BRIAN DE PALMA

Started by godardian, May 13, 2003, 02:03:06 PM

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killafilm

I think we all can admit that if any of us were on MTV Cribs we'd bust out our Scarface dvd and be like, "I'd like to give props to Scarface and Xixax fo' making me gangsta'."

Split Infinitive

Quote from: killafilm on February 15, 2006, 02:36:46 PM
I think we all can admit that if any of us were on MTV Cribs we'd bust out our Scarface dvd and be like, "I'd like to give props to Scarface and Xixax fo' making me gangsta'."
Actually, I'd say that not owning Scarface is my own little personal insurance policy that I'll never be asked to appear on MTV Cribs. 
Please don't correct me. It makes me sick.

MacGuffin

New Body Double DVD Due
De Palma's porn-themed thriller double dips in Oct.

On October 3, 2006, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment will release Body Double (Special Edition) on DVD. This double dip DVD of the sexy thriller-cum-murder mystery features a hearty helping of bonus materials, and will be available for the MSRP of $19.94.

The Body Double (Special Edition) DVD will feature the following bonus materials:

Interviews with Brian De Palma, Melanie Griffith, Deborah Shelton, Gregg Henry and Dennis Franz
The Seduction
The Set-Up
The Mystery
The Controversy

"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol


Skeleton FilmWorks

MacGuffin

The Lives of Brian
The movies of Brian De Palma -- The ''Black Dahlia'' director shares war stories, defends his female characters, and reveals which of his movies he can't help watching on TV by Chris Nashawaty
Source: Entertainment Weekly

No director has had as many ups and downs as Brian De Palma. In the early '70s, the New Jersey native was the ringleader of a group of Hollywood boy wonders that included George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, and Martin Scorsese. He also helped launch the careers of Robert De Niro, John Travolta, and Sissy Spacek. But by the end of the '80s, De Palma had come to symbolize the glorious (Scarface) and not-so-glorious (The Bonfire of the Vanities) excess of the decade. Since then, De Palma has gone in and out of fashion more often than long sideburns. His latest comeback bid is The Black Dahlia, a lavish noir starring Josh Hartnett, Hilary Swank, and Scarlett Johansson. De Palma describes the bruise-black period film as a look at ''the dark side of the Hollywood myth factory.'' And after more than 40 turbulent years in that factory's engine room, he should know what it looks like. We sat down with the 66-year-old director to discuss his legacy behind the camera.

Sisters 1973
Reeling from the disaster of his first studio film, 1972's Get to Know Your Rabbit, De Palma retrenched with this bloody, low-budget thriller about a pair of separated Siamese twins. While some critics praised the film as ''Hitchcockian,'' others thought he was ripping off the master — a familiar refrain during his career.
''Get to Know Your Rabbit was a catastrophe. I had an unhappy star, Tommy Smothers, who looked at Warner Brothers as the enemy. And pretty soon, I was the enemy too. He didn't even want the movie to come out. I said to the studio, 'My way or the highway,' and they showed me the highway. I had to start my career all over again. That's why I made Sisters independently. I made a conscious attempt to learn how to tell stories with images, and Hitchcock is the master of that. I used some of his ideas. I have no apologies for it. Most times when critics say I'm ripping off Hitchcock, it's a shorthand way of describing me when you haven't really thought about what I've been doing.''

Carrie 1976
Based on Stephen King's debut novel, Carrie was De Palma's first hit, thanks to a lot of pig's blood and its famous hand-from-the-grave ending. But the cast, which included Sissy Spacek, Amy Irving, and John Travolta, almost landed in a Galaxy Far, Far Away.
''George Lucas and I were both looking for young actors at the same time, so we held our casting sessions together. We both really wanted Amy Irving — he wanted her for Princess Leia. I don't know where I got the idea for the ending of Carrie. In the original script, the big climax was Carrie giving her mother a heart attack. I remember saying to the producer, 'This is the big scene?! Carrie looks at her mother and she clutches her chest?! I don't think so!' You know, it's actually Sissy's hand that reaches out from the grave. They put her in a box under the ground. I planned on using someone else. I mean, who would know if it was her hand? But she wanted to do it.''

