Word: palmas
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Already film makers are leaving Hollywood, at least geographically, to survive and thrive. George Lucas presides over a contingent of resourceful directors in the San Francisco area. And New York, which lost its production-center supremacy to California 65 years ago, is again nourishing film makers. Benton, Brian De Palma and Woody Allen all live and work in New York. And if Ordinary People cops the top Oscar, it will be the seventh consecutive Best Picture directed by a man who grew up or lives in New York...
...promotional exploitation of the use of this telepathic ability. Scanners can give pain to the person being tapped, can literally blow him to bits by holding on long enough--a good little shock. Similar techniques were featured in George Romero's Dawn of the Dead and Brian De Palma's The Fury. The latter used the effect most spectacularly, with ten camera angles, when John Cassavettes turned to ripe tomatoes all over the dining room walls. But Cronenberg is a terrible director when it comes to shocks and thrills. He uses this effect once--at an anticlimactic moment, thus short...
Measure for measure, Petrie's incompetence matches Gould's. As illustrated by The Betsy and Resurrection, Petrie is an equally mediocre talent. In Fort Apache he relies on pointless camera meanderings, a la Brian De Palma, to give the illusion of a consistent style. The frequent tracking, zooming, and panning--usually from Paul Newman's right profile to his left--generally serve no purpose...
...imitating their masters and gradually developing or refining a style that in the happiest cases becomes unique. In recent American films, though, the process has been reversed. Hot young directors like Steven Spielberg and John Landis have exercised their talent on elaborate homages to the Three Stooges. Brian De Palma has taken up permanent residence as a grinning caretaker of the Hitchcock reliquary. Paul Mazursky has stared into his navel and found François Truffaut. And Woody Allen, whose films find their strength in reflections on his life and the lives of the beautiful battered people around...
...Palma's ineptitude as a writer doesn't help much. He has no 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...