Rank Brian DePalma's Films

Pacino's narration is one of the more successful of the last few decades. Just the right weary pitch.

eh, maybe - I think his dry spell didn't really end til "Boogie Nights" (which is also pre-Soderbergh)

apparently guzman recently moved near my dad's rural vermont town and adopted a bunch of third world orphans - so they cross paths at the price chopper; my dad channeling his inner aging hippy say something like hey man, i like you and i like what you're doin' you're allll right!

no word yet on guzman's reply. (story relaying interrupted by me and my sister's uncontrollable laughter).

The Fury, however, is not.

How odd. The Fury IS my favorite movie ever. Or close enough, at any rate.

Has de Palma commented on why he stopped working with d.p. Stephen Burum after eight films? I see Burum is almost 67, and his last credit is a Lindsay Lohan vehicle.

The Fury has one of John Cassavetes' best performances -- he's the actor/fraud of Rosemary's Baby 10 years after Damian exacted his revenge.

Not that I'm doubting your commitment toward embracing the light here, but what exactly constitutes cake in this context?

I was thinking of the Hitchcock quote "Some films are slices of life, mine are slices of cake." (Let's assume he was being disingenuously modest, as I generally find more life in him than in, say, Kazan.)

And it killed my TV set!!!

(Sorry Eric ... I wish one of my bourgeois faves, like Babette's Feat, on you and Armond White for this one.)

I read it in college and I need to do it again.

“anybody who can’t see the wit and impressive morality of The Fury really has no business in this profession, and I absolutely do believe that anybody who can’t see it in The Fury doesn’t really like movies.”

-Armond White (ok, he is completely kerrraaazy sometimes)

I hafta say I find Andrew Stevens kinda repulsive, even before he starts to speak (and while polevaulting).

What's most intriguing about The Fury is that most of the 'horror scenes' are strangely funny (tho I didn't laugh once), and the 'comedy scenes' are vaguely horrific (Mother Nuckells).

Also relieved to see novelist/adapter John Farris never wrote another movie.

Liking Carlito's Way doesn't really impress me as it is the least litmus test-y of De Palma's better films in that it doesn't require people to get over their hangups about the Hitchcock riffs, his frequently campy sensibilities (I'm with you on the comedy/horror crossover, but I consider it a strength in the film) or his aggressive, almost embarrassing disdain of narrative reality. The only thing that a viewer of Carlito's Way has to get over to enjoy is Penelope Ann Miller. And it's never been all that difficult for male viewers to shrug off female actors, so there it is.

I can shrug off the disliking of The Fury because it is pretty hardcore, but paired with dislike for Dressed to Kill? That indicates to me a fundamental split in how we view films.

If only other critics were right as interestingly as Armond is wrong.

xpost

Actually, none of the Hitchcock riffs in Dressed to Kill pissed me off as much as the hanging-by-the-arm rooftop thing w/ Douglas and Stevens near the end of The Fury.

I'd be with you on the "fundamental split" thing -- if I though BdP was fundamental. There's something about his sensibility -- and the mining of horror tropes in general -- that I consider adolescent at the core, and that just doesn't connect with me much at my *cough* time of life, if it ever did. (Admittedly this jones might be fully served by broad comedy, 1915-65, in my case.) Maybe I found Femme Fatale to be mature and smart (yet still playful) cuz de Palma made it at 60.

(congrats on the double-adulthood move, Most Worthy Adversary ... and don't put the max % in, you'll never get to the TIFF)

I count at least three of the stutter zooms in my memory. They do seem like the farmer thing in The Birds, but the rhythm is definitely different. Plus, I thought Hitchcock only did that in case the censors got uptight about the closest shot of the pecked-out eyes.