Word: palmas
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...UNTOUCHABLES Director Brian De Palma and Writer David Mamet reimagine the gangster epic and create a witty, bloody, touching commentary on two vanished traditions: Hollywood dreammaking and American innocence...
...openly proclaims his emotions. But all these people are relentlessly and statically articulate, especially when they are obscuring motives from themselves and one another. The humor of their humorlessness is often Chekhovian, and the flow of Allen's camera and cutting, together with the elegance of Cinematographer Carlo Di Palma's light, grants them a certain grace and dignity. But sometimes the members of this precious circle are too glibly elucidated; other times they are backed away from silently. In September, Allen is sketching when he means to be etching...
...every strategy, Fatal Attraction is a cagey blend of old and new Hollywood, of current obsessions and conservative solutions. Director Brian De Palma (Carrie, The Untouchables) calls the picture a "postfeminist AIDS thriller." But unless Alex is the disease, Fatal Attraction is not about AIDS. Indeed, the story, stripped to its essentials, is the stuff of many an old movie weepie. Boy meets girl for a brief encounter; boy gets girl pregnant and disappears; girl falls in love with boy and tries to get him back. In those films, though, the lovesick female was the heroine and a rogue male...
...traditional melodrama the ostensibly weak must triumph over the seemingly invincible. And that usually means a clash between a good woman and an evil man. But this time Dan is the vulnerable one -- in De Palma's provocative term, a "feminized male" -- partly because of his position as head of the family. And his adversary is scarily strong, a masculinized female even in name -- Alex. She is the stalker, the demon, the sexual adventurer...
...Eastwood's Play Misty for Me (1971), Jessica Walter is a woman who has a brief affair with a Carmel, Calif., disk jockey (Eastwood) and is soon threatening him, abducting his girlfriend and coming at him with a knife. Sound familiar? It sounded so familiar to Carpenter and De Palma that they passed on directing Fatal Attraction at least partly because of its echoes from Eastwood's film...