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  • Sex Talk with Brian De Palma

    It’s sex month at Premiere.com, and what better way to kick it off than an interview with the director of Redacted and Mission to Mars? OK, we can think of a few better ways too, but even De Palma detractors must admit the man has committed a steamy scene or two to celluloid in his day. “Who can forget his homage to Hitchcock in Dressed to Kill (1980) when the camera pans shortly after the film's opening credits onto Angie Dickenson's crotch as she lustfully masturbates in the steaming shower seconds before she's grabbed from behind by a shadowy male figure?” asks Karl Rozemeyer. And while I think we’re all aware that wasn’t actually Angie Dickenson’s body in the shower scene, the larger point still stands: memorable nudity enlivens even the silliest movie. And the silliest movie I can think of is De Palma’s Body Double.

    The man himself doesn’t seem to be particularly comfortable discussing the subject. Favorite sex scene in a movie?

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  • George Romero Runs the Voodoo Down

    Every kid with a taste for horror movies knows that vampires hate garlic, sleep in, and can be dispatched with a wooden stake through the heart. Also that werewolves are allergic to full moons and silver bullets. But these basic ground rules were cobbled together from a mix of fictional sources and ancient folklore, whereas George Romero, starting with Night of the Living Dead and then with its sequel Dawn of the Dead, actually created a new, long-lasting set of basics for a breed of movie monster. There had been zombies in movies before, but they tended to be dullish, pop-eyed stranglers whose strings were being manipulated by the local voodoo master. Now, thanks to Romero, everybody knows that zombies are carniverous and can only be taken out with a brain-pulverizing blow to the head. Now Romero is getting proprietorial about it. In his new Diary of the Dead, a student crew filming a mummy movie argues over whether a mummy could run; the director is clearly on the side of the guy who says that "dead things" can't move fast because "their ankles would snap." Speaking to the BBC as his movie arrives in Britian, Romero acknowledges that there is a trend build to update his concept by flooding theaters with fast zombies, and he ain't having it.

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  • Forgotten Films: "Demon Lover Diary" (1980)

    With George Romero's Diary of the Dead, the "horror movie as pseudo-home video artifact" category that already includes The Blair Witch Project and Cloverfield (and, in a way, Brian De Palma's Redacted) is an official subgenre, one that has been handled by spirited amateurs, old masters, and slick, gimmick-seeking pros. Yet the unacknowledged granddaddy of this type of film may be an actual documentary that, despite having developed a healthy cult status from festival appearances, has never been legally distributed or released on video. It's the 1980 Demon Lover Diary, a record of the making of a no-budget fright flick in the mid-1970s. That movie was released in 1976 and alternately known as The Devil Master and The Demon Lover. (Not to be confused with the 2002 Olivier Assayas film demonlover or the 1987 Scott Valentine vehicle My Demon Lover, though now that we mention it, does anybody know what ever happened to that movie's lead actress, Michele Little? She was cute as a bug's ear.) The documentary was shot by Joel DeMott, the girlfriend of Jeff Kreines, who had been hired to work on the horror picture as cinematographer. (DeMott and Kreines were both MIT grad students who had studied with documentarian Richard Leacock.)

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  • Review: Diary of the Dead

     

    Diary of the Dead is the latest in George Romero's now forty-year-old "[Noun] of the Dead" franchise. It's back-to-basics in tone and production, after 2005's massive Land of the Dead. It would be easy to accuse Romero of trend-hopping, based on the film's "found footage" presentation and release in proximity to Cloverfield and Brian De Palma's Redacted. But the film parts from the recent surge of Blair Witch-ian diegesis by opening with narration: a character explaining that she's edited and produced the film you're about to watch with the intent not just to record but to frighten. Instead of coming off as pretentiously meta, this contextualizing helps you suspend your disbelief. Romero makes the most of that suspension, and the result is a strange movie that succeeds far more often than it fails.

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  • Simple Simon

    If there's one thing we here at the Screengrab love more than movies, it's crazy right-wing cranks.  Luckily, when Roger L. Simon is around, we don't have to pick just one.  Simon, who prior to co-founding doomed conservative clearinghouse Pajamas Media could boast as his greatest accomplishment having penned Scenes from a Mall, a film which brought us the delightful vision of Woody Allen going down on Bette Midler in a movie theater, has recently been on a tear about how those traitorous dogs in Hollywood, a town which apparently has corrupted everyone who sojourns there except himself, Burt Prelutsky, and Stephen Baldwin, are so alienated from real Americans that they keep making anti-war movies even though they lose money doing so.  His first installment in what is shaping up to be an interminable series on the subject revealed the reason the damn dirty hippies of Tinseltown keep making these hateful anti-American screen screeds:  it's because if you are a Hollywood liberal, you are, de facto, a "miserable self-serving bastard".  He also makes the curious argument that people like Brian DePalma, director of Redacted, are making movies that "validate the orthodoxy", which seems to go against his point that these movies are economic failures due to the widespread support of the war displayed by most red-blooded Americans.  Simon follows up that one with a claim that since Hollywood liberals know nothing of what they speak when it comes to war (an assessment  with which Oliver Stone might take issue), their films are the "addled product of unacknowledged moral confusion"; he then settles back and says that since the surge is working so well, he's beginning what may be a very long wait for the Iraq War version of Casablanca.  His latest on the subversive commie rats who lurk in the Hollywood hills is a hatchet job on Paul Haggis, who he first suspected of anti-American treachery when he saw Crash -- after all, Simon argues, he's lived in L.A. for years and hardly ever saw any racism, so there must not be any.  Simon goes on to savage In the Valley of Elah, and 'explains' the deviltry of this life-hating scum by noting that, like Sean Penn, he is under the sway of that charismatic Stalinist cult leader Dennis Kucinich.  He knows it's true, because he read it on Wikipedia!  Keep up the great work, Roger.


