4v291o

Think this may be my favorite musical.

Much more compelling (and funnier) than its "real life Spinal Tap!!!" reputation, though I can't blame anyone for enjoying it solely on that level. While I'm not the kind of weirdo who thinks St. Anger is a good album (to be clear, I am the kind of weirdo who adores Lulu and thinks "Junior Dad" is one of the great achievements for both Lou Reed and Metallica), it is a great object and a great soundtrack.

Lars Ulrich is among rock's most heroic musicians.

beautiful. something like a career retrospective, but more like a reckoning with how (if?) his multitudes have been captured and refracted by his medium and what that means for his soul. chaplin, lewis, kitano.

MICHAEL'S TOP TEN 1980'S DYLAN SONGS

10) Sweetheart Like You
9) Covenant Woman
8) Brownsville Girl
7) Someone's Got a Hold of My Heart
6) I'll You
5) Man in the Long Black Coat
4) Emotionally Yours
3) Most of the Time
2) Foot of Pride

and my number one Bob Dylan song from 1980 - 1989 is...

Every Grain of Sand!!!!!!!!!!

kind of funny that the first alice rohrwacher movie i like is the one where the cannes crowdpleaser vagaries most noticeably bump up against the triple-underlined Allegory. louvart's images really are beguiling though, and i think at times this does achieve the dreamy elusiveness that it's aiming for. even the kusturica-ish stuff is kind of charming. made me want to re-watch What Do We See When We Look at the Sky

still need to see an actual print of this (and all of lowder's work) but even in this context the final movement is completely discomposing. lowder's meditations make me consider the relationship between the mechanism of the camera and the image in a way that's more physical than cerebral, searching rather than pontificating.

rip malcolm le grice

one of the hollywood langs that i never saw, which is odd because it's a noir about contemptible newspaper journalists featuring ida lupino and a character called "the lipstick killer". saw a review lament that this wasn't a howard hawks movie. sure, but it is a fritz lang movie, which means media criticism via pointed citizen kane homages, impressionistic subway chases, and disturbingly cynical sexual politics undergirding the narrative. meeting with killer brought about via camera and television image + psycho referenced four years early.

"While the City Sleeps shows the hard competition of four men inside a newspaper office at the beginning. My personality refuses the personal satisfaction of being a man. Because each of us, these days, is looking for position, power, money, but never anything inside. You see, it is very difficult to say, “I like this or that.” When one begins a film, maybe one doesn't even know exactly what one is doing. There are always people to explain what I want to do, and I say to them, “You know more than I.” When I undertake a work, I try to translate emotion." - lang to jacques rivette and jean domarchi in cahiers du cinéma

one millionth viewing, first time watching the director's cut. the underlying incongruous conservatism of oliver stone's worldview and narrative approach remains fascinating.

"i don't like what this movie does to you" - brit

fuck mary kill: kevin costner as jim garrison, jake gyllenhaal as robert graysmith, robert redford as bob woodward

Neve wanted to watch something and gave me some parameters that somehow winnowed the choices down to this, a movie of some importance to my teenage self, though even then in part due to its proximity to the movie that loomed largest, My Own Private Idaho. On this watch I liked it more for the formal aspects that seem like a dry run for Idaho’s meandering poetry; the dissolves and superimpositions (with falling house the image used again in Idaho) especially, but also the inserts like the sharp cut to Gentry’s necktie and the bookending Super 8 footage. Was going to say that this is relatively conventional for Van Sant, but then I ed all the Van Sants that I never think about.

lately i’ve been thinking that this is the best one maybe

Already said this re: Poor Things but you guys should really check out Frankenhooker.

was going to go with "lmao", but upon reflection i might be at the point where i find this sort of thing too insidious to be funny. though i just ed the darren aronofsky co-sign and laughed, so maybe not.

"And in that moment, I swear we were infinite." - Karl Marx

Personal memory and historical testimony bleeding into each other and into our abominable present. The malleability of time and the narration evoke a dreaminess that only makes Malas’ attestation more forceful.

The narrative drive of the first hour dissipating into the ether, being recalled ambiently like the way the military superior’s humiliation of his subordinate is echoed by Samet’s demeaning of his students. The subsequent focus on the love triangle (really Samet’s need to find transcendence both through and at the expense of others) works in counterpoint and tandem. Ceylan has referred to the landscapes in his films as a way to “connect the characters to a sense of something cosmic”; here the desire of an artist to find the universal in the human face is reflected in both misanthropic Samet and his ideologically radical foil Nuray (“You have quite an interesting face, actually. A face that somehow embodies the story of this land."). The reflexive undercurrent eventually erupts into an outright Brechtian perforation, made all the more startling by how absorbing the preceding “realistic” dramaturgy has been. It’s a mysterious event that casts the later reconciliations of individuality and solidarity, of grace and callousness, of dry grasses and dense snow, as an expression of hope as much as a dramatic resolution.

That L'amore is essentially two short films packaged together to serve as a vehicle for Anna Magnani may partly explain its reputation as an inessential intermediate work between Rossellini's War Trilogy and his 1950s work. And it is certainly a transitional film, with both halves seeming to foretell Bergman in Stromboli (the awed camera's bearing witness to Magnani's sobbing in the first; more obviously, the pregnant Nannina ascending in the second), which indeed was originally intended for Magnani.

But these aren't sketches; the emotional power of Rossellini's close-ups are overwhelming, as is his orchestration of montage, be it in the one-room melodrama of the Cocteau entry or the cosmic fable of Il Miracolo. Magnani's begging the lord to forgive the cruel villagers taps a similar vein of spiritual audacity as the penultimate episode of Paisan, albeit in an operatic that I find myself responding to more in Rossellini's work as I dig deeper into his filmography.

Fellini's role as screenwriter (besides bringing to mind the travails and resillience of Cabiria) also lends an interesting dreaminess to the allegory; compare the elliptical and mysterious nature of the ending here to the iconic final shots of Stromboli.

Has John Early seen this

El Dorado = Rio Bravo as farce
Rio Lobo = Rio Bravo as elegy

"Is that the only tune you know?"
"I don't know this one! That's why I keep practicing."

Pretty Vacant

Most frustrating case of only-partly-recovered-film-that-may-well-be-a-masterpiece ever (non-Ford edition).

"There's geometry involved."

NO HELP WANTED

HELP WANTED

GOD BLESS OUR HOME

JESUS SAVES

HERE 'YOUR DREAMS COME TRUE'

Every time I watch this I like it a little less. Strainingly mannered, the Brion score smothers, and the masculinist underpinnings rankle. I still find it unnervingly funny and was moved anew by "He Needs Me", Elswit's textures, and "So could you just let me redeem the mileage?". Definitely his best work at that point (PTA's, not Sandler's).

hellish nightmare comedy. genuinely hilarious. the surreality of music and culture; the queer rendition of "you've got me this way" (sung first to his girl and then to an uncle sam poster), the french resistance fighter quizzing the downed american gunner on dick tracy, the reverberating "frère jacques" as they haul him to the psyche ward. no such thing as minor ford.

transgenerational trauma expressed via reverse shot.

I see people have made the (justified) Gone: Scrapbook 1980-1982 and Kenneth Anger comparisons. Something about the animate textures of the stills, the undergirding idea of morbid rebirth for these tortured souls, and my own recognition of some of these images combined to make this a uniquely upsetting experience. Formally audacious and truly transgressive.

Not a re-watch, but I saw Adam Nayman give it a shout-out and I just want to reiterate that this is very good. It thrillingly expands upon and updates ideas from Redacted and ion, but it also re-anatomizes De Palma’s cinema in a way I find strangely moving. Seeing this in 2019 is what sparked my desire to further investigate De Palma; now he’s one of the most significant artists of my life.

Neve wanted to watch this last night. Her first Lynch movie. She loved it and was chill about me crying.

hong's rendering of his process as the hell of creative stasis before a chance encounter with inspiration (in the form of kim min-hee as a successful actress and ha seong-guk as a young filmmaker in his creative outset) leads to an ascension. eye-searingly high contrast b&w giving way to color, the significance of a menu board falling over in the wind echoing in the deceptively delicate composition in which a little girl stares at kim min-hee through a restaurant window. jun-hee's delight in learning how to translate her prose into sign language is a moving metaphor for the specific reflexivity of hong's cinema.

"What is the use of freedom if it is not economic freedom?"

"Duty? The only duty of a socialist is the emancipation of the working class."

Surprising that movie so compromised by studio interference that the director quit is so unsparing and pointed. The rally scene is astonishing.

love putting on a ford silent film with no expectations whatsoever and getting a warmly digressive, laugh-out-loud funny little gem like this. builds on the kinetic frames of bucking broadway (1917) and straight shooting (1917) (the earliest fords i've seen) with the lyrical character gestures and charity of heart that come to define his cinema.

i'm kind of like the bim of my town.

film of the life

"I once asked Jean-Marie Straub what 'an experimental film' is. He slammed the table and declared, 'The Long Gray Line! That’s an experimental film, no?'"

Tom Cruise's preamble is very much part of the film, like Ethan Hawke's is in Zeros and Ones.

Makes me want to go fight The Enemy...

won't drunkenly try to articulate the majesty of this movie so soon after seeing it but i'm in awe. reverberation of meeting god through echo and afterimage, sight and sound aka cinema. greatest achievement in filmmaking since certified copy??? apichatpong weerasethakul! one of the greatest living artists in any medium!!!

Major difference with the restoration is that I now find the notion of these images being channels of conveyance, like dreams, as beautiful as it is terrifying.

Life is crazy. And it can be awful. And people have no idea what's going on. So we're crazy. And awful. It's... kinda our whole "thing". But at the end of the day... we just gotta be kind. Because no matter what else is going on in this random-ass universe, we've got one thing that'll get us through: love.

