Burl reviews Phantom of the Paradise! (1974)

 

With a Hollywood smile and a perfect profile, it’s Burl, here to review the great rock ‘n roll phantasy of the 1970s! No, it’s not the Rocky Horror Picture Show, it’s the other one: Phantom of the Paradise! Ha ha, this picture really was everywhere when I was growing up: everybody I knew had the soundtrack album and could sing the songs by heart! I still recall how grateful I was on being called in by my father from some onerous outdoor chore to watch the movie on TV!

So needless to say I feel quite fondly toward the picture! And of course it comes from Mr. Brian De Palma, who’s made many movies I’ve enjoyed - ha ha, yes, even Wise Guys, and certainly The Fury! In this tale he evokes Faust and updates the cautionary tale of devilish deal-making to the 1970s and plops it into a glam-rock setting! Ha ha, and in this world, the biggest thing in music is a diminutive impresario called Swan, who’s a combination of Phil Spector, David Geffen, Berry Gordy, Bill Graham, Malcolm McLaren, Brian Epstein, Albert Grossman, and Lou Pearlman, with just a dash of Colonel Tom Parker! And all this while standing no taller than three bricks and a short refrigerator, ha ha; but he’s made a deal with the devil as it turns out, and is a pretty ruthless customer in any case!

He’s looking for the perfect new music to open up his new concert hall, the Paradise, and finds it in the piano stylings of Winslow Leach, a songwriter who looks like a weedier Warren Zevon with just a touch of John Sebastian! Of course Swan doesn’t want Leach, just his songs, and soon the naïve but rage-prone songwriter is ignored, then framed, imprisoned, has all his teeth extracted, and is hideously deformed in a record press accident! He dons a leather outfit and a silver bird mask and becomes the vengeful Phantom haunting a cherubic rocksman’s Paradise!

It all ends in a glam-rock delirium that shoots for complete chaos, but, for budgetary reasons, doesn’t quite get there! This is both what’s wrong and what’s admirable about the movie: they all-too-obviously didn’t have the money to create the Olympus of popular music the story really calls for; but what they did accomplish through inventive filmmaking and the Herculean efforts of such people as set dresser Sissy Spacek, ha ha, is extremely impressive!

The songs are good, thank god! Paul Williams, who plays Swan, wrote them and did a good job sending up the 70s singer-songwriter genre, hard rock, nostalgia rock, softrock balladeering, and glam! (It would be considered a truly prophetic work had it predicted punk, New Wave, and disco, but it doesn’t quite make that step!) William Finley, who was in other De Palma pictures like Sisters, and interesting genre pictures like Silent Rage and The Funhouse, is poor schlubby Winslow, driven mad by the storm of malevolence and misfortune he suffers! Jessica Harper from Inserts is the ingénue, Phoenix, the only one Winslow will allow to sing his songs!

The supporting cast has a quintessential quality! We get Gerrit Graham from C pictures like Cannonball, Class Reunion, and Chopping Mall as the fey and monstrous Beef, a sort of Alice Cooper/Gary Glitter hybrid; big George Memmoli from Mean Streets as Swan’s right-hand man; Archie Hahn from Matinee and many other Joe Dante pictures as one of the rotating band members; and groupies played by such lovely and familiar faces as Janit Baldwin from Humongous, Janus Blythe from Eaten Alive, Robin Mattson from Candy Stripe Nurses, and Rainbeaux Smith from The Pom Pom Girls, Logan’s Run, Massacre at Central High, and more!

Its pleasures are so plentiful that it would be churlish to list its flaws, and so I won’t, ha ha! There’s some of that De Palma trickery of course, and I always love that stuff, even when it’s not top shelf material! The split-screen sequence, for example, isn’t as effective as the one in Sisters, but I still like it a lot! But the bottom line is that I am and always will be very fond of this movie! I’ve seen it on TV, on VHS, on DVD and on the big screen in revival showings, and it’s fun every time! And now I’ve shown it to my son, and so the circle continues to turn, ha ha! I give Phantom of the Paradise three and a half neon lightning bolts!

