{"id":1704,"date":"2013-04-10T00:00:59","date_gmt":"2013-04-10T04:00:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/smugfilm.com\/?p=1704"},"modified":"2014-04-28T16:35:59","modified_gmt":"2014-04-28T20:35:59","slug":"brian-depalma","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/brian-depalma\/","title":{"rendered":"Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Brian De Palma (But Didn’t Care Enough to Ask)"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\nWhen I was in junior high school, Scarface was the most talked about movie in the hallways.\u00a0 It was 2000, and those hallways were a reflection of the culture at large.\u00a0 One time a kid asked me, \u201cWho directed Scarface<\/a>, Scorsese?\u201d\u00a0 He had never heard of Brian De Palma.<\/p>\n

There’s a popular book called Easy Riders, Raging Bulls<\/a>.\u00a0 It’s a gossipy, oral history of 60s and 70s American movies.\u00a0 In the back of the book, they summarize the directors integral to the movement and give a filmography for each. Spielberg, Coppola, Scorsese, Lucas, and Malick are featured, but not Brian De Palma\u2014despite being mentioned heavily in the book.\u00a0 You’d think the guy that gave Robert De Niro his first on-screen appearance (The Wedding Party<\/a>, 1969) and gave him steady work way before Scorsese ever did, would be important enough to mention.
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\nBrian De Palma’s work is so important and vastly interesting that I don’t even really know where to start, so I’ll just start with his best movie: Carlito’s Way<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Brian De Palma is an awful screenwriter.\u00a0 Just awful.\u00a0 Raising Cain<\/a>, Body Double<\/a>, and Redacted<\/a> are the best evidence of this.\u00a0 The ending to Raising Cain is so absurdly stupid that I can’t even talk about it.\u00a0 All De Palma’s scripts are basically melodramatic and cheese-ridden.\u00a0 His dialogue is corny, his characters are mindless and one-dimensional, and his plot devices are ludicrous. His best movies are the ones he didn\u2019t write.<\/p>\n

Carlito’s Way was based on a book and adapted by David Koepp. Koepp\u2019s resume was looking good in 1993\u2014he had just adapted this book called Jurassic Park<\/a> for De Palma\u2019s best friend.<\/p>\n

This film also marks the ten-year reunion of Scarface, and is De Palma’s other<\/i> mafia movie that stars Al Pacino as a bombastic weirdo with a crazy accent.<\/p>\n

Carlito’s Way informed the 90s aesthetic just as much as Goodfellas<\/a>.\u00a0 The saturated red lighting, retro 70s chic, and kinetic style are as much the informer to Boogie Nights<\/a> and The Sopranos<\/a> as anything else.\u00a0 Sean Penn’s Oscar loss for Best Supporting Actor is criminal, and the entire cast is phenomenal.<\/p>\n

This movie succeeds where his other work fails.\u00a0 David Koepp\u2019s cheese is poetic rather than stupid and De Palma’s execution is equally lyrical.\u00a0 It opens with post-production slow motion (i.e., slow motion done in the editing room rather than in camera\u2014this, smartly, achieves a blurred motion that looks dreamy) and black and white photography tinted a bluish purple.\u00a0 The sequence is from Pacino’s point of view and the camera floats across the action.\u00a0 There are few better depictions of a man who just died. In fact, I can’t think of any.<\/p>\n

As you’ll see though, De Palma’s filmography is littered with cheese. A veritable cinematic rat trap.\u00a0 But it’s a trap that I love to be caught in.<\/p>\n

What De Palma does well are all the things good directors should<\/i> do well, but don’t.\u00a0 He knows how to use a camera to make you feel things.\u00a0 Tarantino does this too, and is a better writer (sometimes).\u00a0 The reason Tarantino’s movies look awesome, and more importantly, feel<\/i> awesome, is because he fucking loves Brian De Palma.<\/p>\n

Occasionally, Tarantino uses something called a split diopter lens.\u00a0 This allows subjects very, very close to the camera to appear in focus as well as subjects very far away.\u00a0 By virtue of watching movies, our brains have been wired to how a camera lens sees things, which is very different than our eyes.\u00a0 Not only is there an arbitrary \u2018frame\u2019 but there are different lenses that put the background in focus or out of focus, flatten the image, widen it, etc.\u00a0 Our brains have built up acceptance of these lenses because we’ve been inundated with so much media that we just kinda get how they work without thinking about it.<\/p>\n

A split diopter lens purposefully jogs our senses.\u00a0 We aren’t used to seeing things like that, because the grammar of cinema and the technical tools used to execute them have cultivated a set of rules that our brans follow.\u00a0 The best, most advanced directors subliminally deviate from these rules ever so slightly to evoke feelings in us.<\/p>\n

