CULT MOVIE REVIEW: Snake Eyes (1998)

After reviewing two very "heavy" Brian De Palma classics in recent weeks, Scarface (1983) and Redacted (2007), it's a bit of a relief to gaze back at this piece today: a sinuous, mind-blowing action-thriller from the decade of big action films: Snake Eyes (1998).

Of course, because this is De Palma's oeuvre we're discussing, Snake Eyes isn't mere mindless, breezy action. On the contrary, this intricate thriller is virtually brimming with just the kind of sizzling, trenchant imagery and social commentary De Palma has long conditioned his audiences to expect.

Specifically, Snake Eyes is the story of a "slick," morally questionable and charismatic protagonist, Atlantic City cop Rick Santoro (Nic Cage). He's on the take, and exhibits personal/political aspirations to become mayor of New Jersey's "sin city".

While on the job (and hustling...) at a soon-to-be-scuttled boxing colosseum, Rick must unexpectedly contend with a high-profile homicide (the murder of a government official...) during a televised prize fight. Suddenly, Rick finds himself thrust into the spotlight: first championed as a hero of the people and then quickly derided and spit out by the Millennium-era Media's ubiquitous "spin." Ultimately (as the movie ends...), he goes to jail...

One day a hero, the next day a louse? Now ask yourself -- thinking in terms of the 1990s -- what famous figure does that sound like?

The Rules of Spin: Santoro, The Media and The Truth

Give yourself three points if you thought immediately of our 42nd President, William Jefferson Clinton.

In 1998, Bill Clinton had recently won re-election to the White House, but was dealing not only with an ascendant Republican Party in Congress, but the "new" 24-hours-a-day cable TV news cycle that introduced Fox News, Laura Ingraham, Anne Coulter, Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly and other prominent right-wing commentators eager to take him down.

But even given this dedicated cabal of Clinton-haters, the President was arguably his own worst enemy at times. By 1998, Clinton was mired down in questionable money-raising schemes from the presidential bid; specifically the raising of soft money and the "selling" of the Lincoln bedroom to the highest bidder (a practice continued by his successor, George W. Bush, incidentally). Even if Clinton hadn't broken any laws in his quest to retain the Presidency, he certainly skirted them, and the questionable fundraising policies of Clinton came back to injure Al Gore politically (think: Buddhist Temples and "no controlling legal authority").

But more importantly, by 1996 the average American was witnessing the protean stage of a corporate news media that had abdicated a responsibility to the truth. Instead of reporting facts, news programs now featured a representative from each political "side" arguing talking points and promoting partisan spin. Spin, of course, is the cherry-picking of data, the manipulation of facts and the pushing of, essentially, propaganda. The Clinton-Dole election was one of the first salvos in the new"spin"/"sound-byte" sweepstakes. Or as I call it, short attention span political theater.

All of this context finds unexpected voice in in 1998's Snake Eyes. In this labyrinthine film, the truth is difficult to discern, and spin is everything. For example, in the film's first shot, a news-reporter (on-camera) is actually asked to "spin" an approaching hurricane(!) so an not to jeopardize the audience for the prize fight. The word has come down from HQ that it isn't a hurricane at all (despite the physical evidence)...it's...a tropical storm.

Then, after the assassination of Secretary of Defense, Rick's best friend, Navy man Kevin Dunne (who was in charge of security at the event...) worries that he will be blamed for the Secretary's death. Why? He was "out of position" during the assassination. Santoro, however, attempts to spin the event so that Dunne (Gary Sinise) comes out a hero.

"It isn't lying," according to the Santoro Manifesto: "You just tell them what you did right and leave out the rest," he tells Dunne. This parsing of the truth very much fits in with Clinton's grand jury testimony of the year 1999 (in the Monica Lewinsky affair...) wherein the President suggested his answers were meant to be "truthful, but not particularly helpful."

Santoro is a man who plays all the angles -- to his benefit -- but who, during the course of Snake Eyes undergoes an interesting journey. He ultimately comes to point of clarity about who he is, and what he stands for. Ironically, it becomes the task of a champion spinner to discern...the unfiltered truth. He emerges from the film bloodied and bruised and loved by few (again, not unlike Clinton), but at least he knows where he stands.

Here Comes the Pain: The Zero Gravity Flying Eye Sees All

So, in a world of pervasive spin, how do you discern the unfiltered truth? Simple answer: go to the video tape.

In Snake Eyes, De Palma orchestrates a non-stop Roshomon-esque onslaught of opposing point-of-views and flashbacks. It's so much information (and mis-information), in fact, it becomes dizzying. Some audiences and some critics weren't able to keep up with the director and his narrative.

To wit: we get Kevin Dunne's "patriotic" story of the murder (a fabric of lies). We get the perspective of a dedicated government informant and whistle-blower named Julia, played by Carla Gugino, and even the tale of the assassination as re-counted by a prize fighter, Lincoln Tyler, who threw the fight to settle his gambling debts (and unwittingly served a darker agenda in the process).

Each one of these characters, even the noble whistle-blower is vested in their perspective (proving, in classic De Palma fashion, the essential unreliability of human memory), and therefore unreliable. On several occasions, Santoro must resort to an impartial third person observer to ferret out the truth: a video camera; or rather LIVE video camera footage that captured the murderous, tricky events as they occurred.

In the first circumstance, an instant replay of footage during the boxing match reveals that Tyler threw the fight to his opponent, Ruiz. We see with our own eyes (from a high angle) as Ruiz's knock-out punch fails to connect....just seconds before the Secretary of Defense is murdered. This clue, this piece of "unspun" truth leads Santoro to a deeper revelation: someone wanted Tyler to throw the fight at a certain moment, and there were at least five people involved (and, as Santoro aptly recognizes, "five people makes a conspiracy").

Later, Santoro again utilizes live, real-time video footage to track down the missing, frightened informant (who was also targeted for assassination...), going from floor-to-floor of the colosseum/casino complex; searching for her while a friend keeps an eye on the surveillance cameras. This tracking-by-camera permits Santoro to save the informant from the conspiracy, and add sher knowledge/perspective to his own.

And finally -- and most importantly -- Santoro discovers the "Zero Gravity Flying Eye," a "new" camera that was not known to the members of the conspiracy when the scheme was hatched. This gadget captures the real culprit on tape, and exposes him to Santoro. Again, raw, un-manipulated videotape (or footage) holds the key to resolving the crime. Importantly, the film's villain also lives and dies by the sword of the "public" eye/camera. After presiding over a press conference packed with lies and manipulation, Dunne is eventually exposed by live news footage, in the process of trying to kill Santoro. It's an act you can't spin.

The camera is clearly a double-edged sword in Snake Eyes. If people know they are on camera; they are spinners, Snake Eyes seems to assert. If not, the camera can, perhaps, "capture" the truth. Underneath all these video images (lies and truth), De Palma does something else tricky: he girds Snake Eyes with iconic symbols of America; or of America gone wrong. These representations niclude a giant American flag in the colosseum (shades of Blow Out [1981]). Old Glory presides over the assassination of a patriot without protest or stain. Later, a patriotic "Millennium Globe" rolls off its perch, indicating also that something is off-kilter here. And most importantly, we keep seeing (over and over...) a dollar bill stained with blood...literally blood-money. Here, the American dollar is the thing that leads our characters astray...and away from morality.

Snake Eyes, a film noir set against the backdrop of incessant rain, is another De Palma venture in which form strongly reflects content. As described above, the truth is difficult to discern, and motivations are difficult, even impossible, to read. Accordingly De Palma provides us split screens at crucial moments in the narrative, fracturing the "truth" with double perspectives (much like the right/left dividing screens we see displayed on programs like Hardball or Hannity).

Furthermore, De Palma charts Santoro's morally ambiguous position in this dizzying world of spin with winding, careening, darting, long-shots (particularly the famous, eight minute shot which opens the film). We watch Santoro navigate a location that is, visually, a maze, and that locale is a perfect reflection of his situation and of American politics in the 1990s (and even today). There's no way out; the maze is a trap for everyone in it. The film ultimately asks a very relevant and difficult moral question too. Who is worse? The sleazy guy on the take in matters of money, or the outwardly "respectable" patriotic man who lies about matters of life and death and murders innocent people to benefit from war profiteering?