Burl reviews Sisters! (1972)

Ha ha to all you ladies and gents, it’s Burl reviewing your way! Today I’m going full De Palma, reviewing one of his earlier and more eccentric pictures, Sisters! I’ve enjoyed this fine old numbula several times before, and recently I enjoyed it again! It’s not fully developed, mature De Palma, and even De Palma fans like myself must admit that’s both a positive and a negative, ha ha!

Nevertheless the picture establishes much of what we still today love about the man’s filmmaking! Yes, it’s got that unmistakable Hitchcock buttprint, but while De Palma has been given grief about this obvious influence for practically his whole career, I myself have never seen a problem with it! As in Rear Window, the acts of looking, of seeing, of spying, are of paramount concern here; equally too the idea that the looker is as likely as not to misinterpret what they’re seeing!

The picture starts with a goofy game show, Peeping Toms, in which contestants are put into situations in which they must balance moral concerns with prurient ones! (Ha ha, one wonders how many times such a concept could be repeated, and, really, how it could even fill out a single half-hour episode!) Margot Kidder from Black Christmas plays Danielle Bréton, a Québécoise model whose job on the show is to pretend to be blind and to begin undressing in a half-built locker room while a lingering man, the game’s real contestant, decides whether to keep watching through the open wall or not! Ha ha, the male contestant is played in a likeable performance by Lisle Wilson, who was also in The Incredible Melting Man!

After the show, and dinner at The African Room, the two return to Danielle’s Staten Island apartment! Here, things become complicated when some disappearing pills, a gaudy birthday cake, some game show cutlery and a mysterious, savage Siamese twin all come together to spell murder! The bloody carnage is witnessed by investigative newshound Jennifer Salt, from It’s My Turn, who has an apartment across the way!

Ha ha, of course the coppers don’t believe our newly-minted heroine because she writes exposés about police misadventure for the Staten Island Shining Light, so she turns first to aged newshound Barnard Hughes, the heroic Von Grampa in The Lost Boys, and then to private eye Charles Durning, whom we love so well from Stick and The Hudsucker Proxy! Together they discover things about the creepy Franco-Canadian doctor played by De Palma regular William Finley, whom we may recall from The Fury and Silent Rage; and they learn something interesting about a couch; and the personal dangers of hypnosis are revealed! Ha ha, I won’t go into great detail about the rest of the story, as this is the sort of movie whose pleasures derive from the unpredictability of its plot!

Of course there’s one development that might not come as a surprise, to some anyway! But there’s more than enough weirdness along the way to make up for that, ha ha, and the last shot in the picture, involving Durning and a telephone pole, wraps things up with very un-Hitchcock ambiguity! It can’t be said that everything in the picture works; there’s something a little cluttered and unfinished about the storytelling, and the tricky-tricks De Palma employs, like the split screen stuff, don’t seem as well thought out as they do in some of his other pictures, for instance Phantom of the Paradise, Dressed to Kill or Blow Out!

Bernard Herrman’s score is mostly good, though a few of the stings he employs sound like something from a Herschell Gordon Lewis picture! Ha ha! And just about all the performances are strong, each bringing precisely what’s needed to the story! Even Margot Kidder’s Quebecois accent is acceptable! It’s a stepping stone picture, no question, but a good one, and I give Sisters three couchstains!

Burl reviews The Fury! (1978)

By the power of the mind, it’s Burl, here to review a Brian De Palma picture for you! Now, it’s not one of his best movies, like Blow Out, nor his most popular, like Mission: Impossible, nor his most impersonal, like Wise Guys, nor, certainly, is it among his most characteristic pictures, like Dressed to Kill or Body Double, but it’s a solid piece of Hollywood entertainment! The picture I’m palavering about is, of course, his very Carrie-like follow-up to Carrie, The Fury!

The story is a little bit bifurcated, but I think it’s safe to say our hero is Peter Sandza, a secret agent of an undetermined variety played, with his usual vigour, by the recently late Kirk Douglas, whose work we all loved in Two Weeks in Another Town and Eddie Macon’s Run! Peter has a son, Robin, played by Andrew Stevens from Massacre at Central High and 10 to Midnight, and Robin’s bad luck is that he’s extremely psychic! Next thing you know, Kirk’s colleague and supposed pal Childress, essayed in “picking up a paycheque so I can make my own movies” mode by John Cassavetes from Incubus, kidnaps Robin and tries to kill Peter! Ha ha!