Many filmmakers besides Tarantino use split diopter lenses.\u00a0 Hell, there’s even one in an episode of Freaks and Geeks<\/a>.\u00a0 But nobody has quite like De Palma. Just look at how he uses it in Dressed to Kill<\/a>,\u00a0<\/b>as opposed to how Tarantino uses it in Pulp Fiction<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\"blow\"<\/p>\n

\"pulp\"<\/p>\n

(These were the best quality screenshots I could find. When I find better ones, I\u2019ll replace them.)<\/p>\n

Now onto his other movies.\u00a0 Mission Impossible<\/a> sucks.\u00a0 It’s fuckin\u2019 weird and long and boring.\u00a0 But there’s that scene.\u00a0 You know the one I’m talking about, because it’s the only scene that matters.\u00a0 Incidentally, it’s a scene that Spielberg did better in Jurassic Park 2<\/a>, the most forgettable movie of all time (after Knocked Up<\/a>).<\/p>\n

There should be a name for the phenomenon where when a movie is played ad nauseum on TV, you will invariably ALWAYS land on the exact same spot no matter what time of day it is.\u00a0 I like to think it’s the universe telling us all what the only important part of the movie is.<\/p>\n

I defy you to tell me you’ve ever landed anywhere in Mission Impossible other than the Tom Cruise hanging from the ceiling scene.<\/p>\n

Anyway, it’s a great scene.\u00a0 It has a built-in tension, which is what De Palma does best.\u00a0 That\u2019s about all I have to say about the movie. \u00a0Hold on, though\u2014before I go through his other movies, I have to talk about something important.<\/p>\n

I’ve been talking about how De Palma informed Tarantino, about how Tarantino took the ball and ran with it and made himself more famous, and good on him for doing so.\u00a0 He’s the Barry Sanders of American movies, and De Palma is the Joe Montana or something.<\/p>\n

But I can’t talk about De Palma without talking about who he got the ball from.\u00a0 If you’re ahead of me, then you’re a movie nerd like me.\u00a0 Alfred Hitchcock.<\/p>\n

If it’s 1960, Alfred Hitchcock (and Orson Wells) is the best filmmaker of all time.\u00a0 He’s one of the only guys pre-1970 to do anything remotely interesting.\u00a0 Not that<\/i> interesting, though. I mean, his movies are boring as fuck.\u00a0 But hey, they were made at a time when people really didn’t know any better.\u00a0 \u201cHey this painting looks like the sky right?\u201d \u201cYep, it\u2019s like we\u2019re outside! Movie magic!\u201d (It’s insane to me how fake driving in cars still<\/i> looks here in the future.)<\/p>\n

De Palma does Hitchcock better than Hitchcock.\u00a0 To think otherwise is to kid yourself that Hitchcock is good simply because he did it first.\u00a0 He’s interesting perhaps, but not good.\u00a0 In fact, De Palma’s cheese kind of exposes Hitchcock’s inherent badness, and goodness, all at once.\u00a0 Hitchcock is advanced because he was one of the first directors to create tone on top of the story, which is where the movie is.\u00a0 Before him, it was all just nuts and bolts.\u00a0 Hitchcock uses composition, camera movement, and music, all in synthesis, to deliver information in a way that helps the audience feel tension.\u00a0 De Palma’s movies do this with more effectiveness because he learned from the only master before him.\u00a0 You don’t need to see Hitchcock to get it, because the DNA is in De Palma.\u00a0 Like any trailblazer, he stole from the best, and took it further. (Sound familiar? Tarantino.)<\/p>\n

Not only is De Palma better than Hitchcock, he has a more interesting filmography.\u00a0 What people don’t really seem to understand, or care about, about De Palma, is how insane his filmography really is. He’s done it all: blockbusters, iconic horror, Joe Piscopo vehicles, avant-garde underground films, horrible sci-fi movies, Scarface, famous flops starring Tom Hanks, and many more.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s start with his early movies though.\u00a0 De Palma’s early movies are fuckin\u2019 weird. I can’t wait to talk about them!<\/p>\n

Brian De Palma is a science geek that grew up in a dysfunctional, broken home (as semi-depicted by Keith Gordon\u2019s character in Home Movies<\/a> and Dressed to Kill).\u00a0 He was born on September 11th in 1940 in Newark, New Jersey, and made his first movie, Icarus<\/a>, in 1960, and continued to make nine movies throughout the decade.\u00a0 Many of them are extremely rare and underground.\u00a0 I was able to see a few of them while living in NY and having a membership at the famous Kim’s Video.<\/p>\n

Like every director, his early films are just practice. They aren’t good or groundbreaking but merely proof that the director can pull some things together and put some ideas on screen.\u00a0 This achievement is all the more impressive in the early 60s, forty years before digital cameras made it so that everybody ever could be a \u2018filmmaker\u2019.\u00a0 So they\u2019re great to watch and study what it meant to be a budding filmmaker so long ago.<\/p>\n