Snake Eyes underwent a tumultuous editing process in the lead up to release. In particular, a scene involving a tidal wave striking the casino (and nearly drowning Santoro) was entirely deleted from the final cut, a fact which makes the movie's final act seem a little anti-climactic to some. But this shake-up hardly matters because Snake Eyes, especially in that first act, remains an example of exhilirating filmmaking. Critic Nathan Rubin wrote: "The first hour or so of Snake Eyes...are as good as anything De Palma has done. That hour exhibits a joy in the possibilities of film not seen since Paul Thomas Anderson's similarly masterful Boogie Nights."

Writing for The New York Times, Stephen Holden noted, with some insight, that Snake Eyes, "becomes a hyperventilating inquiry into the limits of friendship and loyalty and what constitutes character."

What constitutes character? In so many ways, that fascinating question is the real story of the Clinton Era and the American 1990s (as well as Bush's time in office afterwards; the Republican "answer" to that query).

And as usual, De Palma was ahead of his time in asking it.

CULT MOVIE REVIEW: Scarface (1983)

What does the American Dream mean to you, and how far would you go to pursue that dream? More to the point, when does someone else's relentless pursuit of the American Dream become a nightmare for the rest of us?

In other words, when does the personal journey from "rags to riches" become so consuming, so vital, so paramount that it actually destroys the social conrtact, threatens the larger sense of community, and leaves accepted morality shattered, in pieces on the ground?

And -- importantly -- have we reached that point in America yet? Or did we actually reach it decades ago, when Ronald Reagan assumed the Presidency and changed the way an entire nation conducts business? (By this, I mean de-fanging and eliminating business regulation, cutting taxes for the super rich, and reducing social services to a bare minimum).

These still-relevant questions beat restlessly inside the turbulent, angry heart of Brian De Palma's radical, firebrand gangster movie Scarface (1983), a film that today has become virtually synonymous with the excesses of the 1980s and, in particular, the beginning of the "greed is good" era in American culture. This De Palma film continues to be germane in 2009 because -- to a very large and therefor disturbing extent -- we still live in that culture. Only today the Boeskys and Milkens have morphed into Kenneth Lay, Bernard J. Ebbers, and Bernie Madoff.

In surface terms, Scarface is a remake of the beloved 1932 Howard Hawks film of the same name (though subtitled "The Shame of a Nation"). Yet De Palma and screenwriter Oliver Stone have not slavishly re-fashioned a classic film with their 1983 version of the material. Instead, they have created a fiery, subversive, original commentary on their times, the 1980s.

Although their title character is a gangster and drug dealer named Tony Montana (Al Pacino), De Palma and Stone take great pains to contextualize Montana as something else entirely: a modern, 1980s business man. Accordingly, Scarface is virtually brimming with pointed references to capitalism, communism, and the milieu of big business.

With capitalism-gone-wild as their deliberate subtext, De Palma and Stone reveal how excessive greed eventually separates the film's grasping protagonist from his friends, family, and from his culture, even. Tony Montana's excesses become so...excessive, in fact, that his gold-plate home decorations would likely cause even Tyco's Dennis Kozlowski to blush. The neon production design of the film is extraordinary and effective because it strengthens and supports the notion that Tony observes no limits. Not in his personal appetites, not in his material wants, and certainly not in his morality, though, in his defense, he does not allow an innocent child to die late in the film during a bombing mission. Perhaps because that child makes him think of the child he and Elvira have never been able to conceive.

But when one taboo is broken during the blazing rise to "success," the film seems to advise us, it's impossible to respect any significant boundary. Thus Tony exhibits and nurtures sexual longing for his own biological sister, Gina (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio), and covets her to the point of murder. Nope, the boundary of family is not sacrosanct to Montana.

Tony also kills his boss, Lopez (Robert Loggia), essentially, for possession of his boss's girlfriend, Elvira (Michelle Pfeiffer). Montana eventually proves disloyal even to those who rose up with him to the top, like his doomed best friend Manny (Steven Bauer).

In the end, the film makes a literal comment about Tony's all-consuming selfishness and over-sized ego: Montana is shot and killed in his extravagant upstairs foyer because there is literally no one left to watch his back. His murderer -- a shadowy assassin in sun-glasses -- sneaks up behind him, unnoticed, undetected. The Mannys, the Elviras, the Ginas, the Angels, etc., are all long gone and can't warn him of the danger. Montana's desire to be the one on top has, in fact, left him dangerously vulnerable and alone.

De Palma's film, as critic Vincent Canby noted in The New York Times, "is a relentlessly bitter, satirical tale of greed, in which all supposedly decent emotions are sent up for the possible ways in which they can be perverted." Indeed, Tony's ego is the great destroyer here: ripping apart friendships; forever paranoid; always bullying and out sized. He thinks highly of himself and lowly of everybody else. All that matters is his self-glorification (and here, that glorification takes the form of material wealth).

"The Biggest Problem? What To Do With All The Fucking Cash"

Scarface is dominated by allusions and references to capitalism. First, Montana is introduced as a militant political refugee who fought against Castro in Cuba.

But in fact, he boasts no real political beliefs except he doesn't want "anyone" telling him "what to do," a quality of a communist state, he perceives. Tony even says he would "kill a communist for fun," when offered an "opportunity" to rise through the ranks while incarcerated in "Freedom town," a make-shift community for detainees from the Mariel Boat Lift in 1980. But again, Montana's views are convenient: he's against communism because it restricts his personal freedom to rise to the top. He wants to be rich, so it's a personal not ideological thing.

After leaving the camp, Montana takes a job as a dish-washer at a small food stand in Miami (underneath a sign for a fancy restaurant called Little Havana). From his perch at the kitchen sink, Tony watches gorgeous women and well-dressed men line up in expensive cars and attend a ritzy club. Right there and then, he settles on a life of crime. He wants the proverbial American Dream and he doesn't want to wait for it. He and Manny thus leave their "honest" but low-paying jobs to work for a cocaine dealer named Omar Suarez (F. Murray Abraham). In the world of drug dealing, says Omar's Boss, Frankie, the biggest problem is what to do with all the cash. And he's right. Once ensconced as a thug for Frank Lopez, Montana graduates to the glitzy world of 550 dollar suits ("so you can look real sharp") and 40,000 dollar Porsches. His appetites only grow and grow.

In particular, Montana has his eye on Elvira, Frankie's girlfriend (and a 24-hours-a-day coke whore...). But Tony knows he is not yet ready to claim his golden-haired trophy wife. "In this country, you gotta make the money first," he tells Manny. "Then when you get the money, you get the power. Then when you get the power, then you get the women." That's as terse and accurate a description, perhaps, of the the pathway to success in the contemporary U.S. as has yet been written.

At one point, Montana -- now a murderer for money and a purveyor of soul-stealing drugs -- makes a pilgrimage to the modest home of his honest, work-a-day mother. He brags to her "You son made it, Mama. He's a success." What's important to Tony is clear: his image: the car he drives, the suits he wears, the cash he can throw around (he gives Gina a thousand dollars...); even the fear he can engender in enemies and underlings. Tony knows he is a murderer, but lies to his mother and claims to be a political "organizer." Montana's mom sees through him quickly: "He's a bum. He was a bum then, and he's a bum now."

Also illuminating is the scene in which Tony and Elvira discuss what will be the terms of their marital union. It's a cold-hearted negotiation, not a romantic proposal. "You like children?" Tony asks. "As long as there's a nurse," she replies." It might as well be spelled out in contract boilerplate. There's no romance, no love, no joy in the courting: just an agreement for a mutually beneficial material partnership.

But Scarface finds its most critical voice of crony capitalism in the quick advancement by Tony to drug lord through --- essentially -- murderous attrition. Omar gets killed, and Tony moves up. Then Tony kills Frank, and he moves up again. All the while, Tony says things like "we gotta expand. The whole operation. Distribution." Or "Here's the Land of Opportunity." He's thus talking legitimate "business jargon" in an illegitimate, murderous business, but that's okay: America gives Tony its tacit permission to keep on climbing the business ladder. After killing Frank, Tony spies the Goodyear Blimp in the sky above. Emblazoned on the side, in huge letters is the legend "The World is Yours." This becomes Tony's mantra; his permission to take his personal quest for power and wealth far beyond "the limits" that most Americans observe. The slogan later appears in Tony's extravagant hall entrance, on a statue.

Amusingly, De Palma even stages a montage of Tony's monetary extravagance to the Paul Engemann-performed tune "Push it to the Limit." Again, that might as well be the mission statement of crony capitalism. Grab whatever you can get now, while the gettin's good. Or, as sung in the lyrics: "Hit the wheel and double the stakes; throttle wide open like a bat out of hell and you crash the gates."