Oh, and Jenny Slate ;) is also being very good ;) and is a thing that gets us through ;) lol!

i think i've finally accepted that this is my favorite malick

- Some of Spielberg's finest work with Kaminski; staggering images like the shadows of the rival gangs meeting like interlocking fingers on the floor of the salt warehouse, and kinetic numbers like "Gee Officer Krupke" that still have beautiful compositions like the shot of the streetwalker watching from the cell.

- Ansel Elgort makes Miles Teller seem like a young Jeff Bridges, but the rest of the cast is excellent. It's remarkable how emotionally grounded Mike Faist is as Riff.

- Two scenes that answer my "why"s about this movie: Rita Moreno singing "Somewhere" as she dissolves into the other narrative threads + the cut as Anybodys, feeling acceptance for possibly the first time, comes face-to-face with Anita.

- I agree with Sondheim that "I Feel Pretty" should be axed.

- Armond's review was more of a bummer than usual.

Wild that "The Ostritich" was featured in two movies in 2021.

Almodovar's most pointedly political rewiring of melodrama and to my eyes his most radical work visually.

I compared it to De Palma's ion when I got out, which reminded me of this.

Not to use this as some sort of "online film diary" or anything but this was a significant movie for me as a teenager and I find myself moved thinking about it in relation to Bogdanovich's life and his work as both a filmmaker and historian. RIP to an important figure in American cinema.

structuralist horror warmly rendered by graceful dissolves melding storyteller and audience, and by the meticulous design of the frame and the unvarnished performances within it. but it's also the narrative ellipses, the horror and humanity of eliding the dreaded eruption of real-world violence that would turn them into sleepover folklore. i was really moved by this!

Béla Tarr's executive producer credit is funny in the same way that George Clinton producing Freaky Styley is funny.

If you want to see a good horror movie about reverberating trauma, I recommend both Brian De Palma's Raising Cain (1992) and Rob Zombie's Halloween II (2009).

"it's 1984... mall set piece... frankie goes to hollywood... 360 when they embrace... idk seems like ur biting body double to me" - Britney

“Get the picture?”
“Technicolor.”

“The rich don’t keep art just for themselves. They safekeep it for future generations.”

Four years after Femme Fatale, Brian De Palma’s first post-exile movie, came what could have been mistaken from a distance as an attempt to return to Hollywood. The Black Dahlia had a surface of prestige; much like nine-time Academy Award nominee L.A. Confidential, it was a period piece based on a bestselling James Ellroy novel. The actual film, though, is perhaps his most subversive and substantive since Body Double. It was a box office loss and a critical failure, though this did not entirely kill its award season chances: Vilmos Zsigmond earned a nomination for Best Cinematography at the 79th Academy Awards (he lost to Guillemero Navarro, nominated for Pan’s Labyrinth). That year’s ceremony is most ed as being the one in which Martin Scorsese finally got his “Best Director" Oscar for The Departed, the weakest of his narrative films. The award was presented to him by three of his fellow “Movie Brats”: George Lucas (four nominations), Steven Spielberg (seven nominations, two wins), and Francis Ford Coppola (fourteen nominations, five wins) appeared on stage with him. Brian De Palma (six Razzie nominations) was notably absent; he was perhaps busy preparing for the Jordan-based production of Redacted, a film more resistant to institutional accolade than any other released in the United States this century.

While not as profoundly unpalatable as Redacted, The Black Dahlia is so resolutely anti-Hollywood, anti-wealth, anti-police, and anti-prestige that its lack of recognition in the Kodak Theater comes as no surprise. Maggie Gyllenhall turned down the role of Elizabeth Short with the explanation that a story that uses her murder as a narrative element would be disrespectful to her memory. While it’s an irable stance, it misreads, as many do, De Palma and his objectives. The Black Dahlia is in fact very thoughtful about the forces that came together to kill Elizabeth Short. The perpetration of violence against women is refracted through the lenses of the State, Hollywood as an industry, patriarchy, and capitalism. It’s helpful to look at this as yet another of De Palma’s films about the police as a terror organization, this one being the most directly concerned with it.

In August of 1942, the LAPD arrested 17 young Mexican-American men (12 of whom were convicted) for the killing of José Gallardo Díaz (known as the “Sleepy Lagoon murder”) despite a complete lack of evidence. This grim miscarriage of justice sowed the seeds for the Zoot Suit Riots of June of 1943, in which military servicemen and other white residents of Los Angeles brutally attacked people of color for wearing zoot suits, clothing emblematic of youth and cultural pride for minority communities. When the film opens, we see our characters the fray. The police in The Black Dahlia’s 1947 are understood by our characters to be arbiters of morality as well as legality, and fundamentally forces for good (Kay’s term of endearment for both Bucky and Lee is “my super cops”, repeated tearfully after Lee’s death). The concept of the “dirty cop” exists (note the Black woman remarking that there is “no such thing as a clean cop”), but only to the extent that they violate the social codes of their time and place (the LAPD may not take issue with their officers’ brutality, but they will not allow for a couple to live in sin, requiring cops to imprison women in marriage in a way not dissimilar and likely no less violent than their imprisonment of alleged criminals). The police -- our protagonists -- are meant to uphold white supremacy and accrue power for property and business owners, just as the actual LAPD did with its terrorizing of flourishing post-war Black neighborhoods. The culture of bribery and anti-Communist, racist policies that would prosper with William H. Parker’s ascension to police chief in 1950 is in full swing. When our understanding of an event early in the film -- that two Black criminals have fired on our heroes -- is shown to have in fact been a racist State murder by the police, nothing in the presentation sheds light on the subversion. Quite the opposite, the voiceover doubles down on its valorization. Our own conditioning as a viewing audience is interrogated just as it was when we found our “hero” in Body Double pitted against the “villain”, coded as racist Hollywood’s classic antagonist, the Indigenous American.

As with Body Double, De Palma understands our conditioning to be partially the result of our consumption of Hollywood imagery, but this film is even more interested in the industry itself. We see the ways in which De Palma amends noir form, and the application of his radical perspective to this format is startling; the shot in which Short pleads for help in the background as the camera drifts away from her and back into Bucky and Lee’s story (nearly halfway through a movie called The Black Dahlia) is shrewdly agitational, and the actual discovery of her body is problematized by the foregrounding of the sea of men hovering over her (seemingly seen from her corpse’s POV). (When the police discuss her autopsy in the presence of her cadaver, the question of if it’s okay to smoke is answered by the coroner’s tossed off quip: “she won’t mind”). The screen tests of Short that the detectives watch are one element of the film that even contemporaneous reviews commended, with Mia Kirshner’s performance rightfully garnering praise. These scenes are also thematically, politically, and meta-textually rich. The director of the tests, lecherous and transparently high off the power he holds over this young woman, is played by De Palma himself, indexing the actual film we’re watching as beholden to the strictures and iniquities of commodified cinema. While the reflexivity recalls the self-examination of Murder a la Mod’s screen tests, it’s significant how we see these tests in the context of an investigation into Short’s murder, and how Lee’s obsession with and possessiveness of her image highlights the role of male pathologies in this political examination. Women are property, in Hollywood, in the LAPD, in America, in a man’s world; when Bucky sees “BD” branded on Kay’s skin, he sees them as the initials of Bobby Dewitt, though of course the inscription also signals “Black Dahlia” as well as “Brian DePalma”, interlocking cinematic, social, and historical critiques and alerting us to the recesses of this film’s complex mise-en-scène (and if we allow the initials to stand for “Body Double”, the branding also further signals the link between the two films and their shared reflexivity). The stylized dialogue, further artificialized by the performances, also indicates the ways in which the projections of the characters engage with De Palma’s dovetailing concerns. Regarding Lee and Bucky’s absurd boxing match, Kay says: “For civic reasons, I hope the LAPD is ridiculed for perpetrating this farce. For personal reasons, I hope Lee wins. And, for aesthetic reasons, I hope you both look good with your shirts off.”

The tensions between the apolitical vantage point from which we see the story unfold and De Palma’s heightened consciousness leads to scenes of intense irony and pitch-black satiric humor that most filmmakers adapting Ellroy’s book would never think of, let alone execute so exquisitely. There’s the genuinely gorgeous song-and-dance number in the lesbian bar (starring k.d. lang and featuring an uncredited Cate Blanchett as one of the dancers), followed by the punchline of Bucky’s voiceover and the introduction of Madeline Linscott’s “Black Dahlia” (this “Madeline” is literally named Madeline), placing De Palma’s career-long fascination with gender performativity in the context of an actual drag performance. There is also the parodic meet-the-parents scene when Bucky has dinner at the Linscott’s mansion, in which Madeline points out the taxidermied family dog, morning paper in its mouth, shot to commemorate the news of Emmett Linscott’s first million -- it’s a comic counterpoint to the film’s darker depictions of the accumulation of wealth being immortalized by and inseparable from the taking of lives.

The film recalls The Untouchables, both in the basics of its narrative milieu and its canny complication of our identification with police protagonists. While not as direct an updating of that film as Redacted was for Casualties of War, The Black Dahlia similarly offers an aggressively stylized postmodern answer to its earlier counterpart. Whereas The Untouchables allows for an interpretation as a simple cops vs criminals (and thus good vs evil) story, Dahlia's sophisticated artificiality invalidates such a reading. Compare De Palma’s dialectical utilization of an actor’s presence in both films. Robert De Niro and Sean Connery’s star power establishes the stature of Al Capone and Jimmy Malone, respectively, with both actors mobilizing trademarks of their screen presences to imbue their characters with the weight of their own cultural legacies. Kevin Costner, on the other hand, seems caught between David Mamet’s dramatic nuances and De Palma’s political provocations. When Ennio Morricone’s heroic score swells as the police terrorize on behalf of the state, or when Ness and his wife share a moment of domestic peace as an Amos 'n' Andy episode plays in the background, Costner’s leading-man blandness hinders the potent cynicism. With regards to The Black Dahlia, it appears that Hillary Swank and Scarlett Johansson are keyed into De Palma’s wavelength in the way De Niro and Connery were, while Josh Hartnett and Aaron Eckhardt are not in the same way that Costner wasn’t. The key difference is that Costner’s earnest performance in The Untouchables worked against that film’s sly ironies, but here Eckhardt’s square-jawed performance allows for an archetypal interrogation and Hartnett’s cluelessness perfectly plays into De Palma’s caustic vision. While it's tempting to imagine Keanu Reeves taking the role of Bucky, handling the voiceover narration and dialogue with his awed reverence, he may simply be too intuitive of an actor to convey the same trenchant meta-effect as Hartnett studying footage of De Palma giving direction for clues, or observing the painting of Gwynplaine in the Linscott’s home and saying “I don’t get modern art”.

