You don’t have to overtax the Google machine to find negative comments about being on set with Steven Spielberg. Type in “working with Steven Spielberg” and in 0.57 seconds 20,900,000 results appear, including an article where Shia LaBeouf rants, “He’s less a director than he is a f—ing company.”
LaBeouf’s resume is dotted with Spielberg-produced or -directed films like Disturbia, Transformers, Eagle Eye and, most famously, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, but if Spielberg ever does the same search it’s unlikely they’ll ever pair up again. “You get there, and you realize you’re not meeting the Spielberg you dream of,” LaBeouf told Variety. “You’re meeting a different Spielberg, who is in a different stage in his career.”
But that’s pretty much it for the negativity. There’s a story about Crispin Glover suing Spielberg for using his likeness in Back to the Future Part II and the critical drone that his films are overly sentimental, but primarily it’s LaBeouf against Spielberg and the world. Most of his other co-workers have nothing but praise for the filmmaker Empire magazine ranked as the greatest film director of all time.
This weekend he returns to theatres with Ready Player One, a sci-fi film that brings a virtual reality world called the OASIS to vivid life. Star Tye Sheridan calls the director a great and passionate collaborator who makes everyone feel equal on set. Co-star Ralph Ineson calls Spielberg “one of the most iconic figures of the last 100 years,” adding that it was difficult to takes notes from him on set. “When he is speaking to you your mind vaguely goes blank the first few times because your internal monologue just goes, ‘My god, Steven Spielberg is giving me a note.’ And then you realize you haven’t actually heard the note.”
All directors give suggestions on set, but it seems it’s the way Spielberg speaks to his actors that sets him apart.
Ed Burns remembers making a mess of several takes on the set of Saving Private Ryan to the point where Tom Hanks said to him, “I’ve seen you act before, and this isn’t acting.” Afraid he would be replaced, he got nervous and continued to blow take after take but Spielberg didn’t offer guidance. Two weeks passed. The cast started laying bets on who would be fired first.
Turns out, no one was fired and Burns learned a lesson he would later take into his own directorial efforts like Sidewalks of New York. The actor reports that Spielberg said, “I like to give my actors three takes to figure it out. If I step in after the first take and give you a note, especially with young actors, you’ll hear me rather than your own voice.”
Burns calls the experience “a life changer” adding it taught him that being a director is “about knowing when to give direction.”
The superstar director says the listening lesson was learned early in life. “From a very young age my parents taught me probably the most valuable lesson of my life: Sometimes it’s better not to talk, but to listen.”
There’s someone else Spielberg keeps in mind when making a film. “I always like to think of the audience when I am directing. Because I am the audience.”
In brand crazy Hollywood “Ready Player One,” the new sci fi film from Steven Spielberg, is an everything-old-is-new-again hybrid. Based on the novel of the same name from author Ernest Cline it’s not a reboot or reimagining of a comic book or old film. It’s an original story that may appeal to folks who say the movies only recycle ideas. At the same time it’s stuffed to the gills with enough pop culture icons to warm the hearts of any nostalgic moviegoer.
It’s 2045 and the world is a mess. Cities are a hodgepodge of dystopian horrors, overcrowded, polluted and corrupt. For the people, whatever joy can be mined from the desolate, depressing life comes from immersing themselves in a virtual reality world called OASIS (Ontologically Anthropocentric Sensory Immersive Simulation). “Except for eating, sleeping and bathroom breaks,” says Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan), “everyone does everything in the OASIS.” Based on 1980s movies, pop culture and videogames, it’s a technological escape from the all-too-real societal ills that make life miserable. “These days reality,” Wade says, “is a bummer.”
When OASIS creator James Halliday (Mark Rylance) died he created a way for Watts and his on-line Gunter pals—egg hunters—to find a way out of their IRL problems. The creator left behind an Easter Egg—if you don’t know that an Easter Egg is a hidden game message or image, give up now—amongst the game’s familiar pop culture characters. Whoever finds the three keys that unlock the Easter Egg will inherit the OASIS empire. Money, power, the whole nine yards. Watts, who lives in a vertical trailer park called The Stacks in Columbus, Ohio, along with his digital team the High Five, work to navigate the game and change their lives. In a race against time, they must beat the Sixers, an army of gamers employed by evil corporation Innovative Online Industries, in a war for control of the future.