Interestingly, the police do almost nab Montana. Not on murder charges. Not on conspiracy to commit murder. And not on drug running. Nope, they nearly catch him on charges of tax evasion. What is it with some wealthy capitalists that they can't pay their fair share of taxes? It's laughable: the super rich complaining about paying taxes which benefit the community at large. Taxes pay for libraries, roads, social services, unemployment benefits, utilities, schools for children, firefighters and policemen...and for our standing army (support the troops, but not with your wallet!). Yet the super rich like Tony -- who may have acted unscrupulously (like Lay, Ebbers and the others) to get his money-- behave like they earned it merely by "hard work." That's one of the biggest unchallenged lies in the on-going argument for crony capitalism in this country. that rich got there honestly; and that the poor are somehow lazy or undeserving simply because they didn't "push it to the limit" the way execs at Enron did.

In an essay entitled "The American Dream in Film," author Ray Jones writes: "De Palma presents America as a corrupt and mercenary land in which opportunity is available to those who are prepared to go further for success. Go further in the sense that they, like Montana, are prepared to kill and literally dispose of the competition. De Palma was critical of America and presented the view that to be successful in a corrupt world, to fulfil their goals and manifest destiny, characters would have to become corrupt as well. This theme was presented to some extent in Hawks’ 1932 version of Scarface, which had the tagline “Shame of a Nation”. Yet, De Palma went further in his criticism and the tagline to the video of Scarface tellingly claims “He loved the American Dream with a vengeance.”

Don't Underestimate The Other Guy's Greed: Tony the Tiger

So what does "the limit" look like when you're in the drug-dealing/100-billion-dollar-a-year business? De Palma's Scarface shows us in gaudy, even lurid detal. In the neon and pastel pink Miami of the 1980s, it's a world of golden-plated bedrooms (with bubble baths built right into the floor), monogrammed leather chairs, wall-sized portraits of the happy Montanas...and piles and piles of snow white cocaine on demand.

Why, Tony has even captured a tiger and leashed it on his estate. The ultimate decadence. An animal leashed and trapped merely to prove a visual reminder of Tony's wealth and dominance. From exotic animals, it's just a small step to vodka- spewing ice sculptures and 6,000 dollar gold-and-burgundy floral-patterned shower curtains, no?

The tiger is an important symbol in Scarface. Historically, a tiger is s symbol of strength and power, inspiring respect and fear. That's what Tony is...a tiger. That's how he sees himself: Tony the Tiger. Unlike his pet, however, he is not caged or leashed by society's rules. He is the predator loosed in America, free to roam, to feed, to sate his material appetites. He doesn't believe he'll ever go down, but of course, he does. He makes enemies with people who are higher up the ladder than he is.

I don't know how well this comparison will hold up for you, but in the past I often found it illuminating. I sometimes term Scarface the Dawn of the Dead of gangster movies. By that I mean that both Dawn of the Dead and Scarface are epic master-works (clocking in at over two-hours, each), both are critical of the changes in the American pop culture -- towards overt, unbridled materialism in the late 1970s-early 1980s -- and both are extremely violent; though intelligently so. The violence in Scarface, like that featured in Dawn of the Dead, is brutal, gruesome, and hard-to-stomach in its first half, and then just rather numbing and de-sensitizing in the second half. In both films, the audience comes to view violence and death as part of the inevitable landscape of the characters, whether they are fighting zombies or drug dealers. Both are genre films that overturn genre conventions to make socially valuble points.

And there's one shot in Scarface, I believe, that best represents or symbolizes the film: a Colombian drug dealer opens a suitcase, and stashed inside are two bags of coke...next to a chain saw. Drugs and violence, side-by-side.

I think that perhaps the saddest thing about Scarface is that much of today's culture has taken on Tony Montana as some kind of hero or role model. Like the weirdos who get off on owning the shopping mall in Dawn of the Dead, these people seem to think that Tony's immoral quest for the American dream is something to be emulated and championed. They will tell you, in all sincerity, that it was the breaking of Tony's second rule ("don't get high on your own supply") that resulted in his downfall.

That's kind of ignoring the whole murdering-to-get-rich-quick thing, isn't it?

Watching Scarface, I can't help but wonder if maybe it's time we got a new American dream. How about this one: we all get ahead together and try to restore the shattered social contract. Or how about this post-Reagan/post-Bush thought, (as a person of some note said recently):

Grab a mop.

CULT MOVIE REVIEW: Redacted (2007)

"All the images we (currently) have of our war are completely constructed — whitewashed, redacted."

- Brian De Palma

During the 1990s, I had a good buddy serving in the American Armed Forces. He was (and remains...) -- in every way imaginable -- a stand-up guy: exactly the sort of individual you would want defending our country. He is moral, centered, responsible and articulate. In all his dealings with other soldiers and with the enemy (that I knew of), he understood when sensitivity was called for; and when toughness was called for. He remains a center-right Republican to this day, and also one of the fairest, best men I have had the good fortune to know.

There were (and are) a great many men and women exactly like my friend serving in our Army in Iraq today. But even my buddy confided in me, at one point -- with a keen sense of disappointment and disillusionment -- that some young Americans join the Army simply because they want "to kill people."

Truth be told, he was experiencing a difficult time relating to this brand of soldier; some of whom were under his command. The aim of these men was not defending the U.S.A or helping other nations. They simply wanted to use live human beings for target practice.

In no small way, Brian De Palma's Redacted (2007) examines the vast gulf between these two brands of American soldier. There are the guys (and gals) in the Army who are just like my friend. These are the patriots who fight for us, and who serve our nation at great personal risk and at great sacrifice. And then there are the others; and they tend to be really messed-up: ignorant, arrogant and racist...and they carry big guns.

De Palma's controversial 2007 film (for which he won "Best Director" at the Venice Film Festival) dramatizes in unflinching, brutal terms how the American military -- and these different types of soldiers -- interface with the locals in Iraq. Specifically, the film deals with the rape of an Iraqi teenager in Samarra (in 2006) by two redneck American knuckle-draggers.

This is a fictionalized account of a real incident. In real life, two American G.I.s in the 101st Division were charged in October of 2006 with the murder and rape of a young girl and the murder of her entire family.

Again, just to underline that fact: De Palma didn't pluck the story out of the ether. He didn't invent it from whole cloth. It happened. He fictionalized the details (because of possible litigation); but the incident happened.

Still, some commentator went nuts over Redacted and asserted that by shining light on such a terrible incident, De Palma was smearing the troops.

Michael Medved wrote: ""It could be the worst movie I've ever seen" ... "[T]he out and out worst, most disgusting, most hateful, most incompetent, most revolting, most loathsome, most reprehensible cinematic work I have ever encountered."

Bill O'Reilly wrote: "The American military is doing important, noble work. Brian De Palma and the others who back him should be ashamed."

All I can say is this: the Medveds and the O'Reillys (and throw in the Hannitys, Coulters, Malkins, Limbaughs and Becks while you're at it...) are contributing to the dumbing-down of America with such all-or-nothing, black-and-white nonsense.

As adult, responsible citizens of the United States, we are all fully capable of countenancing life's contradictions and subtleties. In other words, we can understand that our troops are, by and large, worthy of our support and loyalty.

And, we can also understand -- at the same time -- that there are some who, to put it mildly, are not so noble. To acknowledge this reality is not to smear anyone or any organization. Name me one organization or profession in which every practitioner is an angel. Why would we expect differently of the Army:? And even Thomas Jefferson once said "eternal vigilance is the price of liberty." Well, how can we be vigilant if we don't know what is being done in our names by our own armed forces?

And that's very much the subject of Redacted: a plea for vigilance in an environment where news about the war is censored, skewed and redacted. Seek the answers through unconventional, unofficial channels if you must, but seek them nonetheless, the film implores.

Why is this necessary? Well, this is a war in which American journalists were not allowed to film the caskets of American soldiers returning to home soil. Why? Because if we had to actually see our beloved dead, we might no longer support the war effort.

Support Our Troops. But please Ignore Those Corpses.

