Word: depalma
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Stewart in Rear Window, I am unseen); but there's something frightening about seeing your own harmless perversions enthusiastically endorsed by hundreds of people. Except these people didn't seem to want to question their responses. They seemed like the leering, drooling maniacs in the asylum scene of Brian Depalma's Dressed to Kill, applauding the strangulation and partial stripping of a nurse. The image is a sardonic joke and undoubtedly meant to mirror the audience, but thousands of humorless nurses and women are picketing the film across the country, claiming it presents violence against women as erotic. They ought...
...Stewart in Rear Window, I am unseen); but there's something frightening about seeing your own harmless perversions enthusiastically endorsed by hundreds of people. Except these people didn't seem to want to question their responses. They seemed like the leering, drooling maniacs in the asylum scene of Brian Depalma's Dressed to Kill, applauding the strangulation and partial stripping of a nurse. The image is a sardonic joke and undoubtedly meant to mirror the audience, but thousands of humorless nurses and women are picketing the film across the country, claiming it presents violence against women as erotic. They ought...
...disturbing to see such bluffing and two-plus-two obviousness in the work of a man generally regarded as a master of style. All the same, the film is divertingly spiked with scenes in which DePalma admits and mocks the fatuousness of what he's presenting. The biggest tip-off is the incongruously languid, heavily orchestrated, ham-strung music, which seems brought on by mistake from another movie. At the outset of the museum scene, for instance, Angie Dickenson sits alone on a bench, looking at a large billboard-flat painting by Alex Katz--a portrait of a woman...
...inflated to appear like a crucial scene. Most of the humor throughout the picture is similarly point-less, derisive and unaligned with the story's primary course of action. It's used as a kind of filler to bridge scenes of suspense or violence--which are all DePalma really cares about--and it is significant that, of the four or five really suspenseful, violent scenes, three are built into dreams, occurring only in a character's mind but presented in such a way--with a tight, dramatic progression of details--that you can't know they're dreams until each...
Some of these complaints, and a few others--bridling at the film's bluntly exploitational treatment of women, the disregard for character development, the extreme vicious streak--can be deflected by the claim that DePalma's theme, after all, is sexual fantasy. The whole film, it can be said, is intended as a pleasantly nasty sexual fantasy, with all its extravagance and questionable taste registering as expressions of DePalma's basic idea that sex is a dark dirty joke. This is true so far as it goes, and there's a spark of additional interest in light of the film...