Word: palmas
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Paul Almond. Genevieve made her name in such French movies as La Guerre Est Finie and King of Hearts, but found that the Continent had its drawbacks. "Life there is just too difficult to cope with," she said. This month Genevieve must go to Italy to film Brian de Palma's Deja Vu, but she will come home to Malibu not Montreal. As she explained: "Scripts don't just flutter down with the snowflakes in Montreal...
...Woodstock, lightweight dramatic vehicles tailored-to-measure for pop stars, documentaries offering cinema-verité glimpses of Bob Dylan or the Rolling Stones. There have even been a couple of films that used the world of rock as a metaphor for power and ruin: for in stance, Brian De Palma's Phantom of the Paradise (TIME...
...only does De Palma send up every known form of rock, from hard to glitter, but just about every other pop style this side of Glenn Miller. He pays homage to such movie masters as Alfred Hitchcock and Raoul Walsh by echoing a couple of their most famous scenes. Like Truffaut, he borrows hoary cinematic devices-the wipe, the iris and the optical montage-only to mix them with currently fashionable gimmicks like the split screen. De Palma's axiom is that in popular culture, today's wow is tomorrow's cliche and the next...
Indeed De Palma is particularly tough on the youths who invite people like Swan to swindle them. They are observed to grow as hysterical over a talentless transvestite swinger named Beef (played in the film's gaudiest comic turn by Gerrit Graham) as they do over the pure loveliness of Phoenix's voice. A wedding onstage turns them on, but so does an assassination. "That's entertainment!" Swan cries, and no one challenges his all-purpose definition of the term. The terrible possibility exists that he is right-that nowadays all turn-ons are equally transitory...
...movie will be something of a downer for rock cultists who find that the real objects of De Palma's scornful (and occasionally too anarchical) satire are themselves and their false gods. Others will find Phantom of the Paradise a crazy, savage film-iconoclastic and truly liberating. ∙Richard Schickel