I haven’t seen them all. I’d fucking love to see Show Me a Strong Town and I’ll Show You a Strong Bank<\/a> (1966) or 660124: The Story of an IBM Card<\/a> (1961) but not even Kim’s had those.<\/p>\n

I was fortunate enough to see Woton’s Wake<\/a>, which is his first teaming with actor William Finley, a partnership that would extend to 6 movies (Dionysus in ’69<\/a>, Sisters<\/a>, Phantom of the Paradise<\/a>, The Fury<\/a>, Dressed to Kill, and The Black Dahlia<\/a>).<\/p>\n

Woton’s Wake is a cartoonish, sardonic, comedy about a sort of mad scientist that kinda just wreaks havoc and does weird things for about 20 minutes.\u00a0 It’s 16 mm, black and white, shot on high contrast reversal stock, and looks like pretty much every other promising student film.\u00a0 It’s boring, nonsensical, but shows a certain visual prowess and spark that was fortunately allowed to foster and develop.\u00a0 Wake was scored by Finely, which I suspect informed their working relationship over the next ten years or so.<\/p>\n

In 1969, De Palma filmed Dinoysus in \u201969, a very bohemian, experimental Village play starring Finley.\u00a0 It was an audience-interactive \u2018experience\u2019 incorporating a lot of movement and nudity.\u00a0 It’s basically about 90 minutes of chanting and nothingness that culminates in Finley declaring himself a leader or something, and launching into a faux political rally rant.<\/p>\n

De Palma filmed the entire play with two cameras and used split screen for the entire 90 minutes, showing both the audience and play simultaneously.\u00a0 As you can imagine, it’s mind numbing, but it predates Woodstock<\/a> and is actually a pretty interesting use of split screen, albeit a cinematic dead-end.<\/p>\n

I was born in 1986, so as much as I can take an interest in other cultures and time periods, I’ll never really know what was going on.\u00a0 However, from what I’ve garnered from being inundated with mod, British pop, and rhythm and blues from a super hip mom that would show me Help!<\/a> and A Hard Day\u2019s Night<\/a> ad nauseum before the age of 5, I can tell you, with my limited expertise, that Greetings<\/a>, and its sequel Hi Mom!<\/a>, are a picture of the 1960s.<\/p>\n

Greetings is a subversive, draft dodging, fuck you to authority, filled with sex, artistic experimentation, colors, drugs, and crappy guitar music.\u00a0 \u2018Art films\u2019 today are so plastic and homogenized that it’s hard to imagine a time when a filmmaker just took to the streets and threw together some colorful nonsense and called it a movie.\u00a0 Greetings isn’t great, in fact it’s not even that good.\u00a0 It is, however, a time capsule of an energetic period when art was somehow \u2018important\u2019, and an extension of a changing cultural zeitgeist.\u00a0 Greetings may ultimately be a big hodgepodge of nonsense, but so was that kooky decade, and few movies capture that with more heart and integrity.\u00a0 It’s a shame that lesser works like Easy Rider<\/a> and Head<\/a> get all the attention.<\/p>\n

Hi Mom!, the 1970 follow up to Greetings, is better\u2014still not great<\/i>, but a lot better.\u00a0 De Niro’s work in Greetings and Hi Mom! shows the first signs of promise in an actor that would later see his range sucked away by typecasting and comfortability.\u00a0 Don’t get me wrong, De Niro is great, but even in the comedies like Analyze This<\/a> and Meet the Parents<\/a> he’s being funny based on his schtick\u2014it’s not really an extension of his talent.\u00a0 The King of Comedy<\/a>, The Mission<\/a> and Brazil<\/a> are perhaps the only roles that showcase his other chops, and those chops are subtly telegraphed in Greetings and Hi Mom!.\u00a0 In both, De Niro plays the straight man in a zany world of paranoia and sex. He anchors the nonsense and basically carries the movies.<\/p>\n

Although Greetings and Hi Mom! are disjointed at best, often times launching into non-sequitur vignettes only bound by thematic coherence, there is one sequence in particular that is truly transcendent.\u00a0 Hi Mom! has a subplot (if you can call it that) featuring an underground performance art group called Be Black Baby.\u00a0 Their portion of Hi, Mom! is a black and white sequence that heralds the advent of the found footage genre that would come into popularity some 30 years later.\u00a0 The group recreates the black experience by using experiential theater to essentially taunt and terrorize a group of white people, their audience.<\/p>\n

De Palma uses a handheld camera to put you in the room, a style that has been so done to death that it’s easy to forget its effectiveness.\u00a0 The difference here is that at the time, news and fly-on-the-wall footage really did look like that (another good example being the battle scenes in Dr. Strangelove<\/a> which were similarly photographed by Kubrick).<\/p>\n

As the scene begins, you never suspect its inevitable outcome, and the tension rises as the lines between safety and reality get blurred.\u00a0 What’s impressive here is that De Palma is able to use a combination of performance and editing to create the tension.\u00a0 The sheer idea of suspension of disbelief fades away because De Palma is manipulating the tools of cinema before your eyes.\u00a0 This is a level of sophistication far beyond its years, and much more transcendent than anything in any Hitchcock movie.<\/p>\n

