Rank Brian DePalma's Films

For some reason I've never seen Casualties of War, Raising Cain or Home Movies.

the rest are terrible.

Your list makes me think

a) I like Brian De Palma but I'm not exactly crazy about him
b) I don't like ranking things, mostly because I have a bad memory. There are three or four films there that I've seen and can't remember anything about.

That's crazy talk.

I think the Untouchables if a bit ordinary except for two or three good scenes.

I could conceivably watch several individual scenes from Untouchables on loop 50-60 times in a row and not get bored. I know that the casting on its face is terrible but there's just something about it that I find totally fascinating. I sometimes wish they would recast Costner as Ness for a story about the Torso killings, actually. Oh well. Untouchables 2 is supposedly going ahead in 2006, wtf.

I somehow remembered that Ryuichi Sakamoto did the score for "Snake Eyes" but I forgot that DePalma directed it. Anyway, it was crap.

What if the Oscars were on and she kept wanting to flip to Dr Phil>

thankyewverymuch.

fwiw I am a huge fan of Ellroy's writing, at least the LA Quartet (thoe the Kennedy assassination one is also genius)

Carrie
Scarface
Femme Fatale
Carlito's Way
(big dropoff)
Mission: Impossible
The Untouchables
Snake Eyes
Mission to Mars

of what I've seen, best to worst

Dressed To Kill
Blow Out
Casualties Of War
The Fury
Carrie
The Wedding Party
Femme Fatale
Hi, Mom!
Phantom Of The Paradise
The Untouchables
Snake Eyes
Mission: Impossible
Sisters
Carlito's Way
Greetings
Body Double
Scarface
Raising Cain
Mission To Mars
Bonfire Of The Vanities

(heh. There was a joke going 'round among '70s film critics: "Brian DePalma: A Director by Pauline Kael").

Dressed To Kill
Blow Out
Femme Fatale
Carrie
Casualties of War
The Fury
Mission: Impossible
The Untouchables
Scarface
Carlito's Way
Raising Cain
Sisters
Obsession

(still need to screen Phantom of the Paradise and Snake Eyes.)

The opening credits of Sisters is great, what with the Herrmann score and pictures of embryos...rest of the film = eh

01. The Fury (1978)
02. Hi, Mom! (1970)
03. Femme Fatale (2002)
04. Carrie (1976)
05. Dressed to Kill (1980)
06. Carlito's Way (1993)
07. Phantom of the Paradise (1974)
08. Mission to Mars (2000) -- I guess it's sorta De Palma's A.I.
09. Raising Cain (1992)
10. Body Double (1984)
11. Casualties of War (1989)
12. Sisters (1973)
13. Blow Out (1981)
14. Mission: Impossible (1996)
15. Snake Eyes (1998)
16. The Bonfire of the Vanities (1990)
17. The Untouchables (1987)

Need a fresh look at both Obsession and Scarface. Have Greetings, The Wedding Party, and the French disc of some early De Palma shorts (and Dionysus) sitting on my desk, as of yet unwatched.

I guess I agree with this. I'm only kinda excited for Black Dahlia, but (in turn) much more excited for that than I am for the Untouchables sequel.

Correct answer: yes, they are rank!

Still only moderately excited for this one. But that still makes it my #1 most-anticipated movie I can think of.

I'd rerank, but I've got a couple new ones to watch yet. Body Double should be significantly higher.

I am doing something of a DePalma retro at home to coincide with this:

http://www.slantmagazine.com/film/features/briandepalma.asp

Of the stuff I've seen for the first time recently, Carrie excels in the acting and humiliation tragicomedy (and yes, I jumped at the end even tho I knew what was coming since '76). Sisters is way too sketchy (and early) to sufficiently transform the Hitchcock tropes. Dressed to Kill really goes downhill once Angie D exits, but it has one of my fave pervy moments from him, the discovery of the STD letter after the museum pickup.

Of the for-hire jobs, Carlito's Way is ridiculously superior to Scarface, despite Sean Penn reprising his worst Falcon and the Snowman tics and the wheezy romance. Pacino ditches the shouty act for fatigued resignation. That subway/Grand Central chase climax is a marvel. (Didn't see any major '70s anachronisms either... but man, they hadda cast Viggo Mortensen as a Rican just to make Al feel authentic.)

So far, I still think he excels at frosting more often than cake.

Next: The Fury

cuz it's at the beginning?

Penn way too Look At Me. The real mobster he has the jailhouse conf with is way better!

Also, does anyone remember a note of the Phantom of the Paradise music three days after seeing it? Paul Williams wrote better songs for The Muppet Movie.

I last saw Obsession on TV as a teen, long before Vertigo was finally re-released. Forgot that Schrader wrote it, I'd reexamine just for that.

then comes body double, scarface, carrie and the untouchables. the rest are not great but pretty fun to watch anyway.

