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September 15, 2013:

THE DE PALMA NOTES

Bruce Kimmel Photograph bk's notes

Well, dear readers, here I sit, late on a Saturday evening, thinking of this and that and also that and this, and once again I have not even begun these here notes even though they should have been posted two minutes ago.  This has been happening a lot lately – I just sit here at the computer like so much fish and I start fooling around, looking at various and sundried things on the Internet and the next thing I know is hours have gone by.  And then there’s Brian De Palma.  Whatever are we to make of Mr. De Palma?  He has rabid fans who somehow find ways to defend the worst of his films and believe me there are many that fall into that category.  As I’ve said before, I have enjoyed some of Mr. De Palma’s output – Sisters, Obsession, Phantom of the Paradise, Carrie (for me, his best), The Untouchables (over the top, but entertaining thanks to the performances and the David Mamet script), parts of The Fury, parts of Blow Out, and I think that’s about it.  There are moments in other films that I find okay, but stuff that people consider “classics”, films like Dressed to Kill or Body Double, two that I find embarrassingly bad and just horrible rip-offs of much better films.  And then there’s Scarface and Mission to Mars and a bunch of fairly dreadful films in the 80s and 90s, plus the awful The Black Dahlia and his latest, Passion, in which he has the chutzpah to remake a two year old French film, Love Crimes, which was terrific and didn’t need the De Palma “touch.”  In fact, everything that Love Crimes does right, De Palma’s Passion does wrong.  All that by way of saying last night I watched Mr. De Palma’s Snake Eyes on Blu and Ray.

I saw Snake Eyes when it came out on DVD soon after it’s brief theatrical run.  I thought it was terrible, but sometimes certain films from that time period have a way of aging well, so I decided to give it another whirl, since I basically didn’t really remember anything about it.  The film stars Nicholas Cage and Gary Sinise and other actors, most of whom I didn’t know at all.  The film begins with what appears to be a twelve-minute or more single take shot that is basically the director screaming “Look at me, look how cool this is, look what I can do!”  Of course, it isn’t one continuous shot – there are at least three edits in it and maybe as many as eight, but they are cleverly disguised.  Mr. De Palma loves these long one-take shots – just as Mr. Orson Welles loved it when he did Touch of Evil, in which the virtuoso shot is brilliant because – wait for it – it is anything but the director screaming, “Look at how brilliant I am!”  It’s a director doing a great shot that actually serves the story.  And Mr. Hitchcock did an entire film in one-take – Rope.  Yes there are soft edits every ten minutes but the idea of it is that it plays in one continuous take.  Again, a virtuoso idea but one that serves the storytelling.  But while it may serve the storytelling, in the case of Rope, Mr. Hitchcock robs himself of his greatest tool – editing.

I won’t say the opening of Snake Eyes isn’t fun to watch – it looks good, the scope photography is good, but, like Mr. Cage’s performance, it’s just so over the top that by the end of it you just want to hurl your shoe at the TV screen.  Then the first plot point kicks in.  This is fourteen minutes into the movie and if you don’t know who the villain is by that point, we will have to revoke your movie lovers badge.  We see the event happening basically through Mr. Cage’s eyes.  Then later, we see the same event through others’ eyes, and I can enjoy that, too.  But the story is so stupid, and it just gets worse and worse.  I read comments about how stylish and suspenseful it is.  There is not one iota of suspense in this film, and while there may be style, it’s really not in service of anything.  I will say that the score by Ryuchi Sakamoto is excellent.  There’s a lot of stuff and nonsense about some hurricane that is basically dropped like a hot potato – apparently there was to be a huge special effects sequence of the hurricane at the end of the film, but it was scrapped, even though there are references to it that now make no sense.  And the ending is just nothing – the film literally runs out of whatever steam it had.  I always want to like a De Palma movie – he’s a movie lover and one wants to cut him slack, but his output over the last decade or two is just not good, at least in my opinion.

If these here notes were being filmed by Brian De Palma, there would be a huge slash of blood splattered across them right now.

blood_spatter

Holy moley or rye, did you see what happened there?  And if these here notes were written by Brian De Palma they’d be one long unbroken sentence, a virtuoso paragraph that would amaze and astound.  Then there’s be a twist we could all see coming from the first word.  They we could twist again like we did last summer.  Okay, it’s really time to buckle down, Winsocki and write some damn notes.

Yesterday, I woke up after nine hours and fifteen minutes of blessed sleep.  I was lazy, I loafed, then I did some banking, I picked up some packages, I put some gas in the motor car, and I tooled around just enjoying the damn day.  Then I came home, answered e-mails, did some organizing and cleaning and then I did a three-mile jog, I planked, and I did thirty-five sit-ups.  For some reason, the jog was incredibly hard yesterday – that may have had something to do with the fact I was trying to be a good Jew and fast all day, so by five I hadn’t eaten in over fifteen hours.  I finally went to Jerry’s Deli and had a ham and Swiss on rye and a small thing of onion rings, which I devoured, so hungry was I.  Then I went to Gelson’s and got some low-cal, low-fat ice cream (two different flavors), then came home and sat on my couch like so much fish and watched Snake Eyes.

After that, I played on the computer and was lazy as can be.  I was, in fact, the laziest guy in town.  Sometimes you just have to do that.

Tomorrow, I’ll jog, I’ll eat something light during the day, I’ll do some work on the computer, and then I’m attending a birthday bash at The Federal.  I will, of course, have a complete report.

Monday, we’ll be shipping out CDs. I will hopefully have a meeting about a project, but I’ll also be meeting our very own Mr. Nick Redman in the West of Wood for a small meal.  I have been having a need to go to Stan’s Donuts, so I will eat a small sandwich, and make the balance of my food that day two of Stan’s donuts.  The rest of the week is meetings and meals, choosing songs for the November Kritzerland show and casting its final singer, finishing two edit road maps and hopefully finalizing a mix for a film score that’s being paired with one that’s already mixed.

Well, dear readers, I must take the day, I must do the things I do, I must, for example, do a jog, relax, eat, and attend a birthday bash.  Today’s topic of discussion: It’s free-for-all day, the day in which you dear readers get to make with the topics and we all get to post about them.  So, let’s have loads of lovely topics and loads of lovely postings, shall we, whilst I hit the road to dreamland, where I shall dream one long virtuoso dream.

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