. It would be a step toward legitimacy and maybe stardom. Porn stars, at the time, had little to no chance of breaking into mainstream movies, an idea that was at least flirted with when Brian De Palma considered casting the triple-X superstar Annette Haven in “Body Double” (the studio said: over our dead stock portfolio). But in “Maxxxine,” the title character’s yearning to cross over endows her with an underdog fervor.

The way the film presents it, it’s Maxine’s hunger for stardom, her hellbent wish to lift herself out of the trough of the sex industry, that sets her apart. That and her inner fire. And inner fire, as we know from “Pearl,” is something that Mia Goth can really bring. She plays Maxine with a come-hither aggression that’s direct and compelling enough to let us wonder if Maxine could be hardcore porn’s hidden answer to Vivien Leigh.

When a filmmaker recreates an old genre, to the point that it’s obvious he has steeped himself in it, it’s generally a sign that he’s aiming high, trying to make “cinema.” That’s certainly true of Ti West. In his up-from-low-budget-gone-A24 way, he’s as obsessed with old movies as Quentin Tarantino; he riffs on them as a fetishistic act of cult homage. But just as Tarantino can draw on the lowest of grindhouse muck, West, in “Maxxxine,” applies his genre-movie scholasticism to a form that seems, on the face of it, to be the definition of disreputable: the ’80s sexploitation thriller — the kind of badly lit product, featuring women in heavy-metal lingerie and psycho stalkers who are like leering stand-ins for the men in the audience, that no one ever pretended was any good. De Palma drew on some of these films too, but “Maxxxine” is less contempo De Palma than a knowing nod to the movies you used to see stacked up in VHS bargain bins in convenience stores.


Alistair Ryder, The Film Stage
These overlapping cases begin intruding on Maxine’s career, and beneath her defiant persona, the horrors of the past are never too far from her mind. And to show this, with his tongue very firmly in cheek, West depicts Maxine on a tour of the Universal lot, outside the Bates Motel, imagining that she’s seeing the ghost of Pearl in the windows of the looming house above, where another cinematic killing spree took place. If directly invoking Psycho will further embolden the horror auteurists who have begun to view West as a hack who adds nothing to his myriad influences, then directly drawing narrative parallels between it and X––which should be uncontroversial on paper, considering the well-trod slasher template Hitchcock forged––will turn them apoplectic. It’s not even the only time a set piece takes us to the Bates Motel, and if such shameless Hitchcock pastiche feels designed to get his biggest critics labeling him a poor man’s Brian De Palma, well, West is self-aware enough to be on the defensive before a single blow has been struck. Why else would there be a Frankie Goes to Hollywood-scored nightclub scene if not to tip the hat to Body Double?

Shakyl Lambert, CGM Backlot Magazine
Before the film starts, there’s a quote from legendary actress Bette Davis: “Until you’re known in my profession as a monster, you’re not a star.” Funnily enough, that quote clues into why the movie didn’t work much for me. To West’s credit, like his previous two films, MaXXXine displays his knowledge of the aesthetics that each film inhabits, in this case, the 80s slashers and Giallo films. In particular, MaXXXine plays very similar to Brian De Palma’s 1984 erotic thriller Body Double.

That film was one that De Palma made in response to the criticism he was receiving for his other erotic thrillers at the time, and he intentionally went all out with sexuality and violence. It seems like in making a movie that wants to be as sleazy as those thrillers; you need elements of sleaziness in your real-life personality. West doesn’t have that, and as a result, MaXXXine feels way too sanitized and glossy to stand alongside those thrillers.


Matt Donato, Daily Dead
West’s Los Angeles “sleaze noir’ is a seedy haven for murder, treachery, and broken dreams. At first glance, it’s giving Brian De Palma, Dario Argento, and Nicolas Winding Refn; Los Angeles is burning behind VHS static that recreates the experience of watching outdated tubular televisions. An unnamed criminal with squeaky black leather gloves slices victims open in West’s horror-forward scenes, while procedural true crime inspirations — Michelle Monaghan and Bobby Cannavale play persistent detectives — chase a dangerous whodunit. It’s West doing Once Upon a Time in Hollywood by way of Deep Red, but also daffily unserious at parts, which can become a tonal mishmash.