De Palma’s follow up to Hi, Mom! is almost completely unknown. Get to Know Your Rabbit<\/a>, a Smothers Brothers vehicle featuring Orson Welles.\u00a0 The film was taken over by the Smothers Brothers, which De Palma sites as its undoing, however I suspect the movie wouldn\u2019t have been very good regardless.\u00a0 It’s pretty boring and forgettable\u2014really only interesting as an obscure piece of history.<\/p>\n

Sisters, which was confusingly remade in the 2000’s, is perhaps the beginnings of De Palma’s stake in cinema history.\u00a0 Sisters can convincingly be referred to as a cult classic by the Fangoria crowd.\u00a0 And deservedly so.\u00a0 It’s boring and confusing (are you noticing a trend?) but it marks the first time that De Palma’s stylistic universe met critical mass.<\/p>\n

Dionysus in 69 is worth its crappiness, if for nothing more than the fact that it primed De Palma for one of the most brilliant split screen sequences in movie history.\u00a0 The truth is, split screen has barely ever been used well in movies.\u00a0 If the world made more sense, what De Palma started would have been picked up by somebody else and ran with (like he did with Hitchcock).\u00a0 Instead, styles changed, and nobody ever came along and made a better De Palma movie than De Palma.\u00a0 But it’s simple really, the scene in Sisters.\u00a0 I don’t want to give it away, but the components are simple.\u00a0 Something happens that cannot be seen lest our character get into trouble.\u00a0 Somebody is about to see it.\u00a0 These two ideas are run simultaneously in splitscreen.\u00a0 Again, pretty simple, but how many times have you seen it?\u00a0 Watch the movie and revel at its thrilling choreography, brilliantly staged by De Palma (all the way back in 1973, no less).\u00a0 It’s a scene like this that allows you to truly see into the mind of an auteur.\u00a0 Only somebody with an extremely high cinematic IQ could design a sequence like that, because it requires thinking beyond traditional staging.\u00a0 It comes from an innate ability to intuit the movies you\u2019ve seen and design new ones organically.<\/p>\n

His follow up, Phantom of the Paradise, is a bonafide cult classic.\u00a0 Finley gives a tender, human performance that showcases his songwriting and vocal ability in what is one of the weirdest movies ever made.\u00a0 Eraserhead<\/a> is weird.\u00a0 Eraserhead is blatantly<\/i> weird. Its weirdness is superficial and intentional.\u00a0 Phantom of the Paradise is just fucking <\/i>weird.\u00a0 It’s got Paul Williams as a dude named Swan who’s like this diabolical, villainy music producer guy.\u00a0 And there’s a whole section where Finley is wearing this crazy helmet that makes his voice sound all static-y.<\/p>\n

Obsession<\/a> is perhaps De Palma’s most overlooked picture.\u00a0 A De Palma movie is always an event in some way.\u00a0 Whether it be a famous flop like Bonfire of the Vanities<\/a> or a beloved classic like Scarface, there’s always something spinning around its periphery that makes it seem larger than life.\u00a0 But Obsession is just kind of \u2018there\u2019.\u00a0 Maybe it’s because nobody cares about Cliff Robertson.\u00a0 Obsession however marks De Palmas first time working with John Lithgow, who’s awesome as the movies slimy shitheel.\u00a0 It also features one of De Palma’s most dazzling endings, which I won’t spoil here since you most likely haven’t seen it.\u00a0 What’s perhaps most notable about Obsession is that it is his first blatant Hitchcock movie.<\/p>\n

It’s 1976 and we’ve now arrived at De Palma’s first iconic movie, Carrie<\/a>.\u00a0 Carrie is the first of De Palma’s movies that we’ve all seen, and is part of our culture.\u00a0 It’s interesting to look back on a time when Carrie was a teen movie.\u00a0 The teen movies of the 90s didn’t open with a graphic nude school shower scene where a girl is essentially tortured by her classmates for having her first period.\u00a0 I really like the part when the camera spins around Carrie and her dance partner at the prom, and it just keeps spinning faster and faster.\u00a0 And I love that PJ Soles is in it.\u00a0 And who knows, would Stephen King have had such a hot career if not for De Palma?\u00a0 Think about it<\/p>\n

In 1978 he made a really shitty movie called The Fury with Kirk Douglas.<\/p>\n

The 80s were De Palma’s best decade.\u00a0 Beginning with his most outward Hitchcock homage, Dressed to Kill.\u00a0 Dressed to Kill is kind of awesome.\u00a0 The sequence in the art museum is just that\u2014awesome.\u00a0 Dressed to Kill opens with some boobs, and then has Angie Dickenson getting \u2018made love to\u2019 on a bed.\u00a0 She’s faking it, the guy is clueless, and De Palma has arrived.\u00a0 Dressed to Kill is what we think of when we think of Brian De Palma, if such a thing can be said about a guy nobody thinks of.\u00a0 He is the most anonymous auteur with the most flashy and identifiable style.<\/p>\n