OTFM - as a big Paul Williams fan (and a fan of OTT 70s glam musicals in general) I was fairly excited to finally see this, but the music was so not up to the task. Looked great though. DePalma's hit-or-miss for me, he's made a lot of crap ("Snake Eyes" anyone? "Raising Cain"?)

blow out is unbearable for travoltas ponderous epiphany of the whole thing. watching those gears turn, ugh.

I think Dressed To Kill is good and creepy all the way through (that STD letter, sheesh.)

sean penn's jewfro alone is worth the price of admission.

Is Alfred jokily or unintentionally conflating Stallone and Travolta? Stayin' Alive trauma?

The Fury, however, is not.

I have, and quite recently. Only a matter of time before it's everywhere.

Pacino's narration is one of the more successful of the last few decades. Just the right weary pitch.

eh, maybe - I think his dry spell didn't really end til "Boogie Nights" (which is also pre-Soderbergh)

apparently guzman recently moved near my dad's rural vermont town and adopted a bunch of third world orphans - so they cross paths at the price chopper; my dad channeling his inner aging hippy say something like hey man, i like you and i like what you're doin' you're allll right!

no word yet on guzman's reply. (story relaying interrupted by me and my sister's uncontrollable laughter).

The Fury, however, is not.

How odd. The Fury IS my favorite movie ever. Or close enough, at any rate.

Has de Palma commented on why he stopped working with d.p. Stephen Burum after eight films? I see Burum is almost 67, and his last credit is a Lindsay Lohan vehicle.

The Fury has one of John Cassavetes' best performances -- he's the actor/fraud of Rosemary's Baby 10 years after Damian exacted his revenge.

Not that I'm doubting your commitment toward embracing the light here, but what exactly constitutes cake in this context?

I was thinking of the Hitchcock quote "Some films are slices of life, mine are slices of cake." (Let's assume he was being disingenuously modest, as I generally find more life in him than in, say, Kazan.)

And it killed my TV set!!!

(Sorry Eric ... I wish one of my bourgeois faves, like Babette's Feat, on you and Armond White for this one.)

I read it in college and I need to do it again.

“anybody who can’t see the wit and impressive morality of The Fury really has no business in this profession, and I absolutely do believe that anybody who can’t see it in The Fury doesn’t really like movies.”

-Armond White (ok, he is completely kerrraaazy sometimes)

I hafta say I find Andrew Stevens kinda repulsive, even before he starts to speak (and while polevaulting).

What's most intriguing about The Fury is that most of the 'horror scenes' are strangely funny (tho I didn't laugh once), and the 'comedy scenes' are vaguely horrific (Mother Nuckells).

Also relieved to see novelist/adapter John Farris never wrote another movie.

Liking Carlito's Way doesn't really impress me as it is the least litmus test-y of De Palma's better films in that it doesn't require people to get over their hangups about the Hitchcock riffs, his frequently campy sensibilities (I'm with you on the comedy/horror crossover, but I consider it a strength in the film) or his aggressive, almost embarrassing disdain of narrative reality. The only thing that a viewer of Carlito's Way has to get over to enjoy is Penelope Ann Miller. And it's never been all that difficult for male viewers to shrug off female actors, so there it is.

I can shrug off the disliking of The Fury because it is pretty hardcore, but paired with dislike for Dressed to Kill? That indicates to me a fundamental split in how we view films.

If only other critics were right as interestingly as Armond is wrong.

xpost

Actually, none of the Hitchcock riffs in Dressed to Kill pissed me off as much as the hanging-by-the-arm rooftop thing w/ Douglas and Stevens near the end of The Fury.

I'd be with you on the "fundamental split" thing -- if I though BdP was fundamental. There's something about his sensibility -- and the mining of horror tropes in general -- that I consider adolescent at the core, and that just doesn't connect with me much at my *cough* time of life, if it ever did. (Admittedly this jones might be fully served by broad comedy, 1915-65, in my case.) Maybe I found Femme Fatale to be mature and smart (yet still playful) cuz de Palma made it at 60.

(congrats on the double-adulthood move, Most Worthy Adversary ... and don't put the max % in, you'll never get to the TIFF)

I count at least three of the stutter zooms in my memory. They do seem like the farmer thing in The Birds, but the rhythm is definitely different. Plus, I thought Hitchcock only did that in case the censors got uptight about the closest shot of the pecked-out eyes.

SHE LOOKS LIKE THAT DEAD GIRL!

I'm glad that was cut from Vertigo.

I wonder who got the Cassavetes dummy head from The Fury, Rick Baker or Gena Rowlands?

Say ‘Brian De Palma.’ Let the Fighting Start.
By A. O. SCOTT

IF you ever want to start a fight in a room full of film critics — and honestly, who doesn’t? — you might bring up Brian De Palma’s “Mission to Mars.” Released in the spring of 2000, the film is an unusually somber space adventure starring Gary Sinise, Connie Nielsen and Tim Robbins as members of a crew of astronauts encountering danger and mystery on the surface of the red planet.

