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RitrovataBlue wrote: Sun Jun 02, 2019 5:51 pm re: R0lf,

Does this mean I’m alone (or nearly) in considering Snake Eyes one of De Palma’s masterpieces? But then, the only films of his that are complete failures in my eyes are Wiseguys and Get to Know Your Rabbit. Even Mission to Mars and Bonfire of the Vanities have at least enough technique to keep the viewer engaged. I’m intrigued by the idea of a De Palma/Alcaine collaboration, even if it’s on something of a failed film.

colinr0380 wrote: Sun Jun 02, 2019 9:28 pm I assume with something like Snake Eyes that people knew that the style would more than make up for any script problems, especially that split screen sequence of characters in different parts of the stadium leading up to the shooting that recaptures a bit of the pizazz of Phantom of the Paradise's ticking time bomb scene. It also feels a little that some of the paranoiacally shifting character motivations and untrustworthy old friends turned authority figures in Snake Eyes could be like a hang over after Mission: Impossible. That makes the storm scene at the end the similarly over the top equivalent of the Channel Tunnel sequence, I suppose!

I mean logically it is crazy that none of the construction workers could see (or feel!) the object in the final shot of the film that plays out under the end credits, but for filmic impact its great (and its a romantic long goodbye to match the dancing at the end of Carlito's Way).

I keep hearing that Femme Fatale from 2002 is great, though I still have yet to sit down with it. I love 2007's Redacted though.

Mr Sausage wrote: Mon Jun 03, 2019 12:10 pm matrixschmatrix, I think in the 80's List thread, drew a line with Body Double and its big murder set piece. He found the vulgarity so extreme and offensive that it eroded his trust in de Palma and his methods and made him wonder if the good faith with which he had previously watched de Palma's films had been misplaced.

tenia wrote: Mon Jun 03, 2019 12:47 pm

Mr Sausage wrote: Mon Jun 03, 2019 12:10 pm matrixschmatrix, I think in the 80's List thread, drew a line with Body Double and its big murder set piece. He found the vulgarity so extreme and offensive that it eroded his trust in de Palma and his methods and made him wonder if the good faith with which he had previously watched de Palma's films had been misplaced.

I'm not too far away from this, though I mostly laughed at Body Double grand-guignol style. However, I'm coming as someone who tended to dislike DePalma's movies younger, but rewatched them more recently and happened to reassess them positively. Except for Phantom which I always liked a lot, movies like the ones I wrote were movies I disliked. However, I found myself to like less and less Carrie, and always disliked Scarface and Obsession. That might not be where most people comes from about DePalma.

I love The Fury for its fusing of Carrie with the political thriller genre. Though I do concede that I saw it in my early teens where it perhaps had the most impact - I fell in love with all of the actresses in the film to a greater or lesser extent (the Pong playing, ice cream sundae building montage sequence sold me most on Hester though!), which only made the horrible (and horribly amusing!) deaths all the more shocking! I love the slow motion escape scene, the scene on the bus, the strange digressions with Kirk Douglas breaking into an elderly couple's apartment, and so on! Its all silly, extreme, operatic grand guignol but that worked very well, I thought, only highlighting the ridiculousness of convoluted and nebulous political conspiracy genre all the more! (Its like its taking the essential elements of a particular kind of film and pushing it to the limits to glory in the spectacle and emotion of it all) Plus the spinning death here works much better than the limp CGI recreated version that occurs in Mission To Mars.

I kind of think of Body Double as pure De Palma - its the one that you'll either love or hate because it pushes his style, the sex and violence and some of the things that people find casually cruel and flippant about the filmmaker to its absolute limits. But that's part of what makes it amazing, I think! Its a film I find difficult to recommend outside of somewhere like this forum, as I think people would be appalled at my taste and for having recommended it to them (I think I've moved a bit beyond worrying too much about expressing my bizarre opinions on the forum at this point!), but its endlessly fascinating. And its also a film that seems completely aimless and pointless for about three quarters of its running time unless you pick up on the Vertigo and general Hitchcock angle (which I completely missed on my first viewing! It kind of turns into a completely different film when the audience approaches it with that information!)

Plus also Body Double turns into a porn film/music video to Frankie Goes To Hollywood's Relax (NSFW) at the mid-way mark that is brilliantly audacious and the (literal!) climax of the Vertigo allusions.