The museum sequence is so dripping with De Palma you just have to see it.\u00a0 From the moving, intentional POV camera to the fade-in memory bubble on the right side of the screen, it just screams \u201cI make movies, look at me use movie tools!\u201d<\/p>\n

The rest of the movie is kind of whatever, but I think what’s interesting later is the Keith Gordon character.\u00a0 He represents the young De Palma who would spy on his father having affairs.\u00a0 He’s an innovative young nerd, clever with gadgetry.\u00a0 There’s a scene where he whips up a kind of camera thing to spy on some dude.\u00a0 He’s building it in his room but the set looks like some kind of dark scientist lair.\u00a0 This is perhaps the most honest and human reflection of De Palma that we get throughout his career.<\/p>\n

Incidentally, his next film, Home Movies, is unabashedly his most open because it is an autobiographical account of his formative years.\u00a0 With, you guessed it, Keith Gordon playing him.\u00a0 Home Movies, in classic De Palma form, is very odd.\u00a0 It is framed with Kirk Douglas bombastically lecturing a small group of film students as a comically cartoonish huckster.\u00a0 Think the Robert McKee character in Adaptation<\/a>, but played by Kirk Douglas, so even more awesome.\u00a0 Douglas introduces a series of extended vignettes that tell about a put upon teenager and his dysfunctional home life.\u00a0 What’s most interesting about the film however is that it was made by a class that De Palma was teaching at Sarah Lawrence.\u00a0 The students fulfilled all of the technical roles and co-wrote and produced the movie alongside De Palma.\u00a0 It’s kind of a shame that A) there is no documentary of this\u2014had it been made twenty years later their surely would have been\u2014and B) that this film is not more widely known\u2014not that it’s a great movie or anything, but it’s certainly interesting.<\/p>\n

Blow Out<\/a> is also weird.\u00a0 Famously it is one of Quentin Tarantino’s three favorite movies, the other two being Taxi Driver<\/a> and Rio Bravo<\/a>.\u00a0 Blow Out is strange because thirteen years previous Antonioni made a movie called Blow Up<\/a>, that was the exact same movie but instead was about a guy who takes photographs and it ends with a weird mime game of tennis.\u00a0 In De Palma’s version, it’s about a sound recordist and ends really cheesily\u2014in classic De Palma fashion.\u00a0 Blow Out it undoubtedly better than Blow Up because De Palma is better with the visuals and not boring.\u00a0 There’s a really cool sequence where the camera keeps doing 360’s around the room, filmed at a lower frame rate, while Travolta works on his sound stuff.\u00a0 I suspect that if it weren’t for Blow Out, Travolta never would’ve wound up in Pulp Fiction.\u00a0 And De Palma got a pretty good performance out of him (he had worked with him previously in Carrie).<\/p>\n

Scarface is next, but there’s isn’t much to say about Scarface that hasn’t already been said.<\/p>\n

As I said at the beginning of this essay, it’s unfortunate that the culture that loves this film forgot about its director.\u00a0 For whatever reason, when people care about The Godfather<\/a> they care about Francis Ford Coppola, and when they care about Goodfellas they care about Martin Scorsese.\u00a0 Nobody who cares about Scarface cares about De Palma, and there’s really no reason for it.\u00a0 If you go film by film, comparing these three directors\u2019 respective filmographies, none of them really outshine each other.<\/p>\n

Ultimately, De Palma falls out of favor for trying to make movies people actually like.\u00a0 Apocalypse Now<\/a> is a popular movie, but it’s also a three hour long avant garde art film masquerading as a war movie.\u00a0 And Scorsese made fucking Kundun<\/a>.\u00a0 De Palma has his share of clunkers, but I think ultimately the people that bought tickets to Mission Impossible just don’t care about who made it.\u00a0 And the people that do<\/i> care about who makes a thing don’t care about Mission Impossible, so it’s an unfortunate catch 22 that leaves an artist toiling in obscurity while Scorsese gets pity oscars for mediocre movies like The Departed<\/a>, presented to him by Lucas and Coppola, while De Palma is probably watching from home.<\/p>\n

Body Double<\/a> ties Dressed to Kill as his most Hitchcockian outing.\u00a0 Rear Window<\/a> is the one being redone here.\u00a0 I guess if you care about Melanie Griffith for whatever reason, you might care about Body Double.\u00a0 At this point it almost feels like a stupid thing say, but you could say that Body Double is Brian De Palma’s most De Palma-esque movie.\u00a0 The story is stupid and barely makes sense at all.\u00a0 It’s visually captivating and fun by way of amazing visuals, tension, sex and colors.\u00a0 It’s all you could ever hope for from him!<\/p>\n