Dateline Chicago, one year later! The other half of the bifurcation is the story of Gillian, pronounced with a hard G and played by Amy Irving from Crossing Delancy! Ha ha, she too is psychic of course, and doesn’t wish to be! But she soon finds herself in a special school run by Charles Durning from Stick and The Hudsucker Proxy, and staffed by, among others, Carrie Snodgress from Homework and Large Marge herself, Alice Nunn! Snodgress is secretly in love with Kirk, and is going to help him find his son, who has lately been living it up in a big house under the tender care and caresses of Fiona Lewis from Strange Invaders and Innerspace! But the tests and treatments administered by Cassavetes are unwinding him psychologically, as we see in a sequence involving an indoor funfair, two Arab princes, and an out-of-control carousel ride!

Kirk’s search for Robin mainly takes the form of an adventure-comedy picture, though horror and tragedy rear their heads throughout! Kirk’s stint with the Nuckells family is one of the comic passages, and a chase scene involving poor Dennis Franz (whom we know so well from Die Hard 2) worrying about his newly purchased car is another! But the story ends in terrible tragedy, though I won’t detail it for you! But there is a coda, probably the moment for which this picture is best known, which involves Cassavetes and Irving, a pair of blue eyes, the trick effects artistry of a young Rick Baker, and several pounds of explosives! Ha ha, it’s pretty spectacular, and it looks like they had about seven cameras rolling on it at once!

On the downside, the story is a little confused and not completely satisfying; but this is De Palma, ha ha, so whaddaya want! Worse is the sketchy character development: when Robin’s personality changes completely at the end, it doesn’t mean very much, as we are largely unaware of what his personality has changed from! Kirk’s motivation is apparent enough, but that’s about all we get - ha ha, we’re never even told the name of the agency that he and Cassavetes work for! It’s just another one of those “agencies you’ve never heard of,” as we’re told several times! And the ladies, mainly Shodgress and Irving, get even shorter shrift, though their performances are very good! Still, for all this, I enjoy the picture, with its glossy 70s studio feel and its lush John Williams score! I give The Fury two and a half episodes of M*A*S*H!

Burl reviews Wise Guys! (1986)

Holy cannoli, it’s Burl, here to review a mobster picture made in the mid-80s by none other than Brian DePalma! This is a movie I’d never seen before, but of course I’d always been curious about it, because), ha ha, it’s a DePalma picture, and I’m compelled to see each and every one of those!

It’s a comedy too, which seemed to confuse people at the time of its release! It confused me too, but I soon realized DePalma was an old hand at comedy! He made a bunch of them at the beginning of his career, after all, including the great Phantom of the Paradise, and you could say with some justification that many of the more outré sequences in his later suspense films, particularly in such works as Body Double, Raising Cane, Snake Eyes, Femme Fatale and Passion, deliberately edge into the chucklesphere!

Danny DeVito from Ruthless People and Junior and, of course, The Van, plays Harry, who would be the very lowest man in the Newark crime organization he works for if not for the presence of his neighbor, co-worker and best friend Moe, played by Joe Piscopo from Dead Heat! Their organization is godfathered by Dan “Commando” Hedaya, and his brutal enforcer is none other than famed NRBQ manager and song subject Captain Lou Albano!

Well, in a series of boneheaded moves as quick as they are inevitable, Harry and Moe find themselves in deadly dutch with Hedaya’s gang! The boys hudzel down to Atlantic City in Captain Lou’s pink Caddy, looking for protection from Harry’s mob retiree uncle! The uncle is stone dead however, so they must turn to hotelier Harvey Keitel, whom we know from Mean Streets and The Grand Budapest Hotel! But is Harvey friend or foe? Only an unlikely but still satisfying climactic doubletwist will reveal the truth!

DePalma was on a bit of a gangster kick at this time in his career – he’d recently made Scarface, and directly after this would make one of his biggest hits, The Untouchables! Carlito’s Way wasn’t that far down the line either! But very little of the style he put into all those other films is present here! There are a couple of tricky-tricky camera tricks, sure, but I was disappointed that this wasn’t what I’d hoped for: A classic 80s comedy gene-spliced with a classic 80s DePalma movie! A reasonable hope, I think!

