The first of Brian De Palma’s ‘Hitchcock-influenced films, Sisters boldly begat a career long obsession with the Master of Suspese, recycling and deconstructing his stories, themes, techniques in a dozen films or so over forty years. Without the slickness of later and bigger budgeted works, Sisters feels like a marriage of the director’s handcrafted underground/avant garde works of the late 60’s and the delirious visual showman of the 70’s/80’s.
Even by Brian De Palma standards — a man whom critics and audiences continually fall in and out of love with — the collective reaction to his adaptation of the revered Tom Wolfe novel about the evils of '80s capitalism was vicious. But comparing the nuanced social critique of Tom Wolfe's prose to Brian De Palma's wholly unique and bold cinematic recipe requires a different set of expectations. I hope critics and audiences these many years hence who may not have the novel so clearly in their heads can re-watch and enjoy the film for what it is: a bold socio-political farce told through the eyes of a cinema master renowned for visual ingenuity and obsessive cinematic references.
Scarface (1983) dir. Brian De Palma
Starring: Al Pacino, Steven Bauer, Michelle Pfieffer, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, Robert Loggia
***½
By Alan Bacchus
I love this movie, but I freely acknowledge the bombastic, bizarre, heightened reality in which it resides. Scarface represents the best and worst of Brian De Palma, the controversial auteur reviled as much as he is revered. Whatever your opinion is of his films, we can’t deny his expertise in delivering stimulating, thought-provoking movies, however corny, vulgar and exploitive they might be.
Scarface is perhaps his grandest achievement, a superlative epic that represents more a time capsule of 1980’s excess and overkill than the morally-confused gangster pic that was its intention.
Despite the 60-year difference, the original Howard Hawks/Ben Hecht Scarface (1932) is remarkably similar to De Palma's. At the core, like the ’32 version, Scarface is an immigrant story of an ambitious Cuban refugee/criminal exploiting the freedom of the ‘American dream’ to create a wealthy drug empire only to have it all come crashing down in a hail of bullets. Al Pacino is Tony Montana, introduced magnificently in a close-up while being interrogated by the immigration officers in Miami, which was opened up to Cuban refugees very briefly in 1980.
Through Pacino’s strong performance we see Tony as a charismatic, passionate, uncouth young man, but streetwise, tough and full of four-letter f-bombs. His best friend, Manny (Bauer), is an elegant Cuban, handsome and suave, who serves as his right hand man. But Tony is not afraid to put him in his place. After a successful hit in their holding facility they're both released and quickly negotiate their way into the underworld of cocaine trafficking.
The infamous chain saw sequence early on, which shows Montana’s loyalty and strength in the face of adversity, still haunts me. I saw this film on VHS when I was 10 years old. The horrific depiction of Angel’s death, handcuffed to the bathroom shower curtain while his body is dismembered by a chainsaw scarred me. We don’t actually see limbs getting hacked off, but it’s De Palma’s visceral depiction of the massacre that is as powerful as seeing it literally.
De Palma’s version links up with Hawks’ version when the love triangle dynamic is set up between Montana, his new boss Frank Lopez (Loggia) and his wife Elvira (Pfieffer), whom Montana instantly falls for. Same with the near-incestuous love triangle with Manny and Tony’s sister Gina (Mastrantonio), which culminates in the monumentally tragic third act in which Tony commits a heinous and brutal act of jealous rage against his best friend. This moment is deeply affecting in both versions.
This is the core of Scarface. Despite the grandiose gunplay and posturing in the final siege, including lines like, “Say hello to my little friend,” and “I’m Tony Montana, you fuck with me, you fucking with the best,” which make for great posters or t-shirts, they glorify the film in the wrong places.
The key to the resonance of this film is Giorgio Moroder’s score. It’s a synthesized score, which was fashionable for only a brief period in cinema history, but it contributes a wholly original feeling and tone. It certainly places the film within the 1980’s trend in pop music instrumentation. At first glance the harsh electronic sounds might sound like shrill nails on a chalkboard compared to traditional classic scoring, but it's memorable nonetheless.
The sound of the opening chords, for example, which drones like an organist at a funeral, is so memorable, as it accurately sets the mood for the tragic operatic finale. Even the overly tender love theme that signifies Tony’s protectiveness of Gina and the innocence of his mother’s home is simplistic musicianship but so deeply sad and effective. I could probably do without the ‘Razor’s Edge’ montage music, but hell, if we’re going to go fully electronic in the ‘80s, it’s in keeping with the fun.
