Word: palmas
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...film centers around murder committed by a schizoid, as does Psycho. De Palma tries to go Hitchcock one better by making his murderer the ultimate split personality: one member of a pair of Siamese twin sisters separated at the end of their adolescence. The way De Palma handles it, it's a clever idea, and it allows him to include a clever documentary film within the film which he made with the assistance of Jay Cocks, the young film critic for Time. Unfortunately, De Palma never treats the psychological facet of the girls' unusual predicament with any more depth than...
...Kidder, be more than a woman who interests only because she switches her personalities on and off to fit the needs of the plot? The answer lies in the difference between Hitchcock's best films and the vacuity we expect in the typical film from American-International. As De Palma is fond of pointing out, Hitchcock at his best is much more than a technical master of plot and camerawork...
THIS SUPERFICIAL attitude toward the impact of violence carries through into the structure of the entire film. De Palma introduces humorous moments in order, he says, to make the violence more bearable. These moments he handles effectively (in fact, the TV quiz show parody that opens the film and the only slightly macabre humor throughout are very funny: this is De Palma being himself), but these moments are also evasive. The only reason they are so essential in the first place is that the violence in the film is not set in a context of characterization. The acts of characters...
...this film De Palma is nothing if not an imitator. Despite the talk of homage, Sisters is not a film that serves Hitchcock, except in that a comparison of his better films (and there have not been any of those in recent years) with Sisters reveals once again what a master he is of his specialized form. Too many directors try to bestow cinematic homage these days -- by borrowing of personalized shots, glimpses of old movie posters, imitation of scenes or whatever. This is esoterica which film does not need...
Promoting for Sisters last week, De Palma told me he thought Truffaut's worst film making resulted from his admitted efforts to imitate Hitchcock. We both agreed that Truffaut's greatest homage was his book of conversations with Hitchcock. I hadn't seen Sisters then; now I think De Palma, too, should have put his homage into a book...