This is also a war in which embedded journalists surrendered their professional objectivity and road in humvees with soldiers. The consequence: they became cheerleaders. Remember when that "liberal" Dan Rather said "and when my country is at war, I want my country to win, whatever the definition of ‘win’ may be?" Does that sound objective? It didn't matter that we were invading the wrong country; that we had been ginned up by Bush, Cheney and the others on the basis of a lie (where are the WMDs?). But instead of asking why we were at war in the first place with a country that did not possess the capability to strike our soil, the American corporate media cravenly encouraged the war. At every turn. And worse, the reporters even rode with the troops right into battle so they could get better pictures. There's your liberal media for you.

Since the Iraq War began, between 93,492 – 102,016 Iraqi civilians have been killed. Redacted explains why, and in a manner that doesn't, on its face, demean the American military. Instead, it examines a serious problem. Structurally, the film is composed of a variety of perspectives (a video journal; a French documentary, a youtube-like video, etc.) and we get two views which explicitly contradict each other at one point in the proceedings. We see American soldiers guarding a military checkpoint on the French documentary; and we hear the soldiers hollering for an Iraqi civilian car to stop at that checkpoint. The car does not stop -- even when adequately warned -- and the soldiers open fire with lethal force. In the process, they kill a pregnant woman and her unborn child. The family was on the way to the hospital for the delivery...

From an Arab news channel, we get a different story. The Iraqi driver of the car mistook the stop signal of the American soldiers (hands raised, palms up...) for being "waved through." So the driver went ahead. It was all a tragic, "lost in translation" moment. So who, in such a situation, can you rightly claim is at fault? The soldiers did their job; but the Iraqis didn't understand what was being asked of them. The French video also point out that there are signs (in Arabic) all around the checkpoint warning cars to stop. Again, this is true. But as the film points out, it is also true that over 50% of Iraqis are illiterate.

So they can't read the signs telling them to stop at the checkpoints.

So ask yourself: is this a slander of American soldiers? Or is this an indictment of war, and, in particular, the fog of war? The American soldiers aren't portrayed as drooling Orcs out to kill anybody and everybody. And Iraqi civilians aren't shown to be nefarious terrorists trying to blow Americans away, willy-nilly. Again, the movie provides statistics. Only 60 out of 2000 Iraqis killed a month at such check-stops are actually insurgents. Clearly, something systematic is wrong here, and if we don't know about it, who is going to fix it?

Redacted does features two American soldiers, in particular, who are brutes. They are named Rush -- presumably after Mr Oxycontin himself, Rush Limbaugh -- and Flake. These two men commit the rape and murders, and they are terrible, racist, monstrous human beings who refer to Iraqis as "sand niggers." Do men like this exist in America? Be honest: when you were in high school and had to spend time in the locker room before and after gym every day, they were a dime a dozen, weren't they? Why pretend this isn't true? What is served by pretending?

Yet De Palma also presents two American soldiers as a counter-weight to Flake and Rush. First is the moral and decent McCoy, who refuses to participate in the attacks and is assaulted at gunpoint by his fellow soldiers. And second is the intellectual Blix, who exhibits the good sense not to be involved with Rush and Flake. Straddling these poles of "bad" and "good" is the man who records the rape/murder on his camera: Angel Salazar. He is not really good or bad per se; he's just a follower who didn't know when to put down the camera and do the right thing.

I point out these characters simply to demonstrate that De Palma doesn't paint all American soldiers as evil redneck rapist/murders, as right-wing commentators would have you believe. Instead, Redacted represents a nuanced view that asks the audience to consider the morality of the situation, and then reveals characters on all sides of the issue. For instance, Rush and Flake are rightly upset about the death of their sergeant by insurgent IED, but their righteous anger over his death does not justify the crime they commit. Their anger is understandable, but they misplace it. They direct it at innocent people. But De Palma nonetheless presents their argument; to help one understand where these guys are coming from.

One of De Palma's soldiers states in Redacted that the camera "tells the truth." Another soldier replies that it always lies (a reflection of De Palma's personal world view). By fracturing his narrative into a million little pieces (a "Just a Soldier's Wife Blog Site," a terrorist web feed, a French documentary, a night-vision camera, etc.), De Palma asks for our continuing vigilance in determining what is truth and what is lie. His film is built on the presumption of intelligence from viewers; on the presumption that people can view the Iraq War outside the black-and-white parameters of universal, unconditional support for the troops.

In Akira Kurosawa's Rashômon (1950), the director revealed how it is impossible to know the truth when a variety of human perspectives are involved. I wonder what he would have made of the world in 2006 - 2009. It's difficult to see "the whole truth" or even "the whole picture" in this Information Age. We've got Youtube, network news and blogs to show us the world today, but less certainty over those images than ever before in our nation's history. So De Palma can end his film with authentic photographs of dead Iraqi children, and yet war supportors still shout "Support Our Troops" and even claim that those photographs were doctored for a political agenda.

As Redacted reminds us (verbatim): "The first victim in war is the truth." And here's another, corollary quote from the history of cinema that fits perfectly the strident response to Brian De Palma's film. I direct it to the TV pundits:

"You can't handle the truth..."

CULT MOVIE REVIEW: Sisters (1973)

"It's not where you take things from - it's where you take them to."

- Jean-Luc Godard

Watching Brian De Palma's Sisters (1973) today, it's easy to detect the reasons why the director has so widely been touted as "the Next Alfred Hitchcock." His first thriller is perhaps the most inspired homage to the master's Psycho ever created (at least until the same director's Dressed to Kill in 1980).

First and foremost, the "Janet Leigh" trick (the notion that a lead character should expire early on in the proceedings...) is transferred successfully here. Also, in Sisters a surprise twist involving identity resonates and interacts meaningfully with Psycho's climax. Plus, De Palma shares another important trait with Hitchcock: a love of gallows humor. And for all the brutal, crotch-stabbing violence of Sisters, the film exhibits that wicked and subversive sense of black humor.

Yet De Palma's genius is revealed not so much in his multitudinous contextual references to the canon of Hitchcock (including Vertigo and Rear Window), but rather in the dramatic and clever manner by which he fractures the film's imagery. In other words -- in Godard's words -- it's not where De Palma gets his ideas from, but where he goes with those ideas. Here De Palma's purpose is entirely his own: to express, finally, a splintered mind/splintered sense of reality in the language of film grammar, thereby replicating the explicit content of his narrative.

In his Best, Worst and Most Unusual: Horror Films, author Darrell Moore opined that Sisters is "Brian De Palma's best film" because it "has humor and gore and is adept at balancing the two." (Crowne Publishers, 1983, page 125). Entertainment Weekly noted that Sisters' "final half hour set in a rural Bedlam is particularly bent" and that the frilm remains a "strange and scruffy piece of work." (Ty Burr, "Hitchcraft, January 15, 1993, page 56). Both reviews are accurate, and get right to the spirit of the film: a journey into schizophrenia that is simultaneously terrifying and absurd. The thriller even has the audacity to culminate with a bit of social commentary on the role of women in American society in the early part of the disco decade.

We Can't Discuss it Now. A Man is Bleeding to Death

Inspired by a Life Magazine article about the Russian Siamese twins Masha and Dasha, Sisters tells the story of a gorgeous model named Danielle (Margot Kidder), who appears on the local New York TV game show, Peeping Toms (think: The Dating Game) and then goes out to dinner with the winning contestant, Phillip Wood.

But Danielle's bizarre ex-husband, Emile (William Finley) stalks Danielle to the restaurant and makes a scene there. Concerned, Phillip escorts Danielle home to Staten Island. And though her crazy husband stands watch outside their apartment, they spend the night together.

The next morning, Phillip is brutally killed after hearing Danielle speak to her (unseen) sister, Dominique. The murder (which occurs on Danielle's birthday...) is witnessed by plucky investigative reporter, Grace Collier (Jennifer Salt), from her own apartment. The police don't believe Grace's story of homicide because she wrote an expose about the police that the force considered anti-cop. Grace investigates on her own, drawn into a bizarre story of co-joined siblings, a mysterious mental institute, and the shocking truth behind Dominique and Danielle. We learn that Danielle never learned "to accept" the death of her twin Danielle, and, furthermore, that she "kept her alive" in her mind so as to deal with the guilt of having been the twin to survive a surgical separation. Sexual experiences with men (like Philip or Emile) represent the catalyst that awakens the Dominique side -- the murderous side -- of Danielle's tortured mind.

Torn Asunder By Split Screens

In 1976, Brian De Palma staged the climactic scenes of Carrie utilizing split screens. There, in a scene set at the high school prom, he crafted a visual cause-and-effect relationship with opposing freeze frames. In one frame, Carrie (Spacek) would gaze at something, a target. In another, simultaneous frame, her psi energy would generate explosions or fire.

