Word: depalma
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...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...
...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...