This is an oeuvre of diminishing returns. I’’l offer, however:
Carrie
Blow Out
Untouchables
Sisters
I can’t do it, I can’t hit a 4th. Mission Impossible?
This is like making a list of top five war crimes.
Wow, Tom, and I thought I held dePalma in low esteem …
Blow out
Untochables
Carlito’s way
Redacted
Sisters
1. The Fury
2. Blow Out
3. Mission to Mars
4. Carlito’s Way
5. Body Double
I don’t know, but Hi, Mom! is probably my favorite.
1. SUMMER SCHOOL
2. O.C. AND STIGGS
3. FRATERNITY VACATION
4. LICENSE TO DRIVE
5. PRIVATE RESORT
I’ll admit to liking PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE, probably the only DePalma I’ll actually watch willingly.
I hate Brian De Palma, but I guess Carlito’s Way is a decent flick…
RICH UNCLE SKELETON, you’re an idiot.
Not one of my favorite directors but he has done some entertaining films and is seldom boring.
1. Carrie
2. Scarface
3. Carlito’s Way
4. Sisters
5. Blow Out
Worst-Phantom of the Paradise, Mission to Mars, Black Dahlia.
The Fury
Carrie
Phantom of the Paradise
Obsession
Femme Fatale
1. TOP 5 DE PALMA
2. TOP 5 POLANSKI
3. TOP 5 ANTONIONI
4. TOP 5 TARANTINO
5. TOP 5 HITCHCOCK
1. TOP 5 COPPOLA
2. TOP 5 GODARD
3. TOP 5 OZU
4. TOP 5 BERTOLUCCI
5. TOP 5 PECKINPAH
…
I’ll start the thread: TOP 5: TOP 5 THREADS.
TOP 5 HITCHCOCK FILMS DEPALMA HAS STOLEN FROM
Come on guys, let’s discuss Depalma. He deserves more than a mere “top 5” list but i’m not knocking that.
I’ll discuss when I get a chance.
Can we quit with these top five threads but to answer the thread I would have to say:
None, he has an inability to make good movies.
hummmmm, nit in any order here::: THE FURY
BODY DOULBE
DRESSED TO KILL
BLOW OUT
CARRIE
1.Femme Fatale
2.Snake Eyes
3.Carlito’s Way
4.Phantom of the Paradise
5.Black Dahlia
I think the whole Hitchcock thing with DePalma is often over exaggerated. When he references Hitchcock, it’s always Vertigo and Rear Window, and some Psycho. NONE of the other ones appear at all really. And he usually just takes simple plot points that have no bearing at all on his themes or images. Body Double is supposedly Vertigo but it’s clearly about entirely different things.
DePalma encourages us to hate him and fight about his merits. He uses Hitchcock plot points all the time, but obviously he’s got a lot of other stuff going though his head (Blow Out, whole screenplay by him, has very little Hitchcock and only a surface resemblance to Blow-Up. And Phantom of the Paradise…where the hell did that come from? Besides Faust…). He gives us complicated and contradictory movies. For some of us, it becomes all the more interesting to decode him.
For example, I think Femme Fatale has all sorts of crazy influences way above Hitchcock. Double Life of Veronique comes to mind, and I think some Godard as well. She’s watching a movie at the beginning of the movie! Some see the whole TV screen fetish DePalma has as an extension of Rear Window copying. Well, I think it’s an evolved form of Godard’s stuff (He was crazy about DePalma…The Fury is in Historie(s) Du Cinema). And then piled on top of that is the original DePalma stuff, like split screen and his nihilism (I know he didn’t INVENT it, but I don’t think he stole his feelings about it from anyone). And then, finally, the half hearted obligatory Hitchcock reference when Bardot snaps some pictures though a window. Seems to me like he throws stuff like that in just to frustrate critics that can’t accept that since Godard came along, all of movie history is just fodder for regurgitating and reinterpreting.
There ya go, I have given answers and discussed a bit of DePalma. Anyone else think he’s not just a Hitch ripoff?
…anybody?
Although Hitchcock died in 1980, I wonder if he ever saw any of De Palma up to then, like “Obsession” and “The Fury,” both of which drew heavily from him, and what he thought.
What’s the deal with Body Double? Is the whole film meant to be a hallucination which the actor has while suffering a claustrophobic fit on the set of the vampire movie? I was utterly baffled by the ending but it seemed like one of those “it was all a dream” things.
How could every single one of you have left out Casualties of War? Jeeesh! You’re killing me!
1) Casualties of War
2) Scarface
3) Sisters
3) The Untouchables
4) Carlito’s Way
5) Blow Out
>.NONE of the other ones appear at all really.<<
Except that carousel sequence in THE FURY that doesn’t come from VERTGO, REAR WINDOW or PSYCHO …
Ok, I’ll stop raining on the DePalma parade now.
In Body Double, when it flashes back at the end to the filming of that movie, I belive it’s just a creative way to show him gathering up courage. He is trapped in the pit, gets really clastrophobic, and imagines the filming going a more positive way if he had that courage. He then decides to make sure that in reality his life goes in a the positive direction. It’s a metaphor for him getting over the clastrophobia.
And then at the end when he gets his job back, ‘cause he’s cured.
Mr. Long, yes there are a few other Hitchcock movies quoted by DePalma. Really just passing asides though. I mean, do you really find there to be thematical similarities between Strangers on a Train and The Fury? Or plotwise, for that matter. Hitchcock was not down with litteral supernatural phenomenon.
The only DePalma flick that seriously digests the Hitchcock influence is Obsession, I think. It actually has the same themes. There’s a piece in there though about how one painting can cover an old painting, which conserns Sandra and her mother as well as Obsession’s remaking of Vertigo.
And like I said before, post-Dressed to Kill he seems to be just quoting Hitchcock to fullfill our expectations of him. To mock us audience members, really.
Thanks Randal. So a woman’s been tortured to death and a hooker has been humiliated just so this actor can get over his neurosis? Okay then.
Sorry to get defensive, but it’s not really implied that she died specifically so that that actor can get over claustrophobia. She died ’cause that other guy wants money. Bad things sometimes randomly happen to people, and admittedly, more often in DePalma movies.
I don’t know why I bother to defend this actually. I don’t really like Body Double at all. I’m sorry. Please, continue hating.
lol, I wasn’t really hating. And I wasn’t hating on you Randal. I think you’re explanation is probably completely accurate. I guess I just felt almost “unclean” when I watched it. Because the female characters are such stereotypical projections of male lust — two kinds of male lust, one murderous and violent, the other impotent and maternal-seeking. In any event the woman exists as fantasy more than reality. DePalma’s idea of a smart chick is a porn star who can make a wannabe serious actress feel like a prude at a cocktail party by dropping innuendos about how funny it is that the actress is playing dumb about a porno casting call. Now if the male had been Jimmy Stewart or Cary Grant, we’d already be light years ahead. Because they’d play it with more substance. But by the time Melanie Griffith is allowed to do her helium-headed shtick, we are going nowhere fast; it’s as if, rather than come to terms with the real pain of what has happened, the whole cast just went in for a mass lobotomy.
It’s cool, I actually just like any excuse to talk about DePalma.
I certainly agree with you though… Once Melanie Griffith appears it seems like everything that’s happened before is jettisoned.
Yeah. And somewhat cruelly jettisoned.
Willam
Sisters
Blow Out
Body Double
Obsession
Carlito’s Way