A scene of Lee, Bucky, and Kay watching a screening of Paul Leni’s The Man Who Laughs is instructive. The 1928 film (one of the most expensive Hollywood productions of its time) was itself an ostensible literary adaptation deliberately smothered in artificiality by its director (Leni working with the vocabulary of German Expressionism); as its score segues into Mark Isham’s mournful update and we see the reaction of the diegetic audience, we are keyed into the film’s postmodern approach of elemental cinematic language commenting on cinema as artform and industry. This avenue of reflexivity layered over capitalist critique reaches a head in the scene in which Bucky gets his confession from the Linscotts by storming their mansion and shooting up their fine art -- a suggestion of what De Palma himself is doing in his approach to the material. De Palma proposes that what we may call art has to be dismantled in order to uncover something resembling truth. Like the moment Norma Desmond shows up in the otherworldly Frankie Goes to Hollywood video in Body Double, it’s a vulgarization of Hollywood’s history married to a vilification of a corrupt and exploitative industry. De Palma further embeds himself into the film with William Finley’s appearance here in his final role (after a thirteen-year absence from acting and a twenty-six-year absence from De Palma’s films) as the “son of a surgeon”(!) who helps Ramona Linscott murder Elizabeth. Compare this explicitly fictionalized scenario with how David Fincher “solves” the crime at the end of Zodiac, released the following year, in which Fincher points to a real-life person, Arthur Leigh Allen (who, it should be said, is unequivocally not the Zodiac Killer). It’s also worth comparing the political implications of this film’s handling of Elizabeth Short and Hollywood’s history with Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, a film that garnered a good deal of controversy over its rewriting of history but was also praised for its melancholy “rescue” of Sharon Tate and an era of Hollywood sacred to Tarantino. I have a fondness for both of those films, flawed as they may be, but it’s worth pondering the marked difference in the critical and public reaction to those aesthetically accessible, relatively hopeful films with this one: a doggedly cynical, narratively slippery object with one of the most troubling endings in a filmography full of them.

As with subsequent “exile era” films like ion and Domino, the production restraints lend a productive unnaturality to the film. The second-rate typeface used for the opening titles is most likely a consequence of budgetary restrictions, yet they immediately clue us in to the nature of the film’s pronounced staginess. The strength of De Palma’s craft is still unmistakable, as evinced by the abstract fades in the boxing scene, the execution of the Vertigo fall, and the staging of a noir Venetian-blinds-office-exposition scene with an open window at the end of the frame revealing a car burning as the result of the Zoot Suit Riots. De Palma’s achievements here as a technician, surrealist, and satirist are matched by Zigmond’s painterly lighting, sickeningly beautiful when applied to the film-sets-as-slums and Elizabeth Short’s striking monochrome tears.

But aside from Zigmond and Kirshner’s work, the film’s critical reception skewed negative, with many reviews criticizing the plot as being overly complicated and the performances and dialogue as stilted. While I’ve addressed the latter two criticisms, it’s arguable that Josh Friedman’s screenplay (initially written as a five-hour mini series with David Fincher set to direct) doesn’t fully reconcile with De Palma’s approach. The three-hour version of the film, Ellroy’s preferred cut, reportedly fleshed out elements of the narrative that scan as confusing or truncated in the final version. Not having seen it, I obviously can’t compare the two. Nevertheless, the version we have before us is rich with ideas and sutured tightly to a consistent Leftist agenda. A scan of contemporaneous reviews suggests little critical engagement with the male homoeroticism of Bucky and Lee’s relationship (the Vertigo rearticulation in which Bucky fails to save Lee is remarked upon less than the shot of Hartnett’s naked ass) and its contrast with how those characters respond to female homoeroticism (Bucky’s astonishingly delayed reaction to Madeline’s revelation, or Lee’s rage upon seeing Elizabeth in the girl-on-girl stag film). The usual uninspired critical template applied to De Palma’s works -- a paean to his visual acumen followed by a condemnation of its application to images deemed misogynistic or violent, a checklist of his plagiarizations, and a complete lack of thematic or political analysis -- is old hat by now, but it’s especially disappointing when applied to a movie this thoughtful and dense. The critics that view Body Double as pornographic fantasy or Scarface as a capitalist harangue would likely eagerly misinterpret the text anyway, but it’s no less disheartening to see the lack of effort put forth in grappling with the work of one of the few American directors whose films are genuinely radical in both style and substance. Meanwhile, this film’s unanimous rejection amongst ghoulish “true crime buffs” is something I hope De Palma considers an honor.

If The Black Dahlia’s thematic and narrative strands don’t cohere neatly enough for American film critics, it remains thrilling in its weaponization of De Palma’s deconstructive instincts when applied to sacrosanct institutions of film art, Hollywood, and capitalism. Between Femme Fatale’s subversion of cinematic form and Redacted’s sorrowful scream at American evil is a film that offers elements of both, aesthetically and politically incisive even (and perhaps especially) when the narrative is murky. It’s unlikely that De Palma will ever find himself on stage at the Academy Awards, and less likely still that one of his films will be nominated. That’s just as well, as The Black Dahlia makes it hard to imagine De Palma finding the prospect anything but odious.

“The rich get to live differently, I guess they get to die differently too.”

“Jesus. Oh, God. I’m sorry.”

“If you survive in ‘Nam you get to live forever, man.”

In 2018, the La Cinémathèque in Paris held a retrospective of Brian De Palma’s work. The event included a screening of Casualties of War, followed by a “Masterclass” with De Palma. As the post-screening interview began, La Cinematheque cultural director Bernard Benoliel asked him for the basics about the genesis of the film and what drew him to the story. De Palma went over the familiar bullet points: the profound effect Daniel Lang’s New Yorker article about Phan Thi Mao had on him, the difficulty of convincing a studio to make the film, how it was only made due to the interest of Dawn Steel and Michael J Fox...

De Palma seems to lose his train of thought, trailing off in the middle of speaking. He’s silent for a moment, struggling to choke back tears. “It’s a very sad movie”, he says. “I can’t listen to that score…” Finally, he weeps. It’s a surprising moment of vulnerability from De Palma, and it speaks to the power of his most nakedly emotional movie. Even for a filmmaker who so often works on a level of operatic emotionality, this is a deeply mournful, sad movie. It’s a tone to which he’d return to some degree, but the sincerity and empathy of this movie is appropriately vast, and unique within his filmography.

As usual, the film’s warm reception in didn’t carry over to America. It was a modest critical success, with some strong reviews (chief among them Pauline Kael’s essay “A Wounded Apparition”, which I highly recommend; regardless of what you may think of Kael as a critic, it is an invigorating piece of writing and has been instructive to my understanding and appreciation of Brian De Palma), but it was a box office loss. It didn’t garner the prestige reception of De Palma’s Scarface collaborator Oliver Stone’s Platoon, nor has it achieved the canonization and academic attention of Apocalypse Now or Full Metal Jacket. But time has been kind to this movie, and I’d argue its treatment of the war is the most sensitive in hindsight. This is a Vietnam War film from the man who made Hi, Mom! and would go on to make Redacted. While it obviously differs substantially from those films in its mode and its tonalities, it shares their perspective on American imperialism and uses De Palma’s formal lexicon to widen the scope of these concerns to the transcendental.

De Palma doesn’t have the audacity to make the Vietnam War into a grand metaphor about lost innocence. The film can be thought of more as a melodrama-as-parable. It somehow resembles the war films of both Sam Fuller and Terrence Malick: it is a charged, didactic moral play that attempts to integrate the viewer into the incomprehensible horrors of war, yet there’s also a sense of meditative consideration to its presentation that borders on prayerful. Ennio Morricone’s haunting score suggests the celestial with its choir and divine sweep, while Bill Pankow’s editing finds a strange, sad lyricism in its rhythms. There are avenues for spiritual readings when you consider Eriksson’s “I’m a Lutheran” and its defeated repetition when he speaks to the chaplain. Even his frequent invoking of Jesus’ name when faced with Oanh’s unspeakable suffering demonstrates an awareness of the divine. I thought often of The Steel Helmet and its confrontational questioning to pacifist ends, but I also thought of The Thin Red Line’s Witt and his idea of humanity sharing “one big soul”.

The hallmarks of De Palma’s technique have never been more striking than in this context. These devices are not utilized for pop art or for postmodern satire. This is the clearest example of his belief in his cinematic language’s ability to give images an overwhelming emotional profundity. Scenes of war are rendered vividly but thoughtfully, as the opening combat and the sudden, slow-motion death of Brownie are important to our understanding of the American soldiers’ bloodlust as well as the dangerous sense of brotherhood engendered by the battlefield. The Army’s violence isn’t valorized, with the use of canted angles coding Meserve’s murderous rage as sadistic. A split-diopter shot is used twice to foreground Eriksson as he misses a significant event transpiring behind him, and in its repetition the effect takes on a dramatic dimension not previously accessed by De Palma. I even disagree with Kael about the heavy-handedness of Eriksson’s imioned monologue when Cherry is killed: I think it’s purposefully directed to be in harmony with the film’s other two outpourings of raw comion, which are Meserve’s caring for a dying Brownie (the display of Meserve’s capacity for empathy here is wise and daring, especially upon repeated viewings) and the ending. Its moralizing scans as part of the film’s poetry.