Scarface is a helluva lot of fun indeed, but it’s sad and tragic in equal measure. The best qualities of De Palma are present, which see him manipulate his narrative to swing us through all these emotional extremes and titillate us with unforgettable imagery.
Scarface is available on Blu-ray from Universal Home Entertainment.
Dressed to Kill (1980) dir. Brian de Palma
Starring: Michael Caine, Angie Dickinson, Keith Gordon, Nancy Allen, Dennis Franz
***½
By Alan Bacchus
I am a Brian de Palma fan. Though I adore most of his films, I can acknowledge as much as his films are cinematically stimulating and provocative they can also be seen a shameless mysoginistic, poorly acted and often amateurish. There are few films in the De Palma canon that work completely as a whole without gaps in narrative logic, or lapses in good directorial judgement or laziness. But even at De Palma’s worst he continues to go for broke cinematically, attempting to dazzle us with set pieces to leave us beguiled, intrigued or stimulated.
On paper Dressed to Kill is an awful movie, which begins with a shameless nude scene, of Angie Dickinson showering intercut with obvious body double shots of her supple nipples and teasing vagina. (Note De Palma would famous reshoot this scene in his 1984 follow Body Double). It's just a dream as Kate Miller wakes up in the middle of morning sex, being pounded unceremoniously by her unromantic husband. But Kate longs to be desired and she finds this in the coy glances of a stranger in NY's Metropolitan Museum.
De Palma crafts a delirious chase sequence using state of the art steadycams paying homage to Jimmy Stewart's and Kim Novak's museum chase in Vertigo. Pino Donaggio's melodramatic music rises gradually to an orgasmic crescendo which leads into Kate's afternoon tryst with the mystery man in his apartment. Little does Kate know she's being stalked by a mystery 'woman', another voyeur following her from place to place. After leaving the man's apartment De Palma executes another stunning set piece, in one of his preferred locations, an elevator, wherein Kate finds herself attacked with a straight razor blade.
It's perhaps De Palma's most perfectly-crafted yet vicious scene. De Palma builds up immense tension from Jerry Greenberg's delicate editing drawing out each step, and glance to before punctuating the scene with the grisly murder.
An innocent hooker/bystander Liz Blake (Nancy Allen) is seen by the killer who then becomes her next target. Liz befriends Kate's nerdy son who vows to investigate the murder on his own.
Thus with the film's star, Angie Dickinson, dead, a narrative shift directly influenced by Janet Leigh's surprised early death in Psycho, moves the film over to Keith Gordon and Nancy Allen, who become an affable Hardy Boys./Nancy Allen boy-meets-hooker tag team. In the middle of everything is Kate's psychiatrist Dr. Elliott (Michael Caine) who may be hiding the identity of the murderer to protect his anonymity of his client.
Dressed to Kill is filled with silly amateurisms, laughable dialogue and jokes from Nancy Allen, an overly-serious scene-chewing performance from Michael Caine, a cliched detective played by Dennis Franz, and a downright preposterous plotting device given to Keith Gordon's character. Like the contrived machinations of plot in De Palma's 1976's Hitchcockian melange Obsession, the plotting serves as a rudimentary coat hanger for De Palma's stunning set pieces and cinematic bravura.
I've mentioned the elevator and museum scenes, but there's also the subway chase between Nancy Allen and the cloaked killer, and the killer's third act resurrection in the insane asylum which provides one of the great shock moments on De Palma's filmography. This sequence of events which seems narratively unnecessary after the killer's capture is De Palma's loopy obsessiveness at his best, pummelling us with a couple more audacious kills to send us all home with our seats wet and our money's worth. The finale confrontation is pure De Palma, a scene Quentin Tarantino respectfully borrowed for Kill Bill's Vol 1's hospital scene.
Tying everything together, the good and the bad, is Pino Donaggio's awesome score, which oscillates between dreamy overly romantic melancholy to aggressive and violent string arrangements of Bernand Herrmann, the last piece of the puzzle of De Palma's most delirious act of cinematic exploitation.
Dressed to Kill is available on Blu-Ray from MGM Home Entertainment
By 1981, Brian De Palma was well into his ’Hitchcock period’, a string of films in the late 70s going back to 1973’s Sisters, but really starting with 1976’s Obsession, followed by Carrie that same year and then The Fury (1978) and Dressed to Kill (1980), which mashed together Alfred Hitchcock‘s most famous suspense set pieces with a tone of sleazy exploitation and dreamy cinematic bravura. The success of Carrie notwithstanding, Blow Out was arguably De Palma's most accomplished of these films.
