Movie Review: 'De Palma'
By Bill Wine
KYW Newsradio 1060
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- Listen up, film buffs: what a terrific idea for a movie series.
De Palma is the first of what I hope will be many film projects devoted to documenting the works and viewpoints of movie directors who matter.
It's a documentary about Philadelphia-raised director Brian De Palma, a chronological tour throughout his body of work, which includes among the dozens of indelible titles Carrie, The Untouchables, Dressed to Kill, Blow Out, Scarface, Mission: Impossible, Casualties of War, Obsession, Sisters, Phantom of the Paradise, Carlito's Way, and Femme Fatale.
No, he wasn't a friend of Oscar and, yes, there were some clunkers along the way as well.
But half the fun of De Palma is the titular septuagenarian director's willingness to talk about the downs as well as the ups, the misses as well as the hits, the embarrassments as well as the triumphs.
You might expect that this would include interviews with actors he's worked with, studio executives he's worked for, and others who have critiqued his work down through the years.
But this isn't a talking-heads doc, it's a talking-head doc.
Yep, there's just one talking head on display and that's Brian De Palma, reminiscing his way through his career one movie at a time.
Co-directors Noah Baumbach (Mistress America, Frances Ha, The Squid and the Whale, Margot at the Wedding, While We're Young) and Jake Paltrow (The Good Night, Young Ones, and – yes – he's Gwyneth's brother) just let their subject talk and tell his own story.
And he's fascinating all the way through; if anything, the film's too short.
It opens with clips from Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo, recently established officially in an international ranking as the greatest film ever made.
An appropriate place to begin, given that De Palma was such an unabashed imitator (and thus celebrator) of Hitchcock.
Of course, if you're going to crib, crib from the best. Which is what he did.
But it's De Palma's willingness to be detailed in his explanation of moviemaking techniques, confessional in his discussion of the behind-the-scenes movie biz, and candid about the people he worked with that makes the film's running time fly by.
And insights into his own family life are shared as well: for example, how much does the fact that his father was a surgeon and that son Brian now says he "grew up in an operating room" enter into the amount of bloodletting in his films?
There are, in other words, insights galore.
When he mentions the friends and colleagues he broke into the business with – namely, Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, and George Lucas – we immediately begin to look forward to each of them sitting down for this same treatment.
Of course, whether each or all of them will be his equal as an interviewee remains to be seen.
Interestingly, De Palma has never done a DVD audio commentary, but as we now know, it's not because he dislikes talking about his movies.
The co-directors are generous not only with clips from De Palma's films, but with those of others' movies that influenced or inspired his works.
So we'll shoot 3 stars out of 4 for time well spent with a revealing and rewarding raconteur that offers fascinating fun for the film fan. To quote perhaps the most oft-imitated line from one of his movies, Scarface: "Say hello to my little friend," De Palma.