In Sisters, De Palma's purpose is different, but no less powerful. First, he deploys the split screen to ease the audience through a transition from one protagonist to another. He thus finds a new way of "doing" Hitchcock; of expressing the essence of the "Janet Leigh Trick."

As Philip lays dying in Danielle's apartment, the frame is split. On one side (and filmed from inside the window), the audience sees Philip desperately seeking help as he dies. On the other side of the frame, in a different screen, viewers see from outside the window that another character is witnessing this bloody demise. It's the reverse angle, essentially. As Phillip -- current surrogate for the audience -- dies bloodily, Grace Collier, new protagonist, is introduced. It's a visual passing of the torch, a way to get from Janet Leigh, essentially, to Vera Miles, without the connecting, seconed-act presence of Martin Balsam. Instead, the switch in protagonists is expressed instantly, within the confines of a fractured composition. The effect: the audience feels "torn" (or splintered, like Danielle). The object of our interest and sympathy passes violently away and we are shocked. Simultaneously, our curiosity is aroused by the new presence in the film.

De Palma also paints a picture of contrasts with his split screens in Sisters. In one sequence, Grace Collier and unhelpful detectives are seen arguing in the downstairs lobby on one half-of-the-screen as the bloody clean-up of Philip's homicide in Apartment 3R is depicted on the other screen. Here "time" is the notion held in common between competing, simultaneous images. One image reveals time squandered as the police delay Grace Collier. The other image (of Danielle and her husband, Emile, hiding the murder..) reveals time used meaningfully. The effect generated here is suspense: we want to scream at the police to move faster, to do something, because we can see the progress of the cover-up. Again, we are asked to integrate or balance competing feelings: a sense of wanting Danielle to be caught against a sense of wishing Danielle not be caught. De Palma's splintered composition permits and actually encourages both impulses.

In it's totality, Sisters involves a severe psychotic split. Danielle's damaged mind has "split" so as to accommodate two distinct, individual (and competitive...) personalities: hers and Dominique's. Her schizophrenic nature is reflected in De Palma's pervasive use of the split screen; and the impact of this split is revealed, in narrative terms by the myriad thematic allusions to Psycho. There too, Norman was two people: himself and his mother; an innocent and a guilty party. One individual seemed to be two in Psycho, but in Sisters the idea of doubling/twinning/splitting is carried to new heights thanks to the technique of the split screen editing. Even our ears, too, in Sisters are tuned to "register" Psycho thanks to Bernard Herrmann's score, but the visual imagination here goes brawnily beyond Hitchcock's considerable triumphs. Psycho tricked us (brilliantly), Sisters "splits" and divides our attention, mirroring the psychosis of Danielle/Dominique. Now, I'm not arguing that Sisters is a better film than Psycho (it isn't...); only that De Palma goes someplace new with the familiar building blocks of Psycho.

Sometimes There Are No Solutions: Order Not Restored in Sisters

Again, it's not where you get things from, it's where you go with them. And in Sisters, De Palma ultimately travels to a destination that Hitchcock might not have imagined.

In Hitchcockian cinema, order is almost universally, dogmatically restored. The static, lengthy, psycho-babble coda of Psycho proves this hypothesis, at least to a large extent. It slowed down the film's pace, it was mostly unnecessary in terms of understanding the narrative, and it ended a pioneering film on a placid, peaceful note, instead of with a jarring shock.

Contrarily, as the lead-in back to normal life outside the movie theater, this coda was just perfect. It was what the doctor might have ordered in 1960: reassuring, easily understandable, and rational to the point of being pedantic. Audiences would not leave the theater feeling debauched after Psycho, because that very important sense of decorum or order had been restored.

By contrast, De Palma apparently has zero qualms about leaving the audience to return to daily life unsettled. Consequently, he leaves his protagonist, Grace "hypnotized" at the end of the film. She even states that there have been no murders (a result of Emile's intervention). Now remember, this is the dogged reporter who has spent the entire film screaming to the heavens, Cassandra-like, that murders are afoot. Yet the film ends with Grace completely muddled.

This development, I believe, reflects two things. The first is De Palma's sense of humor: I think it strikes him as funny to undercut the protagonist we have followed for much of the picture. But more importantly, Grace's sad state at the finale is representative of De Palma's anti-establishment streak. Grace is a single-woman who, in the course of her profession, takes on entrenched male power in the form of the city police force. While reporting Philip's murders on the phone, Grace notes to irritated cops, "I'm sorry you feel that way, Detective, but I have to write it the way I see it. Sometimes the police are wrong." Grace has thus had the audacity to question the status-quo, the order of the establishment, and thus spends the entire film scorned and disbelieved, a deliberate reflection, perhaps of Nixon's "Silent Majority," (circa 1969) viewpoint. The "Silent Majority" was a law-and-order, right-wing demographic that the conservative president saw as loyally backing American institutions, such as the police...often at the expense of the individual liberties. Unmarried, liberated and liberal, Grace is treated rather shabbily by conservative male authority figures in Sisters, a clear reflection of the turbulent times.

What is the viewer to take away from this conclusion? Perhaps that Grace is now as schizophrenic and mentally damaged as another woman treated badly by the same cadre of men: tragic Danielle.

De Palma once stated, of Hitchcock: "He is the one who distilled the essence of film. He`s like Webster. It`s all there. I`ve used a lot of his grammar."

Indeed, and in Sisters, De Palma uses that grammar to write a completely new sentence, one that is "split" into several modes: social commentary, suspense and black comedy. It's not that De Palma actually outdoes Hitchcock (you can't do outdo grammar...); it's that -- again and again -- he's written the next chapters in the great American thriller.

CULT MOVIE REVIEW: Mission to Mars (2000)

"If you talk to these astronauts, and we spent a lot of time with them - I mean, it's "the last frontier." And it's completely devoid of the hellish corruption that I represent in a lot of my movies. So it's a kind of beautiful thing, and a departure for me. It gets weary to be so cynical all the time. And this is one area where you don't find cynicism."

- Director Brian De Palma excavates the Romantic subtext of Mission to Mars (2000), (Brian De Palma: Interviews; Bill Fentum, University of Mississippi Press, 2002, page 170.)

Lost in the 2000 - 2001 shuffle of competing Hollywood Mars movies -- including titles such as Red Planet (2000) and John Carpenter's Ghosts of Mars (2001) -- Brian De Palma's Mission to Mars remains a genre film that many people don't seem to remember very clearly. Or with much admiration.

Film critics savaged it, finding it difficult to comprehend that firebrand Brian De Palma -- mastermind of the blazing Scarface (1983) and the subversive Blow Out (1981) -- was behind it. Why? Well the quotation excerpted at the top of this review provides some indication. Mission to Mars is a film entirely eschewing corruption, cynicism and other earthbound traits of human impropriety or misbehavior, thus making it entirely out-of-step with the kind of movies that have been popular since the "Dark Age" of genre entertainment commenced in the 1990s.

In short, Mission to Mars is a movie about the sky we reach for; not the mud on our feet that tethers us to Earth.

An Invitation? Mission to Mars and The Romantic Movement

De Palma cleverly revised and contextualized 1920s-era American history in The Untouchables (1987) so as to engage in heroic myth-making on a grand scale. This was a response to the fact that America was a young country in global terms, without the supporting bedrock myths of older, more established nations. Thus Eliot Ness became an updated cowboy, an avenging white knight bringing justice to the "wild west" of Chicago. Al Capone was similarly transformed from thug and crook into a corrupt tyrant on par with Mussolini.

With Mission to Mars, De Palma undertakes a similarly bold task. Specifically, the director here fashions a flat-out Romantic space adventure; one that -- in the accepted style of that genre -- emphasizes human feelings, imagination and intuition, and which culminates in an emotionally satisfying, uplifting and transcendental climax.

In broad terms, Mission to Mars involves brave, selfless, futuristic heroes on a romantic quest to tame Mars and cope with the final frontier. They discover at the end of that journey nothing less than the ultimate human knowledge. Sure, there be monsters here (a seemingly-sentient Martian tornado rears and coils its head like a mythical dragon...) but the monsters of the film are all technological in nature, not psychological.