Dressed to Kill 1980
Right from its opening — a shower scene with Angie Dickinson that left little to the imagination — De Palma was branded a misogynist. That didn't stop audiences from making the controversial thriller a hit.
''Angie's not shy about appearing without her clothes, but she felt that a younger body might look better in the shower scene. She was like, 'I'll do it, but I think you'll be better off with a body double.' So that's what we did. In any movie, as soon as you see a girl, you're waiting for her to take her clothes off. You'll sit there and watch her forever for this to happen. I get attacked for putting women in jeopardy and having them get attacked, but I'm sorry, if I'm going to photograph someone in peril, showing a woman in a negligee holding a candelabra is a lot more interesting to me than some guy walking around with a flashlight.''

Blow Out 1981
A riff on Antonioni's Blow-Up, Blow Out stars John Travolta (at the height of his fame) as a movie sound man who overhears what may have been a murder. De Palma's obsession with surveillance pops up in several films; he traces the theme to an incident in his youth.
''When I was 17, my mother thought my father was cheating on her. And she kind of recruited me to follow him. When he made a date with this girl, I followed him and took some photographs, like a little detective. Ultimately I confronted him when I broke into their love nest and caught him with the other woman.... Blow Out was supposed to be a little picture, but John had just done Saturday Night Fever and Grease back-to-back. So when he wanted to do it, that made it a much bigger picture. He was terrific, but it was expensive and when you have a bummer ending like Blow Out's... I'll never forget when the distributor saw it, they almost had a coronary.''

Scarface 1983
The Oliver Stone-penned saga of Cuban drug lord Tony Montana features more bullets, blow, and bad accents than you can shake a rolled-up dollar bill at. But it remains De Palma's most iconic and lasting film.
''It just goes to show you never know which are the films people will still be talking about 25 years later. Oliver Stone almost got himself killed researching it. He was hanging out with a bunch of drug dealers and they thought he was an undercover agent. The movie's grand opera, so of course Pacino played it big. He's on cocaine, for chrissakes! When he took Michelle Pfeiffer's hat in that scene with the two of them in the car, he did that spontaneously. It's one of those magical moments. The thing I'm proudest of is Al's performance. If I'm watching TV and I come across that film, I'll sit and watch it for a while.''

The Untouchables 1987
Written by David Mamet, De Palma's period epic about Eliot Ness' crusade against Al Capone features an impressive cast — in retrospect.
''Originally, I had Bob Hoskins as Capone. And I told the head of the studio, 'We have a cast for an episode of Masterpiece Theatre. We need a big star as Capone.' So we went to De Niro. I spent weeks trying to convince him because he would have to put on weight and he had a couple of other pictures he was doing. No one had heard of Kevin Costner yet. And Sean Connery — he hadn't had a hit since 007. Now the cast looks great, but at the time, it wasn't quite as hot. In the end, Hoskins had a pay-or-play deal, so he got paid $300,000 for not doing the movie. To this day, he says to me, 'It's the best job I ever had!'''

Casualties of War 1989
De Palma's Vietnam film had the misfortune of hitting theaters after Full Metal Jacket and the same year as Born on the Fourth of July. Despite powerhouse performances by Sean Penn and Michael J. Fox, it got lost.
''The other Vietnam movies had something to do with it. And also that Michael J. Fox was considered a comedy star at the time. When you make a movie like Blow Out or Casualties of War, which is unending agony to make and to watch, your audience isn't going to sit up and go, 'God, that's great! I'm going to go tell my friends about this one!' I mean, the movie's devastating. It's about a girl that gets raped and killed. Vertigo is one of my favorite movies. Hitchcock was mortified when it wasn't a success. Maybe it's a bummer, but you have to look beyond that. You have to stick with your instincts. And sometimes, unfortunately, you go down with them.''