Here’s a really weird thought.\u00a0 Goodfellas couldn’t be called Wise Guys<\/a>, even though it obviously should’ve been (that’s what the book is called) and you even get the sense that the narration when he says “we were wise guys, we’d say you’ll like this guy, he’s a good fella.” it’s tacked on.\u00a0 Goodfellas is clearly an invented word to make up for the fact that four years previous, Brian De Palma made an insanely unfunny Joe Piscopo vehicle featuring Danny DeVito called Wise Guys. Movie fuckin\u2019 sucks.<\/p>\n

I think De Palma’s obsession with cheese is concurrent with his eagerness to please audiences.\u00a0 I think he’s ahead of them as an artist, but behind them as a purveyor of ideas.\u00a0 I think he thinks cheese is what people like, and it’s partly why people don’t like him.<\/p>\n

The Untouchables<\/a> isn’t so bad.\u00a0 But it’s the epitome of cheese.\u00a0 It’s cheese cinema. Cheese fest \u201887.\u00a0 I mean, I guess it’s mostly the music that\u2019s cheesy, the heroic AMERICA music while the heroic police officers get on their steeds and fight the evil gangsters.\u00a0 However, Costner is awesome as usual, and it features another bizarre, shoehorned lifting of a famous movie sequence\u2014the baby carriage scene from\u00a0Battleship Potempkin<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Did you know Brian De Palma directed the Bruce Springsteen music video where he’s just dancing on stage and then he brings up Courtney Cox for her big break?\u00a0 Yep.<\/p>\n

Casualties of War<\/a>, what a way to end the 80s, with a devastatingly under-seen, underappreciated whimper.\u00a0 I suspect this is one of those times where by virtue of bad luck, the director was working against the popular grain.\u00a0 Like how John Carpenter got fucked over timing wise when he made Starman<\/a> and The Thing<\/a>, both not cared about at the time of their release because the former featured good aliens when audiences wanted aliens to be bad, and the latter, vice versa.\u00a0 Casualties of War features some of the best performances that nobody has ever seen from Sean Penn, a young John C. Reilly, and of course, Michael J. Fox.\u00a0 It echoes war classics like Kubrick’s Paths of Glory<\/a> and is actually a great, depressing, gut-wrenching movie.\u00a0 Also it has a bizarre, intellectualized ending.<\/p>\n

Now we\u2019re in the 1990s.<\/p>\n

It’s been said that when they were younger, Steven Spielberg looked up to De Palma.\u00a0 They were friends but De Palma was a dashing, learned, intellectual from New York. He was large and imposing, yet warm and inward.\u00a0 De Palma had already been making movies for almost ten years when Spielberg was trying to make it as a hot shot kid lying about his age to appear younger.\u00a0 By 1996 however, the tables had turned.\u00a0 While De Palma was suffering through Hitchcock comparisons, controversial violence, accusations of sexism, and mega box office flops, Spielberg was busy making the most popular, successful, and iconic movies of all time.\u00a0 David Koepp, who had just adapted Jurassic Park for Spielberg, next teamed up with De Palma to adapt Carlito’s Way, De Palmas best movie.\u00a0 (I already covered it earlier.)<\/p>\n

De Palma spent his career chasing box office success while not compromising his artistic vision.\u00a0 But while Spielberg did the same, it turned out that his vision aligned with the public, and thus made him the most household of all the household name directors. (When a Spielberg movie goes iconic, credit is given to him. When it happens to De Palma, he has rappers restoring his movie or talking about what a great first book Stephen King wrote.\u00a0 It\u2019s a shame.)<\/p>\n

De Palma struggled as a writer\/director, and failed even more miserably as a director for hire with Bonfire of the Vanities a famous flop starring Tom Hanks and Bruce Willis.\u00a0 (It opens with a beautiful long take and actually there are some neat things in it, but ultimately it is unwieldy and over the top.) And by 1996, it looked as though De Palma was done\u2014not in a literal sense, but just in that he had tried it all and failed.<\/p>\n

It was then that Spielberg gave him the opportunity to direct Mission Impossible.\u00a0 The movie is really worth two shots, plus that one scene we all remember that I talked about earlier.\u00a0 The two shots being some dutch coverage that look awesome, somewhere before a bunch of water explodes. However, with Mission Impossible, De Palma finally didn’t drop the ball. It’s his highest grossing movie and a bonafide blockbuster that spawned a franchise (albeit a shitty one).<\/p>\n

Snake Eyes<\/a> was also co-written by Koepp and De Palma, and is actually pretty good.\u00a0 It’s basically just a noir thriller.\u00a0 It opens with an awe inspiring long take that nobody will ever care about because it’s in Snake Eyes and not Goodfellas, Boogie Nights<\/a> or Touch of Evil<\/a>.\u00a0 When De Palma does it, it’s not \u2018cool\u2019, apparently.\u00a0 Anyway, Gary Sinise is awesome in it and it’s got great lighting.<\/p>\n

