At this year’s Venice Film Festival, Italian filmmaker Luca Guadagnino, there to promote his divisive new film A Bigger Splash, was announced as the director of David Gordon Green’s long-gestating passion project- a remake of Dario Argento’s giallo masterwork Suspiria. Naturally, this is news that has overshadowed that of the film he was there to …
Dressed to Kill has a perfect blend of De Palma story with De Palma style, where each is equally in the service of the other
The Conversation is a new feature at Sound on Sight bringing together Drew Morton and Landon Palmer in a passionate debate about cinema new and old. For their third piece, they will discuss Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow Up. **** Landon’s Take: The cultural impact of Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow Up would be very difficult to overemphasize. Upon release, Andrew …
In his book Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America, journalist Rick Pearlstein posits that Nixon, one of history’s most reviled presidents, manipulated social trends, tense racial crises and even war to assume the office, and, perhaps inadvertently, created the way the Right and Left deal with each other in the present day. The scars of the seventies indeed still hang like a dark cloud over Washington, its internal systems ravaged by covert bugging operations and illegal payoffs. With Edward Snowden’s NSA revelations and Wikileaks at the forefront today, America has once again regressed into paranoia, though nothing in contemporary cinema compares to the violent, bleak reactions filmmakers had to the Watergate scandal. The occasional modern conspiracy thriller, such as Closed Circuit, typically winds up under the radar these days. Why? Because America already saw this show, and now it’s on Blu-ray.
This piece naturally reveals the end of every film mentioned. You have been warned. What is most exciting about the pure joy of watching a Brian De Palma film usually comes as far away from subtext as one can get. Very few filmmakers can stage a major setpiece in their climax where the visceral excitement …
Please note that the following piece contains spoilers for the final act of Blow Out. Taken at face value Blow Out, Brian De Palma’s 1981 film, is a nifty and tightly wound little thriller. It starts to run into some trouble, however, when compared to Michelangelo Antonioni’s seminal counter culture classic Blowup (1966), the film …