E Y E W E A R, THE BLOG - FREEDOM MEANS BEING UNAFRAID TO WRITE WHAT YOU THINK

To say that Brian De Palma's film The Black Dahlia is all style and no substance is like saying water's all wet. The film is a virtual wet dream - whose thematic binary systems of fire and ice, body and no-body (or dismembered corpse), girl and girl, boy and good-girl, boy and bad-girl, cop and cop, voyeur and victim, are seamlessly sutured in to the filmic reverie with premeditated sadistic glee. De Palma pries from the robbed grave of Hitchcock's body of work what he can - he is a master of the Oedipal drama and the trajectory that fingers the audience - our watching such visual excess is our culpability - we are the doers ourselves. The screeching crow on the cut-up corpse in the final scene of TBD is the spider in the skull at the end of Psycho - the unsaid shock image that is the last nail in the scopophiliac's coffin. TBD is not a good movie. It may not even be a movie at all - in the traditional sense of having been written and structured to offer comfortab...

A.O. Scott is someone in The New York Times I enjoyed reading this long summer in North America. Recently, on a trans-Atlantic flight, I caught this article by him: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/17/movies/17scot.html?_r=1&ref=movies&oref=slogin I've often thought Brian De Palma a cineaste worthy of auteur status - Femme Fatale was one of the best films of the last few years (its visual panache is lurid and Wellesian) and its non-release in UK cinemas was revelatory of the need for the director's status to be reconsidered. No one else does Vertigo-homage like he does, and no one else ever featured Frankie Goes To Hollywood so well. With the release of The Black Dahlia , which I have yet to see, now's as good a time as any for such a re-evaluation to begin. So, I look forward to reading the articles at Slant , below: http://slantmagazine.com/film/features/briandepalma.asp As something of a post scriptum, let me note that Scott writes: "[...] the movies that...