Maxxxine is pulled in too many thematic directions, trying to wrap a young starlet’s evolution from zero to hero, while also encapsulating 1980s Los Angeles’ lawless Wild West period. There are details that remain vivid, like Maxine evading John by sprinting into the backlot Psycho house, or pentacles seared into dead flesh — but also an overall glitzy shallowness. Giallo notes are muted, horror fierceness takes a backseat, and the dopey B-movie sheen that promotes illicit entertainment reads like caricature exaggerations. Where X had me on the edge of my seat, enraptured by tension, Maxxxine struggles with momentum. West never quite delivers a soup-to-nuts slasher, or fulfilling Night Stalker caper, lost in Maxine’s ascension to a detriment.


Robbie Collin, The Telegraph
West has set his film in 1985, when another (real-life) killer, known as the Night Stalker, was terrorising LA – and there is something of Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood in its bleary mingling of fiction and fact. The photography by longtime West collaborator Eliot Rockett evokes the era with vivid ease: his hot colours and grimy surfaces leave a residue, but one you don’t necessarily want to wash off.

The style is impeccable. The substance, not so much. Perhaps after Pearl, MaXXXine is simply a victim of heightened expectations, but it has little of its predecessor’s mischief or steely psychological brinksmanship. Instead, we get a jumble sale’s worth of homages and an odd and eventually derivative stop-start storyline, in which you often feel as if you’re watching Goth literally walk from one subplot to the next.

The references are enormous fun: we get Psycho’s Bates Motel as an unlikely refuge, Kevin Bacon as a scummy private eye with a Chinatown nose plaster, and lashings of Brian De Palma’s Body Double and Paul Schrader’s Hardcore. West clearly adores these films, and in an ideal world, MaXXXine would have joined them in the canon. In the event, though, it’s content to lust after them from the confines of the peep show booth, nose pressed up against the grubby glass.


Posted by Geoff at 11:12 PM CDT
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Monday, May 20, 2024
DE PALMA MENTIONED IN SOME REVIEWS OF 'THE SUBSTANCE'
GLEIBERMAN: "SHOCKING & RESONANT, DISARMINGLY GROTESQUE & WEIRDLY FUN"
https://www.angelfire.com/de/palma/substance0.jpg

Coralie Fargeat's The Substance had its world premiere yesterday at the Cannes Film Festival. The film has caused something of a sensation, and at least a couple of reviews mention Brian De Palma. This includes Variety's Owen Gleiberman, who begins his review with this:
Shocking and resonant, disarmingly grotesque and weirdly fun, “The Substance” is a feminist body-horror film that should be shown in movie theaters all over the land. By that, I don’t mean that it’s some elegant exercise in egghead darkness like the films of David Cronenberg, or a patchy postmodern punk curio like “Titane.” Coralie Fargeat, the writer-director of “The Substance,” has a voice that’s italicized, in-your-face, garishly accessible and thrillingly extreme. She draws on much of the hyperbolic flamboyance that’s come to define megaplex horror. But unlike 90 percent of those movies, “The Substance” is the work of a filmmaker with a vision. She’s got something primal to say to us.

Gleiberman's De Palma mentions come a bit later in the review:
Fargeat, who has made one previous feature (2017’s “Revenge”), works in a wide-angle-lens, up-from-exploitation style that might be described as cartoon grindhouse Kubrick. It’s like “A Clockwork Orange” fused with the kinetic aesthetics of a state-of-the-art television commercial. Fargeat favors super-close-ups (of body parts, cars, eating, kissing), with sounds to match, and she also vacuums up influences the way Brian De Palma once did (though he, in this case, is one of them). We’ve all seen dozens of retreads of the Jekyll-and-Hyde story, but Fargeat, in her imaginative audacity, fuses it with “Showgirls,” and even that isn’t enough for her. She draws heavily on the hallucinatory moment in “The Shining” where Jack Torrance embraces a young woman in a bathtub, only to see her transformed into a cackling old crone. Beyond that, Fargeat‘s images recall the exploding-beast-with-a-writhing-face in John Carpenter’s “The Thing,” the bloodbath prom of “Carrie,” and the addiction-turned-dread of “Requiem for a Dream.”