The stylized performances in this are some of the most impressive of their time, heightened to the operatic pitch of De Palma and Stephen Burum’s immense images and yet strangely recognizable, like humanity in microcosm. There is much to praise about the quintet of young male actors: Michael J Fox’s unmannered sincerity; Sean Penn’s callousness rising as he maintains his cherished supremacy; Don Harvey as a man drunk on hatred, his startling blue eyes even more severe than Penn’s; John C Reily in his first role as a grotesque parody of the squad cut-up, bullshitting about cars and beer as Than is assaulted; John Leguizamo, also in his debut, as a counterpoint to Eriksson whose corruption is one of the most disturbing aspects of the film. But Thuy Thu Le is the revelation. A student in Paris who responded to a casting notice, this is her sole acting role (she later became a teacher). What she does is miraculous, embodying the timbre of Morricone’s score and the film’s mythic texture.

The bedrock of the male characters isn’t based upon film traditions, but masculine traditions: the codes of soldiers, of “brothers in arms”, the understood privileges of conquering kings (Hatcher’s awestruck “it’s like Genghis Khan, man!”, or his “it’s what armies do!”). Eriksson’s manhood is questioned when he refuses to rape Than. “Are you a faggot?” Meserve shouts, pantomiming fellating his gun. When he obliquely threatens to kill Eriksson, he tries to conjure a vision of his mother and father’s reactions, prompting Eriksson to mutter that his father is dead. It hangs in the air for barely a moment before Meserve shouts that he doesn’t care about his family history, but it’s a key line that’s in keeping with De Palma’s depiction of the patriarchal family unit as a source of destructive social and psychological conditioning. Even before Than is kidnapped, trips to brothels are presented as a recreational activity soldiers are expected to enjoy, their entitlement to women a condition of male dominance exacerbated but not caused by a sick war. Even the Full Metal Jacket quote isn’t a “reference” as much as it is a pointed inversion: Meserve reverses the chant so that his dick is “for fighting” and his rifle is “for fun”.

De Palma is less concerned with filmic tropes than with the substance of this story. Eriksson’s failure doesn’t (primarily) as an echo of Scottie Ferguson’s, nor do we think of Kate Miller or Sally Bedina reaching out to us when Oanh walks toward us on the bridge. The power of this visual language is elemental, not necessarily emblematic. Still, it is worth thinking about how Redacted, De Palma’s 2007 answer to this film, impacts my view of this movie. I believe this is an implicitly anti-imperialist film, whereas Redacted is an explicitly, furiously, violently anti-imperialist film. That film, as responsible a war film as there has ever been, makes a point of draining Casualties of War’s grandeur and narrative coherence from its story of a real-life rape and killing by American soldiers. There is a great deal of difference in the circumstances, of course, of De Palma in 1989 looking back on Vietnam and De Palma in 2007 tackling the Iraq War, and I largely find the visual storytelling here to be as principled as Redacted in its own way. But I find myself wondering about the POV scene in which Clark tries to kill Eriksson while he is in the latrine. The film offers a more thoughtful iteration of this device in the kidnapping scene, with its provocative and incisive shifting of perspectives and complicities. Here, though, a relatively straightforward suspense sequence rankles. Arguably, since we know from the outset the Eriksson will live, it’s not really a “suspense” sequence. But unlike the scenes of Eriksson and Than in peril, the skillful filmmaking strikes me as manipulative. I’ve often thought of this film as a masterpiece, but I continue to wonder about this scene and its function, and I think it’s flawed in its execution.

Elsewhere, however, De Palma and David Rabe approach their depiction of the soldiers with intelligence. The boys have no macro sense of American evil and the men don’t care. The reality of their friends being killed fuels the soldiers’ racism and desensitizes them to their own expendability (upon the oddball Cherry’s death: “they should’ve just shot him at home”). There are drunken buffoons who delude themselves, boys who never had a chance of surviving, and people who fail when their humanity is tested (it is important that even Eriksson, our moral center, is one such person).

“This ain’t the Army, Sarge”, says Eriksson, but as he finds when trying to alert Lieutenant Reilly (Ving Rhames, in an incredible scene) to Than’s rape and murder, this very much is the Army. Reilly shares his story of racial injustice as a means of cynically signaling his own righteous indignation so that he can more easily convince Eriksson to drop the charges. His rank has come at the price of his humanity, and the scene’s venom recalls the excoriating of liberal inaction in De Palma’s earliest political films. Captain Hill offers that “these men fucked up good”, but regarding Meserve, he screams: “He’s a kid! He's 20 goddamn years old! And you're gonna ruin his life? He saved yours!” A boys-will-be-boys attitude towards rape that has become increasingly familiar, paired with a militaristic “code of honor” shaming. This is followed, of course, by the tacit threat of violent retribution. Reilly commiserates with him and Hill threatens him, but we understand that they are essentially a liberal and conservative working in conjunction toward the same goal: Eriksson’s silence.

It should be noted that the two scenes missing from the theatrical version and restored for the director’s cut are pivotal to reinforcing this anti-military perspective. The first is a brilliantly staged scene in which Eriksson is interrogated over the details of his story, and the other sees a defense attorney played by Gregg Henry questioning Eriksson with a dressed up version of Maserve’s homophobic taunt: “Does sexual activity always repulse you in this way?” When questioned at trial, each of the four rapists responds with a rationalization that implicates their received ethos.

“Throw us in the stockade and you’re helping no one but the Viet Cong.”

“He was brand new, sir. I was there three weeks longer than him.”

“I have a loyalty to the men I was out there with.”

“I gave one small child mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. That just shows you we ain’t all combat over there.”

It’s only Eriksson that has any clarity, with his anguished realization that he should have shot them, that being a deserter and traitor to the U.S. Army was a moral responsibility, that his ive witnessing sealed Than’s fate. This indictment of the military carries on to the end of the film, in which Captain Hill’s terrifying “warning” returns to the soundtrack. Maserve whispers something we are left to imagine as Eriksson is jolted awake.

But is he awake? The ending is very mysterious to me. I think it represents an apogee of De Palma’s dream codas. I have seen it read as an appeal to “heal” from Vietnam. I’m wary of an interpretation of the scene as a trite metaphor for peace regained, as it’s evidently more complex than that. Engage with the ending on a purely cinematic level: the muffled conversation of the engers, the oneiric gloss that recalls Eriksson’s half-conscious awareness while in the medic tent, and the San Francisco landscape somehow made to rhyme with the terrain of the Central Highlands. “It’s over now, I think”, says the woman, and those last two words carry a nightmarish weight. Study Fox’s performance. The expression on his face carries a world of possibilities.

I find myself ruminating on those possibilities often. I truly don’t know how to definitively “answer” the ending’s riddle, and I find its ambiguity to be uniquely cinematic. I know how I felt when I first saw that final shot, and how moved I was by Eriksson genuinely, maybe stupidly, maybe profoundly believing that he’s encountered a soul he’s encountered before, thousands of miles and an eternity away. It’s as if he’s been given a chance, not of redemption, but of resurrection, of time travel, of the hand of God bringing Than back. He doesn’t seek forgiveness, but justice, and he thinks by returning her scarf it’s somehow achievable. Of course, he knows that can’t happen. Than is dead, because they killed her. Because he didn’t save her. But I also think he knows that the young woman walking away from him is Than, that it’s the same soul, that it’s all the same soul, that she is a memory of Than, that everyone will always be a memory of her.

god michael haneke sucks

“Unfortunately in America, you can never say anything negative about the troops. Even though they’re over in a country they shouldn’t be, doing things where a lot of innocent civilians are getting killed. They’re all ‘valiant warriors’. [...] [There are] many things that are repeated over and over again that sort of create this atmosphere. One is ‘America is the greatest nation in the world’. I don’t know how many times I’ve heard that. […] Why are we all over the world? We have a military presence all over the world. Why? Because we’re the policemen of the world? Who decided this?” - Brian De Palma, Russia Today

“If any movie theater in your neighborhood shows this vile film, Redacted, let’s stand out in front of the theater with the same sign: ' the troops'.” - Bill O’Reilly, Fox News

“My free into film school.”

At the 2006 Toronto Film Festival, Brain De Palma was approached by HDNet Movies about making a film with HD video. He answered that he would be interested if he could find a story that would best be explored by said medium. Shortly thereafter, he encountered an article about the horrific killing of Abeer Qassim Hamza al-Janabi and her family, so similar to the story of Phan Thi Mao that had provided the basis of Casualties of War 17 years earlier. De Palma went down an online rabbit hole, digging through the blogs and YouTube pages of the soldiers and their families. It was all there, all filmed, and all ignored.

This film, released when De Palma was 68 years old, is his most innovative. It’s a new kind of radical cinema and a culmination of the most daring aspect of his project, creating images that are inseparable from their reception and examining the inherent political implications of our viewing of them. Yet those same qualities lead to its commercial and critical failure in the United States. In my writing on Brian De Palma, I’ve tried to address the ways in which the American critical apparatus has failed in examining his work. It seems to be in the best interest of the dominating narratives of film studies to pretend that Redacted doesn’t exist.

The anguish of Redacted is inherent to its existence; regardless of whether you think Brian De Palma had to make Casualties of War again, the fact is he could make Casualties of War again, based on a new profoundly horrifying crime in a new profoundly horrifying war. The differences in approach are illuminating. The power of Redacted is in not allowing us to exculpate ourselves; it doesn’t pose a question about our responsibilities, but rather confronts us with our complicity. In 2007, in the midst of war, dramatization was no longer adequate. Redacted rejects the lyricism of Casualties of War. There is no beauty in this film. Truffaut’s famous quote about the impossibility of making an anti-war film is challenged, but more relevant to De Palma is Godard’s more recent dictum, itself a quote of Edward Said: “all representation is violence”. De Palma is the only American filmmaker with the courage and cinematic intelligence to interrogate that idea in the context of an Iraq War film. If De Palma has been dismissed as a pornographer (a label so ignorant and so indicative of our collective cinematic illiteracy that I frankly don’t know where to begin in addressing it), this film’s annihilation of “war porn” should have changed that conversation permanently.