The Bonfire of the Vanities 1990
Speaking of going down, Bonfire was not only a turkey but one with a bull's-eye painted on its tail feathers. Critics had it in for De Palma's take on Tom Wolfe's novel from the get-go. Not that they were being unfair; the film's a mess — as De Palma himself admits.
''We tried to make Sherman McCoy likable. That was my first mistake. That's why we hired Tom Hanks. But Sherman McCoy is a prick and an arrogant aristocrat. And that's the way it should have been. Ultimately, Tom was wrong for the movie. The reaction to the film was mortifying. You love this book, you make some decisions you regret, and you think, well, you just have to go on. In my career, I've been burned down to the ground about every 10 years. Finished! And somehow I've managed to rise up out of the ashes. It's not a particularly pleasant cycle.''

Carlito's Way 1993
Al Pacino's world-weary Carlito Brigante is like Tony Montana lite. The standout in the film is Sean Penn as Pacino's nerdy, psychotic, coked-out lawyer. De Palma says the actor was just as intense as the character.
''I was reluctant to read the script because it was gangsters again. Do I really want to go back there? But when I got Sean Penn into it, it got much more exciting. The only person who was close to getting Sean's role — because Sean has never been a favorite of the studios — was Kevin Spacey. I know some people have problems with Sean, but I never have. I remember in one scene he got very unhappy with the way it was being done and he wanted to do a lot of takes. It was the scene where he's all coked up, trying to convince Al to go on the boat with him. Sean was crazy that whole day. He was so into character. We'd done about 15 takes and I said, 'Let's move on.' But Sean wanted to do 15 more. I looked over at Al and he was fine with it, so we did 15 more.''

Mission: Impossible 1996
The franchise's first installment features several signature De Palma sequences, like the break-in at CIA headquarters with a dangling Tom Cruise. De Palma liked Cruise, but says one Mission was enough for him.
''Tom asked me to come back for the second one, but I said no. I saw the sequels. The second is very much a John Woo picture. I can hardly remember anybody else in it besides Tom Cruise. I think that's a mistake. The problem with the Mission: Impossibles is they've been copied so much on television now. And then in the third one, where you have a television director [J.J. Abrams] directing it, you're going to get a long episode of 24. I don't understand why people are ganging up on Tom. I've worked with two of the biggest Scientologists — Travolta and Cruise — and I don't think people understand Scientology. As for Paramount recently canceling their deal with his company, well, you've got me in a difficult spot because I'm trying to do a sequel to The Untouchables there."
"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol


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MacGuffin

The death-deifying De Palma
Brian De Palma's never-say-die brio.
Source: Los Angeles Times

"Nothing stays buried forever," says a cop in the new Brian De Palma thriller "The Black Dahlia." This basic rule of homicide investigation also applies to De Palma's career. One of his very first movies was called "Murder à la Mod," and the murders have continued almost unabated ever since. So have the exhumations.

In De Palma's House of Pain, corpses have a way of springing back to life, if only in fever dreams. In "Carrie," Sissy Spacek's blood-soaked prom queen exerts her revenge from beyond the grave — or, to be more exact, from inside it. At the end of "Blow Out," Nancy Allen's throttled death scream, recorded on a surveillance tape, pulls apart the psyche of the man who failed to save her, a sound recordist for cheapie horror movies played by John Travolta. At the end of "Casualties of War," a slaughtered Vietnamese girl, or her look-alike, beckons Michael J. Fox's Pfc. Eriksson, the man who failed to save her. In movie after movie, De Palma keeps returning to the scene of the crime — he digs up his obsessions and buries them and hauls them up again.
 
At 66, 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, to whom he has often been compared, and not always favorably, his name represents a brand.

For all that, the dread he parlays has never quite devolved into shtick because, even in a film as roundly slammed and wildly unsatisfactory as "The Black Dahlia," there are moments when his ecstatic love of filmmaking comes through. But his ardor can be a mixed blessing. De Palma's technique alone can hold you, but sometimes we must ask: Technique in the service of what?

