Tracking shots. Split screens. Eighteen-minute Steadicam sequences. Visually spectacular set pieces. All are part of the Brian De Palma canon, but absent from a new, comprehensive look at his career. “De Palma,” a love letter to the director from filmmakers Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow, makes up for its lack of visual pyrotechnics with De Palma’s storytelling prowess.
“Many of movies were considered great disasters at the time,” says the director of “Phantom of the Paradise,” “Dressed to Kill” and “Body Double.” Now, decades after his commercial peak, many of De Palma’s films are considered classics. This new talking head documentary chronicles them all, warts and all.
From his early days as an indie filmmaker, working in the shadow of better known friends like Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola, to his critically reviled (“You are always being criticized against the fashion of the day,” he says.) but commercially successful period to a brief era when reviews and audiences lined up in tandem, he holds nothing back.
We learn how the director kicked “Scarface” screenwriter Oliver Stone off the set for talking to the actors, that in “The Untouchables” Robert De Niro wore the same kind of silk underwear Al Capone wore (“You never saw it but it was there,” says De Palma.) and how the studio loved the controversial “Body Double” “until they saw it.”
There’s more, told in De Palma’s bemused, colourful way—“I love photographing women,” he admits. “I’m fascinated by the way them move.”—but the real meat of the doc comes when he auteur talks about being a square peg trying to fit into Hollywood’s round hole. “The values of the system are the opposite of what goes into making good original movies,” he says.
“De Palma” is a simple film about a complex subject. “The thing about making movies is every mistake is right up there on the screen,” he says. “Everything you didn’t solve. Every shortcut you made. You will look at it for the rest of your life. It’s like a record of the things you didn’t finish.” It’s a master’s class not just in De Palma’s life and career, but also in how movies were made in the latter half of the twentieth century.
People have been asking me about this movie for months but they haven’t been asking, ‘Is it good?, they’ve been asking me why anyone would remake the 1976 classic.
After seeing it, I’m not sure.
The new version is a perfectly serviceable adaptation of Stephen King’s famous book but it doesn’t have the vulnerability or frailty that made Sissy Spacek so memorable in the title role.
The third adaptation of Stephen King’s 1974 novel stars Chloë Grace Moretz as Maine high school outcast Carrie White, a lonely girl teased by classmates and abused by her deeply religious mother (Julianne Moore). Despite the best efforts of gym teacher Miss Desjardin (Judy Greer) to help Carrie fit in, a clique of mean girls led by Chris (Portia Doubleday) make it their mission to ensure that Carrie has a rough time at school. After being humiliated at her senior prom—pig’s blood will really ruin a taffeta dress apparently—she unleashes a terrible telekinetic vengeance on those who wronged her.
Director Kimberly ‘Boys Don’t Cry’ Pierce has been more or less faithful to the flow of the book and Brian De Palma’s movie, but there are differences.
Where Spacek was a true outsider, an abused, naïve girl, Moretz plays her with a bit more pluck and I’m not sure it services the character. Carrie 2.0 still has a sullen look for the ages but she has more backbone than her predecessor and for me that eroded some of the tragedy of the story. Both are Ugly Ducklings transformed into swans and then monsters, unwitting and undeserving victims of horrible abuse, but Spacek’s take on the character brought more vulnerability to the character and that, for me, better underlined her deeply sad story.
Moretz’s best scene happens before the bloody revenge rampage. There is a sweetness to her in the prom scenes (pre pig’s blood) that makes the anticipation of what is to come all the more tense. Too bad the rest of the movie doesn’t hold that tension. Also a mother and daughter knife battle made me shift to the front of my seat mostly because it felt more organic and less computer generated than some of the other displays of Carrie’s mad telekinetic skillz. It felt dangerous in a way that the rest of the violence didn’t.
Despite a slower-than-necessary pace, I liked Julianne Moore’s head thumping self-punishment scenes and Portia Doubleday’s take on the lead mean girl who takes just a bit too much delight in tormenting Carrie.
“Carrie” works in those moments, but generally there’s too much CGI—the floating books are silly—and since when can Carrie fly?
This weekend actress Chloë Grace Moretz will recreate one of the most famous sequences from 1970s cinema.
Years after the release of the 1976 Brian De Palma-directed Carrie, the movie’s impact was summed up by Esquire who wrote, “Like any top-tier, truly unforgettable scene in cinema [it’s] so well-known that you don’t even have to see it to know it.”
The image of the teenaged Carrie (Sissy Spacek), the victim of a cruel practical joke, dressed in her best Prom Queen outfit, wide eyed as pig’s blood covers her, dripping from the fake jewels on her tiara, has been referenced in everything from the sitcom Roseanne—daughter Darlene says the only way she would go to the prom is if she was the one sitting in the rafters with a bucket of pig’s blood—to the X-Files, Mystery Science Theater 3000, Scream, Gilmore Girls and even Veronica Mars.
The gore soaked scene also provided the inspiration for a sequel called The Rage: Carrie 2. In this unintentionally funny b-movie Rachel (Emily Bergl) is another high-schooler with the ability to make objects fly and explode with her mind. “Do not attempt to sit through this movie without a hefty supply of psychopharmaceutical drugs,” warned one critic.
Marginally better was Carrie, a 2002 television film meant to serve as a pilot for a proposed series. But that involved making some sweeping changes to the plot, including having Carrie survive the high school carnage and final run-in with her unstable mother. Bad reviews and poor ratings doomed this to the DVD delete bins.
From the screen to the stage Carrie provided the source material for an ill-conceived 1988 Broadway musical and several spoofs, including Scarrie! The Musical and Carrie’s Facts of Life, a mash-up of Stephen King’s story and the sitcom The Facts of Life.
All singing, all dancing versions of Carrie’s humiliation aside, the original film remains a horror touchstone, but don’t expect the new remake to be a carbon copy.
“The script is totally different from the [original],” Moretz told ET OnLine. “It’s more like the book. It’s a more Black Swan version – it messes with your mind.”
One thing is for sure, there will be blood—pig’s blood. Judy Greer, who plays Miss Desjardin in the new film, says the prom scene is “amazeballs,” adding, “It’s really totally jarring and creepy but also in a strange way gorgeous.”
