Kabuki Mask

Either the festival fathers (Venice, Telluride, Toronto) have Brian DePalma‘s back out of age-old loyalty or Passion, his remake of Alain Corneau‘s Love Crime (2010), a corporate potboiler about rivalry between two ambitious women, is half-decent or even good. It’s very hard for me to accept that possibility. In my mind DePalma’s last decent film was 1998′s Snake Eyes.

The Passion trailer is telling us that DePalma has emphasized a lesbo current …fine.

In Corneau’s film Kristin Scott Thomas played the older, dominant, more jaded executive and Ludovine Sagnier played the young go-getter. In DePalma’s film Rachel McAdams has the Thomas role (seven years ago she was the hot new actress and now she’s playing older woman roles?) and Noomi Rapace has the Sagnier part.

13 thoughts on “Kabuki Mask

  1. I hope for DePalma’s, and for Rapace’s, sake that it’s at least a decent remake of sorts. The casting of McAdams in the Kristin Scott Thomas role looks like a mistake.

  2. If nothing else I’m glad to see that Pino Donaggio is scoring it, their first collaboration since RAISING CAIN (92). De Palma still has some gas in the tank, it’s too bad it takes him years to get a project off the ground. (Hard to believe that REDACTED, which I interviewed him about, is five years old.) TOYER, with Colin Firth and Juliette Binoche, sounded interesting but never happened.

  3. LOOK AT THEM!

    Did someone just complain that RACHEL MCADAMS is somehow a comedown from Grandma Scott Thomas? This is what it is all about… if only DePalma’s last two movies weren’t so INCREDIBLY TERRIBLE they deleted almost his entire legacy.

    Femme Fatale is GREAT though, but post-Casualties, BDP always seems like he’s frozen in time in like 1974, and that overlit, hermetic, phoney-baloney look was starting to run its course….

    Also, here’s some blasphemy…. I know a lot of die-hard auteurists are stoked that PINO DONAGGIO is back, but man, his scores for DePalma are some of the WORST MUSIC EEEEEEVER, all saccharine and depressing beach-jazz sleaze gauze from like the Malibu Colony or something; DRESSED TO KILL and CARRIE’S scores are kill-yourself depressing and TERRIBLE.

    The montage music when the girls are doing situps and the guys are buying tuxes in CARRIE is absolutely– ABSOLUTELY– the single worst music in any movie ever, except maybe that ZITHER shit from Third Man.

  4. Having seen the original, and the trailer for the remake, Rachel does seem young for the part. My guess is she wanted to try something different. Her next film with Richard Curtis “About Time” is currently scheduled in a prime summer slot, May 10th, the Friday between “Iron Man 3″ and “Star Trek 3-D.”

  5. Lex, she was in that massive hit for maybe six minutes.

    (And for the record, I think she’s swell; her performance in MORNING GLORY is one of the great comedic turns of recent years.)

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>