In the mid-'80s he said in an interview, "I don't start with an idea about content. I start with a visual image." In the same interview he said, "I'm interested in motion, sometimes violent motions, because they work aesthetically in film."

But surely this patter about pure cinema is a decoy. A sports film, for example, offers abundant opportunities for dynamic movement, and yet De Palma has never attempted one of those. As a rule, things really get rolling for him when his camera tracks are slicked with fresh blood. The fact that the blood most often belongs to women, who are perceived as prey, or that sex is often the lure for violence in his films, fouls the air.

THE WAGES OF SIN

In "Dressed to Kill," probably his most controversial movie, an unhappily married woman played by Angie Dickinson has a hot tryst with a dark stranger and gets sliced to death in an elevator for her troubles. The camerawork throughout all this is — no other word for it — gorgeous. It's an emblematic sequence for De Palma and the sickest of jokes: Sex, even good sex, can only end badly.

Despite the super-sophistication of his technique, in essence De Palma's movies express, at least for men in the audience, how sex was experienced as an adolescent. An early adolescent. They capture the rage and mortification, the guilt, the tingle of voyeurism. In "Carrie," the slo-mo glide through the girls' locker room that opens the movie is every boy's porno fantasia.

One of the most unnerving things about De Palma's films, even more than their eruptive, gargoyle terror, is the suggestion that these adolescent anxieties are naggingly ever-present. The tyranny of sexual desire, woman as the Other — for most men, these fears still fly. And because De Palma came of age as an artist in a consciousness-raising era when the women's movement was in full swing, he has always been the whipping boy of those who flaunt their liberal bona fides. It was predictable that "Femme Fatale," his most recent movie before "The Black Dahlia," would be cheered by his detractors, many of whom believe he is the ungodly creation of his greatest champion, Pauline Kael. Aside from being his best movie in years, it also showcased a rare species for De Palma — the sexually in-control female hero, the pansexual praying mantis.

Equally unnerving in his movies is the cackle often underscoring the terrors. In a De Palma movie, the worst-possible-case scenario is almost always the only scenario, and there's a kind of ghastly comic justice in that. Carrie isn't just humiliated at her prom, she's doused in pig's blood. In return, she incinerates her classmates.

In one of his early, revue-sketch movies, "Hi, Mom!," De Palma stages a sequence that, for sheer satiric audacity, is unmatched by anything else of that era. A gaggle of white, liberal, middle-class theatergoers attend an off-off-Broadway happening called "Be Black Baby" in which African American militants, in white face, darken the audience members' faces and proceed to school them in what it's like to be black. They're terrorized, brutalized; there's even a rape. When it's all over, the dazed but grateful playgoers give the evening high marks. "It really makes you stop and think," says one.

In his early prime, De Palma was singled out for opprobrium, it seemed, because he did extremely well what the schlock horror-meisters, with their scantily clad victims and bogie men, did badly. He was also, as the draft-dodger comedy "Greetings" and "Hi, Mom!" and the rock-horror jape "Phantom of the Paradise" showed, closer to the Zap Comix ethos than is generally recognized: Like R. Crumb, with his pageant of brazen racial and sexual stereotypes, De Palma was unapologetically upfront about the lurid inappropriateness of his fantasy life.

Unlike Crumb, he doesn't always make it clear if he is "commenting" on those gonzo stereotypes or buying into them. Probably a little of both. But he is a much more calculating artist than Crumb, who is so entranced by his own perversities that he can't quite imagine anyone being shocked by them. De Palma, by contrast, always has his public in mind. The diabolical streak in his thrillers comes from the fact that he is not as shocked as we are about what he is showing us. And boy, does he want us to know it.

And yet there is much more to De Palma than puppet-mastery, just as there was with Hitchcock, who suffered a similar criticism. The adverse comparisons to Hitchcock have for the most part been unfair. While it's true that the distinction between rip-off and homage is sometimes stretched a bit thin in De Palma's films — "Body Double," that bargain-bin "Rear Window," comes to mind — the whole feeling tone of his movies is much more voluptuous and surreal and malign. With Hitchcock, no matter how garish he gets, even in "Psycho," we are still in the hands of someone who regards the murder genre as a bad-mannered branch of British etiquette. The horror thriller for him represents an aesthetic conundrum to be worked out.