Think your kids spend too much time playing video games? Get a load of Wade, Art3mis (Olivia Cooke), Aech (Lena Waithe), Daito (Win Morisaki) and Shoto (Philip Zhao). This crowd are best friends, although for most of the movie they have never met on terra ferma. They spend all their time on line, forming friendships, falling in love and eventually fighting for their real life lives.
“Ready Player One” takes off like a rocket. There’s a lot of set-up and Spielberg finds a way to impart information and keep it lively. He fills the screen with an industrial view of the future, contrasting Wade’s dour real life with his vivid on line adventures, visually developing the push and pull between reality and virtual reality that fuels the film’s story. A wild car race, featuring Freddy Krueger, King Kong and the Batmobile, establishes the OASIS in a way that the minutes of exposition surrounding it never could. It also establishes the film’s love of spectacle over story.
Spielberg dives deep into the VR world, intoxicated by the endless possibilities of mixing-and-matching pop culture iconography with an adventure story. When Wade says, “The limit of reality is your own imagination,” he could very well be talking to the director. The result is a frenetic film that is fun for a while but the whimsy soon gets bogged down with feverish detail. It’s a little too long, there’s too much exposition, too many twists for a story that can be boiled down to the notion that we should spend more time in the real world.
A tribute to “The Shining” is often quite fun and there are moments of levity but it isn’t about anything other than the adventure. The commentary on our own virtual lives are never expanded upon. Of a spark of on-line love between Art3mis and Wade, who hadn’t yet met outside OASIS, Art3mis says, “You only see what I want you to see. You don’t know me.” It’s a good starting point for a conversation about what happens when avatars become real people but instead we get more exposition.
“Ready Player One” is pure escapism that begs the question, Will there ever be a video game movie that really works? The function of storytelling is vastly different between videogames and film and yet filmmakers try for a amalgam, the best of both worlds. What we usually end up with is what Steven Spielberg finds in his treatment of “Ready Player One,” a film that honours the spirit of the games at the expense of great storytelling.
Earlier this week Northern Michigan’s Lake Superior State University added the term “fake news” to its 43rd annual List of Words Banished from the Queen’s English for Misuse, Overuse and General Uselessness. According to dictionary.com those two toxic words, popularized by Donald Trump and adopted by, well, almost everyone, denote “false news stories, often of a sensational nature, created to be widely shared online for the purpose of generating ad revenue via web traffic or discrediting a public figure, political movement, company, etc.”
A new film, The Post, is a time capsule back to a time before exhortations of “fake news” created an atmosphere where the press is perceived as an enemy rather than the voice of the people.
Meryl Streep plays Katharine Graham, the first female publisher of a major American newspaper. With the paper bordering on insolvency she has tough decisions to make.
When the New York Times breaks the story of a massive cover-up and is shut down by the Nixon White House, hardnosed editor Ben Bradlee (Tom Hanks) sees an opportunity to scoop the Times and make a splash. “Are any of you tired of reading the news,” he asks his staff, “instead of reporting on it?” Trouble is, the story involves several people close to Graham, most notably former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara (Bruce Greenwood), who prolonged the Vietnam War despite knowing it was a no-win situation.
Graham must make the decision to publish or not. Running the so-called Pentagon Papers would expose years of government secrets, make an enemy of President Nixon and could scare off the investors she’s been courting. Not reporting could endanger young the Americans who were still being drafted and sent to fight an unwinnable war. “The only way to assert the right to publish is to publish,” argues Bradley.
The Post is a historical tale that feels as timely as any front-page story in today’s paper. A high-stakes look at journalism before the age of fake news, it reminds us of the importance of objective, investigative reporting in an era of secrecy, lies, and leaks. It’s an ‘if you don’t know your past, you don’t know your future” message movie that shines a light on a watershed but mostly forgotten slice of our past.
The Pentagon Papers were a significant turning point in our recent history. They were proof of a credibility gap between what politicians say and what they are doing. For Bradlee, publishing these documents sent a message that the White House had no influence on what stories made the front page and which don’t. “The press must serve the governed not the governors.”
Combined, all these elements add up to a movie that aims to make a statement while avoiding preaching to its audience. Director Steven Spielberg and stars Hanks and Streep are entertainers first and foremost, and they do entertain here, but they also portray a period whose reverberations in the time of fake news are being felt stronger than ever.