At first glance it does not seem to be the kind of picture that would incite ferocious controversy, since it contains no sexual provocation, little in the way of graphic violence and few obvious gestures toward topical relevance. A disappointment at the box office, it nonetheless stirred up unusually fierce sentiments among reviewers, or at least among its defenders, who used their regard for the movie as a cudgel against some of their colleagues.

“It can be said with certainty,” Armond White wrote in the weekly New York Press, that anyone panning “Mission to Mars” “does not understand movies, let alone like them.” Charles Taylor in the online magazine Salon, revisiting the movie on the occasion of its release on DVD later that year, sounded a similar note when he declared that “a critic who does not recognize the visual rhapsody” of the film ‘‘is about as trustworthy as a blind dance critic.”

This kind of language arises with arresting frequency in discussions of Mr. De Palma’s work. Almost from the beginning — certainly since he began to receive wide attention with the lurid, unnerving and strangely comical horror thrillers “Carrie” (1976), “The Fury” (1978) and “Dressed to Kill” (1980) — his name has been a critical fighting word. Sometimes the arguments fasten on a particular theme or issue: the sexual violence in “Casualties of War” (1989), for instance, or the general violence, extreme for its time, in “Scarface” (1983). But more often the combativeness of Mr. De Palma’s committed admirers reveals more about the nature of cinephilic ardor than it does about the filmmaker himself. Rock stars have fans; opera singers have worshipers; but movie directors have partisans. Liking a given director’s movies can feel like a matter of principle, not of taste; failing to appreciate them is therefore evidence of cretinism or, at best, a serious moral and intellectual deficiency.

Last month, in anticipation of the release of Mr. De Palma’s new movie, “The Black Dahlia” (which opened on Friday and which stars Josh Hartnett, Scarlett Johansson, Aaron Eckhart and Hilary Swank), the online magazine Slant, a repository of passionate and often prickly pop-cultural analysis, began publishing a series of essays on this director’s oeuvre. Many of those articles — new ones continue to appear at slantmagazine.com/film/features/briandepalma.asp — are packed with insights and ideas. They are also noisy with the din of gauntlets clattering to the ground.

Introducing the De Palma package — called “Auteur Fatale,” a play on the title of his 2002 film, “Femme Fatale” — the critic Eric Henderson tosses down a bucketful, construing Mr. De Palma’s career as a series of face-offs with his uncomprehending and uptight detractors.

“Perpetually a crucible to critics who liked only the most tasteful dash of sensualism mixed in with their rigid formalism,” Mr. Henderson writes, without naming names, “the release of each new De Palma film would inevitably bring forth offended defenses of sacrosanct cinematic aridity, and that was only if he got off easy.” More than that, it seems that his movies have served as a direct riposte to such critical bluestockings: “De Palma’s oeuvre owes at least some part of its brash vitality to the destructivism his critics sparked in the director’s bruised ego,” Mr. Henderson writes.

Whether or not this is true — and I’m not sure it does Mr. De Palma much of a favor to suppose that his creative potency springs from a vendetta against journalists — Mr. Henderson is hardly alone in taking a defiant, oppositional stance in the director’s defense. The tepid early reviews of “The Black Dahlia,” a tangled period noir based on James Ellroy’s novel about a famous 1947 murder case, may be an incitement to further polemics.

But who (or what, since the “critics” who are always imagined to be ganging up on Mr. De Palma are rarely specified or quoted) is being opposed? And in the name of what?

It depends on whom — and when — you ask. Like a number of other American directors, including Robert Altman, Martin Scorsese and Jonathan Demme, who came into their own in the 1970’s and early 80’s, Mr. De Palma, who turned 66 last week, found an important champion in Pauline Kael. Her long, enthusiastic New Yorker reviews of “Carrie,” “The Fury” and “Dressed to Kill” were not only appreciations of his technical skill and sadistic sense of mischief, but also important installments in her long-running polemic against what she took to be a stuffy, condescending way of looking at — or refusing to look at — movies. In many ways Mr. De Palma’s supremely artful approach to horror movies and slasher films was ideally suited to Ms. Kael’s aesthetic commitment to finding exaltation in entertainments too easily dismissed as trash.

In the “Carrie” review, the words trashiness, tawdriness, candy and schlock appear in the space of a few sentences, and none of them are used disapprovingly. They signal how much fun the movie is, and also that the fun is not mindless but knowing. In Ms. Kael’s account, which remains one of her most persuasive reviews, “Carrie” is at once terrifying and funny, satirical and heartfelt, exploitative and implicitly critical of the machinery of exploitation. It draws promiscuously on the movies of the past — in addition to Hitchcock, Ms. Kael invokes Buñuel, “Splendor in the Grass,” “The Bride of Frankenstein” and “The Wizard of Oz” — to arrive at something lively and new.

To put it another way, the movies that secured Mr. De Palma his critical following (which has not, it should be noted, been limited to Ms. Kael’s followers) exhibited many of the attributes of what people would eventually call postmodernism: a cool, ironic affect; the overt pastiche of work from the past; the insouciant mixture of high and low styles. They were also — sometimes playfully, sometimes vertiginously — self-conscious, making you aware of the psychological manipulations inherent in cinema even as they manipulated your own responses with sadistic glee.