De Palma's thrillers, at least as a point of origin, are more temperamentally aligned with cheapo exploitation pictures and pulp fiction. His effrontery is that he can, sometimes, as in "Carrie" or "The Fury," make art from dross.

What happens to De Palma in these films is similar to what happens to Hitchcock in a film such as "Vertigo." The scaffolding of plot and logic fall away and the movie seems to slide into a fugue state. It becomes almost suffocatingly personal. The real point of comparison between Hitchcock and De Palma may be this: The extreme rigor of their technique masks a deep derangement.

De Palma's movies are best when they spook him too — when they inhabit his private places. He can turn out a highly slick entertainment like "Scarface," "The Untouchables" or "Carlito's Way" and you can sit back and enjoy it without once believing that it means much of anything to the director. (It must tickle the creator of "Be Black Baby" to know that "Scarface" has become a gangsta touchstone.)

"Blow Out," often regarded as his masterpiece, is marred by an overreliance on penny dreadful plot twists once John Lithgow's bull goose loony appears on the scene. But it's still amazing. Of all De Palma's movies, it's the one that cuts closest to the bone. Travolta's performance may be a big reason why. Playing the sound effects technician who accidentally witnesses a political assassination and can't save the girl he loves from its annihilating consequences, he is atrociously responsive to De Palma's torment. De Palma's movies are often riddled with dualities and doppelgangers, but in "Blow Out" it is Travolta and De Palma who are in deep communion.

Filmed in his hometown of Philadelphia, the movie released something intensely private in him. The murders are often shot from very high up, from a vulture's perspective, as if to anatomize the obscenity. De Palma was a teenage physics whiz and several of his movies, especially "Dressed to Kill," feature geeky boy geniuses. Piecing together the truth of the assassination from bits of sound and picture, Travolta's Jack is a kind of scientist too, but the upshot of the movie is that in the end science can't help you. The irrational will always trump the rational.

HEART OF DARKNESS

Some of the most powerful, and powerfully violent, American movies ever made — such as "Bonnie and Clyde," "The Godfather" films and "The Wild Bunch" — are personally felt on a very deep level and yet also seem to have a large purchase on the zeitgeist. They express a national mood. De Palma's films are not like that. (Neither are the films of David Lynch, another fabulist of his own innerscape.) Even "Casualties of War," which is based on the true account of the rape and murder of a Vietnamese girl by an American patrol, is less a movie about that war than it is a grand-scale reenactment of De Palma's recurring nightmare — the torture of not being able to rescue a loved one. The scene in which the girl is torn from her family for a little "portable R & R" is the most powerful sequence he has ever shot because for once there is nothing standing between us and the horror, no cackles, no sleight of hand, no baroque frissons.

I do not mean to slight those ingredients. Back in 1978, coming off "Carrie" and "The Fury," De Palma said that "I imagine that in the next 10 or 20 years I'll start moving into more intellectually complicated things." In fact, those films were plenty complicated; the insistently Catholic sense of dread in "Carrie," with its almost hallucinatory imaginings of the wages of sin, is far more complex than most of what passes in the movies for "intellectual." One reason that the arbiters of critical taste have not always given De Palma his due as an artist is because he has worked predominantly in disreputable genres.

But there is a case to made against De Palma for other reasons. His apprehension of the night doesn't allow much daylight to seep through. If Steven Spielberg, in his "E.T" and "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" days, was our chief purveyor of transcendental goodness, De Palma's MO has been almost unrelentingly Manichean, with the dark side hogging all the glory. (Be black baby, indeed.) As "The Black Dahlia" makes clear, a complacency has worked its way into De Palma's heart of darkness. The movie seems anesthetized by its own aura of menace.

