4 Likes
John Kenneth Muir is always a great source of thorough film criticism. Hereās a link to some of his work on De Palma:
https://reflectionsonfilmandtelevision.blogspot.com/search?q=Brian+de+Palma
And naturally, the more I think of De Palma, the more the idea of a Bond film directed by him feels interesting.
Too late now, probably.
1 Like
I donāt know if it becomes interesting.
Was the first M.I. movie interesting for you?
I watched the first two M.I. movies last weekend on my old dvdās and I liked them both, but it are not the huge movies what they became after those.
1 Like
And I would go the other way. A De Palma-helmed Bond would be an interesting film, but would it be good for the franchise?
Thank you.
another oft-misunderstood talent from the formalist school
Preach, John.
What struck me as I watched BODY DOUBLE was how formalist De Palmaās work is. I have always known this, but coming back to these films, it is striking me harder than ever before (which may reflect the overall decline in formalist film aesthetics).
1 Like
I can think of a community member or two, who would not object to such an approach.
1 Like
In the 90ās, if he had been given the āfreedomā he was given on M:I, I would say yes.
Right now - no. He is understandably cynical about the business and would turn Bond into a sex-obsessed maniac who at the end fails to save the one woman who could have saved him.
One could argue that De Palma always was out of tune with the business, and thatās what makes him so interesting. At least he was allowed to make movies back then.
These days itās only about conglomerate-friendly IP-enablers.
Could he do the independent arthouse circuit, being feted at the festivals? Sure. But most of these films will end up financial failures, forcing the directors to go where the money is. And De Palma surely would say: Iām too old for that shit - and I know too much to swallow it.
1 Like
I might be in the minority saying this, but I think Brian De Palmaās Mission Impossible film is actually the worst of the franchise basically for the absolute character assassination done to Jim Phelps. To me, it would be the equivalent of Bernard Leeās M being revealed as the head of SPECTRE.
1 Like
I respect your opinion butā¦ did Ethan Hunt played by Tom Cruise appear in the series? Or Jon Voight as Jim Phelps?
Itās a different universe, a different variation.
Bernard Lee was not a female M. Still, in 1995 M was suddenly a female.
They did not retroactively change the character, nor did the M:I movie. What came before still exists untouched.
4 Likes
SISTERS
Itās been so long since I saw Brian De Palmaās first wide release, and I mainly remembered the shocking gore of the murder and the famous split screen following it.
This time I was surprised that the gore is not the most shocking element here but the depiction of women and Afro-Americans being mistreated by white males.
De Palma already establishes his precise and visually striking directorial style with a surprising abundance of satirical humour. The film is using the structure of PSYCHO but turns it into something different: a thriller about people either seeing something, disregarding what they are seeing or being unable to see it. He even goes further in the finale by having a terribly lovestruck, yet brutally dominating character forcing someone to see things his way. And yet, nobody in the end dares to see what is really there or act on it.
It is really an intelligent concept within a genre thriller whose surface made some critics not look deeper.
Me included. This second look was absolutely worth it.
1 Like
I think that is an accurate estimation of De Palma.
Exactly. Outliers were allowed to make movies, and if they turned out to be unexpected hits, e.g. CARRIE, they got to make more.
Agreed. Those who can guide IP to a safe and profitable harbor will enjoy flourishing careers.
If Scorsese is a Catholic filmmaker, De Palma is a Quaker one. He bears witness in his films to injustice and the mechanisms of injustice.
I am having the same response as I re-watch the films. Every shot is exactly what De Palma wants and needs it to be. As I re-watched MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE last night (review to come), the adjective ājudiciousā came to mind to describe his style. Everything that is in the frame is there for a reason, and everything is precisely arranged within that frame.
De Palma does not merely imitate Hitchcock; he takes his concepts/approaches and develops them, never hiding their origins, but but also never simply repeating them.
A fine description of all De Palma movies. Central to his films:
a) the act of seeing/watching
b) understandings/misunderstanding what has been seen
c) characters setting up narratives/events/visuals to be seen by other characters
d) the unreliability of what one sees
His is a very scopophilic cinema.
3 Likes
And once again my vocabulary is enlarged.
3 Likes
Thatās me. A one-person geek squad. LOL.
But I have found that thinking about De Palmaās films in terms of scopophilia and Quakerism help makes sense of them.
As I re-watch his films, I realize that his plots are nothing to write home aboutāthey do their job, and move the story along, but his images are endless fascinating.
Watching M:I last night, what drew me in and kept me absorbed were the images and their relationship to one another: so precise, so full of meaning and allusions. What De Palma cares most about resides in the images as images, and not in their use as transparent conveyors of story. As a result, even though I know what is going to happen, I am continually engaged by the way De Palma visualizes it.
3 Likes
Forgive my ignorance but what does IP mean, I think I already asked this months (years?) ago, but I canāt remember the answer. Google doesnāt give me the right answer, I know itās not about a phone, or IP adressā¦soā¦?
2 Likes
Intellectual property: a franchise like Bond, Marvel, LOTR, so on so forth. Everything thatās dealing with universes, spinoffs and the like.
3 Likes
Thank you, now it becomes clear to me, I was wondering about it for days, weeks, every time it came up here.
3 Likes
MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE (1996) on streaming.
Thoughts/impressions:
-
It is a short film. Excluding credits, it runs about 105 minutes, and has a three-act structure.
-
Screens within screens, and frames within frames. De Palma offers them all up, but they never retard the action. It is never visual flourish for the sake of visual flourish.
-
Kittridge stages a scene for Phelps and his to team to participate in, while also deploying a second team to watch the first team.
-
Phelps stages a scene within the above scene for Ethanās consumption.
-
Glasses being worn, used as transmitters, permitting special vision.
-
Phelps betrays Ethan, and, in turn, Ethan betrays Phelps. Claire is the character through whom their game of cat-and-mouse plays outāhence Beartās modest performance. Claire is most stark/cold in Ethanās imagined reconstruction of what happened during the Prague job. But he (and De Palma) immediately back away from this view, and Ethan rewrites the action so that Phelps, and not Claire, detonates the car with Hannah in it.
-
In the boxcar, there are two shots from behind a wire mesh door. At first it can seem that the shots are there for visual variety, but it is revealed that Phelps is beyond that door, watching Claire plead with the phony Phelps (Ethan in disguise) for Ethanās life. Once more, we have watching/lookingāin this case, confirming Phelpsā suspicion/wonder if Claire has fallen for Ethan. Again, we have a woman part of a manās plan, who is not protected by him, or worse, directly harmed by him.
-
Final shot of Cruise reminds me of he final shot of Travolta in BLOW OUTāfocused on the star, but less than heoic.
5 Likes
I understand now that I had an underwhelming reaction to my rewatch of the first M:I because I had watched the last two films in the preceding days - and those are so finetuned with the action that the first film almost seems to belong to a different franchise.
It kind of does because M:I was rebooted every time until the fourth one set the new template of Ethan and his posse.
In that regard the De Palma mission is like a prequel, an origin story. And therefore different in style and purpose.
4 Likes
It does: the films of Brian De Palma.
That thought crossed by mind last night. Cruiseās Ethan is boyish, even a touch adolescent. The gravitas comes later.
3 Likes
Not really something substantial to contribute to the discussion, just the observation that at 145 minutes - 2 hours and 25 minutes ā a movie isnāt really short. As I didnāt expect such a misjudgement from you, I opted to just look it up, and ā lo and behold ā according to my source (Wikipedia, that is), itās only 110 minutes (not certain if that includes credits). Which makes it a rather short movie. 
Please proceed
6 Likes