I caught Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow‘s De Palma (A24, 6.10) last night on Rodeo Drive, and pretty much loved every second of it. So much so that I intend to see it a second time at the Aero on Sunday night. It put me into film-maven heaven. It’s basically MCU footage of Brian De … Read more
I was just thinking that it’s a shame that Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow‘s De Palma, a five-years-in-the-making documentary which screened in Venice and New York last September, won’t be screening at Sundance ’16. Every Christmas I get a little hungry for fresh watchable movies, knowing full well that I won’t have this satisfaction until … Read more
To judge from David Rooney‘s 9.8 Hollywood Reporter review, Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow‘s De Palma, a A24 doc about the once-dazzling auteurist who’s been downswirling for at least the last 15 years, is a lot of fun, or more precisely “a blast.” It’s just played in Venice and will screen at the N.Y. Film … Read more
“Murders have continued almost unabated [in his films], and at 66, Brian De Palma has been at it a long time, since the mid-’60s. While the other major directors of his generation — Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola — have ranged high and low, De Palma keeps hitting the same groove. Like Hitchcock, … Read more
When I think of the respectable and rewarding things about the films of Brian De Palma, I always think of those visual arias that are his well-known specialty — those searing displays of virtuoso camerawork and choreography that are worked out just so. My right-off-the-top-of-my-head favorites: (a) a fantasizing Angie Dickinson being mauled in the … Read more
In this order: Phantom of the Paradise, Carrie, Sisters, Scarface, Greetings, Hi Mom!. Phantom tops the list because of Gerrit Graham‘s madhouse performance as “Beef.”
If a director is no longer making good films or having trouble getting funding for his/her next project, there’s almost always a good reason for that. Usually it’s because he/she has simply aged out and has therefore (a) lost the ability to hear and respond to the cultural current, (b) has nothing new to say … Read more
“I’m writing a film about [the Harvey Weinstein] scandal, a project I’m talking about with a French producer. My character won’t be named Harvey Weinstein but it will be a horror film, with a sexual aggressor, and it will take place in the film industry.” — Brian DePalma speaking to Le Parisien‘s Catherine Balle in … Read more
As promised, I saw Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow‘s De Palma (A24, 6.10) for the second time at the Aero on Sunday night. It’s easily the most enjoyable portrait of a director doc I’ve seen in years, and of course your average T-shirted, backwards-baseball-cap-wearing megaplex stooge will avoid it like the plague. As clever as … Read more
News reports indicate that an innocent gorilla died yesterday because an irresponsible mother was too distracted to properly watch her four-year-old son. The kid crawled through a barrier and fell into a 12-foot-deep gorilla pit at the Cincinatti Zoo, and was soon being carried around by Harambe, a 400-pound, 17-year-old gorilla. Fearing for the kid’s … Read more
The Playlist has reported about Brian DePalma‘s Passion, a remake of the late Alain Corneau’s 2010 French thriller with Rachel McAdams and Noomi Rapace respectively playing the Kristen Scott Thomas and Ludivine Sagnier parts, being “repped” on the Croisette “as one of the myriad films on the block.” Does that mean it’ll be screened or…? … Read more
Brian DePalma‘s Redacted pretends to be a video verite account of some horrid homicidal behavior on the part of some U.S. troops (based on an actual incident) with a third-act stab at depicting the moral penalty for such deeds. I saw it as a sloppy film about a group of badly directed actors playing soldiers, … Read more