Six years ago De Palma made "Mission to Mars," which alone among his films is supernally hopeful and was almost universally panned. Were the critics maybe expecting "Invaders From Mars"? Making his way in Hollywood through four decades, De Palma has had to try for the big score just like everybody else. "Mission: Impossible" was his penance for the debacle of "Bonfire of the Vanities," and "The Black Dahlia" looks like an attempt to revive the De Palma brand. Compared to the overheated gore-o-ramas of David Fincher and Quentin Tarantino, his two most conspicuous acolytes, De Palma seems almost like a classic now. He's imprisoned by his own legend, but I'm betting he has the Houdini moves to escape and astonish us — astonish himself — once again. For a director who prizes resurrections, that would be the neatest trick of all.
"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol


Skeleton FilmWorks

MacGuffin

De Palma's 'Redacted' version of War
Source: Production Weekly

Brian De Palma's next film is aimed to tackle the same subject matter as his 1989 drama "Casualties of War," set during the Vietnam war, where a girl is taken from her village by five American soldiers. Four of the soldiers rape her, but the fifth refuses. The young girl is killed. The fifth soldier is determined that justice will be done. The film is more about the realities of war, rather than this single event.

De Palma is schedule to begin production early April on "Redacted," a film based on the recent events surrounding the rape and murder of a 14-year old Iraqi girl, and the killing of three of her family members by four US soldiers. The soldiers were sleep-deprived and living on energy drinks and sleeping pills in a situation where anyone outside the fence was considered the enemy. The killings have been the most provocative in a series of war crimes that have tarnished the reputation of US armed forces in Iraq.

The films narrative will be told using a mixture of video from news broadcasts, documentary footage, trial coverage, YouTube posts and excerpts from one of the soldier's video blogs.
"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol


Skeleton FilmWorks

MacGuffin

Cannes 2008: De Palma Prints the Legend
Director plans second Iraq film.

Following on from last year's Iraq flick Redacted, Brian De Palma has announced a second film set in the region and dealing with the fall-out from the war.

According to Screen Daily, Print the Legend will explore the process of selling the war to America, and revolve around a Jennifer Lynch-like character whose heroic exploits on the battlefield are later exposed to have been concocted by the US military.

Canadian outfit The Film Farm announced the project in Cannes, where they also unveiled plans to produce a second De Palma film, this time an untitled political thriller with a budget of around $15m.
"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol


Skeleton FilmWorks

MacGuffin

Brian De Palma to helm 'Stranglers'
Adapted from Susan Kelly's nonfiction book
Source: Hollywood Reporter

Brian De Palma has long had a thing for the notorious.

The "Scarface" director has signed on to helm "The Boston Stranglers" for producer Gale Anne Hurd's Valhalla Motion Pictures.

The film is adapted by Alan Rosen ("Head of the Class") from Susan Kelly's nonfiction book "The Boston Stranglers: The Public Conviction of Albert DeSalvo and the True Story of Eleven Shocking Murders."

The thriller will detail the early-'60s Beantown killings and their controversial resolution.

Hurd will produce, and Kevin Kelly Brown will exec produce.

De Palma similarly plumbed real-life-derived atrocities in "Casualties of War," "Redacted" and "The Black Dahlia."

The Strangler case continues to stir debate. Many question whether Albert DeSalvo -- a publicity hound who confessed to the murders and was later stabbed to death while incarcerated on unrelated charges -- was the actual killer.

The murders were the basis of a 1968 movie that starred Tony Curtis as DeSalvo and Henry Fonda as the detective pursuing him. That version was based on an earlier book by Gerold Frank. Several TV and DVD movies have been derived from the events.

Valhalla and Hurd produced "The Incredible Hulk" for Marvel and Universal, which will release the film June 13.

De Palma has been the writer and/or director of "The Untouchables," "Carlito's Way" and "Dressed to Kill," but his recent films have underperformed. His last hit was "Mission: Impossible" in 1996.
"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol


Skeleton FilmWorks

hedwig

i'll see it.

i rewatched Carrie the other night for the first time in about 10 years and fell in love all over again. with de palma and with carrie herself.

