On this latest episode of Adjust Your Tracking, my co-host, Joe von Appen, and myself bring down the shades, look through our telescopes and stare endlessly at the lurid, surreal and dreamy filmic universe of Brian De Palma. Of course, this is in honor of the theatrical release for “De Palma,” the new documentary by the filmmaker’s friends and colleagues Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow that features the titular director dishing out one fascinating and deeply entertaining anecdote after another on a whirlwind tour through all his filmography. The film was released in limited theaters this past weekend and should expand slightly in the coming weeks before landing on VOD. Continuing with the show’s main subject, we discuss “Carlito’s Way” in our latest edition of HOLD UP, where we reexamine a film we enjoy from our past to see how it looks with modern eyes.
We recently ranked all of De Palma’s films over at The Playlist (our top 5 is admittedly pretty interesting with some bold picks), where we noted the importance of his place along the New Hollywood movement of the 1970s, where he was friendly with many of those contemporaries, particularly George Lucas and Paul Schrader, but he always seemed distinct from them. After a string of early comedies and experimental pictures, De Palma became best known for thrillers of various scope and scale, being influenced by Hitchcock, Antonioni and the French New Wavers, but repackaging their work into something that felt new and exciting, partly thanks to his dazzling camerawork. He’s returned consistently to the same themes — voyeurism and violence — but found new ways to talk about them. Tune in to the podcast to hear why we find him to be so fascinating, problematic and goofy, while also being an incredibly gifted visual stylist. If nothing else, he’s worth a revisit, we’d argue.
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