Voyeurism, surveillance, the deceitful nature of appearances and the unstable nature of reality: these have been preoccupations of Mr. De Palma’s from the start, so much so that he has sometimes seemed to parody himself. Peeping Toms, mysterious doubles, evil twins, mirrors, video cameras, film clips, tape recordings — all are predictable elements of a De Palma movie.

When too many of them are missing, admirers can find themselves disappointed. Ms. Kael’s review of “Scarface,” for example, was published in The New Yorker under the heading “A De Palma Movie for People Who Don’t Like De Palma Movies.” That the advertisements for “The Black Dahlia” promise a new film “from the director of ‘Scarface’ and ‘The Untouchables’ ” is likely to frustrate true believers, since those two movies, maybe his best known, are also in many ways his least characteristic.

Over all, though, he has remained remarkably consistent. The teasing shock of “Sisters” (1973), with its murderous twins, resurfaces in the underappreciated “Raising Cain” (1992), just as the uncanniness of “Obsession” finds an echo in “Femme Fatale.” (“The Black Dahlia,” though a rare period piece, is nonetheless loaded with the director’s usual themes and visual hallmarks, from the mysterious doubles to the films-within-the-film to the vulnerable and monstrous femmes fatales.) But if he has not changed, his partisans — or at least the terms of their partisanship — have.

Ms. Kael’s celebration of trash has given way to the defense of art. Mr. De Palma, customarily associated with Hitchcock, Dario Argento and other masters of the movie Gothic, is now frequently placed in the company of cinema philosophes like Jean-Luc Godard and Chris Marker. No longer the playful postmodernist, he is now, in the eyes of his admirers, something of a classicist, his critical enemies not high-minded squares but soulless philistines.

In his brief for “Mission to Mars,” Mr. Taylor of Salon claimed that “more than any filmmaker now working, De Palma communicates his meanings almost entirely in visual terms.” The hyperbole in this statement — more than any filmmaker? Steven Spielberg? Wong Kar-wai? — indicates that he sees something at stake beyond the merits of a particular film or filmmaker, namely the continued appreciation of film as a visual medium.

In other words, if you find yourself attending, as professional critics and everyday moviegoers often will, to things like the psychology of characters, the coherence of plot or the plausibility of dialogue, you are missing not only the point, but also the art. And if critics, the presumed protectors of the art, are dismissive of its purest expression, then there is reason to worry, and maybe also to fight.

Even though Mr. De Palma’s detractors are accused of formalism, what elicits rapture from his admirers is in the end nothing other than his formal command. Even in his weakest movies there are moments of intense visual pleasure, in which he moves the camera with the elegant, arrogant virtuosity of a pianist tackling a treacherous passage of Liszt. “The Bonfire of the Vanities,” for instance, can be a chore to sit through — as it was, notoriously, a nightmare to make — but the opening shot, which follows a drunken Bruce Willis on his meandering course from an underground garage, up stairs and elevators, through one change of clothes and several female companions, and into a faceful of poached salmon — well, it will take your breath away, as describing it just did mine.

And Mr. De Palma specializes in choreographing extended set pieces that are variously breathless, breathtaking, heart-stopping and nerve-racking. Even a De Palma dilettante will single out favorites, while the more scholarly will arrange them in motifs. He has, for example, an evident affinity for elevators and stairwells, and for traveling shots in which his camera moves vertically and laterally as if borne aloft by birds or balloons.

He had the nerve to recreate the baby carriage-on-the-stairs sequence from Eisenstein’s “Battleship Potemkin,” in “The Untouchables” (1987). But that scene, in Mr. De Palma’s oeuvre, is just one variation on a theme, part of an anthology that includes the long, intricate chase and shootout in Grand Central Terminal at the climax of “Carlito’s Way” and, most recently, a suite of killings on a marble staircase that forms the centerpiece of “The Black Dahlia.”

Anyone familiar with Mr. De Palma’s work can compile a catalog of marvels, and there seems to be at least one in every picture. (Even “Mission to Mars” skeptics will smile at the image of Mr. Robbins and Ms. Nielsen dancing in zero gravity to Van Halen). But are such moments enough? That, it seems to me, is a case-by-case question of taste, and thus not really a matter for sweeping, all-or-nothing arguments.

In other words, you can like movies just fine and still not like “Mission to Mars.” But behind such combative assertions is a very real worry: that the possibility of recognizing and relishing such moments, and of appreciating the unique visual power of film, is at risk in a culture saturated with cheap, flashy, corrupting images, few of them worthy of a second look. Which is something Mr. De Palma’s films always demand and frequently reward.

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

ho snap!

I'm incredibly flattered to be used in that NYT article, Morbs, but I think it's amusing he picked one of the most stilted things I wrote in that feature. Only the Casualties of War review was more dour than those excerpts.

No matter, my parents are thrilled all the same.