Reel

anyone ever see Blue Manhattan? It wasn't very good, so you don't have to. The best part was the "Be Black Baby" sequence. The rest of it was kinda, meh. Like "Travis Bickle: Before he went to 'Nam" at the very end he even comes home and starts ranting about how gore and mutilated bodies there changed his view on things. That was the only other thing I found mildly amusing about this.

I'm checking out Depalma's old stuff, just to see if there's anything else I like as much as Body Double.

MacGuffin

Brian De Palma To Helm QED's 'The Key Man'
BY MIKE FLEMING | Deadline

EXCLUSIVE: QED International and Safehouse Pictures have set Brian De Palma to direct the Joby Harold-scripted thriller The Key Man. That film was recently set for U.S. distribution with Tom Ortenberg's Open Road Films and will begin production by year's end. QED is financing the movie, about a single father who's targeted by U.S. government agents because his body contains answers to important national secrets. The style is a throwback to paranoid 70s movies like Three Days of the Condor and Marathon Man.

The Key Man will be produced by Bill Block, Paul Hanson, Tory Tunnell and Harold. Harold's recent script work includes Awake, Army of the Dead and All You Need Is Kill. De Palma, who was part of that paranoid 70s thriller movement, last directed the 2007 Iraq drama Redacted and before that The Black Dahlia. He's also responsible for Scarface, The Untouchables, Carrie and Mission: Impossible. De Palma's repped by ICM.
"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol


Skeleton FilmWorks

MacGuffin

Jason Statham To Star In Brian De Palma-Directed Re-Heated Burt Reynolds Film 'Heat:' Berlin
Source: Deadline

Jason Statham will star in Heat, a remake of the 1987 Burt Reynolds film that Brian De Palma will direct from a script by the great scribe William Goldman. Goldman who wrote the original script from his novel. Statham plays the recovering gambling addict who makes his living providing protection on the rough edges of the gambling world. When a female friend is beaten by a high-rolling mobster, the enforcer kicks some ass and gets in over his head. Sierra/Affinity will sell in Berlin. When I first got this release, I thought they were remaking the Michael Mann classic Heat, which would have been a travesty. This sounds okay. Statham stars in the Taylor Hackford-directed Parker, also financed by Sierra/Affinity. Steve Chasman and Statham are producing the re-heated Heat, which shoots in France by year's end.
"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol


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wiped_out

I am so fucking jazzed for the new De Palma movie and the fact that he has the Heat remake with Jason Stratham lined up is a bonus. I have been waiting for a De Palma movie for the LONGEST, he is one of the best living directors and its shame he has made a film since Redacted,which I enjoyed.

ElPandaRoyal

Not so happy with the fact that his next two movies will be remakes, but I completely agree with him being one of the best living filmmakers and that Redacted was way underrated. Hope he still has a couple of great movies up his sleeve. Over the last few years, I kept hearing about a project of his titled Toyer with Colin Firth, which kept me very curious but, like Scorsese with Silence, it's starting to look like it will never happen.
Si

socketlevel

redacted was made 6 years too late, in the same way when romero did diary of the dead, or craven with scream 4. it's old guys having the idea "oh the internet, found footage, and home video. let's construct a narrative about that." long after it's cool to do it.

i'm not saying that it isn't a good device to use, but people have to stop tipping their hats to it, like winking at the audience saying 'hey this could be you.' rely on seeing a stupid scene that tries to recreate a pseudo-real moment of someone recording themself, and all it really is, is exposition for why the camera is on at that given moment. that's a director being unsure of the material, and covering it up with a quirky gimmick.

last good found footage movie was chronicle, one of the main reasons being that the film spent far less time doing this kinda stupid shit (though there are a couple moments) and the kids want to record what is happening to them. it's far more believable that whatever is going on in the plot causes a reason to be captured, then a series of "oh shit, thank god we got that on tape" moments.

besides that criticism, redacted is horribly acted.

so good enough script, but bullshit direction and acting.
the one last hit that spent you...