The air of paranoia that hung over All the President’s Men, another movie centered on the investigative reporting of The Washington Post, is missing in The Post. Instead, Spielberg film’s is a fist-pump-in-the-air look at the integrity and importance of a free press. It’s a little heavy-handed but these are heavy-handed times.
The air of paranoia that hung over “All the President’s Men,” another movie centered on the investigative reporting of The Washington Post, is noticeably missing in “The Post.” Instead, the new Steven Spielberg film is a fist-pump-in-the-air look at the integrity and importance of a free press. It’s a little heavy-handed but these are heavy-handed times.
Meryl Streep plays Katharine Graham, the first female publisher of a major American newspaper. The socialite inherited The Washington Post following her husband Phil Graham’s death in 1963. “Kate throws a great party but she’s only here because her husband died,” harrumphs board member Arthur Parsons (Bradley Whitford). With the paper bordering on insolvency she has tough decisions to make.
Meanwhile hardnosed editor Ben Bradlee (Tom Hanks) is looking for a story that will help the paper break out of its local market and go national. “Are any of you tired of reading the news,” he asks his staff, “instead of reporting on it?”
When the New York Times breaks the story of a massive cover-up and is shut down by the Nixon White House, Bradlee sees an opportunity to scoop the Times and make a splash. Trouble is, the story involves several people close to Graham, most notably former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara (Bruce Greenwood), who prolonged the Vietnam War despite knowing it was a no-win situation.
Graham must make the decision to publish or not. Running the so-called Pentagon Papers would expose years of government secrets, make an enemy of President Nixon and could scare off the investors she’s been courting. Not reporting could endanger young the Americans who were still being drafted and sent to fight an unwinnable war. “The only way to assert the right to publish is to publish,” argues Bradley.
No spoilers here, but the historical record shows that bombshell revelations were made and today The Washington Post is still a going concern.
“The Post” is a historical tale that feels as timely as any front-page story in today’s paper. A high-stakes look at journalism before the age of fake news, it reminds us of the importance of objective, investigative reporting in an era of secrecy, lies, and leaks. It’s a ‘if you don’t know your past, you don’t know your future” message movie that shines a light on a watershed but mostly forgotten slice of our past.
The Pentagon Papers were a significant turning point in our recent history. They were proof of a credibility gap between what politicians say and what they are doing. For Bradlee, publishing these documents sent a message that the White House had no influence on what stories made the front page and which don’t. “The press must serve the governed not the governors.”
Hanks and Streep, the two most trusted people in Hollywood, are solid as the two most trusted people in Washington.
As Graham, Streep is a woman who transcends the attitudes of her male advisors to do the right thing regardless of the repercussions. It’s a slow burn performance as she slowly sheds the weight of her socialite upbringing to embrace an outgoing and progressive point of view. As she grapples with publishing and possibly losing everything versus playing it safe, she becomes one of the film’s few characters with an arc.
Hanks plays Bradlee with bluster. As a noted collector of old school typewriters in real life, Hanks must have relished the chance to surround himself with the clickety-clack soundtrack of a newsroom in full tilt boogie. He is the movie’s reckless moral code, barking orders and making larger-than-life pronouncements on the importance of a free press. Hanks is at the Spencer Tracey stage of his career, an actor who brings with him an aura of decency and strength; the epitome of American exceptionalism made flesh. Despite the character being one-note Hanks breathes life into him, even if only as a spokesperson for the power of the first amendment.
“The Post” is propped up by good supporting performances, although fine actors like Sarah Paulson and Tracy Letts are stranded in roles that don’t give them much to do. Bob Odenkirk as Ben Bagdikian, one of the architects of the plan to publish the Pentagon Papers, fares better in one of the handful of roles expanded to full bloom.
The expected Spielberg touches are there as well. The Washington Post building shakes as the massive printing presses roar to life, a no-so-subtle metaphor of the upset the Pentagon Papers are about to cause in Washington.
Combined, all the elements add up to a movie that aims to make a statement while avoiding preaching to its audience. Spielberg, Hanks and Streep are entertainers first and foremost, and they do entertain here, but they also shine a light on a historical era whose reverberations are being felt today stronger than ever.