A brief refresher: Romanticism is a movement in philosophy, art and literature that lasted roughly from the 1790s through the 1850s. A response to the Age of Enlightenment, Romanticism championed the human imagination and human intuition over the intellectual, or science-based (read: technological). Romantic works of art also frequently explored national and ethnic origins, favored spontaneity and curiosity as human qualities, recommended a solitary life away from rules and boundaries, and often featured some form of spiritual awakening. A caveat: that spiritual awakening was often anti-establishment in execution; evidencing a revulsion of religion, for example.

Mission to Mars fulfills virtually all of those criteria, thus accurately meriting the descriptor of "romantic." Let's take them one at a time. First, consider the very heroic, very noble astronauts in the film. After dutifully making mission plans and adhering to technical protocols, they adjust on the fly when confronted with disaster again and again. Ingenuity -- not reliance on tech -- is definitely the order of the day. Plain and simple: these guys (and gal) survive on their wits.

When a micro-meteorite (another technological "monster") breaches the hull of the astronauts' ship and they can't pinpoint the origin of a deadly air leak, astronaut Jim McConnell (Gary Sinise) has a brainstorm. Using a futuristic soda container, he sprays the liquid inside a zero-gravity chamber to "seek out" the location of the breach. Similarly, when the ship's engine explodes, mission commander Woody Blake (Tim Robbins) improvises, suggesting a dangerous unplanned EVA and rendezvous with another ship in Mars orbit.

And again, after his team is murdered by a Martian "security system" at the Face on Mars on the mesas of Cydonia, Mars 1 commander Luke Graham (Don Cheadle) spontaneously improvises his survival shelter, creating a delicate ecosystem and balance of life (in coordination with oxygen-providing plants). Even the ultimate solution of the alien puzzle -- which requires a signal be sent to the Face on Mars using human DNA -- is reached under the auspices of human intuition; by McConnell's sudden flash of inspiration. This insight is visualized by De Palma using the technique of the flashback (one involving candy/M & Ms, of all things). Going even further, McConnell reached this solution after consulting with Luke, a man who lived on Mars alone for almost a year, and thus fits the Romantic ideal of leading a "solitary life" away from society and its accepted boundaries.

Cumulatively, it's not that Mission to Mars is anti-science; it's that the astronauts primarily rely on their human instincts to weather the various storms they encounter. Technology is a useful tool and assistant in a pinch, but not dependable to solve a crisis. A (technological) radar sweep of the Face on Mars is what activates the alien security system and kills the Mars 1 crew in the first place. The computers on the ship fail at a critical point, and the engines are left damaged...undetected. When not guided by human, romantic qualities (ingenuity, instinct, spontaneity, inspiration), technology can be very deadly, the film reminds us.

I also noted above that Romantic works of art often involve "national" or "ethnic" origins, and Mission to Mars again fits the bill, with the slight variation that it is actually a "global" origin revealed here. The astronauts on Mars are grouped (by the Martian sentinel) as citizens of a planet; not merely an ethnic group, or people of a single country. The astronauts discover the Face on Mars, and when they travel inside the vast alien structure, learn that Martians seeded life on Earth. That, in the words of the film: "They're us. We're them." Humanity originated...on Mars. The journey to Mars has thus been a journey of self-discovery, not just a visit to another world. We learn, at long last, where we came from. Who we are.

And in this discovery, we find a specific rejection of traditional religious values. It was not God who created Man in his own image, as superstition would have it, but the ancient Martians. If "God" is responsible in other words, then "God" is surely an alien. Thus Mission to Mars entirely subtracts the divine from the human equation, and lauds the ingenuity and curiosity of mortal, ephemeral, natural beings.

At the conclusion of Mission to Mars, Jim (Sinise) undergoes the spiritual awakening we would expect from a film of Romantic quality. He experiences an extraordinary epiphany -- which we share, thanks to De Palma's clever use of the montage -- in which the characters looks back across the entire sweep and movement of his life. He sees that every instant, every choice, every decision has led him to this moment on Mars; this moment of awaking. Of awareness. He sees images of his dead wife (Kim Delaney); and remembers her instinctive, emotional belief that "the universe is not chaos; it's connection," that "life reaches out to life." This is the revelation that has led man to Mars; that once led the Martians to seed Earth; and which will lead -- in the transcendental finale -- to Jim's journey to another galaxy.

From start to finish, Mission to Mars fits the mold of Romantic literature and philosophy. Yet for many critics, the virtuous, unblemished adventure of Mission to Mars was apparently a bridge too far, and they greeted the non-cynical Mission to Mars with...cynicism.

Writing for The New York Times, Elvis Mitchell wrote of the astronaut lead characters: "The director, Brian De Palma, catches them in noble profile so often that you wonder when the commemorative coins are going to be issued."

The critic for The San Francisco Chronicle, after opening his review with a snarky joke about NASA's real-life Mars mission failure, goes on to write: "We're supposed to share the characters' awe at the wonder of the universe, but more likely the audience will wonder whatever were the filmmakers thinking."

Variety cut to the chase and simply called the film "highfalutin."

Reading these snippets, it's abundantly clear that these (and other) reviewers were unwilling to approach Mission to Mars with even the smallest sense of innocence or astonishment. Yet if they can't understand why astronauts are heroic and noble; if they can't feel some sense of wonder at a splendidly-visualized expedition to Mars and an emotional revelation about mankind's prehistoric origin, then something is missing in them; not in De Palma's movie.

How exactly has a Romantic mission of space exploration become something "highfalutin" and not an opportunity to feel...child-like? Did critics even try to meet the movie Mission to Mars on the terms it set out for itself? Or is innocence as extinct as the film's ancient Martians?

Judging by reactions, Mission to Mars remains out-of-step with the entertainment of the 2000s. It's the Romantic response to an age of cynicism, and technology dominating humanity. The film's dialogue, esprit-de-corps and emotionality -- all part and parcel of Romanticism -- were interpreted by cynics in the audience as being simply "corny," or "cheesy." We have forgotten, it seems, how to take a film at face value. When confronted with honesty and sincerity in our entertainment, we recoil and try to act superior to it. We mock it, instead of legitimately countenancing and feeling it. I submit this is what happened with Mission to Mars.

Hello Beautiful: Some Couples Dance. Some Couples Go To Mars

No discussion of a De Palma film is really ever complete without a mention of the set-pieces the director so ably stages. In Mission to Mars, he creates another dazzling one: the EVA from the destroyed spaceship and the tragic attempt to rendezvous with the REMO, a re-supply module.

Here, four astronauts -- with nothing to hold onto but each other (another canny visualize of the film's Romantic motifs...) -- traverse the emptiness of space and attempt not merely to survive; but to rescue their friend on the surface (Luke) below. Woody Blake makes a heroic but dangerous maneuver to save his wife and his comrades. He manages to attach a tether to the REMO, but then overshoots the ship himself...and begins a long slow drift into the atmosphere of Mars...where he will burn up. Space affords no second chances.

The special effects are rendered with great beauty, accuracy and precision in this sequence, and they reflect the perspective of a director who understands what good framing can mean. For an uncomfortably long period, man and wife stare at each other across a relatively small and yet entirely un-traversable gap; on opposite sides of the composition. They are lost to one another, able to communicate and see...but not able to touch. It's...agonizing. When it becomes plain to Blake that his wife, Terri (Connie Nielson) is going to die attempting to save him, he commits the ultimate act of chivalry (another Romantic quality?) He removes his helmet, thus killing himself and stopping any doomed-to-failure rescue attempts. In his final gesture, however, there is no terror, no fear. Only acceptance.

Throughout this scene, De Palma's unsettled, dizzying camera captures all this orbital action with a sort of vertigo-inducing intensity. It's a very convincing depiction of man in space, and more to the point, terrifying...even to passive spectators. The scene successfully posits the idea of humans as small, adrift creatures in the vast cosmos; which is just the right touch for a second act crisis; before man's place in the universe is discovered and affirmed in the third act.

Some of the earlier characters scenes between Terri and Woody even forecast this sad end. There's a "dance" sequence in zero gravity on the spaceship early in the film, and it establishes their sense of human "connection," before space tears ultimately the couple apart. A number of critics complained about the tenor of these character-building, romantic scenes, but remember, this is supposed to be a film without cynicism. De Palma does portray the astronauts in operatic, noble terms, black-and-white...because that's how the heroes of a Romantic drama should be portrayed. The director is just adhering to the form, but again, it was mistaken as "cheesy" or "sappy" or "syrupy."

