Entries associated with the tag "Brian De Palma":

"I see what you mean," my partner for life said after sitting through a screening of Hellboy II: The Golden Army last weekend. She's a fan of Guillermo del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth, or at least had been until just then, for what usually passes as the maudit "poetry" of that weenie bit of business. Whereas I'd stubbornly insisted there was more complex emotionality in a single handprint on the aquarium glass in Hellboy number one than in all the wan aestheticizing of Pan. Ramp up the prefab sensitivity, rake in all the praise, even if the work's patently innocuous and/or inferior. "He really loves what he's doing, doesn't he?"

Like a cat with a fuzzy Nerf toy and just about the same attention span. Andrew Tracy's complained that del Toro's Hellboy II stagings are too ham-fisted, lumbering and abrupt where they ought to be ... well, I don't know what they ought to be, aside from not existing at all, since I can't imagine anyone bringing more keenly tuned awareness to the meticulous ins and outs of this fabricator's art, all the precision-crafted mini motifs that, as seems to me obvious from the get-go, most contemporary pulp directors couldn't begin to emulate, much less think of in the first place. Of course, Peter Jackson might, though with Jackson narrative's a necessary form of discipline: there has to be a through line to bring the proliferating effects together. But Del Toro'd rather wing it: this I like, and this, and this, like one of Brian De Palma's mad, free-associating frenzies (a la Raising Cain), only del Toro does it better, his this 'n' that balancing act more exactingly executed and felt. And there's no sitting back to admire the spectacle, since already he's pushing to the next effect, and the next one after that. (For intelligent critical back-and-forth addressing many of Tracy's points, see Jim Emerson's Scanners link here.)

So no, not "absolute" creativity, I can see where Tracy's coming from—but so the hell what? Since the affection's both palpable and generous: this guy's really into his epiphanies, like Bach turning technical somersaults in one of his elaborate keyboard inventions. Which of course is sacrilege to suggest, since by definition Bach's, uhh, "profound," whereas del Toro, per Tracy fiat, is just a commercial hack. Another prime example of genre conferring status, more or less automatically, determining where we do or don't get to stick the tendentious label aaarrrttt. Which is something Jeff Koons could tell you about too ... can't get those category boundaries muddled!

But where Tracy sees hackabout, I see, e.g., Minnelli and Miyazaki—in the elegantly confected beanstalk creature, delicate, graceful, and menacing at the same time. Or Brakhage, in the resurrected robot armies: all those compositional curlicues in elementary reds and blues. Or Joseph H. Lewis and the B studio auteurs of the 40s and 50s, termite energies burrowing into their finest—as in most demented—work. Which of course was and still remains resolutely commercial, ergo, in Tracy's cleansing, puritanical light, "corrupt," just another co-opting product of Hollywood Moloch, Inc.

Meanwhile our Hellboy delirium continues, its echt termite consciousness never backing off. Is it aaarrrttt or just another case of death by CGI technology? I sure can't tell you—except we're not getting this kind of work anywhere else. Michael Bay anyone?

Maybe the media circus surrounding Brian De Palma's Redacted (see Pat Graham's recent post) will spark the kind of water cooler chat that gets people into theaters, but the saber rattling has overshadowed any discussion of the director's artistic intentions. When I first saw the movie in September, at the Toronto International Film Festival, I was struck by how stylistically different it is from his previous works; De Palma met the challenge of shooting a high-definition video feature on a $5 million budget by radically reinventing his approach to storytelling. Much as Barry Levinson recharged his creative batteries with the low-budget satire Wag the Dog, De Palma regains the vigor of some of his best 70s and 80s work using mock Web sites, blog posts, camcorder footage, and surveillance tapes to present a fictionalized version of the 2006 killings of a Mahmudiyah family by U.S. soldiers in Iraq.