Instead, most reviews concentrated on the movie’s supposed formal “ineptitude”. Clumsy wipes and expressly Brechtian acting (De Palma specifically cited Brecht in interviews, something he hadn’t done since the 1970s) are apparently signs of incompetence, as if America’s greatest living stylist couldn’t possibly be using these tools for diegetic strategy, as he has in virtually every film he’s made. The archetypes are here, yes, but they are mobilized archetypes, and recontextualized for a new era. Examine the soldiers in their barracks, rich in 2007 detritus; our nominal hero is pointedly drained of Michael J Fox’s humanity, just as Sean Penn’s answer here is an anti-Penn, his bed covered in cum-stained Maxim magazines and Confederate flags. We have our intellectual punk soldier with his Cometbus and Minor Threat poster, and we have Private Angel Salazar, a poor Hispanic film student rejected from USC who intends to document the war as a means of gaining ission.

Casualties of War was his most lyrical film, standing out in a filmography of artificiality induced to postmodern ends. In contrast, here he understands that any kind of romantic gesture applied to our current war is irresponsible. This is aggressively stylized, with “aggressively” meant in the most literal sense -- a patchwork of textures derived from our modern surveillance panopticon (closed-circuit TV, night-vision DV, TV news, vlogs). In a way, it’s anti-poetic, as even the images of the scorpion being devoured by ants or the time-lapse footage of clouds are bracketed by their placement in the documentary by “Marc and Francois Clement”. “So don’t be expecting a Hollywood action flick”, says Angel. “There’s not gonna be smash cuts, no adrenaline pumping soundtrack, no logical narrative to help make sense of it. Basically, here? Shit happens.”

If De Palma had previously diagnosed our addiction to images, Redacted is his first (and perhaps the first) film to understand that the twenty-first century’s proliferation of images has given way to a compulsive creation of images. There is a lineage here, if anyone took his movies seriously enough to find it, from Blow Out’s ending (the scream of a sex worker murdered as part of a political cover-up being embedded into a sleezy exploitation movie) to this one (the confession of the rape and murder of an Iraqi girl being staged as a “war story” delivered to a digital camera at a homecoming party). Like in that film about a filmmaker, the protagonist here knows that no one else will ever know or care.

What happens when you stop looking at De Palma’s reflexivity as “self-indulgence” and allow these films to work in concert with each other? What does it mean when the bar scene from Casualties of War is sampled here? What is he saying about that film’s dreamlike, ambiguous ending with his decision to end this film on a bitter scene of despair? Compare his cameo in the film’s final scene with his similar cameos in Murder a la Mod and The Black Dahlia. In the latter two instances, which could be considered bookends of a sort, the director character is using the flimsy pretext of a screen test as an excuse to objectify and humiliate a woman. What does that mean here? What is he saying about the “director”? About this scene? What does it mean that the performance in this “screen test” is detectably a performance? And what are the implications of reusing a device that had been used to critique gendered power dynamics in filmmaking? Do we understand De Palma’s films to be concerned with women being marginalized into objects of capital? What about the visual reference to The Untouchables? What is De Palma saying about himself? About his work? About the people who see his work? About what they do after they’ve seen his work? About his responsibilities as an imagemaker? About our responsibilities as an audience?

And what is the critic’s responsibility when presented with Redacted? It is worth examining the film’s reception in the USA and Europe. Flagsuckers like Michael Medved trashed the film (“it could be the worst movie I’ve ever seen”), while the majority of liberal critics took umbrage with its aesthetics (an indicative quote from Kenneth Turan: “Even if you agree with its politics, you will probably weep at the ineptitude of it all”). Meanwhile, De Palma received the Silver Lion at Venice Film Festival and the film was included on Cahiers Du Cinema’s top ten list. This is par for the course for De Palma, obviously, but it’s to our country’s shame that Fox News’ boycott dominated the public conversation around the film. There are American critics who praised the movie: Stephanie Zacharek called it “the first important fictional film about the war”. And it must be said that credit is due to Roger Ebert, who notes that the actors’ “edge of inauthentic performance paradoxically increases the effect”. All critics are entitled to their opinion of course, but so many contemporaneous reviews indicate the lack of curiosity and adventurousness of our film culture.

Within that culture, the controversy over the censorship of the film’s end credits (which features a montage of graphic war photographs) generated more discussion than the film itself. As Ebert points out, the real-life redaction only bolsters De Palma’s point. But the indignity of a cretin like Eamonn Bowles interrupting De Palma at the film’s New York Film Festival press conference on behalf of the spineless shithead Marc Cuban tells you everything you need to know about what the world of “independent film” really thinks of an artist like De Palma. (The moving story in Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow’s documentary De Palma about the unfathomably brave young actress Zahra Zubaidi will hopefully leave a more lasting ripple in the public consciousness.)

Truly, Redacted is a film of purposeful displeasure. It opens and closes with lines about the stench of death, and it’s a miasma that pervades every frame. “Difficult” seems an inadequate word for ninety ugly minutes of sadness, anger, and utter hopelessness. I understand how one could ask that if, as De Palma boldly stated, the film’s aim was to inspire the public to take actions that would end the war, it would benefit from being more palatable. I asked the same question upon first seeing it. Then I think of Abeer Qassim Hamza al-Janabi, of Phan Thi Mao, and the untold number of murders that have been redacted. I think of Bill O’Reilly, of Eamonn Bowles, of Marc Cuban, of George W Bush, of Barack Obama, of my youth spent on a military base. I think of these things and I realize that even this brutal vision is so much better than the hell we richly deserve.

A merchant in Baghdad sends his servant to the marketplace for provisions. Soon afterwards, the servant comes home white and trembling and tells him that in the marketplace, he was jostled by a woman, whom he recognized as Death, who made a threatening gesture. Borrowing the merchant’s horse, he flees at great speed to Samarra, a distance of about 75 miles (125 km), where he believes Death will not find him. The merchant then goes to the marketplace and finds Death, and asks why she made the threatening gesture to his servant. She replies, “That was not a threatening gesture, it was only a start of surprise. I was astonished to see him in Baghdad, for I have an appointment with him tonight in Samarra.”

“I did plays at Sarah Lawrence with Wilford Leach, who subsequently became a director at the Public Theater with Joe Papp, and I also worked with John Braswell. So I had Will and John and Brian De Palma, who was one of our first male students – in fact, he was one of the few men around. He directed and did some of his earliest movies there. I dated him and worked with him. We did a movie called The Wedding Party. It was a collaboration with Will and Brian. John was in it too, and Robert De Niro, who used to come up from the City and do shows at SLC. What Will was doing was so off the radar; it was as if he had his own theatre chemistry lab at the College.” - Jill Clayburgh, 2007

"When I went to pick up my check I was with my mom because I was under-age and she had to sign the contract for me. I was looking at the contract and it said 50 dollars. I thought it was 50 dollars a week but she explained that it was 50 dollars for the whole thing." - Robert DeNiro, 2015

“I don't understand how Troma ended up being the company that released this movie. Can anyone fill me in as to why they released it? It is soooo different than any of thier other movies.” - IMDB clockworkorange13, 2004

After winning a Rosenthal Award and some critical accolades for his short film Woton’s Wake, Brian De Palma made his first foray into feature filmmaking while a student at Sarah Lawrence. He co-directed The Wedding Party with his professor (and theatre director of note) Wilford Leach and classmate Cynthia Munroe. De Palma and Monroe recruited Leach to oversee them in the endeavor; the three co-wrote the screenplay, Monroe produced, Leach worked with the actors, and De Palma essentially directed the rest.

The narrative is as square as De Palma gets: a well-off couple (Charles Pfluger and Jill Clayburgh) have a wedding party at their Shelter Island property and the groom’s anxieties are stoked by his groomsmen. You’d think this was a set-up for satire a la Robert Altman’s A Wedding, but excepting some the expected jabs at the expense of the snooty parents, it’s a farce from beginning to end, complete with undercranked 16mm sequences that recall silent comedies (or Benny Hill). In fact, it gets pretty sentimental: the heart-to-heart between groom and bridesmaid on the night before the wedding, the cad groomsmen extolling the virtues of monogamy after a Production Code-friendly bachelor party, and an ending in which (following a madcap escape attempt sequence) Pfluger’s reservations melt away as he sees Clayburgh’s face on their wedding day. De Palma would satirize the middle class white liberal in a couple years, but here, they’re essentially the ones making the film, and its content is more a reflection of that milieu than an examination.

That's not to disparage their talents, though. For one thing, there is the biggest point of interest for most viewers in the years since the film’s release: Robert “Denero” in his film debut, playing a role much smaller and more crew-cutted than that poster would have you believe. It is fun and more than a little endearing to watch the young De Niro try to keep up with the energy of his more confident castmates (he visibly relaxes in the seemingly improvised scenes). Of course, De Palma would soon give him his first great role (as Jon Rubin) with Greetings, and he’d really show what he’s capable of as an actor when he reprised the character in Hi, Mom!. Jennifer Salt (a fellow De Palma player) and Clayburgh are more comfortable, and it’s similarly fun to see them as young actresses palpably enjoying their first movie roles.

But the real star here is William Finley. He’s electric to watch, and not just under a retrospective lens. There is a verisimilitude to his riffing that feels ahead of the era (take his drunken metaphysical monologue at the stag party: “Nothing’s real. The only thing that counts are the simple things, like weddings… and grass… and like, a flower.”). Between this and Woton’s Wake, De Palma had clearly found his man. Their best work together was yet to come[1], obviously, but it’s a pleasure to see such a unique and underappreciated screen presence formed so early.