Mission to Mars also shows-off some typical De Palma flourishes. In the "camera lies 24 times a seconds" category, he starts the movie with a wicked, tricky opening shot. It's a view of wide-open, magnificent sky as a single rocket ascends to the Heavens...only to burst open and rain confetti down on a backyard barbecue in Texas. Yep, it's just a toy...

Later, the camera tricks us again, showing us the imposing mesa on Mars and leading us to believe it might be the source of water. In fact, it is the Face on Mars -- an alien structure -- buried under rock and dust. One discovery has been mistaken for another. The crew has acted on hubris and made a mistake. They assumed they were the only intelligent life on the planet.

The critical viewer may also pick-up on the fact that Mission to Mars -- perhaps more than any other De Palma film, relies on the first-person subjective point of view at critical points in the narrative, especially during the last act. This occurs so that De Palma can reel us -- the audience -- into the spiritual climax. His P.O.V. shots, which position the camera amongst the astronauts, remind us that we too are team members sharing this transcendental adventure. We are part of the journey.

If Mission to Mars has any real failing, it is a failing in special effects technology. The spacecraft action and the landscapes on Mars remain positively stunning, but the depiction of the Martian Being in the film's denouement leaves something to be desired. (And that single tear may be gilding the lily, even for a film of the Romantic school). The alien appearance does not hold up particularly well in 2009, alas. I watched Close Encounters of the Third Kind on Blu-ray last week (review to come soon...!) and the live-action animatronic aliens featured in that Spielberg film -- produced over 30 years ago -- hold up far better than the CGI E.T. in Mission to Mars, created just eight years ago. This is very much a case in which a director is undercut by the vicissitudes (and advancements) of technology.

Mission to Mars features a number of De-Palma trade-mark tributes (to Kubrick, to Cameron, to Spielberg, to Clarke, even to Byron Haskin), but in some critical, entirely beneficial way, this is one of De Palma's most direct, simple efforts. The meta-textual stuff is simply not that important here; and it plays second fiddle to the film's Romantic depiction of astronauts and the space pioneer milieu.

In Mission to Mars, De Palma created an inspiring film about the breadth of human imagination and ingenuity. It's also a film about how -- as a culture -- we have seemingly lost the will and capacity to do the hard work of reaching for the stars. How, as a people, we have stopped dreaming about the next horizon (a fault not shared by the film's Woody, who wears a necklace of a "Flash Gordon" spaceship around his neck as a reminder of the fantasies that guide him). We'd rather see a film about brooding heroes vetting black-hearted vengeance against despicable terrorists than one that imagines that the sky really is the limit.

And the critical reaction to the film only serves to prove De Palma's point. He might as well have been speaking Klingon. No one really wanted to look at the mode he was operating in here, or why it matters so much to an understanding (and appreciation) of Mission to Mars.

CULT MOVIE REVIEW: Carrie (1976)

Although he had directed many fine feature films before this 1976 thriller (including the exquisite Sisters [1973] and the wacky Phantom of the Paradise [1974]), it was Carrie that truly landed Brian De Palma on the cinematic A list.

The director's critically and financially successful adaptation of the Stephen King novel not only assured De Palma a long and storied career in Hollywood, it also set off a virtual blizzard of celluloid King adaptations vetted by high-profile film directors (Tobe Hooper and Salem's Lot [1978], Stanley Kubrick and The Shining [1980], David Cronenberg and The Dead Zone [1981], George Romero and Creepshow [1982], John Carpenter and Christine [1983], Rob Reiner and Misery, etc.). This is a horror trend that endured well into the 1990s, and even to into this decade, though to perhaps a less-significant degree.

Carrie proved so resonant as a horror genre initiative, in fact, that it spawned a fad, a significant number of B movie imitations. These were films about wronged, lonely teens seeking bloody vengeance against their cruel school mates. These films had titles such as Ruby (1977), Jennifer (1978), Laserblast (1978) and Evilspeak (1981)

With his keen and accomplished visual sense, De Palma creates an intimate portrait in Carrie of this aforementioned adolescent, high-school cruelty. It's Lord of the Flies in a locker room...only with mean girls instead of wild boys. In her review of the film for New Yorker, critic Pauline Kael noted that prior to De Palma's film, "no one else has ever caught the thrill that teenagers get from a dirty joke and sustained it for a whole picture," terming Carrie a "terrifyingly lyrical thriller."

Most critics strongly agreed with the assessment that King's novel found perfect expression in De Palma's capable hands. Film Quarterly, Volume XXI (page 32) in 1977 noted that "De Palma develops his familiar motifs of exploitation, guilt and sexual repression with a sure hand, so that his visual fireworks for the first time do not seem themselves obsessional and out of control." Roger Ebert wrote in his review of January 1, 1976 that: Brian De Palma's Carrie is an absolutely spellbinding horror movie, with a shock at the end that's the best thing along those lines since the shark leaped aboard in Jaws. It's also (and this is what makes it so good) an observant human portrait. This girl Carrie isn't another stereotyped product of the horror production line; she's a shy, pretty, and complicated high school senior who's a lot like kids we once knew."

Today, no less than three major sequences in Carrie have entered the pop-culture lexicon (and endured there for over thirty years.) These three sequences are so well-directed, so brilliantly-staged that they jump immediately to mind when considering the film. More importantly, they visually support the film's narrative: forging an understanding of Carrie's world and what it means, in some cases, to "grow up." Those scenes are set in a girl's locker room, at the senior prom, and finally, (ominously...) grave side.

We're All Very Sorry For This Incident: The Curse of Blood

In part, Carrie works so splendidly, because of the universality of the high school experience. Sometimes it feels like high school is a realm where cruelty -- along with apathy -- has become institutionalized.

Teenagers often seem to boast a sixth sense (or is it a killer instinct?) about those students who are less well-adjusted, who come from bad homes, or who are just more sensitive...and therefore vulnerable. And then those kids are ridiculed, teased, shunned and mocked sometimes, to the point of sadism.

Probably nothing could expose this milieu more clearly (or more artfully) than the locker room scene that opens Carrie. After a game of volleyball (shot from a high angle, as if to clue in the audience to the fact that something terrible is soon to occur...), De Palma cuts to the gym locker room. The steam from the showers softens the image on screen, providing the impression of a lulling dream, or even a sexual fantasy. Immediately, we start to understand how high school represents a time of sexual awakening.

As the camera pans right, accompanied by the romantic strains of Pino Donaggio's score, the audience sees gorgeous young women frolicking, nude or half-nude after their exertions on the court. As I wrote in Horror Films of he 1970s, this is an "erotic image of wood nymphs at play," one intended to arouse, titillate and stimulate. But as the camera moves past this fanciful action in a forward motion, we soon spy Carrie White (Sissy Spacek) alone in a shower. It's a strangely solitary, personal and erotic moment too. The young woman caresses herself in slow-motion. Glistening water drops decorate her euphoric face. A phallic-shaped shower-head sprays water down upon her.

Carrie's hands wander innocently down to her stomach, then her legs -- and, as curious viewers -- we wonder how far this scene is going to go. As Carrie's hands continue to spiral downwards to her legs, scarlet blood suddenly stains her skin, mixing with the pounding water. It's menstrual blood. On her fingers, on her legs. On the floor.

This is a typical De Palma bait-and-switch, a deliberate reversal or undoing of expectations. Those males in the audience aroused by the sight of female nudity are no doubt -- much like the disturbed school principal featured in the next scene -- not at all aroused by the visual of a high school girl getting her period. A sexy fantasy has given way to common reality

The dream-like nature of this sequence dissipates quickly now, giving way to abject horror. Carrie does not know or understanding what is happening to her. She believes she is dying. From a subjective point-of-view shot, we now see harsh reality: the other high school girls categorically reject Carries' entreaties for help and the "misty" look of the scene has evaporated. With startling cruelty, the girls even toss tampons at the desperate Carrie. We get close-ups of taunting, ugly faces, and hear the girls' mean chants. Those beautiful bodies in the slow-motion dream have given way to the cruel reality of high school. Mocking, teasing, the mob mentality. Like pack animals, the teen girls can smell the weak number in their pack...and go in for the kill.

This scene serves a few important narrative functions. First, the visual obsession on young, sexy bodies (and Carrie's body, in particular...) serve to note the full extent of this character's burgeoning womanhood. Though shy and awkward, Carrie is also beautiful in an innocent way...stepping into the realm of sexual maturity with awkwardness.