Blow Out, Dressed to Kill and Body Double strike me as the perfect trilogy as they feel very much of the same aesthetic and dealing with the same themes, just weighting them differently (much as Carrie and The Fury are a good pairing, or Scarface and Carlito's Way work well together). Within their similarities Blow Out strikes me as the more emotional and dramatic film, Dressed to Kill is the best genre thriller and Body Double is the best metatextual, layers of film referencing one interested in fantasy and reality being mixed up. Though of course all three feature all of those elements to a greater or lesser extent!

There is a scene in Body Double very similar to the Psycho-style lift scene in Dressed To Kill. And I think Melanie Griffiths here, as the nice-but-dim adult film actress is very much in the vein of Nancy Allen's character from Blow Out, albeit even more pushed into being a bit irritating! So much so that I wonder if De Palma was originally intending for Nancy Allen to play the part. And the film within a film that begins Blow Out gets hugely expanded in Body Double into bookending stagefright scenes but also our main character being a frustrated and literally cuckolded out of work actor, rather than the private investigator of Vertigo!

And here's a bit more on Body Double:

It’s a very voyeuristic film and very much the ‘male gaze’ companion piece to Dressed to Kill, which felt as if it was privileging the viewpoint of the female characters more (to such an extent that Dressed To Kill resulted in the killer only being able to give licence to their urges Psycho-style by unleashing his repressed female side! It makes Nancy Allen’s attempted seduction scene in retrospect seem almost a taunting of the killer by true femininity!).

Its also a kind of veiled critique of masculinity in the sense that our hero is regularly failing to ‘perform’ in all areas of his life! (Its why I kind of identify with the character!). He’s sort of paralysed by his voyeuristic tendencies in all sorts of ways from his stagefright paralysis in his auditions to literally seeing his girlfriend in bed with someone else, to eventually finding himself in the too good to be true situation of housesitting across from an uninhibited neighbour with a handy telescope to hand! (In some ways the scene in Carlito's Way of spying on the object of affection also bears a lot of comparison to Body Double. They are both scenes couched in a kind of glossy objectifiying and glorifying point of view of the unattainable female figure)

It might be a blunt metaphor but the early adultery scene and the mid-point murder itself are kind of putting our hero into a passive spectatorship role to watch a more masculine figure ‘take’ the woman he cares for in front of his eyes. The failed attempt to save the woman (itself like the climax of Blow Out) isn’t just a way of drawing out the horror but a more concerted attempt of our hero to actually try and become the hero of his own narrative, to save the girl and the day and get a kiss, much as he falteringly had first tried to do with the mugger on the beach.

His failure pushes him back (after admonishment from the tough guy cop types, less interested in catching the phallic power drill wielding killer than being disgusted at our lead character’s creepy, stalkerish behaviour!) into the voyeuristic role, abandoned by the narrative much as Scottie in Vertigo is left in limbo after the initial suicide. But rather than abandoning his passive skills of observation, that is the aspect that he uses to solve the mystery.

The second half of the film from the murder on is about our lead learning to put his ‘unique set of talents’ to effective use, from putting the clues together, to convincingly acting the part of ‘The Nerd’ in the film within the film, to confronting his fear of enclosed spaces, saving the girl (who is amusingly played by Melanie Griffiths as someone who really doesn’t like being used either in a murder plot or as part of our hero’s self actualisation process!), and overcoming the dominant masculine figure who has been pulling all the strings behind the scenes in the way that Scottie in Vertigo singularly failed to do!

Really the whole film is kind of its bookending performance scenes with the opening of our lead being humiliated by his gruff director, played by Dennis Franz, and seemingly fired for his panic attack. Then the final scene is him back on set as one of your confident and sexy Twilight-anticipating vampires, extremely comfortable in confronting a lady in her shower stall, while the director (and his new self assured manager-style girlfriend) watch on approvingly.

It sort of suggests that the film is also a kind of a veiled take on ‘method acting’ with the actor unsure of how to play a scene and paralysed by fear at first drawing on his ‘real life’ experiences to give him the confidence to tackle his role.

This perhaps leads me to one of my few qualms about the film, though its not a deal breaking one. Much as I think Melanie Griffiths’ part feels like a Nancy Allen one, I get the impression that Craig Wasson’s lead role should very much be seen as a William Finley-styled one. In some ways Wasson is too handsome for the part of a bullied nerd lusting after and stalking a woman out of his league, before eventually saving the day. Just imagining William Finley in the lead role (as he was in Phantom of the Paradise) suddenly made a lot of the intent of the film click into place for me. Although in some ways that re-casting, doubling (crudening? remaking?) itself feels like it adds another intriguing metatextual element to the film. It sort of emphasises that synthetic quality even further.

dda1996a wrote: Mon Jun 03, 2019 3:10 pmsome scenes are just cliched and staged badly