At the Q & A following the first Toronto public screening, De Palma said he was inspired by a movie he'd seen at the festival the previous year, Bruno Dumont's Flanders, about the rape of a Middle Eastern woman by French soldiers and her revenge. (Thematically, Redacted also harks back to De Palma's 1989 Vietnam drama Casualties of War.) When a man in the audience asked why Americans aren't protesting the war in Iraq on the same scale as they did the Vietnam war, De Palma replied this was because images of the carnage aren't being seen as frequently in TV and print news.

The next morning at a press breakfast he expounded on that comment: "Well, all this stuff is out there; it's either on the Internet, or they've made videos or DVDs. I looked at Iraq in Fragments—there's a whole bunch of them, I looked at them all. We're talking about [alternative media showing] the actual conditions of what's going on over there, as opposed to the sanitized infomercials we get from the embedded reporters. I found it, and I found the form in which it was presented; that's what dictated the structure of the movie. All this stuff we basically copied from what was out there, and we had to change or redact because we couldn't get the rights to use this, or [the producers] worried about some lawsuit from somebody."

I asked him if the growing retreat of media consumers to outlets tailored to specific demographics might have something to do with the lack of broad-based protest. "I don't know the statistics," he responded, "but as the Internet becomes more commercial I'm sure then that news [there] will start to be corrupted too. The day news started to make money, that's when everybody was in trouble. It wasn't supposed to make money. You weren't supposed to have talk shows and book deals and commercials and be hanging out with all the powers that be to get them on your talk show. You can't really insult the vice president and expect him to come on your talk show."

There comes a time in a free society when citizens must take a stand. And this is one of those times. Cuban has a constitutional right to make this piece of garbage. And we have a right to criticize him and anyone who supports the project. —Bill O'Reilly on Fox News (11/14) rallying the troops against Redacted

The sidewalk outside Century shopping mall at Clark and Diversey, home to Landmark's Century Centre theaters, seems way too narrow to accommodate angry swarms of Bill O'Reilly supporters, carpooling in from Naperville and Buffalo Grove and points beyond the Fox (the river, not the TV network), who promise to descend this afternoon and evening (though maybe not—snark, snark) to protest the Chicago release of Brian De Palma's new Mark Cuban-produced anti-Iraq war film Redacted. Not to mention less angry swarms of "counterprotesters"—of which I may be one, I'm not sure yet—who, whether by accident or design, will brave the O'Reillyites' taunts and jeers to buy tickets on opening night (with reduced rates for seniors, hot damn!). But hey, we're all seasoned pros, right?—picket-line crashers from the get-go (well, maybe not quite), from Godard's Hail Mary through Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will to Kevin Smith's Dogma and beyond ...

Speaking of which: I once worked for a nonprofit group that decided to screen D.W. Griffith's notorious silent epic The Birth of a Nation to fill some downtime on the schedule. Everyone knew the classic objections—the sinister racial biases, the Ku Klux Klan hagiography, etc—but, so the rationalization went, it's still a cinematic treasure and part of our national heritage, whatever problems there are attitude-wise. So arguably we'd be performing a service: watch Nathan Bedford Forrest types ride down former bondsmen, get educated—like Johnny Guitar or whatever. Plus since everybody'd already seen it, probably no one would come—so how far down the collective-guilt ladder are we obliged to go?

But then the harassment started: first organized phone blitzes—"it's a racist film, it's racist!"—then promises of picket lines to come. Well, why shouldn't they harass us, they're all just royally pissed! Except now the idea dawned that we might actually—a shameful thought, depending on your tolerance for cynical marketing ploys—sell a few extra tickets, raise a couple of shekels. So from zero-degrees visibility to instant notoriety ... and nobody'd even bothered to raise a finger. At which point I probably should have torched the popcorn, since that's usually what I did, and—poof!—there'd go all our talk about marginal profitability in a carbonaceous haze.

Ah, capitalism ... but of course I'd be happy to give the O'Reillys another popcorn opportunity. Catering, anyone?