To the extent that I actually don't understand the intellectual value of "objective" film criticism. To the extent that it is supposed to be fun and to give you someone else's point of view.

I'd rather be neither, frankly.

Whenever that line was used, I kept thinking "Snake Plissken, I thought you were dead..."

We couldn't be more different.

Still unseen: Murder a la Mod, Get To Know Your Rabbit, Home Movies, Wise Guys

The Fury
Femme Fatale
Carrie
Dressed to Kill
Hi, Mom!
Body Double
Casualties of War
Carlito's Way
Mission to Mars
Raising Cain
Sisters
Phantom of the Paradise
Blow Out
Greetings
The Black Dahlia
Dionysus
Mission: Impossible
Snake Eyes
The Wedding Party
Scarface
The Bonfire of the Vanities
The Untouchables

Well, maybe I do. A lot of my favorite movies are less than 10 minutes long, but I don't take issue with films' inability to sustain for two hours or more, otherwise I wouldn't be interested in movies, much less list A Grin without a Cat as one of my very favorites.

Dressed To Kill
Blow Out
Casualties Of War
The Fury
Carrie
The Wedding Party
Femme Fatale
Hi, Mom!
Phantom Of The Paradise
The Untouchables
Snake Eyes
Mission: Impossible
Sisters
Carlito's Way
Greetings
Body Double
Scarface
Black Dahlia
Raising Cain
Mission To Mars
Bonfire Of The Vanities

(I'm probably buying Home Movies next month, too)

I just rescreened Internal Affairs. He's so much more interesting when not called upon to "act."

Alex, what exactly is so "awful" about the climax of Femme Fatale? It's ludicrous and funny in exactly the appropriate way, just as many of Hitchcock's or Cronenberg's are.

Maybe Sidney Poitier was just miscast his entire career.

Remember that remark of Pauline Kael's about Meryl Streep -- that she's made a career out of being miscast?

I just got that anthology of US film critics from the library, and skimmed the long famous P.K. essay "Trash, Art and the Movies" or whatever the hell it's called... and given the way she makes clear that the "trash" she finds pleasurable (eg, The Thomas Crown Affair and Wild in the Streets) is NOT ART, it's amazing she could consider De Palma an artist, rather than a giddy trashmaker. (Oh, also "not art": 2001.)

otm

Poitier's status as an icon for his times is fine with me, even worth celebrating. But he was an awful actor. (Indeed, I'm surprised I don't like him more because of it.)

For all her perception the collaborative and serendipitous nature of film, plus the inevitable compromises, repelled her, and why she was given to creating these polarities. I'd be uncomfortable comparing Citizen Kane directly with any modernist novel, but she couldn't accept the picture as anything other than an extremely well-acted and shot newspaper comedy a la Ben Hecht.

Once baseball is over I want to get to Casualties of War, Body Double and maybe Obsession.

wish this thread would've continued...

Watched Dressed to Kill last night -- there's an awful lot to like about it, but that Pino Donaggio score is nails-on-blackboard horrible, imo.

That's cool.

can't believe I waited so long to watch Body Double

what an enjoyably ridiculous film

1. Scarface
2. Carrie
3. Phantom of the Paradise

the rest are terrible

^^^posts I regret

"Enjoyably ridiculous"--good description. Kael ripped it apart, but I think it's well worth watching. The villain's make-up job when in disguise is of course atrocious.

no one ever told me about the Frankie Goes to Hollywood bit, or the driller-killer bite, or the lolz closing credits sequence

DePalma's range is limited but there is something audaciously brazen in it that is compelling

Melanie Griffith's really good, and I kind of like Craig Wasson, even though it's possibly a terrible performance...I find it hard to separate the character's annoying helplessness from the quality of the performance.

Someone persuade me I should see Raising Cain in 35mm tonight. I do like Lithgow, it's apparently lacking in any attempt at depth whatsoever, and runs only 91 minutes.

Lithgow is good and Steven Bauer is hot but it's even more preposterous than usual.

well my fave film of his might be Femme Fatale so that wdn't figure to bother me.

I couldnt make it through Raising Cain fwiw. "Preposterous" is an apt description.

Femme Fatale has way less dialogue and "acting."

wasn't sure if Femme Fatale was worth seeing, I will check it out. post mid-80s De Palma seems really hit or miss.

Anyone seen the De Palma documentary? I was harassing s1ocki about it on twitter, since I think it opened at the TIFF Lightbox right after I left Toronto

I'm planning on seeing it eventually

"wasn't sure if Femme Fatale was worth seeing, I will check it out. post mid-80s De Palma seems really hit or miss."

I like it. Snake Eyes is also good (starts really strong, kinda flames out halfway through).

My memory is more forgiving of these films than my post of 2005 would suggest hah.

I think I started watching Snake Eyes and turned it off after the long opening shot ended lol

wasn't sure if Femme Fatale was worth seeing

it's incredible, though you do have to put up with some brain-gouging "sexy" biz. morbs otm.

Saw somewhere that BdP disses The Fury in the doc, which is the best thing i've read about a minor artist since the Soul Coughing guy said those records were crap.

