Word: depalma
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...BRIAN DePALMA'S Dressed to Kill is a steamy, lurid thriller involving a sexually-dissatisfied Manhattan housewife. her brainy teenage son, her psychiatrist, an expensive call girl, and a transvestite killer wearing dark sunglasses and a dirty blond wig, wielding a straightrazor. The story proper is too silly to waste space explaining. You get a sharp sense of the confusion at the film's center when you realize that DePalma plundered the plot, the essential development of jolts, twists and red herrings, from Hitchcock's Psycho. There are two shower sequences, and a murder in an elevator--which is pretty...
This comes as no great surprise. While Hitchcock's talent lay in planting even the most implausible action within plots that were enclosed in, and aerated by, chilly factual details, DePalma has always submerged his stories under a torrent of extravagant stylistic effects, ditching Hitchcock's logic, his psychological insight, his mooring in the specific tension and atmosphere of a given situation or place. He shares Hitchcock's cynicism about human relations, but he has none of the sly, mordant perception that makes this cynicism persuasive and disquieting. In Dressed to Kill he dispenses with Psycho's emotional complications...
...only during the high-voltage stuff, the really extreme violence, that DePalma becomes most securely and resourcefully himself. His special skill lies in an ability not merely to prepare for and describe violence, but to enter into it, conveying a character's awed, frozen awareness of disaster by prolonging and intensifying an action trhough slow-motion shots, slash-cutting, emphasis of details as in a dream. In this he approximates--the analogy only sounds far-fetched--the experiments of the best Soviet filmmakers of the '20s: breaking action and events into flurries of separate shots to deliver something...
...TROUBLE is that DePalma, unlike Roeg, is uninterested in extending his technical inventions into the body of a film using them to invigorate and give meaning to a story's more casual, empty, expository sections. A good deal of the direction in Dressed to Kill appears awkward or perfunctory. Shot for shot, through patches of inaction and weaker stretches of suspense, the movie advances with a clumsy, prosaic quality--not unlike the flat-footed style of Kubrick's The Shining, which DePalma, in a recent interview, says he detests...
...sense for dialogue, and cripples the film's pace with a number of curiously inert scenes featuring stiff, unbelievable talk. Then there is a long wordless sequence, a ludicrous, halting flirtation and pick-up in the galleries of the Metropolitan Museum, drawn out to run 15 minutes in which DePalma (like Kubrick) deploys a steadicam camera, swimming and veering through the chambered rooms, using a subjective panning shot to cover an arc of space that the character, in fact, could take in at a glance. (The device amounts to a kind of cheating, a withholding of information to milk suspense...