What makes all of this original is that Coralie Fargeat fuses it with her own stylized aggro voice (she favors minimal dialogue, which pops like something out of a graphic novel), and with her feminist outrage over the way that women have been ruled by the world of images. At first, though, the over-the-top-ness does take a bit of getting used. Dennis Quaid plays the brash pig of a network executive, in baroquely decorated suit jackets, who has decided to fire Elisabeth, and when he’s having lunch with her, shoving shrimp in his mouth from what feels like four inches away from the audience, you want to recoil as much as she does. But Fageat is actually great with her actors; she knows that Quaid’s charisma, even when he’s playing a showbiz vulgarian as reprehensible as this, will make him highly watchable.


Screen Daily's Tim Grierson also mentions De Palma in his review:
Special makeup effects designer Pierre-Olivier Persin becomes the film’s secret weapon in its second half. Unlike other films that claim to be body-horror, Fargeat delivers in spectacular and revolting fashion, not just conjuring memories of David Cronenberg but also Brian De Palma. At 140 minutes, The Substance can feel bloated and a tad repetitive, but the extra runtime allows Fargeat to push her disturbing premise to its logical, funny, utterly disgusting end point.

Posted by Geoff at 12:01 AM CDT
Updated: Tuesday, May 21, 2024 12:15 AM CDT
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Friday, February 23, 2024
LANDON TO MAKE 'DROP' - 'THIS IS MY LOVE LETTER TO DE PALMA'
UPCOMING FAST-PACED THRILLER FROM DIRECTOR OF FREAKY & HAPPY DEATH DAY
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Pictured above is director Christopher Landon with Jessica Rothe on the set of the 2017 film Happy Death Day, a film I enjoyed very much. I also really liked Landon's Freaky from 2020, which starred Kathryn Newton and Vince Vaughn. Deadline's Justin Kroll reports today that Landon will direct "a fast-paced thriller" titled Drop, with Meghann Fahy attached to star.

On his twitter-X page this afternoon, Landon himself posted, "Finally get to announce this one. I’m so excited to work with such a talented group of people. This is my love letter to DePalma."


Posted by Geoff at 12:01 AM CST
Updated: Saturday, February 24, 2024 12:02 AM CST
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Sunday, January 14, 2024
DE PALMA & LYNCH REFERENCES IN UPCOMING DEBUT NOVEL
REFERENCES TO DE PALMA & LYNCH STREWN THROUGHOUT
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Publishers Weekly's Matt Seidel includes an upcoming novel by Abraham Chang in an article headlined, "Writers to Watch: 10 Promising Fiction Debuts, Spring 2024" -
Describing his days as a 20-something singer-songwriter in New York City during the 2000s, Abraham Chang riffs on Wordsworth’s famous dictum about poetry being emotion recollected in tranquility. “I didn’t have that tranquility,” he adds, “so I was just getting my feelings out.”

888 Love and the Divine Burden of Numbers (Flatiron, May), Chang’s ebullient debut, is anything but tranquil. Praised by Flatiron v-p and editorial director Zachary Wagman for its “infectious energy,” the novel follows Young Wang, a Chinese American coming of age in late-1990s Queens, N.Y., who views the world through his idiosyncratic brand of numerology. A helpful glossary explains the properties of various numbers from one to 888 according to Chinese tradition and/or Young’s personal taste (19, an example of the latter case due to its significance in Stephen King’s oeuvre, stands for “GOOD”).

Young learns to embrace the inherent chaos of the world from his globe-trotting uncle and his gleefully coarse girlfriend. Each chapter begins with a “soundtrack,” and Chang, a first-generation Chinese American who grew up on a “constant diet of Western pop culture,” strews references to films by David Lynch and Brian De Palma throughout, hoping to please the “pop culture geeks who are going to catch every Easter egg.”


Posted by Geoff at 12:01 AM CST
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Monday, November 27, 2023
MONDAY TWEET - LEAVE THE WORLD BEHIND, BASICALLY
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Posted by Geoff at 10:25 PM CST
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Sunday, October 29, 2023
LIKE MELVILLE'S 'LE SAMOURAI' REIMAGINED BY BRIAN DE PALMA
REVIEWS OF DAVID FINCHER'S THE KILLER FROM KEITH AT THE MOVIES & VARIETY
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Keith Garlington, Keith and the Movies:
The Killer” has a cool and alluring style but with a gritty veneer. It’s as if Jean-Pierre Melville’s “Le Samourai” was reimagined by Brian De Palma. The action comes in spurts and often leaves indelible impressions (Fincher shoots one of the best hand-to-hand fight sequences you’ll see). And it’s all accentuated by yet another simmering score from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross.