Baby Driver: Although it contains more music than most tuneful of movies “Baby Driver,” the new film from director Edgar Wright, isn’t a musical in the “West Side Story,” “Sound of Music” sense. Wallpapered with 35 rock ‘n roll songs on the soundtrack it’s a hard driving heist flick that can best be called an action musical.
The Big Sick: Even when “The Big Sick” is making jokes about terrorism and the “X-Files” it is all heart, a crowd-pleaser that still feels personal and intimate.
Call Me By Your Name: This is a movie of small details that speak to larger truths. Director Luca Guadagnino keeps the story simple relying on the minutiae to add depth and beauty to the story. The idyllic countryside, the quaint town, the music of the Psychedelic Furs and the languid pace of a long Italian summer combine to create the sensual backdrop against which the romance between the two blossoms. Guadagnino’s camera captures it all, avoiding the pitfalls of melodrama to present a story that is pure emotion. It feels real and raw, haunted by the ghosts of loves gone by.
Darkest Hour: This is a historical drama with all the trappings of “Masterpiece Theatre.” You can expect photography, costumes and period details are sumptuous. What you may not expect is the light-hearted tone of much of the goings on. While this isn’t “Carry On Churchill,” it has a lighter touch that might be expected. Gary Oldman, not an actor known for his comedic flourishes, embraces the sly humour. When Churchill becomes Prime Minister his wife, Clementine (Kristin Scott Thomas) makes an impassioned speech about the importance of the work he is about to take on. He raises a glass and, cutting through the emotion of the moment, says, “Here’s to not buggering it up!” It shows a side of Churchill not often revealed in wartime biopics.
The Disaster Artist: The key to pulling off “The Disaster Artist” is not recreating “The Room” beat for beat, although they do that, it’s actually about treating Wiseau as a person and not an object of fun. He’s an outrageous character and Franco commits to it 100%. From the marble-mouthed speech pattern that’s part Valley Girl and part Beaker from The Muppets to the wild clothes and stringy hair, he’s equal parts creepy and lovable but underneath his bravado are real human frailties. Depending on your point of view he’s either delusional or aspirational but in Franco’s hands he’s never also never less than memorable. It’s a broad, strange performance but it may also be one of the actor’s best.
Dunkirk: This is an intense movie but it is not an overly emotional one. The cumulative effect of the vivid images and sounds will stir the soul but despite great performances the movie doesn’t necessarily make you feel for one character or another. Instead its strength is in how it displays the overwhelming sense of scope of the Dunkirk mission. With 400,000 men on the ground with more in the air and at sea, the sheer scope of the operation overpowers individuality, turning the focus on the collective. Director Christopher Nolan’s sweeping camera takes it all in, epic and intimate moments alike.
The Florida Project: This is, hands down, one of the best films of the year. Low-budget and naturalistic, it packs more punch than any superhero. Director Sean Baker defies expectations. He’s made a film about kids for adults that finds joy in rocky places. What could have been a bleak experience or an earnest message movie is brought to vivid life by characters that feel real. It’s a story about poverty that neither celebrates or condemns its characters. Mooney’s exploits are entertaining and yet an air of jeopardy hangs heavy over every minute of the movie. Baker knows that Halley and Moonie’s well being hangs by a thread but he also understands they exist in the real world and never allows their story to fall into cliché.
Get Out: This is the weirdest and most original mainstream psychodrama to come along since “The Babadook.” The basic premise harkens back to the Sidney Poitier’s classic “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.” In that film parents, played by Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn, have their attitudes challenged when their daughter introduces them to her African American fiancé. The uncomfortable situation of meeting in-laws for the first time is universal. It’s the added layers of paranoia and skewered white liberalism that propels the main character’s (Daniel Kaluuya) situation into full-fledged horror. In this setting he is the other, the stranger and as his anxiety grows the social commentary regarding attitudes about race in America grows sharper and more focussed.