Fuck Man, Mission to Mars<\/a>.\u00a0 I mean, what?<\/i>\u00a0 Fuck.\u00a0 God that movie sucks.<\/p>\n

Femme Fatale<\/a> is De Palma’s most interesting movie, and his most beautiful.\u00a0 It’s the only transcendent script he ever wrote, and its weirdness once again reaches Lynchian proportions.\u00a0 The movie plays out like an exotic dream, and it might be.\u00a0 The opening is perhaps one of the most detailed, brilliant sequences in movie history, with multiple layers all intercut.\u00a0 It’s really a cinematic ballet unfolding masterfully by someone who had amassed 40 years of filmic knowledge and is putting it all to good use.\u00a0 The movie itself homages all types of old movies, and does so in such an abstract and refreshing way that you can’t help but become completely immersed.\u00a0 It’s an amazing thing when an artist has been working that long and not lost touch with his own sensibility, and can still execute not only at the highest level, but still create something \u2018different\u2019.\u00a0 Femme Fatale might be the last great De Palma movie.<\/p>\n

I’ve skipped a few along the way.\u00a0 Raising Cain, a visual masterpiece with some scary moments and a crazy ass performance by Lithgow that\u2019s totally worth the price of admission.\u00a0 But ultimately, it\u2019s just a Lifetime movie but weirder.\u00a0 The pale, pinkish hue is my favorite part.<\/p>\n

The Black Dahlia sucks because of Josh Hartnett and the fact that it’s long and confusing.<\/p>\n

Finally we arrive at Redacted.\u00a0 A movie so out of touch and misplaced it doesn’t even seem real.\u00a0 Redacted is De Palma doing what he used to do in the 60s.\u00a0 But 40 years later he’s lost his zest, fun, and brain.\u00a0 De Palma said that with the state of politics in America in the mid 2000s, he was surprised that there weren’t a ton more anti-war films being made.\u00a0 And he’s right.\u00a0 He was also remembering back to 40 years ago when they had the Vietnam war and people like him made, edgy, cool, subversive anti-war movies like Greetings.\u00a0 I respect the fact that he then went out and made one.\u00a0 Redacted is what he said people should be doing.\u00a0 And, perhaps ironically, it is as bad as you’d expect the people of today to make.\u00a0 In fact it’s bad in all the worst modern ways: horrible acting by non-actors trying to come off as ‘real’ in some shitty-looking fake YouTube internet nonsense, and unconvincing surveillance footage.<\/p>\n

What’s weird is that 40 years ago he did it so well. The scene in Hi, Mom!, the Be Black Baby scene, is so good, and represents reality so well.\u00a0 What happened?\u00a0 I think what happened is he’s no longer in his late twenties, worrying about getting laid and not taking himself so seriously.\u00a0 By the 2000s, in his 60s, he is taking himself way seriously, which actually undermines the entire message.\u00a0 Part of the message, subtext, and charm of a movie like Greetings is that it is silly.\u00a0 But its silliness is a slap in the face of convention.\u00a0 A slap in the face of organization, homogenization, media, and society.\u00a0 It’s what makes it subversive, and you really get a sense of the people making it.\u00a0 This all becomes circular, and you end up with something interesting by way of itself.\u00a0 Redacted, however, feels out of touch. Because it is.\u00a0 Because it’s not the kind of thing De Palma does well.<\/p>\n

The filmography of Brian De Palma is a subversive wonderland.\u00a0 A sexually-charged nightmare where villains are sinister and heroes are accompanied by larger than life scores that make sure you know they’re the good guys.\u00a0 The De Palma-verse is populated by cinematic experimentation, unrivaled by his contemporaries and successors.\u00a0 It\u2019s a world where split diopter lenses show us the murderer’s knife lurking in the background, and split screens put us on the edge of our seats.\u00a0 It’s where long takes and fast cutting intersect in the hands of someone who marvels at the possibilities of the movies.\u00a0 Few directors delight in the ability of movies to shock us and scare us and tap into our primate senses that something dark is waiting to get us like De Palma does.<\/p>\n

To forget De Palma is to forget that art is meant to entertain and that those who utilize cinematic tools to do so are the most transcendent, not the most trivial.\u00a0 Even if those tools often result in a disjointed mess.\u00a0 I’d rather watch a failed attempt than a completed empty gesture.<\/p>\n

I’m looking forward to seeing Passion<\/a>.\u00a0 A lesbian sex thriller starring Rachel McAdams? Don’t mind if I do.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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\nWhen I was in junior high school, Scarface was the most talked about movie in the hallways.\u00a0 It was 2000, and those hallways were a reflection of the culture at large.\u00a0 One time a kid asked me, \u201cWho directed Scarface<\/a>, Scorsese?\u201d\u00a0 He had never heard of Brian De Palma.<\/p>\n