Blow Out (1981) dir. Brian de Palma
Starring: John Travolta, Nancy Allen, Dennis Franz, John Lithgow
By Alan Bacchus
Not all Blu-rays produce the same high quality. You know that type of pristine high-def imagery that makes a movie you’ve seen a dozen times seem as fresh as seeing it for the first time on the big screen. Not all HD conversions go to the original negative or have the painstaking effort and money to digitally remove scratches and imperfections. Not all BD releases time the movie again so the colours are as originally intended by the cinematographer and director. Criterion does this, and who knows how Brian de Palma’s 1981 thriller classic Blow Out would have looked under just another no frills studio effort.
Thankfully, the marvellous imagery of Vilmos Zsigmond, ASC is lovingly preserved and enhanced by the new Criterion Collection edition on Blu-ray. There’s a shot in the middle of the film of John Lithgow seen from behind standing on the top level of a mall looking down at his intended victim (Nancy Allen) descending an escalator. The shot looks so fucking good I got that same ‘feeling’ when I first bought my HD TV and saw high-definition images for the first time.
This shot is superlative, and the rest of the movie meets this standard. A film like this needs to be in this top shape to truly appreciate it, and few directors have relied on visuals as much as De Palma.
In terms of cinematic set pieces, personally I think Dressed to Kill trumps them all, but Blow Out feels like his most complete and resonant of these films – a film that caught the 70s paranoia genre a tad late but fits in well with the untrustworthiness felt by the general populace after the Watergate cover-up.
Here, John Travolta, playing Jack Terry, a sound man for a lame b-movie production house, who, while recording effects for his latest b-horror film, accidently records a car accident of a prominent political candidate. After he saves a naïve young gal, Sally (Nancy Allen), who is not the senator’s wife, the seeds of a conspiracy start spinning in his brain. But what’s really eating Jack is the sound of a gunshot just before the crash. When a newspaper prints the frame-by-frame still photos of the accident caught by a photographer, Jack gets the idea to sync up the images with his sound reel to prove the existence of a murder and a cover-up.
This leads us to the film’s key set piece, a scene cut using mostly close-ups of Jack going through the steps to sync the picture and sounds of the accident. It’s not a murder scene and De Palma uses almost no sound, certainly no music – just the sound of the syncing device doing the work. It’s riveting stuff and one of the high-water marks of De Palma’s career.
It fits into one of the recurring themes in his career – the self-reflexive nature of the filmmaking process and the self-awareness in most of these thrillers. In a film like Obsession, the audience is aware they are watching a very specific homage to Hitchcock’s Vertigo. In Body Double, there’s a movie within a movie, which references a particular scene in Dressed to Kill, which in and of itself steals a number of scenes from Hitchcock, including Vertigo and Psycho. But crafting a suspense scene out of the technical craft of filmmaking adds another level of cinematic enjoyment to Blow Out.
As usual, the film is also spotty with its performances. Nancy Allen’s cartoonish characterization of the dollish Sally, who, after being saved by Travolta, becomes the target of the diabolical Lithgow, is a 180 degree turn from Travolta's surprisingly sympathetic heroic portrayal of Jack. It’s better than Cliff Robertson’s performance in Obsession, which makes it probably the best performance ever directed by De Palma.
But to give Nancy Allen some credit, she was De Palma’s wife at the time and was shamelessly given a shallow and vacant character to try and bring to life, not that dissimilar from her role in Dressed to Kill. On the BD special features, a new interview reveals her reservations about the role and her struggle to find her character’s motivation. That said, despite the over-the-top airhead depiction, Allen is naturally sincere and honest, and even though her acting chops are suspect, she’s still lovely to look at.
And one of the reasons Blow Out resonates emotionally more than any of De Palma’s other films is because of Allen’s on-screen chemistry with Travolta. The slo-mo chase finale beneath the 4th of July fireworks, which is superbly choreographed and executed, is deeply tragic. And months after the violent confrontation, De Palma finishes the film with a touching denouement showing Travolta at his most tender and heartwarming – a great actor in his prime.
****
Blow Out is available on Blu-ray from The Criterion Collection.
Obsession (1976) dir. Brian De Palma
Starring: Cliff Robertson, Genevieve Bujold, John Lithgow, Sylvia Kuumba Williams, Wanda Blackman, J. Patrick McNamara
***1/2
By Alan Bacchus
Looking back on the filmography of Brian De Palma, 1976’s Obsession is one of his most important. It was made prior to Carrie, his breakout film, but after Sisters, this was the first of his Hitchcock-homages, a style of filmmaking he would return to numerous times in his career.
