Sean Witzke

supervillain:

images from Sisters (1972), directed by Brian De Palma.

I think for De Palma humanity is ultimately about weakness, which I think is a common element in the places he likes to play, which are thrillers and dark comedies and the types of stories he likes to tell. Which is why The Untouchables, as well written and well directed as it is, is shit. De Palma doesn’t really buy the idea of heroic characters who do things for pure reasons, his best characters are driven, obsessed, taken to lashing out at the wrong person, taken to underestimating a situation, to committing to a principle long enough to run their lives. Over and over it forms a complete view of the world. Or maybe the types of filmmaking he wants to do eventually lead to these people — impotent heroes, objectified women, all relationships doomed, all families dysfuctional, all caprices headed towards death. The world is a terrifying place in this films, and you are forced to wonder if the weakness is inevitable or forced upon these people. Hitchcock and Welles and Godard , the directors De Palma learned the most from, they make a clear choice in each film. Whether or not these people have agency within their films. But with De Palma the characters always have agency, and the world always seems to have a divine hand making everything go wrong. Like coincidence, it only works both ways when things are going wrong, and things going wrong is the thing De Palma does best.

Over at the Factual Opinion, there is a new episode of Travis Bickle on the Riviera. This one is all about Iron Man 3, but we spend a whole lot of time talking about space food, Shane Black, and uh… comics? PLEEEEEEZE CHECK IT OUT.

This is as short a summation of the reason I am currently watching all the De Palma movies, from last night. Here’s the tag, only have Carrie, Dressed to Kill, and Blow Out left.

supervillain:

Obsession (1976), directed by Brian De Palma.

This kind of s-curve shot is so beautiful and so much what De Palma is about, where you as a viewer are both following the figure in the foreground and what their eyes are following. De Palma’s work with splitscreen and diopter focus shots do the same thing, but visually he is always leading you to look at two things at once, and allowing you the space to understand both of them, his compositions manage to be simple and direct but complex in their effect. What I love about the best comics artists is so much of what I love about Brian De Palma, and I think that comics people aren’t aware of the tools he uses for these effects are the same.

This week on the TRAVIS BICKLE ON THE RIVIERA movie podcast, Tucker Stone and I talk about William Friedkin’s Sorcerer, The Lords of Salem, Pain & Gain, The Place Beyond the Pines, and Slayground. After last weeks unexpected skip week, we’re back in peak form - Tucker talks about seeing Friedkin speak live, and I talk about naked elderly people, it’s a good one.

PLZ CHECK IT OUT.

supervillain:

Mission: Impossible (1996), directed by Brian De Palma.

De Palma does this amazing thing where he does the Kurosawa show-the-plan-first-in-minature but he reverses it to make it work in a spy movie where they misdirect you by telling you all the obstacles they are about to run through, but he does it by having detailed a third element buried in the telling, where the guy who works at the computer is a pawn in the narrative. And he gets beaten up as the story moves forward, just to show how callous the heroes are. It’s all games, and Hunt actually describes it as a game first. I really love how smart/aware it is for a movie that doesn’t need to be anything but set pieces.

The movie was regarded, at release, as hackwork. Set pieces strung together by multiple writers and directed by a technician, because of the massive massive push behind it at the time. But it functions at such a high level not only as a spy story - full of reversals, nasty violence, huge scope, intimate details, personal stakes, heists, and of course flashy set pieces - but also as a De Palma movie. His themes of surveillance,  misinformation, close-up violence, betrayal, visually literalizing narrative complexity, all of them wrapped around the structure of a massive summer blockbuster. The other Mission Impossible movies (all of which I do love in various ways) are Cruise doing Bond, but Mission Impossible is De Palma figuring out how to do his best tricks for the bleachers. 

supervillain:

The Fury (1978), directed by Brian De Palma.

Another cap from the night I decided “let’s obsess over The Fury forever”. It’s five or so great movies all in service of a specific story - there’s a Carrie by way of Mean Girls high school movie, a psychic warfare movie that paves the way for Scanners, a coming of age X-Men type thing, a love story turned sour, a cat and mouse spy thriller, and a blood and thunder big budget effects movie. It has these amazing performances and one really bad one that hinges too much on it, and it uses it’s locations in a smart, thoroughly engaging way few movies do.

But it is also a De Palma movie, stacked deep in technical brilliance, set pieces, visual magic tricks, violence that takes me aback even today, and the most venal psychic sequences possible. What De Palma does with it… it kind of lives in the space where the stars are old men battling using teenagers as weapons, and he picked exactly the right guys to play the old men. Kirk Douglas and John Cassavettes are at the cusp of aging out of their star status - and this movie not doing well actually helped that happen. Because it’s them, it adds so much weight to a movie that already does so much - and the way that Douglas has no ego about how he appears onscreen, it totals up to be one of De Palma’s best.

Every time I see it I admire it more. I think he has movies that hit me closer and that are better stories, but this one is special.

Rare photograph of Tucker Stone and Sean Witzke together. Stone (back left), Witzke (right), and that creepy old man they stole from a nursing home (front center).

I still don’t know where we left that old guy.

ANYWAY new episode of Travis Bickle on the Riviera, Tucker Stone and I talk about The Shield, Delocated, Roman Polanski’s Cul De Sac, Powell and Pressburger’s The Small Back Room, David Denby, the Evil Dead remake, and Brian De Palma. CHECK IT OUT.

supervillain:

1. Cul De Sac (1966), directed by Roman Polanski

2. The Hidden Fortress (1958), directed by Akira Kurosawa

Both of these movies start off with enormous amounts of information, all delivered clearly, and visually brand new. You are thrown into the deep end and the amount of info you are shown lets you dig out before you feel lost. Just by watching, you do the work, they are a clinic on how stories should be told visually.