There’s a popular book called Easy Riders, Raging Bulls<\/a>.\u00a0 It’s a gossipy, oral history of 60s and 70s American movies.\u00a0 In the back of the book, they summarize the directors integral to the movement and give a filmography for each. Spielberg, Coppola, Scorsese, Lucas, and Malick are featured, but not Brian De Palma\u2014despite being mentioned heavily in the book.\u00a0 You’d think the guy that gave Robert De Niro his first on-screen appearance (The Wedding Party<\/a>, 1969) and gave him steady work way before Scorsese ever did, would be important enough to mention.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,17],"tags":[1022,1032,856,810,1036,1059,1060,1013,1066,1042,397,1058,1000,1048,61,1038,987,988,989,986,990,991,1068,998,1051,1067,994,1069,1064,68,586,1024,641,1006,695,698,1046,1045,1079,993,561,1077,996,1043,65,1033,37,1035,1031,1034,724,1017,1018,1012,1016,1073,1072,1050,1080,66,1008,1019,1020,1040,1054,1010,563,995,1047,564,1037,1062,1075,1007,1078,1049,1014,1053,1081,778,1026,1052,327,383,1082,999,1061,1001,1057,1003,1055,1076,1056,997,876,1074,1021,1025,1044,104,185,1004,992,1005,1070,67,436,396,1027,1028,593,833,1041,1009,1039,1071,1065,1002,1011,1015,574,1029,1063,1030,1023],"class_list":["post-1704","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-allposts","category-gregsessays","tag-660124-the-story-of-an-ibm-card","tag-a-hard-days-night","tag-adaptation","tag-alfred-hitchcock","tag-analyze-this","tag-antonioni","tag-apocalypse-now","tag-barry-sanders","tag-battleship-potempkin","tag-be-black-baby","tag-blow-out","tag-blow-up","tag-body-double","tag-bonfire-of-the-vanities","tag-boogie-nights","tag-brazil","tag-brian-de-palma","tag-brian-de-palma-filmography","tag-brian-de-palma-retrospective","tag-brian-depalma","tag-brian-depalma-filmography","tag-brian-depalma-retrospective","tag-bruce-springsteen","tag-carlitos-way","tag-carrie","tag-casualties-of-war","tag-coppola","tag-courtney-cox","tag-danny-devito","tag-david-koepp","tag-david-lynch","tag-dionysus-in-69","tag-dr-strangelove","tag-dressed-to-kill","tag-easy-rider","tag-easy-riders-raging-bulls","tag-eraserhead","tag-fangoria","tag-femme-fatale","tag-francis-for-coppola","tag-freaks-and-geeks","tag-gary-sinise","tag-george-lucas","tag-get-to-know-your-rabbit","tag-goodfellas","tag-greetings","tag-greg-deliso","tag-head","tag-help","tag-hi-mom","tag-hitchcock","tag-home-movies","tag-icarus","tag-joe-montana","tag-joe-piscopo","tag-john-c-reilly","tag-john-carpenter","tag-john-lithgow","tag-josh-hartnett","tag-jurassic-park","tag-jurassic-park-2","tag-keith-gordon","tag-kims-video","tag-king-of-comedy","tag-kirk-douglas","tag-knocked-up","tag-kundun","tag-lucas","tag-lynchian","tag-martin-scorsese","tag-meet-the-parents","tag-melanie-griffith","tag-michael-j-fox","tag-mission-impossible","tag-mission-to-mars","tag-obsession","tag-orson-wells","tag-p-j-soles","tag-passion","tag-paths-of-glory","tag-phantom-of-the-paradise","tag-pj-soles","tag-pulp-fiction","tag-quentin-tarantino","tag-rachel-mcadams","tag-raising-cain","tag-rear-window","tag-redacted","tag-rio-bravo","tag-robert-deniro","tag-robert-mckee","tag-sanke-eyes","tag-sarah-lawrence","tag-scarface","tag-scorsese","tag-sean-penn","tag-show-me-a-strong-town-and-ill-show-you-a-strong-bank","tag-sisters","tag-smothers-brothers","tag-smug-film-2","tag-smugfilm","tag-sopranos","tag-spielberg","tag-split-diopter-lens","tag-starman","tag-steven-spielberg","tag-tarantino","tag-taxi-driver","tag-teh-fury","tag-the-black-dahlia","tag-the-departed","tag-the-godfather","tag-the-king-of-comedy","tag-the-lost-world","tag-the-mission","tag-the-thing","tag-the-untouchable","tag-the-wedding-party","tag-tom-cruise","tag-tom-hanks","tag-touch-of-evil","tag-william-finley","tag-wise-guys","tag-woodstock","tag-wotons-wake"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1704","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1704"}],"version-history":[{"count":19,"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1704\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4946,"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1704\/revisions\/4946"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1704"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1704"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1704"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}