But I still enjoyed the picture! DePalma rounded up a top-flight gangster cast: in addition to the names already mentioned, there are appearances by such stalwart gangster mugs as Ray Sharkey, Frank Vincent and Tony Mufano! And though it’s not often funny in the traditional sense, I found it a pretty funny movie much of the time! Captain Lou in particular delivers the goods! DeVito and Piscopo bring everything they learned from their earlier gangster comedy Johnny Dangerously, and I’m pleased to report that Piscopo was not as irritating a presence as I’d expected him to be! His character actually has a sort of arc!

In short, Wise Guys is worth a look, but it’s no lost classic! It’s an oddball entry in the DePalma filmography, and feels exactly like a little palate-cleanser shoehorned in between bigger projects, kind of like After Hours was for Scorsese! I’m going to give Wise Guys two and a half pairs of the strangest pillow cases ever seen!

Burl reviews Passion! (2012)

Burl saying hello! Ha ha, there seem to be plenty of people who hate Brian De Palma and his movies, and I suppose there might be people who are kind of hem-haw about them; and then there are people who really have a thing for the beardsman’s go-for-baroque style, ha ha! I’m one of these latter nutcases! By garr, I can say without hesitation that De Palma movies have given me a lot of enjoyment over the years!

Fond memories include hearing my father wax rhapsodic about Phantom of the Paradise, and being excused from chores because it was coming on afternoon television! Another time mother spoke in hushed tones about Dressed To Kill, a film she’d just returned from seeing with her girlfriends! Thus was bated the De Palma hook before I even knew the man’s name, or what a movie director did! Later I had marvelous theatrical experiences with The Untouchables, Mission Impossible, Raising Cain, Carlito’s Way and The Black Dahlia, among others! I saw Blow Out in a big old wonderful rep house, and that was a real treat!

Ah, De Palma! Well, though it may seem so, I’m not avoiding talking about Passion, the movie ostensibly under review here! Ha ha, of course there was no opportunity to see it in a theatre, but I’ll bet it might have played pretty well in one, with the right audience at least! The picture features Rachel McAdams, from Midnight in Paris and Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows as Christine, a blonde executive at a Berlin ad agency! Ha ha, one day she’ll wear hamburger-sized crimson lipstick; on another she’ll dress like a diabolist! You just never know what stylecrime this wacky woman will pull next! Her underling is Isabelle, played by Noomi Rapace, from Prometheus and Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows! A fellow who seems to have an erotic connection to both is Dirk, played by Paul Anderson from, yes, Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows!

There’s workplace cutthroatery galore in the first half of the movie, and that sort of thing has never interested me much, so I was a little bored! But the movie, and the Pino Donaggio score, turn more recognizably De Palmian by the second hour, with some split screen, a murder, some dreams and a number of dumb plot turns! But recognizably DePalma doesn’t necessarily mean good DePalma, and I’m sad to say it’s not, really! There are moments, to be sure, but once you get to the very climax, with a suspense scene involving some pretty laughable cellphone technology and a police inspector clutching a bouquet of posy flowers, you have to say to yourself “Ha ha!”

After apparently casting his film simply by watching Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, De Palma demonstrates a general sort of laziness that pervades the whole picture! The climactic scene already mentioned feels as though DePalma thought to himself “Hmm, wonder what Hitch would have done if he’d lived in a world of portable data storage!” No one else has really wondered that, though of course modern technology (cell phones especially) have undercut so many traditional suspense devices that maybe it’s laudable for DePalma to have embraced it here!

All he’s really done is repurposed it though, and set it within a goofy plot involving ladies fighting ladies! But hey, it’s still the SubMaster at work, and there’s much to be said for that! I look forward to DePalma making more movies before he hangs it up for good, and I hope they’re wild and crazy thrillers like he’s always done! Meanwhile I should revisit some of his older works and review them for you here, and maybe finally catch up with Wise Guys, which, can you believe it, I’ve never even seen! Ha ha! Anyway, I give Passion one and a half ladykisses, which is only a fraction of the amount we get in the picture!