I like Fury too.

blow out is his best but people should rank sister way highter

+s

sisters is great. have yet to be able to watch the Fury unfortunately.

Saw Sisters once, meh, some good stuff but probably his first and most blatant Hitchcock rip. But has this great scoring story related by BdP... Bernard Herrmann complained,

"Nothing happens in this movie for forty minutes!" And I said, "Yes, that's the idea. There is a slow beginning—you know, like Psycho, where the murder doesn't happen until about 40 minutes into the picture." And he shouted at me, "YOU are not Hitchcock; for Hitchcock they will WAIT!"

I'm not a fan of Sisters either. He's way too uneven for me, but I respond to the good stuff.

iirc De Palma doesn't so really diss The Fury in the doc, but he does kind of whisk by it to get to his other films. It's possible I'm forgetting something specific he said, but I believe his attitude was basically that, after the huge success of Carrie, that was the next project that was available to him, so he did it. De Palma does say that Cassavetes didn't like being in the movie, and thought the exploding scene was ridiculous.

The documentary is definitely worth seeing, De Palma tells pretty great stories and has a pretty even-handed, dispassionate view of his own work, though he tends to overrate his major commercial successes (The Untouchables and Mission: Impossible) His wry sense of humor comes through, and the doc moves briskly through all of his films without seeming too rushed.

he comes of as a sweet uncle type who happens to love film and can discuss it – and a s someone too old to adjust to Marvel.

I should re-watch Body Double.

I held off watching that for a long time for some stupid reason, then when I saw it last year I was chuckling all the way through it, really entertaining.

I didn't like it all, largely because Craig Wasson was unbearable to watch.

the newest rep house in Manhattan has been doing a retro w/ lots of 35prints, and i was semi-sorry to miss Greetings and maybe Casualties of War.

Wasson doesn't bring much to Body Double, no argument there. best described as "functional"

Looking at the Wiki on Body Double, I'd forgotten this -

Body Double is referenced repeatedly throughout the Bret Easton Ellis novel American Psycho as the favorite film of the protagonist serial killer Patrick Bateman.[citation needed] He mentions that he has seen the film 37 times and rents the tape of it from a video store several times in the story. He also repeats scenes from the film to the reader or to other characters.

It's been a long time since I've seen it - remember a longish, near-silent sequence with some 360 degree pans that is DePalma at his best. Do remember that it was v badly received in the UK for its misogyny/violence against women, and it only limped out on home video three years later. According to the Melon Farmers site:

Holly (Melanie Griffith)'s line of dialogue regarding what she won't do in porn films is cut: I will not shave my pussy. No fist-fucking. Absolutely no coming in my face

Agree that Sisters ain't all that great. Wise Guys, otoh

I'm a big fan of his technical skill, but I think the Hitchcock stuff all gets a bit much. Not unlike Argento, he clearly knows what he's doing with a camera but often seems to have no idea, or doesn't care, what to do with his actors or about the script. But I love when his films come together, whether as sheer Hollywood entertainment (Untouchables, Mission Impossible, Carrie) or as meta exercise (Femme Fatale). Not sure I like any of his films quite as much as I like "The Devil's Candy," which really gets to the heart of a guy working his ass off to make a total mess.

Raising Cain is super silly and Lithgow is fantastic. Saw the screening a week ago, was not disappointing. Expect a total mess, though, and just go for the ride.

Also regarding Craig Wasson there's something about his dopey aloofness that works for that movie, especially when things get even more absurd in the final act. I love that he basically only did Body Double and A Nightmare on Elm Street 3!

and that big Arthur Penn flop, that was written by the Breaking Away guy

(well not 'big', it was a low-budget prestige film)

and almost every TV series from 1975-'97

sisters fucking rules, you maniacs.. but i say this as someone who rates phantom of the paradise in his top 3. if you like phantom you'll like sisters.

I like Phantom a lot although man do I wish the music was better. A rare Paul Williams 70s sdtk failure imo

A rare Paul Williams 70s sdtk failure imo

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bE2m355-JRo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bE2m355-JRo

Raising Cain not bad in toto, tho BdP's refusal to do a 'Patty Duke' shot with the Lithgows was too obvious. and the Davidovitch-Bauer scenes were mostly painful. (otoh, how often does Frances Sternhagen get a headbutt?)

didnt know the Psycho riffs went that late

Bauer not getting naked was a problem.

Saw The Fury for the first time a couple weeks ago and lol every time Cassavettes was onscreen I thought "Dude looks miserable. Must've needed that check."

"Body Double" is great, dopey fun.

I love that he basically only did Body Double and A Nightmare on Elm Street 3!

Don't forget his dual role/full frontal in Ghost Story!

I like The Fury but I have to rematch it for the purpose of introducing it at a local art house's early De Palma retrospective and don't feel like it. Maybe I can pay Eric H to summarize it for me.

watched Femme Fatale last night - didn't love it, but it had enough of DePalma's verve and audacity to keep things interesting, or at least ludicrously entertaining. Big chunks of it strain credulity but no surprise there.

saw that the Fury is on Netflix streaming, so that's next!