But perhaps most appealing is how Fincher embraces and subverts genre expectations. From one angle he has delivered a pretty straightforward hitman movie. But as you look closer you see the markings of a filmmaker with more on his mind. They’re markings that go beyond mere craftsmanship and execution (although those things are critical). And ultimately that is what sets this film apart. “The Killer” will show in select theaters on October 27th before streaming on Netflix November 10th.


Owen Gleiberman, Variety:
Just watching Fassbender do push-ups in his black rubber gloves wires up the atmosphere. At one point, the door of the WeWork office opens. And when the killer puts music on his earbuds (the Smiths’ “Well I Wonder”) to get into his groove, it becomes the needle drop as homicidal pop-opera soundtrack. The target arrives, and as we watch him move about the apartment, the film generates the hypnotic tension one remembers from “The Day of the Jackal” or certain moments in Brian De Palma films. We realize that the chemistry of cinema hasn’t just put us in the killer’s shoes — it has put us on his side. We want to see him do the deed.

The posters and ads for “The Killer,” a Netflix movie that’s premiering at the Venice Film festival, feature a terrific tagline: “Execution is everything.” The pun is crystal clear in its cleverness, yet there’s a third layer of meaning to it. For just as the killer’s execution of his job depends on coldly calibrating every moment (no empathy, no mistakes), Fincher has made “The Killer” with more or less the same attitude. The film is based on a French graphic novel, written by Alexis “Matz” Nolent and illustrated by Luc Jacamon, that was published in 12 volumes starting in 1998. And as staged by Fincher, from a meticulous bare-bones script by Andrew Kevin Walker (who wrote Fincher’s “Se7en”), the film is all about its own execution. It’s a minimalist nihilist action opera of procedure.


Posted by Geoff at 11:31 PM CDT
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Friday, October 27, 2023
'SUITABLE FLESH' REVIEW SEES INFLUENCE OF DE PALMA & GORDON
"SPLIT SCREENS, CAMERA SWIVELS, COMPOSER STEVE MOORE'S PINO DONAGGIO-LIKE SCORE"
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Robert Abele at the Los Angeles Times reviews Joe Lynch's Suitable Flesh:
Giggles have always had their place in the enjoyment of horror, whether tacked onto the end of a prolonged freakout or as a nervous placeholder that acknowledges a silly premise before we fully get owned by terror and blood.

But Stuart Gordon, who died in 2020, believed real laughs belonged in true horror, like a complementary energy source, as his gore-ific cult hits “Re-Animator” and “From Beyond” proved. It’s fitting that he’s the dedicatee at the end of director Joe Lynch’s body-possession lark “Suitable Flesh,” since it’s a mostly amusing throwback to Gordon’s brand of blackly comic grisliness, starting with the fact that it’s also an H.P. Lovecraft adaptation (of his 1937 short story “The Thing on the Doorstep”), written by frequent Gordon collaborator Dennis Paoli, and starring the late director’s mainstay Barbara Crampton (also a producer) in a prime role.

Just as prominent in Lynch’s shout-out sweepstakes, however, are the naughty-peekaboo trappings of Brian de Palma’s violent melodramas, which initially take pride of place here as Heather Graham’s institutionalized, wild-eyed psychiatrist Elizabeth Derby spins a tale from her padded cell to her doctor friend Daniella (Crampton) about a malevolent force trying to get her. (Another connection: We’re in the same Miskatonic med school where “Re-Animator” was set.)

Days prior, an anxious young patient named Asa (Judah Lewis) had come to Elizabeth with a tale of being the target of body possession, complete with an in-session seizure and instant change to a more arrogant, suggestive, darker personality. Later, during sexy time with her horny, ignored husband (Johnathon Schaech), a vision of Asa briefly takes over Elizabeth’s mind. Since Elizabeth wrote the book on mind/body splits (there’s always a cutaway to a thick tome as proof), her way of helping means getting more involved. She visits the creepy house where Asa lives with his father (Bruce Davison), who appears angrily haunted as well, and soon the corporeally hungry, lascivious force takes over Elizabeth too.