Lady Bird: Greta Gerwig’s skilful handling of the story of Lady Bird’s busy senior year works not just because it’s unvarnished and honest in its look at becoming an adult but also, in a large degree, to Saoirse Ronan’s performance. I have long called her ‘Lil Meryl. She’s an actor of unusual depth, a young person (born in 1994) with an old soul. Lady Bird is almost crushed by the weight of uncertainty that greets her with every turn—will her parents divorce, will there be money for school, will Kyle be the boy of her dreams, will she ever make enough cash to repay her parents for her upbringing?—but Ronan keeps her nimble, sidestepping teen ennui with a complicated mix of snappy one liners, hard earned wisdom and a well of emotion. It’s tremendous, Academy Award worthy work.
The Post: Steven Spielberg film is a fist-pump-in-the-air look at the integrity and importance of a free press. It’s a little heavy-handed but these are heavy-handed times. Director Spielberg and stars Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep are entertainers first and foremost, and they do entertain here, but they also shine a light on a historical era whose reverberations are being felt today stronger than ever.
The Shape of Water: A dreamy slice of pure cinema. Director Guillermo del Toro uses the stark Cold War as a canvas to draw warm and vivid portraits of his characters. It’s a beautiful creature feature ripe with romance, thrills and, above all, empathy for everyone. This is the kind of movie that reminds us of why we fell in love with movies in the first place.
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri: The story of a mother’s unconventional war with the world is simple enough, it’s the complexity of the characters that elevates the it to the level of great art.
Wonder Woman: Equal parts Amazon sword and sandal epic, mad scientist flick, war movie and rom com, it’s a crowd pleaser that places the popular character front and centre. As played by Gal Gadot, Diana is charismatic and kick ass, a superhero who is both truly super and heroic. Like Superman she is firmly on the side of good, not a tortured soul à la Batman. Naïve to the ways of the world, she runs headfirst into trouble. Whether she’s throwing a German tank across a battlefield, defying gravity to leap to the top of a bell tower, tolerating Trevor’s occasional mansplaining or deflecting bullets with her indestructible Bracelets of Submission, she proves in scene after scene to be both a formidable warrior and a genuine, profoundly empathic character.
“The BFG,” new kid’s film from Steven Spielberg and based on a much-loved book by Roald Dahl, has so little to do with today’s kids entertainment it feels as though it’s a relic from another time, a singular holdover from a day before Minions gurgled and everything was awesome.
The story begins at a London orphanage. Insomniac Sophie (Ruby Barnhill) is a preteen urchin awake at 3 AM when she hears a noise in the street. Rather than stay safe in her bed the youngster breaks her three rules. “Never get out of the bed. Never go to the window. Never look behind the curtain.” Looking out into the street she locks eyes with a giant (Mark Rylance), a taller-than-tall man with a shock of white hair and hands the size of bulldozer scoops.
Realizing he has been seen, he grabs the girl, taking her back to Giant Country before she can tell anyone about his existence. “There’d be a great rumpus dumpus,” he says, “if you went on the tele-tele bunkum box and the radio squeakers.” Sophie soon gets that he isn’t going to harm her, that he is The BFG, Big Friendly Giant. “You think because I’m a giant that I’m a man eating canny-bal?” Unfortunately in Giant Land the neighbours are less friendly. Goliaths with names like Butcherboy and Gizzardgulper have a taste for young humans, and it soon becomes BFG’s job to keep Sophie safe. When the threat becomes too great this odd couple asks the most powerful person in Britain for help.
“The BFG” is a fantastical story that respects its audience. Spielberg understands not every second of the movie needs to be tweaked to a high, irritating squeal. Instead he immerses the audience in a new world, taking his time to set the scene and introduce the characters. Frenetic it is not. The director goes for a more classic approach, gently and methodically laying out the story. State of the art effects mix-and-mingle with old-fashioned storytelling to produce a beguilingly imaginative tale of friendship, family and flatulence. That’s right, like all great kid’s movies “The BFG” is a gas, including inventive and funny flatulence jokes.
Small children may find the film’s opening moments to be the stuff of bad dreams. The image of BFG’s giant hand coming through the window to snatch Sophie from her bed is memorable. It’s a timeless image of nightmarish terror, but may keep the kids awake at night.
The young’uns, however, will likely love The BFG’s unusual way of speaking. A Giant patois that sounds like Pig Latin filtered through Olde English, it’s addictive so expect the kids to be buckswashling and sqiubbling around the house for weeks to come. I’ve already introduced the term veggiterrible into my daily routine.