Esoteric movie prop I wish I owned: one of the prom ballots from Carrie, preferably the one Carrie and Tommy fill out.

Just saw the doc, and it makes a very strong case for DePalma as an eccentric filmmaking savant, less of a case for DePalma as the maker of great films.

Considering a double bill of Vertigo/Body Double at the Castro for my birthday

I have never really gotten into DePalma, but I like this Chris Randle essay on spectatorship in his work: http://reallifemag.com/night-visions/

“I certainly wouldn’t go see [my films],” De Palma once told an interviewer. “But there’s a difference between being the marionette and being the puppet master. One is a director because one wants to be the master.” He plans meticulous images, filling in plot and motivation like plaster, but you can only direct a scene with perfect control until it leaves your storyboard, and De Palma has always been self-conscious about the fakeness of the blood, the strings binding the puppet. Like Walker Evans, who hid his Contax in his coat as he rode the subway, releasing the shutter via handheld cable, or Diane Arbus, who fantasized about creeping through the bedrooms of strangers to capture them while they slept, De Palma used to sit in the front row during test screenings and watch the audience, caught between spectator and tableau. No matter how far photography advances, it never satisfies the desire to make images in secret.

I loved the doc. It also really made me want to go back and rewatch all the films on my list above up to 14 (minus Scarface and the Untouchables which I've seen enough).

I tried to watch carlito's way last night but gave up after 20 minutes. Much love for p much everything pre-wise guys tho

Does anyone have any idea how I can track down the insanely elusive Body Double soundtrack (it was issued on CD in 2007 but is out of print and doesn't show up *anywhere*)?

I am pretty sure I recently saw an LP copy of this at Lost Weekend in SF

It's never had an official LP release so it might have been a bootleg! Weirdly it's one of Pino Donaggio's most sought after scores but it's only ever been issued once on CD by Intrada in an edition of 3,000, and it never shows up anywhere. There's a compilation CD from Milan that is a sort of "best of" his scores for DePalma, but it doesn't contain any of the key cues (namely the excellent Tangerine Dream rip-off "Telescope").

do you mean a physical copy? or just a download

Big fan of the Lovelock Pino Grigio edit, which I think is Steve Moore from Zombie?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EhV2PKli1S8

x-post - I'd be thrilled with just a download; the CD rarely pops up and when it does it goes for hundreds of dollars.

That Steve Moore cut is great.

x-posting from detrius thread: http://reverseshot.org/features/2305/two_cents_2017

Worst De Palma Critic: De Palma

Take it from a staunch Brian De Palma addict: Brian De Palma is the person you least want to hear talk about le cinéma de Palma. Sitting awkwardly before a fireplace mantle in Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow’s talking-head doc, the now enormous De Palma holds court, going through his films chronologically, one by one, relating some terrific anecdotes, and overall being a surprisingly genial guide. The result is an aesthetically impoverished documentary about a great visual thinker—a disconnect hard to get over—but more detrimentally, his perspective on his own work’s merits is mostly tied to financial success (as is the case with many American filmmakers, including Spielberg). Thus, De Palma reiterates that his greatest accomplishments are benchmarks Carrie, Dressed to Kill, Scarface, The Untouchables, and Mission: Impossible, while such relative box-office disappointments as The Fury, Raising Cain, and Femme Fatale get short shrift—especially the latter, which barely rates any screen time even though any true De Palma fan knows it’s a career-defining masterwork. There’s a purity of vision and concept to Baumbach and Paltrow’s approach for sure: wind up the man and let him talk. But if there’s any filmmaker whose work is worthy of a more dialectical approach it’s De Palma, one of our most hotly debated, divisive directors. Like any artist, his work benefits from considered, serious criticism. (If you really care about De Palma, read Chris Dumas’s brilliant recent book Un-American Psycho, an engaging and endlessly revealing political and aesthetic study.) De Palma provides us with a rare home visit with an elusive figure, but its anti-critical approach left me thirsty. —MK

It seemed to me from the documentary that he was prouder of Blow Out and Casualties of War than almost anything he'd ever done, and both of those were commercial flops.

xxp i think this works? http://download-soundtracks.com/movie_soundtracks/body-double-soundtrack-by-pino-donaggio/

That Reverseshot take does not seem accurate to me.

Also Femme Fatale is p bad

(iow Clemenza otm)

I got a massive virus warning from that download-soundtracks site - a million questionable pop-ups started launching and my computer was huffing and puffing.

Fair enough, I guess, but it's frustrating when you're happy to buy something that has been available before but isn't anymore!

Maybe Death Waltz or one of those companies will reissue it someday...

xp yeah IIRC the film he seemed proudest of was Carlito's Way which was hardly a box office smash so basically agree with everyone above that Reverse Shot seems to suck at watching films. I felt like all the films got pretty equal time and if anything De Palma seemed pretty ambivalent about some of the most successful stuff which was more work for hire than personal.