Like many of his pictures Obsession is a deliciously dreamy thriller, enjoyable on a number of cinematic levels. In terms of story, the title represents the state of transcendant experienced by De Palma’s hero Michael Courtland (Robertson),who, years after his wife and daughter’s kidnap and apparent death, obsessively courts a young girl who looks strikingly similar to his former love. The title also resonates with the methodology of filmmaking from De Palma, his own personal obsessions with Hitchcock from whom this film and many others have heavily borrowed.
Enjoyment of a Brian De Palma requires buying in to these many levels, however sensational and shameless. And most certainly the De Palma experience is helped by one's knowledge cinema and seeing where his films link up to others throughout history (for example, watch Jules Dassin's Topkapi together to Mission Impossible!). In particular to this film, the fun of linking Obsession to Vertigo. For example, in the final shot, it would be difficult to accept and appreciate the circular camera shot spinning around Bujold and Robertson embracing. The shot is so excessively long it calls attention to itself, but knowing it apes the dramatic kiss between Jimmy Stewart and Kim Novak in the middle of Vertigo adds a specific context which is not present on the page.
The plotting of Obsession is very traditional for two thirds of the film, the opening takes place in 1959, wherein we see the kidnapping of Michael’s family, an event dramatized not unlike the Charles Lindbergh baby kidnapping. Robertson’s performance as a grieving man who becomes obsessed with Sandra (Bujold), a doppelganger for his wife, is understated and terrific – rare qualities for a De Palma film. Robertson is quietly heroic and sympathetic, and arguably more grounded than Jimmy Stewart in Vertigo.
The relationship between Michael and Sandra is the stuff of soap opera plotting but emotionally engaging thanks to Robertson and Bujold. Where the film falls off the rails, is in the second half, when the ulterior motives of Sandra and Michael’s wily partner La Salle (Lithgow) are revealed. It all becomes rather silly and outlandishness very quickly, but there’s inspiration in De Palma's grand plans for Robertson’s redemption. He pays off a number shots established in the first of the picture, cleverly doubling back over the some of the same scenes to show an almost divine chance for redemption for Michael’s character.
Viewers also need to buy in the mood and tone of De Palma’s works. It’s not hard to be swept up by Bernard Herrman’s grandiose score, which recycles many of his themes from his Hitchcock pictures, but there's no doubt this score is amplified by De Palma’s own tastes for the excessive. Herrman’s score in this picture is front and centre, driving the film harder than Hitchcock’s films ever did.
The redemption of Michael is obviously played out on the nose by De Palma, but without the sumptuous aural and visual experience, Vilmos Zsigmond’s hazy-romantic photography and Bernard Herrman’s score, the film would die an awful death. Instead it remains to be a mesmerizing early De Palma classic.
Body Double (1984) dir,. Brian De Palma Starring: Craig Wassen, Melanie Griffith, Gregg Henry,
**½
By Alan Bacchus
It would be easy to dismiss ‘Body Double’ instantly as a grade B Hitchcock thriller and shamelessly exploitative 80’s skin flick, because with the naked eye that’s pretty much what this picture is. The twists in the potboiling plot are forecastable from the outset, most of the acting and dialogue is atrocious, and the excessive skin would appear to the worst kind of gratuitous nudity synonymous with 80’s genre filmmaking.
Appreciation of this film though requires a deep knowledge cinema history past and present. There’s a reason Brian De Palma’s pictures, especially his suspense thrillers, captured the attention of esteemed critics like Pauline Kael, newer generation filmmakers like Quentin Tarantino and cinephiles like me. Certainly the style and craft of the look and sound of his films are striking, and even in his absolutely worst pictures De Palma has the ability to craft stand alone set piece of cinematically visceral power.
‘Body Double’ is in the genre of his ‘Hitchcock-influenced (or some might say Hitchcock-obsessed) suspense films, along with 'Obsession', 'Dressed to Kill', 'Blow Out', 'Raising Cain'. Written by De Palma himself 'Body Double' mashes obsessive elements of 'Vertigo' and the voyeuristic themes of 'Rear Window'. Craig Wassen plays Jake Scully, a struggling actor who get fired from his latest horror movie for his extreme claustrophobia, an ailment which prevents him from functioning properly in enclosed spaces. In one of his acting classes he meets a fellow actor looking for a house sittter to occupy a large home in the Hollywood hills. One of the attractions of the space is its vantage point to peer into the neighbour’s homes, in particular, the bedroom of an attractive young gal who likes to dance naked in front of her window.