In her possession scenes, Graham has great fun dialing down her golden-girl shine and ramping up a smirking, predatory air, a refreshingly parodic twist on years of sexpot-role survival in a male-dominated industry. Too bad the weak body-swapping farce she’s given to play isn’t worthy of her gameness, a missed opportunity to fuse Lovecraft, Blake Edwards and Paul Verhoeven. Lynch does exhibit a winking fondness for the sax-scored signposts of ‘90s cable eroticism, but it’s not always clear what’s intentionally funny about these style tags.

Meanwhile, the De Palma-fication — split screens, camera swivels, composer Steve Moore’s Pino Donaggio-like score — doesn’t really add anything except make one wish to be more authentically inside the premise’s nightmare ride (which De Palma was so expert at) rather than observing a fan’s riff. Much more enjoyable are the parts where Gordon’s influence is prominent, especially the splattery transference-apalooza at the psych ward, where the story catches up to where it all started and we know what we’re laughing and wincing at. Crampton’s genre-burnished authority is particularly disarming here, juggling the preposterous and the believable as memorably as she did in Gordon’s madness-and-mayhem classics.


Posted by Geoff at 11:10 PM CDT
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Tuesday, October 3, 2023
'ORIGIN OF EVIL' REVIEWS MENTION DE PALMA, CHABROL
DIRECTOR SEBASTIEN MARNIER: "I DON'T DESERVE THAT - HE'S ONE OF MY FAVORITE FILMMAKERS"
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"Succession meets Brian De Palma in this delicious family-fortune thriller from France, directed by Sébastien Marnier." So reads the subheading of Beatrice Loayza's positive review of The Origin Of Evil in The New York Times. The Independent's Lindsey Bahr interviewed Marnier for a profile piece:
Like many French filmmakers before him, Sébastien Marnier fell in love with cinema through Hollywood movies. Thrillers like “Basic Instinct,” “Fatal Attraction” and “Single White Female” made a big impact on him as a teenager. They were exciting, usually featured strong and dangerous women at the heart of them and, of course, they were sexy, which at 14 or 15 was a “really big deal,” he laughed in a recent interview.

“American cinema is really the foundation of my cinephilia,” Marnier said through a translator. “What I like to look for is finding that feeling that American film gave me when I was a teenager, but making a truly French film with those feelings. So how do I take the inspiration that I felt as a teenager from those emotions to make a truly French film that is taking place on the French territory?”

With “The Origin of Evil” he wanted to pay homage to those films and put them within a distinctly French context. Influences range from Claude Chabrol to “Parasite.” A playful mixture of genres, it’s scary at times, but also funny, offbeat and, yes, sexy, as Stéphane, who is in a romantic relationship with a volatile imprisoned woman, navigates the personalities in her father Serge’s (Jacques Weber) orbit: His spendy wife Louise (Dominique Blanc), his daughter George (Doria Tillier) who is angling to push him out of the business, a jaded granddaughter (Céleste Brunnquell) and their unfriendly maid (Véronique Ruggia).

Though the origin of this story comes from a very personal place — Marnier's mother, who made contact with her father later in life — he hopes it has broader commentary on issues affecting modern France.

“I think ‘The Origin of Evil’ talks about the end of a certain French society, the end of a powerful patriarchy, the end of a super-rich right wing dominant class, especially in the Riviera, a very rich class that was anti-Semitic and extremely powerful,” said Marnier. “And it’s in this confrontation of two worlds that we find a tension that France, is really experiencing at the moment. There’s something very French, I think, in the way the film captures the class struggle.”

It’s also a film where no one is quite what they seem, and it keeps you guessing and second guessing until the very end. Instrumental in this was the casting of Calamy.

“She has something that’s quite rare in French cinema, which is that she’s very beautiful and sexy, but on the other hand, she’s also banal in the good sense of the word. She’s really the woman next door,” Marnier said. “And because of things like ‘Call My Agent!,’ we like her. We have an empathy for her.

"If I had cast Isabelle Huppert, we would know right away that she was going to kill everybody,” he added.

Stéphane, it should be said, does not “kill everybody,” but she has her dark secrets too.