I idly got around to watching the rest of Carlito's Way last night and conventional wisdom seems m/l correct to me - it takes a bit too long/is excessive given the plot/material but what does work works really well and there are a number of bravura scenes that are top tier De Palma, esp the ending sequence and the final shot where the advertisement comes to life.

loved the documentary! i mean i didn't know about the De Niro/film school stuff so that was fascinating. i liked how he said even he didn't want to sit through Casualties.. in the editing room as it was so grim.

Whoa.

http://www.hardcasecrime.com/books/bk160/cover_big.jpg

wtf?!

Just watched Obsession for the first time on TCM. I dug it.

Happy 83rd birthday perv-ish suspense director

It's Brian De Palma's 83rd birthday, so here are my rankings pic.twitter.com/tlpGPS5Q2P

— Eric Henderson (@ephender) September 11, 2023

Hollywood Suite here (a four-channel thing you get with basic cable) has Carrie on 281, Scarface on 282, and Snake Eyes (followed by Raising Cane) on 283. That's a lot of fulminating on 282/3.

My own list.

Just watched Obsession for the first time on TCM. I dug it.

I'm not a DePalma fan, but that's the one I like best. It's not his most technically accomplished film, but it may embody his work better than anything else he's done, in a way that can be seen as critical of his vision (or lack thereof).

DePalma's harshest critics argue that DePalma thinks he's Hitchcock even though he lacks Hitchcock's genuine fascination with human behavior (or what makes us human). Some claim he's more interested in duplicating Hitchcock's films than creating anything personal himself. One of DePalma's favorite films is Vertigo, and Obsession is obviously heavily inspired by it. Some may even dismiss it on the grounds that it's DePalma trying to remake Vertigo, just as Sisters was a pastiche of other Hitchcock films.

If you believe there's a lot of truth to that, I would say that even though Obsession repeats the same approach, the context makes it far more engaging. Mirroring Scottie's relationship to Madeleine, here is DePalma fixated on a film that he not only adores but is compelled to reproduce as closely as he can, short of a straight up remake. If it seems too close to a rip-off, that's the point - it's not lack of imagination so much as a perpetual compulsion on DePalma's part, telegraphed by a scene in Obsession when one of the main characters is working on an art restoration - she wonders if she should try holding on to an original element of the work that is very degraded, and her suitor tells her to "hold on to it." The character is obviously echoing his own inability to let go of the wife he's lost (and will try replacing with a lookalike), but this could apply to DePalma's filmmaking in Obsession. De Palma even gets Hitchcock's longtime collaborator Herrmann (who scored Vertigo and already scored Sisters for DePalma) to once again do the score here, and to drive the point home, DePalma even used Vertigo's score as a temp track in order to convince a producer to let him hire Herrmann.

At worst, you can say it sounds like an exercise in trying to replicate a film that DePalma could never approach, giving us a hollow thriller instead of a true, disturbing masterpiece with a deeply felt tragedy. Scottie trying to revive Madeleine through his relationship with another woman could even be thought along the same lines - that is, what's going on between Scottie and Judy is the result of necrophilia instead of a great love. But Judy really is in love with Scottie and there's a terrible yet honest sadness in how she allows Scottie to do something so awful to her. I'm not moved by Obsession the way I am by Vertigo, but I find it compelling for what it sees in Vertigo and what it regurgitates.

And thanks to Herrmann, Obsession does have real feeling - his score articulates beautifully what's going on between the two romantic leads. The best is when Robertson goes back and follows her after work. Not a word is exchanged, he stays behind her. It builds to a marvelous peak, when she goes into her home and he comes out on the street. Watch as he walks and pulls up, and how the music shifts and subtly augments that moment. His back's to you and he's in long shot, but with that bit of walking in synch with that perfect music, you can feel Robertson's heart begin to flutter. And then the killer is when we fade to a shot that drifts down from a ceiling to Robertson, who's in the foreground of a deep focus shot. As that camera floats down, listen to those soft, stray notes plucked on the soundtrack. When we finally land on Robertson (seen in profile, deep in thought), you can feel his mind miles away, thinking only of her.

Watch that scene alone and without music - what's going on is still clear, but you don't feel the intoxicating pull that's swallowing him up. It could be a cold case of stalking that elicits no empathy. That changes with Herrmann's score.

One more thing about the film - Paul Schrader's screenplay originally called for a Patti Page song, "Changing Partners," to be played during Michael’s opening dance with his wife and daughter, but the rights would have cost about $15,000. Schrader said “the money thing that hurt me most in the movie was that I lost (the song), because that to me was just everything that the movie was about… ‘I’ll keep changing partners till you’re in my arms again.'” In its place, Herrmann composed a waltz theme that recurs at the end, when De Palma’s camera swirls around the reunited father and daughter.

Here's the recording in question and as much as I like Herrmann's score (a masterpiece in itself), this feels pretty perfect, with a sense of humor that puts it on par with Kubrick's musical choices IMHO.