When Scully witnesses a robbery in her home, he turns his obsession for the woman into a sense of protection and follows her around town. Unfortunately, despite his best efforts he’s unable to prevent her despicable murder at the hands (or should I say 3 foot drill) of her shifty and elusive stalker. The cut and dry murder for money motive, unravels into a complex game of deception involving a porno actress and Scully‘s own clausterphobic ailment.
The theft from Vertigo are obvious, Scully is a poorly masked shadow of Jimmy Stewart’s character, substituting out a fear of heights, for Scully's fear of enclosed spaces. The narrative structure rolls out with the same timing as Vertigo. Like the death of Kim Novak's character in 'Vertigo', the neighbour's murder occurs at the midpoint, thus spinning the plot into a direction back onto the main character, revealing a diabolical plot exploiting the hero’s ailments and obssessions. With 'Rear Window', the homage is even more obvious but also more superficial than 'Vertigo'. In fact most of De Palma’s pictures use this point of view of voyeurism as a theme.
Below this surface lies even more fun cinematic layers. The title has a dual meaning for De Palma, sure it refers to Melanie Grifffith’s character’s role in the plotting, metaphor for the ease of deception men can be tricked by when it comes to sex. The final scene which would be appear to be gratuitous nudity, a film-within-a-film scene featuring Scully as a vampire fondling a naked woman in a shower actually references De Palma’s “Dressed to Kill” and the body double used by Angie Dickinson in her infamous opening shower scene. Perhaps reacting to the critical drubbing that picture and that scene in particular De Palma’s lampoons himself with his own recreation.
Quentin Tarantino has never been shy to express his interest in De Palma’s films. There was that particularly gleeful De Palma homage in Kill Bill Vol 1 in the hospital, but look carefully at the climax of ‘Body Double’ when Scully finds himself trapped in a grave burying buried alive by his assailant. During this scene De Palma’s cuts away to a lengthy flashback/dream sequence within the character’s head which gives him the strength to escape - a scene which appears to directly influence the Bride’s great graveyeard escape in Kill Bill Vol 2.
Other goodies in ‘Body Double’ include the glorious centrepiece, the lengthy foot chase sequence in the shopping mall. A classic cat and mouse De Palma set piece choreographed elegantly and set to the wonderfully melodramatic tones of Pino Donnagio’s swooning score. There's also the lengthy and aesthetically out of place, Frankie Goes to Hollywood music video sequence.
After the failure of Scarface,'Body Double' represents of the few major lows in De Palma's career. De Palma would eventually pick himself back up with the Untouchable and Casualties of War later in the decade. But with most of career behind him, we're able to appreciate 'Body Double' in the greater context of De Palma's career and cinema history.
Untouchables (1987) dir. Brian De Palma Starring: Kevin Costner, Sean Connery, Robert De Niro, Andy Garcia
****
By 1987 Brian De Palma had established himself, first as an underground filmmaker in the early 70’s, then with a series of Hitchcock-inspired films in the late 70s/early 80s. Most of his films, including “Scarface” have moments of brilliance, but also suffered from sloppy writing, bad acting and questionable taste. But with “The Untouchables” all the stars aligned together - script, producer, cast and music - which helped make it Brian De Palma’s most realized and best film.
Though the filmmakers retained the title, “The Untouchables” doesn’t borrow a lot from the Television series, and only a smattering from the real life story of Eliot Ness. No matter, reality should never get in the way of making a good film. Ennio Morricone’s terse piano-heavy music gets the blood running early during the credits. Then De Palma establishes the heinous acts of violence and corruption that plagued Prohibition-era Chicago. After a young girl is killed by a bomb in a local pub (note, the HD Net broadcast cut out the explosion?!), treasury officer Eliot Ness (Kevin Costner) is charged with taking down Capone and ridding the city of organized crime and corruption.
Ness’ search for a task force starts with aging Irish policeman Malone (Sean Connery) – a lowly beat cop, who prides himself on being uncorruptable, a practice which unfortunately hasn’t gotten him ahead in life. Talented rookie sharpshooter George (Giuseppe) Stone and bookkeeper Oscar Wallace (Charles Martin Smith) also join the team. Ness’s team battle Capone’s crew in the streets and near the borders where illegal liquor is trading, distributed and sold. The film climaxes with a raucous courtroom trial where was Capone nailed for tax evasion.