It’s also interesting to see how early Jean-Luc Godard’s influence is felt. Granted, it is a superficial Godardian patina, found solely in the mechanics (jump cuts, spasmodic sound editing, etc); the actual cinematic investigation would come with Murder a la Mod (this is also where Hitchcock[2] becomes an element) and the social engagement doesn’t really factor in until Greetings. The devices are utilized for a straight-up farce, and while it’s rarely laugh-out-loud funny, it’s frequently amusing, thanks to its cast (John Braswell’s reverend[3] doling out increasingly convoluted marriage metaphors) and some well-executed gags (the game of telephone at the dinner table conveyed by jump cuts). Even the sweatiest vignettes are kind of charming in their vigor, like the bride’s ex inexplicably taking Charlie for a plane excursion.

The production was a learning experience for De Palma. He wrestled control of the blocking and staging from Leach, somehow already endowed with a strong filmmaking sense. The staging is often impressive, like the background action in the scene where Charlie drunkenly flirts with Phoebe, and there is already evidence of an aptitude for in-camera effects. Chris Dumas points to the scene in which Charlie and Josepehine are viewed through the bars of a window during a downpour (actually an image matted over the frame) as the first true De Palma image, given both its voyeuristic aspect and its “mobilized artificiality”. The effect may be unpolished, but we do see De Palma’s formal guile in its embryonic stage.

The film was shot in 1963 but only saw release in 1969, to capitalize on the surprise success of the previous year’s Greetings and the critical notices that both De Niro and De Palma had begun to garner -- even upon release, interest in the film was predicated on a curiosity about their origins. With even more distance though, it’s interesting to watch in light of the rest of De Palma’s filmography. Beyond seeing his earliest work with De Niro, Finley, and Salt, it also adds a dimension to 1979’s Home Movies, which sees De Palma, now a film professor at Sarah Lawrence himself, assuming Leach’s role and making a film with his students as a means of giving them a final project.

While that incredibly fucking weird personal film is many times more revealing than this one, there is still something to be learned about De Palma as an artist from seeing his humble beginnings. I can’t help but love that the first scene in a Brian De Palma film features a woman intoning in voiceover the key tenet of his doctrine: “photographs are terribly misleading”.

[1] Speaking of that role, note that “Winslow Leach” is a clear tribute to Wilford.

[2] Although he is mentioned by Finley! ”Bergman knows how to suffer, Fellini knows how to suffer, even Hitchcock suffers.”

[3] An all-time great wedding toast: “I have a couple of words for this couple of children who are about to become a pair of married people, and may they be as two things that come together and make one thing, which is a better thing than the first, such as salt and pepper, food and drink, or this and that.”

1995 is thirty years old

1. Up, Down, Fragile
2. Premonitions Following an Evil Deed
3. Showgirls
4. The Bridges of Madison County
5. The Addiction
6. Safe
7. La Ceremonie
8. Heat
9. August in the Water
10. When It Rains

...plus 20 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

coleman that is

• Catalog
• Detective
• Ornette: Made in America
• Naked Lunch

• Come and Get It
• Vertigo
• Obsession
• Body Double
• Exotica
• Lost Highway
• Femme Fatale
• Déjà Vu
• Phoenix
• Asako I & II

...plus 1 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

halftime

looking forward to close your eyes and grand tour and the final godards and i still haven't seen benediction etc etc

1. Memoria
2. Caught by the Tides
3. What Do We See When We Look at the Sky?
4. Days
5. City Hall
7. Fallen Leaves
8. Chime
9. Stars at Noon
10. Pacifiction

...plus 22 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. Stella Dallas
2. The Lady Eve
3. Clash by Night
4. Ball of Fire
5. Baby Face
6. Forty Guns
7. the Night
8. The Bitter Tea of General Yen
9. The Plough and the Stars
10. Lady of Burlesque

...plus 4 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. L'Avventura
2. The enger
3. La Notte
4. Identification of a Woman
5. Red Desert
6. Zabriskie Point
7. Blow-Up
8. The Mystery of Oberwald
9. L'Eclisse
10. Il Grido

1. My Darling Clementine
2. Pilgrimage
3. The Long Gray Line
4. The Sun Shines Bright
5. 7 Women
6. The Searchers
7. How Green Was My Valley
8. Wagon Master
9. The Fugitive
10. Fort Apache

...plus 55 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. Caught by the Tides
2. Platform
3. Mountains May Depart
4. 24 City
5. The World
6. A Touch of Sin
7. Unknown Pleasures
8. Still Life
9. Ash Is Purest White
10. Pickpocket

• The Velvet Underground: Psychiatrist's Convention, NYC, 1966
• The Velvet Underground and Nico: A Symphony of Sound
• Moe Gets Tied Up
• The Velvet Underground in Boston
• Diaries, Notes, and Sketches
• The Velvet Underground at Bataclan '72
• The South Bank Show: Velvet Underground
• Lou Reed and John Cale: Songs for Drella
• The Velvet Underground - Velvet Redux Live MCMXCIII
• Velvet Underground: Under Review

...plus 2 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

The evidence on the screen is the proof of Howard Hawks's genius: you only have to watch Monkey Business to know that it is a brilliant film. Some people refuse to it this, however; they refuse to be satisfied by proof. There can't be any other reason why they don't recognize it.

Hawks' oeuvre is equally divided between comedies and dramas -- a remarkable ambivalence. More remarkable is his fusing of the two elements so that each, rather than damaging the other, seems to underscore their reciprocal relation: the one sharpens the other. Comedy is never long absent from his most dramatic plots, and far from compromising the feeling of tragedy, it removes the comfort of fatalistic indulgence and keep the events in a perilous kind of equilibrium, a stimulating uncertainty which only adds to the strength of the drama. Scarface's secretary speaks comically garbled English, but that doesn't prevent his getting shot; out laughter all the way throughout The Big Sleep is inextricable from our foreboding of danger; the climax of Red River, in which we are no longer sure of our own feelings, wondering whose side to take and whether we should be amused or afraid, sets our every nerve quivering with panic and gives us a dizzy, giddy feeling like that of tightrope walker whose foot falters without quite slipping, a feeling as unbearable as the ending of a nightmare.

While it is the comedy that give Hawks's tragedy its effectiveness, the comedy cannot quite dispel (not the tragedy, let's not spoil our best arguments by going to far) the harsh feeling of an existence in which no action can undo itself from the web of responsibility. Could we be offered a more bitter view of life than this? I have to confess that I'm quite unable to in the laughter of a packed theatre when I am riveted by the calculated twists of a fable (Monkey Business) which sets out -- gaily, logically, and with an unholy abandon -- to chronicle the fatal stages in the degradation of a superior mind.

It is no accident that similar groups of intellectuals turn up in both Ball of Fire and The Thing from Another World. But Hawks is not so much concerned with the subjection of the world to the jaded, glacial vision of the scientific mind as he is with retracing the comic misfortunes of the intelligence. Hawks is not concerned with satire or psychology; societies mean no more to him than sentiments; unlike Capra or McCarey, he is solely preoccupied with the adventure of the intellect. Whether he opposes the old to the new, the sum of the world's knowledge of the past to one of the degraded forms of modern life (Ball of Fire, A Song is Born), or man to beast (Bringing Up Baby), he sticks to the same story -- the intrusion of the inhuman, or the crudest avatar of humanity, into a highly civilized society. In The Thing, the mask is finally off: in the confined space of the universe, some men of science are at grips with a creature worse than inhuman, a creature from another world; and their efforts are directed towards fitting it into the logical framework of human knowledge.

But in Monkey Business the enemy has crept into man himself: the subtle poison of the Fountain of Youth, the temptation of infantilism. This we have long known to be one of the less subtle wiles of the Evil One -- now in the form of a hound, now in the form of a monkey -- when he comes up against a man of rare intelligence. And it is the most unfortunate of illusions which Hawks rather cruelly attacks: the notion of adolescence and childhood are barbarous states from which he are rescued by education. The child is scarcely distinguishable from the savage he imitates in his games: and a most distinguished old man, after he has drunk the precious fluid, takes delight in imitating a chimp. One can find in this a classical conception of man, as a creature whose only path to greatness lies through experience and maturity; at the end of his journey, it is his old age which will be his judge.

Still worse than infantilism, degradation, or decadence, however, is the fascination these tendencies exert on the same mind which perceives them as evil; the film is not only a story about this fascination, it offers itself to the spectator as a demonstration of the power of the fascination. Likewise, anyone who criticizes this tendency must first submit himself to it. The monkeys, the Indians, the goldfish are no more than the guise worn by Hawk's obsession with primitivism, which also finds expression in the savage rhythms of the tom-tom music, the sweet stupidity of Marilyn Monroe (that monster of femininity whom the costume designer nearly deformed), or the ageing bacchante Ginger Rogers becomes when she reverts to adolescence and her wrinkles seem to shrink away. The instinctive euphoria of the characters' actions gives a lyric quality to the ugliness and foulness, a denseness of expression which heightens everything into abstraction: the fascination of all this gives beauty to the metamorphoses in retrospect. One could apply the 'expressionistic' to the artfulness with which Cary Grant twists his gestures into symbols; watching the scene in which he makes himself up as an Indian, it is impossible not to be reminded of the famous shot in The Blue Angel in which Jannings stares at his distorted face. It is by no means facile to compare these two similar tales of ruin: we recall how the themes of damnation and malediction in the German cinema had imposed the same rigorous progression from the likeable to the hideous.

From the close-up of the chimpanzee to the moment when the diaper slips off the baby Cary Grant, the viewer's head swims with the constant whirl of immodesty and impropriety; and what is this feeling if not a mixture of fear, censure -- and fascination? The allure of the instinctual, the abandonment to primitive earthly forces, evil, ugliness, stupidity -- all of the Devil's attributes are, in these comedies in which the soul itself is tempted to bestiality, deviously combined with logic in extremis; the sharpest point of the intelligence is turned back on itself. I Was a Male War Bride takes as his subject simply the impossibility of finding a place to sleep, and then prolongs it to the extremes of debasement and demoralization.