Of that De Palma comparison, Marnier deflects. It is, he said, much too much. “I don’t deserve that,” he said. “He’s one of my favorite filmmakers.”

He’s mostly just excited that after a few films, he’s finally got one that’s playing in American cinemas too.

“It’s really moving and beautiful,” he said. “My other films were released on platforms in the U.S., but to be released theatrically is a great gift.”


Here are some more review clips:

Craig D. Lindsey, Nashville Scene:

The Origin of Evil is practically two hours of Sébastien Marnier declaring that Brian De Palma is one of his favorite filmmakers.

The French director works many of the psychological-thriller legend’s tricks into his psychological thriller: overhead shots, slow dissolves, split-screen sequences. Hell, the movie even begins with the camera lecherously roving around a women’s locker room, much like the salacious opening sequence from De Palma’s Carrie, set in a girls’ locker room.

Like in most De Palma thrillers, we also have a mysterious female protagonist. Stéphane (Laure Calamy) is a fish-plant worker who gets reacquainted with her wealthy father (Jacques Weber), whom she didn’t grow up with. Of course, when she visits the old man at his swanky (and cluttered) Mediterranean mansion, she’s greeted by a family who’s just as off-putting as she is. The business-minded daughter (Doria Tillier, gloriously icy) wants Stéphane gone the minute she meets her, while the chain-smoking matriarch (a vainglorious Dominique Blanc) is too busy being a compulsive shopaholic to incite much animosity. The business-minded daughter’s daughter (Céleste Brunnquell) is mostly around taking pictures, hoping to escape this poisoned clan she’s unfortunately bound to by blood.

With the old man ailing after a stroke and the fam ready to carry on his business without him, Stéphane — who’s ready to do anything for her daddy — has come along at the right time. Of course, we learn in the second hour that Stéphane, who has a girlfriend (Xavier Dolan regular Suzanne Clément) in prison, has some hidden motives of her own.

Evil is basically a tribute to eat-the-rich thrillers made by French filmmakers. (De Palma, who has famously divided his time between New York and Paris, is considered an honorary Frenchman.) Along with De Palma, you also get whiffs of Claude Chabrol and René Clément, two Frenchmen who have done adaptations of Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley — which should tell you exactly what you’ll get with this flick. Fans of Succession may also get a kick out of the so-deranged-it’s-funny family politics that pop off when Stéphane arrives. Weber’s devious, ambiguously depraved dad certainly gives Brian Cox’s Logan Roy a run for his money in the piece-of-shit-patriarch department.


Rob Thomas, The Cap Times:
Then that big twist happens, and “Origin of Evil” becomes a deliciously wild thriller in the vein of Brian De Palma or the late French suspense filmmaker Claude Chabrol, as we try to figure out who is really manipulating who.

Marnier tightens the screws of the plot as things unravel, using attention-calling filmmaking techniques to heighten the suspense, like sudden zooms and organ music on the score by Pierre Lapointe. He even deploys split-screen views in a clear De Palma homage, at one time breaking the screen into five points of view.

Calamy keeps us guessing as to Stéphane’s motives, concealing layers of complexity beneath her seemingly guileless exterior. And Blanc is a riot as the Norma Desmond-esque Louise, who wears expensive furs to the breakfast table and seems to be enjoying the skullduggery in her house almost as much as the audience is.

Watching “The Origin of Evil,” we keep changing our minds about who we should be rooting for, but in the end just root for a good time at the movies. And we certainly get one.


Clayton Dillard, Slant:
Sébastien Marnier’s The Origin of Evil is a thriller with scant thrills but plenty of echoes of better, more explosive works. It opens with a slow-motion tracking shot of young women inside a locker room in various states of undress, but rather than land on a showering teenager being horrified by her womanhood, as in Brian De Palma’s Carrie, the camera stops on the upturned face of Stéphane (Laure Calamy). It’s a naked allusion and nothing else. To wit, the film’s later, recurring use of split-screen—another staple of De Palma’s voyeuristic cinema—exudes a visual anonymity, as if Marnier were working from a checklist.

Previously:
Ballet of pretense & double-dealing: two reviews of The Origin of Evil

Posted by Geoff at 12:01 AM CDT
Updated: Wednesday, October 4, 2023 12:15 AM CDT
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