Brian De Palma starts with an ironclad script by the great David Mamet. Most of De Palma’s previous films are so overwhelmingly style over substance, story, dialogue, subtext, dramatic foreshadowing all get pushed aside for his bravura technical sequences. There’s a place for films like “Dressed to Kill” and “Blow Up”, but it’s refreshing to combine a great visual artist with a great script.
The heart of the film is the relationship between Malone and Ness. Malone is the classic mentor archetype. A heavily flawed character – racist, a drinker, a bully – but in their first meeting over the bridge at night Ness sizes up Malone with only a few honest words. Mamet writes the sequence brilliantly and does it all with subtext.
Mamet’s dialogue is typically razor-sharp as well. The best lines are saved for Malone and Capone. Though Capone is under-realized and played largely as a caricature, De Niro is given so many good lines and great speeches, it was a dream role for any actor. His press scrums speeches are great, but it’s the tension squeezed out of the baseball scene which always gives me shivers – “part…of…a….team”.
Connery is pitch perfect as Malone and delivers Mamet’s lines with complete authenticity. Each scene with his corrupt colleague and countryman, Dorset, is well-played specifically his final confrontation in the rain-soaked alley. Connery’s highlight is one of the all-time great death scenes. After a long “De Palma-esque” sequence from the point of view of a hitman breaking into his home, Malone tells him off with one of his great lines, “isn’t that just like a wop, brings a knife to a gunfight”. Then he’s gunned down like Bonnie and Clyde – his body riddled with bullets. His final crawl across the hallway, spewing blood from his mouth is heroic, but it’s his last bit of strength to grab the train schedule (not the St. Jude necklace) that won his Oscar.
Though script is king in this film, De Palma is not invisible whatsoever – he gets his usual elevator, train and staircase scenes, his swooning score, and his typical red and blue cinematography etc. The Malone death scene is great but it’s the final staircase scene that he not-so-subtly ‘borrowed’ from “Potemkin”, that is the piece-de-résistance. Shot entirely in slo-motion, each shotgun blast, squib explosion, crash zoom and bold closeup is set to the metronome sounds of the baby carriage tumbling down the steps. Never has such a short moment been extended longer on film.
Few directors use their widescreen better than Brian De Palma. Before widescreen TVs widescreen films had to be conscious of framing for video and television (4:3 aspect ratio), but De Palma seems to consciously buck that trend. Watch when he even ‘dutches’ the angle to squeeze a couple more inches out of his frame. In many scenes De Palma shoots from below the actors looking up into the air. Aside from aggrandizing the character it also relieves the production design department from filling the background with actors and sets. De Palma also highlights the magnificent Chicago architecture as we see the top of the tall buildings and in the interiors some of the immaculately painted ceilings of the churches, hotels, and theatres.
I love Brian De Palma. But I’m the first to admit he’s had many good films, a few bad films, but not many ‘great’ films. De Palma’s Hitchcock films, his gangster films, his exploitation films, and even his comedies (I actually like “Bonfire of the Vanities”) have a soft spot in me. But it’s also frustrating to watch “The Untouchables” and question if he directed more good scripts where his career would be now. David Cronenberg could probably answer that. Enjoy.
Welcome to the first edition of many daily dose's of film. It's the day after my birthday, and I saw this as the best way to start my 33rd year of film-watching.
This site is easy.
Step 1: Each day, visit dailyfilmdose and receive a good film to watch. Step 2: Go rent or buy or borrow the film from me Step 3: Enjoy Step 4 (optional): Send back or post comments to me
It's that easy.
Here's your first dose:
CARRIE (1976) dir. Brian DePalma
Starring: Piper Laurie, Sissy Spacek, John Travolta
****
Based on Stephen King's classic (and first) novel, CARRIE is the story of a sheltered teenager with telekinetic powers who uses her abilities to take revenge on everyone who has tormented her.
This was Brian DePalma's first breakout hit after several underground indie hits (ie. SISTERS and PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE). Sissy Spacek's performance is awesome, as a naive waif and daughter of a god-fearing abusive mother played by Piper Laurie. Both were nominated for Oscars. Technical bravura makes up for some occasional bad acting and stereotypical characterization (some hammy performances from John Travolta and Nancy Allen add to the fun) The final prom scene is a masterpiece of choreography, editing and cinematography and is worth the price of admission. Despite the horror and terror, the film never takes itself seriously - the opening scene - a one-shot long take tracking move through a girl's high school locker room/shower - is notoriously naughty. Enjoy.