  • Today in the Hooksexup Film Lounge: Margot at the Wedding, Southland Tales, Beowulf, Redacted, The Life of Reilly, Bob Balaban, Close Encounters DVD

    Margot at the Wedding: "Somehow plays more like curdled Rohmer than straight Bergman, thanks to Baumbach's precise wit and penchant for droll exaggeration."

    Southland Tales: "A great high-concept movie can be summed up in a single sentence, and Southland Tales is too confused to be summed up in two hours and twenty minutes."

    Beowulf: "The real star of Beowulf is the technology on display."

    Redacted: "It's a formally ambitious approach to a dramatically powerful subject, which makes it all the more disappointing that nothing involving the characters seems even remotely believable."

    Close Encounters of the Third Kind: Thirtieth Anniversary Edition: "Close Encounters foreshadows the movies Spielberg would make in the coming years. It's showy. . . it's far from intellectually challenging, and it's as sentimental as a high-school yearbook."

    Q&A: Bob Balaban: "I directed My Boyfriend's Back, in which a teenage boy becomes a zombie and eats some of his classmates, and Parents, in which Randy Quaid and Mary Beth Hurt cannibalize people for meat. I don't know as I'd really call it a theme, though."


  • Box-Office Quagmire

    Remember fifteen minutes ago, when people were complaining that nobody was making movies about Iraq? Well, while you were blinking, the octoplexes got overstuffed with movies about Iraq. The only problem is that, as A. O. Scott points out, nobody's going to see them. The films that've opened this past year — In the Valley of Elah, Rendition, The Kingdom, The Situation — have been greeted with "soft box office returns." Similar commercial fates may await the string of films currently lined up on the runway, which include Brian De Palma's Redacted and Robert Redford's Lions for Lambs, as well as Grace Is Gone, an indie tearjerker starring John Cusack as a father of two who is widowed by the war, and the adaptation of Khaled Hosseini’s best-seller The Kite Runner, set in Afghanistan during the reign of the Taliban. (As Kim Masters recently wrote in Slate, Lions for Lambs also has its own special problems: it stands to be the next exploding boxcar in the continuing train wreck of Tom Cruise's career.) For all the automatic clucking about how American audiences don't really want to see movies about real problems, some of the recent Iraq movies make it clear that there's a built-in problem in trying to make drama out of an ongoing national trauma. As Scott puts it: "What is missing in nearly every case is a sense of catharsis or illumination. This is hardly the fault of the filmmakers. Disorientation, ambivalence, a lack of clarity — these are surely part of the collective experience they are trying to examine. How can you bring an individual story to a satisfying conclusion when nobody has any idea what the end of the larger story will look like?" — Phil Nugent
  • Redacted Redacted

    Brian De Palma has always been fascinated by contrasting points of view, and by the way the media frames and filters complex events to serve its own purposes. His new film, Redacted, which got the sixty-seven-year-old director his first invitation to the New York Film Festival, is based on an actual atrocity committed by American soldiers in Iraq; it tells its story through mock-documentary footage, YouTube and video blog postings, and one soldier's video diary. It's clearly a staged and acted film; De Palma isn't out to fool anybody, though there have still been reports of walkouts during a couple of key, horrific moments. But the movie ends with a brief montage of actual photos of carnage from Iraq, photos that look like scenes that have come before them, yet are so much worse that they put the whole film into perspective.

    De Palma has great faith in the power of images to change the world; after Redacted won him the Silver Lion for best director at the Venice Film Festival, he confidently told reporters that "The pictures are what will stop the war," and he's chastised the media for not showing Americans the full awfulness of what has been unleashed against the Iraqi people. So it's an oddly apropriate sick joke — a De Palma-esque joke — that Redacted itself is being, as its director says, redacted: the movie's producers are insisting on "protecting" the anonymity of the dead and wounded in the photos by placing black bars across their faces, as if they were in a vintage stag film. De Palma has been using the bully pulpit of the NYFF stage to complain about this, and even to publicly argue with his backers. Blogger and critic Jurgen Fauth has posted video of a recent Q&A here. — Phil Nugent