Secondly, the hurling of the tampons and the close-ups of twisted, evil faces mocking Carrie help to dramatize what a delicate, uncomfortable, embarrassing time this can be for those undergoing puberty. Through the cruelty of the girls in the locker room, we comes to sympathize for Carrie's feelings of isolation and separation. In addition to her sexual maturation, this scene charts Carrie's first steps into "psychic" maturity as well. Her outrage at the cruel treatment causes a telekinetic burst: the shattering of a lamp bulb over the shower enclosure. This is clear foreshadowing...

Another scene -- less showy and far less notorious than the locker room sequence -- also reveals much about Carrie's school life and builds on our compassion. The only bright light in Carrie White's world is her quiet, heretofore secret affection for classmate Tommy Ross (William Katt). De Palma finds a unique way to connect these characters visually the first time that they share a scene. In English Class, Tommy is highlighted in the foreground of one shot, in an extreme close-up. Meanwhile, Carrie is depicted as diminutive and tiny, in the background of the self-same shot. Interpreting what our eyes see, he is thus paramount -- a towering paragon -- and she is literally almost a midget, an after-thought in distant orbit of his "star." Yet importantly, the characters share the same frame. De Palma's choice of shots here expresses Carrie's own (insecure) view of self. To her, Tommy is "big" and "shiny," at center stage, while she is "small" and far from attention. Almost unseen.

In Horror and Science Fiction Films II (Scarecrow Press, 1982, page 52), critic Donald C Willis noted that "it's debatable who's meaner to Carrie - her fellow students or her director, who draws out their elaborate prank for 90 minutes, then lovingly shoots its penultimate moments...in slow motion."

I understand his point, but, as always, we should ask the question "why?" I submit that that De Palma makes much of the film a torturous build-up to Carrie's moment of explosive rage not so we can mock her; but so we sympathize with her. The film spends much time on Carrie's home life with her stark-raving-crazy mother (Piper Laurie), a zealous, Christian, fundamentalist freak. Between these harrowing home sequences and those set in high school, the audience rightly wonders how much this poor girl can endure Then, De Palma grants us that gleaming moment of hope as Tommy and Carrie appear to develop a meaningful relationship. De Palma again pulls a bait-and-switch (with his lying camera, dammit!), letting the hope linger in our minds that perhaps, just perhaps, Carrie has found the very kindred spirit who will allow her to join the rest of the world and vanquish her intense loneliness and awkwardness. Of course, this is not to be...

Split-Screen Prom Queen

De Palma is renowned for the cleverness of his climactic set-pieces, and Carrie gives us one of his most terrifying, and his most accomplished. His camera prowls the prom as Carrie and Tommy attend the dance and Carrie -- for the first time in the movie -- is all smiles. She is still tender, vulnerable, but her hopes have been raised (as have ours). The gym coach, Mrs. Collins (Buckley) even shares a tender story with Carrie about her own prom.

This is the brand of personal, human story another horror film might not pause to record with such meticulous attention, but again, De Palma pulls the rug right out from under us (and his characters). Mrs. Collins' anecdote -- like the dream-like moment in the shower, or like the hope of a relationship with Tommy -- encourages us in the hope that Carrie is going to have a beautiful experience too. To that end, De Palma's camera dizzily revolves around the happy couple (Carrie and Tommy) as they dance together.

At first, these camera revolutions are euphoric and romantic, an intoxicating moment of hope realized, dreams come true. But then the rotating accelerates, out of control, faster and faster. Because of the off-kilter, fast-moving camera, we just know things are not going to go well. When De Palma's camera then tracks one of the mean girls, P.J. Soles, onto the stage, and the camera determinedly banks up to the rafters, to a shaky pail filled with pig's blood, our hearts sink.

The trap is set.

And again, De Palma gives us a happy moment. Carrie and Tommy are crowned king and queen of the prom, and this revelation is shot using triumphant slow-motion photography. Only this time, we don't feel dreamy or intoxicated...or even triumphant. On the contrary, we're agonized. We know what is coming now, and the slow-motion victory lap drags out our tight-throated feelings of anticipation and dread to an almost unbearable degree. We see what is going to happen but we can't stop it. Now the film marches inexorably towards terror, and the explosion of Carrie's monstrous rage; the force of her anger.

When Carrie is finally "crowned" in pig's blood on stage, the horrifying moment is a specific reflection of the locker-room/shower debacle at the beginning of the film, wherein Carrie first confronted the flowing of her vaginal blood; her messy, confusing entrance into adulthood. Her mother has told her that blood represents sin ("First comes the blood, then comes the sin,") so imagine poor Carrie's terror at being covered in such blood in public; worse -- on stage. By loving Tommy, she must fear, she has again brought the flowing of blood.

Carrie's climactic psychic outburst is depicted utilizing one of De Palma's favorite techniques: the split screen. In this case, the split-screen connotes the instantaneous, light speed transmission of telekinesis; the cause-and-effect relationship of the psychic power. Visualized in one side of the frame, Carrie turns her head, widens her eyes, and casts her gaze upon a specific tormentor. In the other side of the frame, we see the simultaneous psychic effect of the murderous gaze. Someone falls down, someone catches fire, or there is an explosion.

The prom apocalypse also flashily reflects the film's themes. Adults in Carrie are depicted in various shades of negativity. They are colored as uncaring (the principal, who can't remember Carrie's name), utterly mad (Mrs. White), sedated and drunk (Mrs. Snell), or heartless and bitter (Carrie's mocking English teacher). At their very best, the adults might come off as capricious, like Mrs. Collins, whose draconian punishment of the mean girls spawns the revenge against Carrie.

But now that Carrie is an adult -- covered in blood -- we can therefore no longer sympathize with her. Accordingly, she goes beyond the bounds of the "sane" during her incredible telekinetic attack, killing friends (Mrs. Collins) and foes without distinguishing between them. The innocent and the guilty both fall to her wrath and in the end, that's what makes Carrie a monster here...an adult monster like all those around her. De Palma has proven successful at making Carrie sympathetic until this point, until Carrie's "real" entrance into adulthood. The world has taught Carrie to be cruel, and at the Prom, she learns that lesson too well.

Carrie White Burns in Hell. Or, Did You Ever Stop to think that Carrie White Has Feelings?

The third "famous" moment in Carrie arrives at film's end. It's possibly the best sting-in-the-tail/tale ending ever captured on film. It's certainly the most-imitated. Shot in misty slow-motion (again like the locker room sequence preamble...), Sue Snell (Amy Irving) lovingly deposits flowers on Carrie's grave. Her intentions had been good; and despite all the horror Carrie wrought, Sue still has some residual feelings of compassion for the girl who everybody teased. But then, without warning, Sue is pulled down into the grave by Carrie's groping, burned claw. The message: even the innocent must fear Carrie, because she has lost control of her hate.

Sue awakens from the nightmare, traumatized and terrified, and the movie ends with heart-pumping, breathless intensity. We understand that Sue will never be the same; will never view the world the same way. If Carrie has moved into adulthood in the film; so has Sue. She has learned that the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Carrie is a terrifying film dominated by the three memorable scenes I have outlined in this review (the locker room opening; the prom set-piece, and the terrifying coda). But it is more than that too.

Again, as I wrote in Horror Films of the 1970s, what you ultimately take away from Brian De Palma's adaptation is a sense of growing frustration with a world that allows good people to be tormented and then turned into monsters themselves. Carrie was so harried, so abused by everyone in her life that she finally retaliated with the very force of hatred she despised so much in others. In charting this story, Stephen King and Brian De Palma chart a cycle of violence. They remind us how children turn to us -- adults -- for guidance and compassion. How they turn to us as role models, and how they sometimes fall through the cracks and find themselves lost, rudderless..emulating only the worst angels of human nature.

De Palma executes Carrie like a perfectly-realized cruel practical joke indeed; but not to debauch us; not to make us gawk or laugh at lonely Carrie White. On the contrary, De Palma victimizes the audience, much as Carrie is herself victimized throughout this harrowing film. He reminds us that in youth (and indeed, adulthood) we've all had to contend with our own Chris Hargensons and Billly Nolans: people who are cruel simply for the sake of cruelty. With his dream visions shattered by harsh reality, with his dazzling split screens, even with his anticipatory, anxiety-provoking slow-motion photography, De Palma reminds us to stop and remember that other people have feelings too.

Carrie White burned in Hell all right. But that Hell was called high school. And the real thing could hardly have been worse than gym class.