Hawks knows better than anyone else that art has to go to extremes, even the extremes of squalor, because that is the source of comedy. He is never afraid to use bizarre narrative twists, once he has established that they are possible. He doesn't try to confound the spectator's vulgar tendencies; he sates them by taking a step further. This is also Moliere's genius: his mad fits of logic are apt to make the laughter stick in your throat. It is also Murnau's genius -- the famous scene with Dame Martha in his excellent Tartuffe and several sequences of Der letzte Mann are still models of Molieresque cinema.

Hawks is a director of intelligence and precision, but he is also a bundle of dark forces and strange fascinations; his is a Teutonic spirit, attracted by bouts of ordered madness which give birth to an infinite chain of consequences. The very fact of their continuity is a manifestation of Fate. His heroes demonstrate this not so much in their feelings as in their actions, which he observes meticulously with ion. It is actions that he films, meditating on the power of appearance alone. We are not concerned with John Wayne's thoughts as he walks toward Montgomery Clift at the end of Red River, or Bogart's thoughts as he beats somebody up: our attention is directed solely to the precision of each step -- the exact rhythm of the walk -- of each blow -- and to the gradual collapse of the battered body.

But at the same time, Hawks epitomizes the highest qualities of the American cinema: he is the only American director who knows how to draw a moral. His marvelous blend of action and morality is probably the secret of his genius. It is not an idea that is fascinating in a Hawks film, but its effectiveness. A deed holds our attention not so much for its intrinsic beauty as for its effect on the inner works of his universe.

Such art demands a basic honesty, and Hawks's use of time and space bears witness to this -- no flashback, no ellipsis; the rule is continuity. No character disappears without us following him, and nothing surprises the hero which doesn't surprise us at the same time. There seems to be a law behind Hawks's action and editing, but it is a biological law like that governing any living being: each shot has a functional beauty, like a neck or an ankle. The smooth, orderly succession of shots has a rhythm like the pulsing of blood, and the whole film is like a beautiful body, kept alive by deep, resilient breathing.

This obsession with continuity imposes a feeling of monotony on Hawks's films, the kind often associated with the idea of a journey to be made or a course to be run (Air Force, Red River), because everything is felt to be connected to everything else, time and space and space to time. So in films which are mostly comic (To Have and Have Not,The Big Sleep). The characters are confined to a few settings, and they move around rather helplessly in them. We begin to feel the gravity of each movement they make, and we are unable to escape from their presence. But Hawksian drama is always expressed in spatial , and variations in setting are parallel with temporal variations: whether it is the drama of Scarface, whose kingdom shrinks from the city he once ruled to the room in which he is finally trapped, or of the scientists who cannot dare leave their hut for fear of The Thing; of the fliers in Only Angels Have Wings, trapped in their station by the fog and managing to escape to the mountains from time to time, just as Bogart (in To Have and Have Not) escapes to the sea from the hotel which he prowls impotently, between the cellar and his room; and even when these themes are burlesqued in Ball of Fire, with the grammarian moving out of his hermetic library to face the perils of the city, or in Monkey Business, in which the characters' jaunts are an indication of their reversion to infancy (I Was a Male War Bride plays on the motif of the journey in another way). Always the heroes' movements are along the path of their destiny.

The monotony is only a façade. Beneath it, feeling are slowly ripening, developing step by step towards a violent climax. Hawks uses lassitude as a dramatic device -- to convey the exasperation of men who have to restrain themselves for two hours, patiently containing their anger, hatred, or love before our eyes and then suddenly releasing it, like slowly saturated batteries which eventually give off a spark. Their anger is heightened by their habitual sangfroid; their calm faade is pregnant with emotion, with the secret trembling of their nerves and of their soul -- until the cup overflows. A hawks film often has the same feeling as the agonizing wait for the fall of a drop of water.

The comedies show another side of this principle of monotony. Forward action is replaced by repetition, like the rhetoric of Raymond Roussel replacing Peguy's; the same actions, endlessly recurring, which Hawks builds up with the persistence of a maniac and the patience of a man obsessed, suddenly whirl madly about, as if at the mercy of a capricious maelstrom.

What other man of genius, even if he were more obsessed with continuity, could be more ionately concerned with the consequences of men's actions, or with these actions' relationship to each other? The way they influence, repel, or attract one another makes up a unified and coherent world, a Newtonian universe whose ruling principles are the universal law of gravity and a deep conviction of the gravity of existence. Human actions are weighed and measured by a master director preoccupied with man's responsibilities.

The measure of Hawks's films is intelligence, but a pragmatic intelligence, applied directly to the physical world, an intelligence which takes its efficacity from the precise viewpoint of a profession or from some form of human activity at grips with universe and anxious for conquest. Marlowe inThe Big Sleep practices a profession just as a scientist or a flier does; and when Bogart hires out his boat in To Have and Have Not, he hardly looks at the sea: he is more interested in the beauty of his engers than in the beauty of the waves. Every river is made to be crossed, every herd is made to be fattened and sold at the highest price. And women, however seductive, however much the hero cares for them, must them in the struggle.

It is impossible adequately to evoke To Have and Have Not without immediately recalling the struggle with the fish at the beginning of the film. The universe cannot be conquered without a fight, and fighting is natural to Hawks's heroes: hand-to-hand fighting. What closer grasp of another being could be hoped for than a vigorous struggle like this? So love exists even where there is perpetual opposition; it is a bitter duel whose constant dangers are ignored by men intoxicated with ion (The Big Sleep, Red River). Out of the contest comes esteem -- that irable word encoming knowledge, appreciation and sympathy: the opponent becomes a partner. The hero feels a great sense of disgust if he has to face an enemy who refuses to fight; Marlowe, seized with a sudden bitterness, precipitates events in order to hasten the climax in this case.

Maturity is the hallmark of these reflective men, heroes of an adult, often exclusively masculine world, where tragedy is found in personal relationships; comedy comes from the intrusion and ixture of alien elements, or in mechanical objects which take away their free will -- that freedom of decision by which a man can express himself and affirm his existence as a creator does in the act of creation.

I don't want to seem as if I'm praising Hawks for being 'a genius estranged from his time', but it is the obviously of his modernity which lets me avoid belabouring it. I'd prefer, instead, to point out how, even if he is occasionally drawn to the ridiculous or the absurd, Hawks first of all concentrates on the smell and feel or reality, giving reality an unusual and indeed long-hidden grandeur and nobility; how Hawks gives the modern sensibility a classical conscience. The father of Red River and Only Angels Have Wings is none other than Corneille; ambiguity and complexity are compatible only with noblest feelings which are soonest exhausted but rather the barbaric, mutable natures of crude souls -- that is why modern novels are so boring.

Finally, how could I omit mentioning those wonderful Hawksian opening scenes in which the hero settles smoothly and solidify in for the duration? No preliminaries, no expository devices: a door opens, and there he is in the first shot. The conversation gets going and quietly familiarizes us with his personal rhythm; after bumping into him like this, we can no longer leave his side. We are his companions all through the journey as it unwinds as surely and regularly as the film going through the projector. The hero moves with the litheness and constancy of a mountaineer who starts out with a steady gait and maintains it along the roughest trails, even to the end of the longest day's march.

From these first stirrings, we are not only sure that the heroes will never leave us, we also know that they will stick by their promises to a fault, and will never hesitate or quit: no one can put a stop to their marvelous stubbornness and tenacity. Once they have set out, they will go on to the end of their tether and carry the promises they have made to their logical conclusions, come what may. What is started must be finished. It doesn't matter that the heroes are often involved against their wills: by proving themselves, by achieving their ends, they win the right to be free and the honour of calling themselves men. To them, logic is not some cold intellectual activity, but proof that the body is a coherent whole, harmoniously following the consequences of an action out of loyalty to itself. The strength of the heroes' willpower is an assurance of the unity of the man and the spirit, tied together on behalf of that which both justifies their existence and gives it the highest meaning.

If it is true that we are fascinated by extremes, by everything which is bold and excessive, and that we find grandeur in a lack of moderation -- then it follows that we should be intrigued by the clash of extremes, because they bring together the intellectual precision of abstractions with the elemental magic of the great earthly impulses, linking thunderstorms with equations in an affirmation of life. The beauty of a Hawks film comes from this kind of affirmation, staunch and serene, remorseless and resilient. It is a beauty which demonstrates existence by breathing and movement by walking. That which is, is.

1. Duelle
2. Céline and Julie Go Boating
3. Out 1
4. La Belle Noiseuse
5. The Story of Marie and Julien
6. The Nun
7. Up, Down, Fragile
8. Le Pont du Nord
9. The Duchess of Langeais
10. Secret Defense

...plus 1 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. My Darling Clementine
2. An Autumn Afternoon
3. We Won't Grow Old Together
4. Duelle
5. Trust
6. Goodbye, Dragon Inn
7. Notre Musique
8. Colossal Youth
9. Redacted
10. Artemide’s Knee

1. Meshes of the Afternoon
2. I Walked with a Zombie
3. The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp
4. The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek
5. The Life of Matsu the Untamed
6. Day of Wrath
7. Shadow of a Doubt
8. The Seventh Victim
9. The Gang's All Here
10. Obsession

...plus 16 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

you know what time it is gorehounds!!!!!