Rylance and Barnhill are an engaging pair—for much of the film they are onscreen alone—but the star of “The BFG” is Spielberg whose sense of wonder is infused in every frame.
“We didn’t know what we were getting into,” says Eric Zala.
Zala, along with Chris Stompolos and Jayson Lamb, spent much of the 1980s, their entire teen years, making a shot-for-shot remake of Raiders of the Lost Ark complete with special effects, car chases and melting heads. Ambitious in the extreme, they stopped at nothing to translate their vision to the screen, almost burning down a family home in the pursuit of their DIY dream.
“You can be surprised at what you accomplish,” says Zala. “As adults you have awareness of your limitations, real or perceived. That was one thing we had on our side when we embarked on this as kids. We didn’t know what we were trying to do was impossible. It’s a damn good thing because we would have been scared to death.”
A new documentary called Raiders!: The Story of the Greatest Fan Film Ever Made uses the original home movie as a basis to pick up the story decades after the trio abandoned the project. Zala and Stompolos are front and center to tell the tale of the obsession as they, now as thirty-somethings, try and finish the movie by shooting the one scene that eluded them as children, the exploding airplane sequence.
Stompolos describes seeing Raiders of the Lost Ark for the first time as “lightening in a bottle.”
“For our generation I don’t think we had ever seen such a perfectly crafted, mythologically aligned hero,” he says. “Indiana Jones was human, accessible, smart, macho, academic and flawed and could get hurt. The historical context was interesting and everything was just perfect. This larger than life character just kind of blew my mind. For me I wanted to create a playground for myself and see what it would be like to have those experiences.”
Enthusiasm and chutzpah go a long way, especially when they aren’t tainted by cynicism. The love of Raiders these fans—both as kids and adults—share is pure and respectful and their passion bleeds through the screen.
“We finished it in ‘89 and would have loved for Spielberg to see it but that was a pipe dream,” says Zala. “We certainly didn’t anticipate any kind of fan film movement back then. As far as we knew we were alone in the world. Come to find out, we weren’t. Lots of kids played Indiana Jones in their backyard. We just took it a little further. None of this was supposed to happen, we just did it for ourselves.”
“Eric and I pushed it over the finish line and stayed true to the pure vision,” says Stompolos, “because we simply love the movie.”
For this pair of fan filmmakers Raiders of the Lost Ark isn’t just a childhood fixation. Both have seen it recently, thirty-five years after Zala says it, “split my brain open.”
“It took our breath away,” Stompolos says of his recent viewing. “Even now there is so much detail. We caught so many new things. I can still watch the film and love it. I don’t ever get tired of it. The thing that amazes me to this day is that no matter how many times we’ve seen it, it still has secrets to give.”
In recent years fandom has developed a bad name. Gamergate and the kneejerk reaction to “Ghostbusters” have given being a geek a bad name. “Raiders! The Story Of The Greatest Fan Film Ever Made” harkens back to a pure time before twitter trolls gave nerd culture a black eye.
The story begins in 1982 when three eleven year old Indiana Jones obsessed kids, Eric Zala and Chris Stompolos and Jayson Lamb, embarked on a journey that would eat up most of their childhoods. The audacious trio spent seven summers making a shot-for-shot remake of Raiders of the Lost Ark, complete with special effects, car chases and melting heads. Ambitious in the extreme, the boys almost burn down a family home in the pursuit of their DIY dream and it becomes clear that the most astonishing thing about their project isn’t that they attempted it, but that their parents allowed them to continue with it.
The new documentary by Jeremy Coon and Tim Skousen uses the original fan film as a basis to pick up the story decades after the three friends abandoned the project. Zala and Stompolos are front and center to tell the tale of the obsession as they, now as thirty-something men, try and finish the film by shooting the one scene that eluded them as kids, the exploding airplane sequence.
Enthusiasm and chutzpah go a long way, especially when they aren’t tainted by cynicism. The love of “Raiders” these fans—both as kids and adults—share is pure and respectful, and their passion bleeds through the screen. Film geeks will love “Raiders! The Story Of The Greatest Fan Film Ever Made,” but despite its subject, it isn’t just for Indy-heads. It’s for anyone who ever had an impossible dream, anyone who never said no, even when the odds were stacked against them. In the doc no less a fan than Steven Spielberg says he was inspired by their dedication and chances are good you will be too.
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.