1. Floating Clouds
2. Two in the Shadow
3. Lightning
4. Every-Night Dreams
5. Sound of the Mountain
6. Wife! Be Like a Rose!
7. When a Woman Ascends the Stairs
8. Late Chrysanthemums
9. The Approach of Autumn
10. Yearning

...plus 7 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

watched five of these for the first time this month

1. Tenebre
2. Suspiria
3. The Bird with the Crystal Plumage
4. Deep Red
5. Inferno
6. Four Flies on Grey Velvet
7. Opera
8. The Cat o' Nine Tails
9. Do You Like Hitchcock?
10. Phenomena

...plus 4 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. Black Caesar
2. The Ambulance
3. God Told Me To
4. Special Effects
5. Q
6. It's Alive
7. The Stuff
8. Original Gangstas
9. Hell Up In Harlem

1. One from the Heart
2. The Rain People
3. The Conversation
4. Apocalypse Now
5. Rumble Fish
6. Tucker: The Man and His Dream
7. The Cotton Club
8. Youth Without Youth
9. The Godfather Part II
10. The Godfather Part III

...plus 13 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

"but really I don't see the intense domestic quarrels you speak of"

1. A Nos Amours
2. Van Gogh
3. We Won't Grow Old Together
4. The Mouth Agape
5. Naked Childhood
6. Loulou
7. Police
8. Under the Sun of Satan

1. Flowers of Shanghai
2. Goodbye South, Goodbye
3. Millennium Mambo
4. A City of Sadness
5. The Puppetmaster
6. Daughter of the Nile
7. The Assassin
8. Three Times
9. The Boys from Fengkuei
10. Dust in the Wind

...plus 5 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

double nickels

1. The Long Gray Line
2. Floating Clouds
3. All That Heaven Allows
4. French Cancan
5. Rebel Without a Cause
6. Ordet
7. The Night of the Hunter
8. I Live in Fear
9. Smiles of a Summer Night
10. Kiss Me Deadly

...plus 15 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. The Big Sleep
2. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
3. Rio Bravo
4. To Have and Have Not
5. Only Angels Have Wings
6. Bringing Up Baby
7. Red River
8. Man's Favorite Sport?
9. Red Line 7000
10. Hatari!

...plus 23 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Progenitor of the zombie movie and a master of horror, but also a virtuoso cutter, a director with an innate sense of kinetic energy, and a thoughtful writer with a throughline of ineffable sadness in his scripts. Whether that feeling is expressed despairingly, as in Martin's reckoning with Catholic-family-as-hell, or with the romantic wistfulness of Knightriders (a deeply moving work and one of the great UFOs of my movie-watching life), it's there, and it works to refute the idea that allegory was his chief concern as a filmmaker. Dawn of the Dead's immense power doesn't lie in a surface-level reading of its mall setting as a takedown of consumer culture or of the corrosive effects of capitalism on the population, but rather in scenes like the one in which Gaylen Ross gently turns down David Emge's proposal in the eerie liminal space of a restaurant at the end of the world ("it wouldn't be real...").

Of course I'm going to say this, but it's curious how often Romero and Brian De Palma seemed to be in conversation with one another. There's Always Vanilla and Get to Know Your Rabbit work as a double feature on the countercultural reaction to advertising, while Sisters and Jack's Wife (or Season of the Witch or Hungry Wives) both inquire into second-wave feminist themes in a genre context. Most interesting to me is the case of Diary of the Dead and Redacted, both coming out in 2007 and both pioneering works in my mind. Diary isn't as powerful or radical as De Palma's masterpiece (and how could it be), but its aesthetic strategies and reflexivity are similarly fascinating, and its final moments are the most horrifying images of Romero's career.

One of the most preternaturally gifted director-editors we've ever had and a genuine maverick.

"That's the trouble with the world, Sarah darling. People got different ideas concerning what they want out of life."

"What if I wasn't civilized anymore?"

"You've got to fight for your ideals. And if you die, your ideals don't die."

1. Dawn of the Dead
2. Knightriders
3. Martin
4. Night of the Living Dead
5. Hungry Wives
6. The Crazies
7. The Amusement Park
8. Monkey Shines
9. There's Always Vanilla
10. Diary of the Dead

...plus 8 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Haven't seen War Horse.

1. A.I. Artificial Intelligence
2. Close Encounters of the Third Kind
3. Catch Me If You Can
4. 1941
5. Minority Report
6. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
7. The Sugarland Express
8. Duel
9. West Side Story
10. Ready Player One

...plus 24 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Unseen:
Spider (2002)

1. Crash
2. Cosmopolis
3. Videodrome
4. Naked Lunch
5. A Dangerous Method
6. M. Butterfly
7. eXistenZ
8. Dead Ringers
9. Crimes of the Future
10. The Brood

...plus 11 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

i was asked to submit a ballot but i’m shy

• An Autumn Afternoon
• Taste of Cherry
• My Darling Clementine
• Tropical Malady
• Céline and Julie Go Boating
• Hi, Mom!
• Goodbye, Dragon Inn
• 35 Shots of Rum
• Hail Mary
• The Lusty Men

1. Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me
2. Mulholland Drive
3. Twin Peaks: The Return
4. Inland Empire
5. Eraserhead
6. Twin Peaks
7. Lost Highway
8. Blue Velvet
9. The Straight Story
10. The Elephant Man

...plus 2 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. 35 Shots of Rum
2. Friday Night
3. Beau Travail
4. Let the Sunshine In
5. U.S. Go Home
6. Trouble Every Day
7. Stars at Noon
8. High Life
9. No Fear, No Die
10. The Intruder

...plus 9 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Ice-T

DJ Funk

Ganksta N-I-P

Gangsta Pat

UNLV

UNLV (2)

1. Halloween II
2. Halloween
3. Halloween III: Season of the Witch
4. Halloween
5. Halloween II
6. Halloween H20: 20 Years Later
7. Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers
8. Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers
9. Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers
10. Halloween Ends

...plus 3 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

and time and time again i just made things worse

1. Pilgrimage
2. The Lusty Men
3. Carnival of Souls
4. Little Stabs at Happiness
5. The Naked Kiss
6. Céline and Julie Go Boating
7. Je Tu Il Elle
8. Every Man for Himself
9. Losing Ground
10. L'Argent

...plus 10 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

The American Godard, the greatest of the New Hollywood, the only American director who understands giallo, the most forward-thinking director of the 21st century, the most radical/responsible image-maker, etc etc etc

Nick Pinkerton on Femme Fatale

Helen Grace on Dressed to Kill

Collin Brinkmann on Domino

Wanna change my clothes my hair my face

Masterpieces

Masterclass

1. Hi, Mom!
2. Body Double
3. Redacted
4. Carlito's Way
5. Femme Fatale
6. Blow Out
7. Casualties of War
8. Scarface
9. Obsession
10. Carrie

...plus 20 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

america's film critic

1. The Brown Bunny
2. The Devils
3. The Doom Generation
4. Freddy Got Fingered
5. Hardly Working
6. Snake Eyes
7. Taste of Cherry
8. Walker

1. They Live by Night
2. The Red Shoes
3. 3 Godfathers
4. Red River
5. Fort Apache
6. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
7. Women of the Night
8. Drunken Angel
9. Letter from an Unknown Woman
10. Rope

...plus 17 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. The Book of Life
2. Bamboozled
3. Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones
4. Russian Ark
5. Collateral
6. Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith
7. Miami Vice
8. Inland Empire
9. Still Life
10. Colossal Youth

...plus 10 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

The best director-editor since George Romero

1. Old Joy
2. Meek's Cutoff
3. First Cow
4. Certain Women
5. Night Moves
6. River of Grass
7. Wendy and Lucy

1. The Naked Kiss
2. Pickup on South Street
3. Park Row
4. Shock Corridor
5. The Big Red One
6. I Shot Jesse James
7. White Dog
8. Forty Guns
9. The Steel Helmet
10. The Crimson Kimono

...plus 8 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

best writing was by lydia ogwang, nick pinkerton, violet lucca, chloe lizotte, julien allen, genevieve yue, filipe furtado, collin brinkmann

best criticism in tweet form was "why is last black man in san francisco shot like a liberty mutual ad"

best viewing experience was body double (1984)/femme fatale (2002) with neve bryce cailin jade and erin

best first-time watch was star spangled to death (2004)

worst movies of the 2010s were compliance (craig zobel), christine (antonio campos), the neon demon (nicolas winding refn), jojo rabbit (taika waititi), seven psychopaths (martin mcdonagh)

annette michelson is the GOAT

lot of critics who lack basic media literacy

moral panics go in cycles

eugene oregon has had an appreciably negative impact on film culture lol

steve mcqueen is good now

tv still sucks

1. Days
2. I Was at Home, But . . .
3. Vitalina Varela
4. To the Ends of the Earth
5. First Cow
6. Lovers Rock
7. Da 5 Bloods
8. Siberia
9. Martin Eden
10. Notes From a Journey

...plus 52 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

twitter.com/johnvvariety/status/1272006374604574720

1. Grass
2. The Day He Arrives
3. Tale of Cinema
4. Right Now, Wrong Then
5. On the Occasion of ing the Turning Gate
6. The Day After
7. Hotel by the River
8. On the Beach at Night Alone
9. Hill of Freedom
10. Like You Know It All

...plus 14 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. One from the Heart
2. The Rain People
3. Youth Without Youth
4. Apocalypse Now
5. The Godfather Part II
6. The Godfather
7. Rumble Fish
8. The Conversation
9. Tetro
10. Bram Stoker's Dracula

...plus 12 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. Sound of the Mountain
2. Repast
3. Late Chrysanthemums
4. When a Woman Ascends the Stairs
5. Two in the Shadow
6. Yearning
7. Flowing
8. Mother
9. Wife! Be Like a Rose!
10. Apart from You

...plus 1 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. The Lusty Men
2. Singin' in the Rain
3. The Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice
4. The Quiet Man
5. Park Row
6. The Life of Oharu
7. Limelight
8. The Bad and the Beautiful
9. Le Plaisir
10. Ikiru

...plus 10 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

idk

chronological

was going to do one film per director but i couldn't decide between hi mom and body double lol

• City Lights
• At Land
• They Live by Night
• A Star Is Born
• Hiroshima Mon Amour
• An Autumn Afternoon
• Hi, Mom!
• Céline and Julie Go Boating
• The Devil, Probably
• Days of Heaven

...plus 15 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.