Is De Palma's "Blow Out" the best movie made in Philly?

Movie Geek Alert: The estimable Cinema Viewfinder is hosting a learned blog-a-thon on the movies of Brian De Palma, with excellent contributions from the likes of Glenn Kenny, Ratnakar Sadasyula and Chris Voss.

Few filmmakers polarize filmlovers like De Palma, whose love-'em-or-hate'em features include the marrow-chilling Sisters (1972) and the definitive high-school horror flick Carrie (1976). The director, a bearded barrel of a man, grew up near Philadelphia's Rittenhouse Square (his father was the head of surgery at Jefferson Hospital) and attended Friends Central. De Palma directed Blow Out (1981), one of the best movies made in Philly, the addictively enjoyable Scarface (1983), the provocative peeping-Tomcat Body Double (1984),  that slickly entertaining The Untouchables (1987)  one of the most compelling among Vietnam films, Casualties of War (1989) and the stylish Mission: Impossible (1996). Though he hasn't scored a maintream hit since then,  Femme Fatale (2002) is one of my guilty pleasures, an  impossibly sexy dreamscape with Rebecca Romijn-Stamos and Antonio Banderas.

De Palma does not so much explore as present the connection between sex and power (and vice-versa), which in his films is often linked by an umbilicus of blood. (As Tony Montana, hero of the Oliver Stone-scripted Scarface, put it: First you get the money, then you get the power, then you get the women.") Another persistent theme is that of a man unable to save a woman in jeopardy.

The naked violence and sexuality of De Palma's films have made him a controversy magnet. During the 1980s some social critic observed that every time he made a movie he lowered the national IQ by 10 points. Since there are so few filmmakers with such swoony style, I'm inclined to forgive him for a lack of substance. You will not, however, hear me defending the indefensible The Bonfire of the Vanities (1990) or Mission to Mars (2000), ravishing, but indecipherable.

Are you a De Palma fan or foe? Favorite film? What themes do you see in his films?

Cary Grant outrunning assassins in the sublimely entertaining "North by Northwest."

"That's funny, that plane's dustin' crops where there ain't no crops," observes the guy at the prairie bus stop to dapper Cary Grant in North  by Northwest, granddaddy of the modern action flick, at the top of a sequence in which a DDT-spewing plane attempts to fumigate the Manhattan adman mistaken for a CIA agent. N by NW (its title borrowed from Hamlet -- "I am but mad north-northwest: when the wind is southerly, I know a hawk from a handsaw") will celebrate its 50th anniversary in November with reissues on DVD and Blu-Ray.

N by NW may not be Alfred Hitchcock's best film, but it is something better. It is one of those movies -- including Casablanca, Rear Window, The Magnificent Seven,  The Man Who Would Be King and the Sean Connery James Bond films -- that are cinematic best friends. You're always happy to see them and you see something new every time you visit. Most would nominate N by NW, a Cold War film travelogue that zips from Manhattan's Plaza Hotel to the United Nations to Chicago's Union Station to an Iowa cornfield to Mt. Rushmore as the most purely entertaining film ever made.

Legend has it that James Bond creator Ian Fleming was so smitten with the film and Grant's performance as the imperturbable, well-tailored  figure at its center that it inspired his conception of James Bond. What is definitely true is that Fleming wanted Grant to star as Bond. Grant demurred.

There is much to recommend in the mistaken-identity Cold War thriller apart from Grant's high-comic performance. James Mason is suave and slithery as a Communist operative, Martin Landau shifty as his henchman and Eva Marie Saint seductive as an intellectual who may be playing  both for Communism and Democracy.  It also has a memorable score by Bernard Herrmann (subject of a Turner Classic Movies tribute this month), a snappy screenplay by Ernest Lehman and influential art direction by Robert Boyle. You might be interested in this post about James Mason's modernist house seen in the film.

Where does N by NW rank in your Hitchcock pantheon? What other movies do you include among your film best friends?

Does the announced remake of "Yellow Submarine" make you feel like a Blue Meanie?

"There's nothing new except that which has been forgotten," proclaimed Rose Bertin, Marie Antoinette's milliner. Looks like Hollywood is taking her words to heart, as Patrick Goldstein reports today in his audit of the reboots and remakes clogging the movie pipeline. They include Bob Zemeckis' Yellow Submarine, Steven Spielberg's Harvey and Bryan Singer's Excalibur.

Many classic films -- including John Huston's The Maltese Falcon  with Humphrey Bogart and Martin Scorsese's The Departed -- are remakes, the Huston the THIRD version of the Dashiell Hammett story cranked out by Warners in under a decade and the Scorsese a reboot of the Hong Kong actioner Infernal Affairs. His Girl Friday, one of the greatest comedies ever, was Howard Hawks' gender-reversed remake of The Front Page.  

 Great as some sequels are, I'm not looking forward to the upcoming remakes Fame and Footloose and The Karate Kid. And yet I totally get why audiences want to see classic stories with contemporary actors, for example J.J. Abrams' Star Trek. In this vein,  there are very good remakes of The Parent Trap (Hayley Mills and Hayley Mills in the original, Lindsay Lohan and Lindsay Lohan in the remake) and Freaky Friday (Jodie Foster and Barbara Harris in the original, Jamie Lee Curtis and Lohan in the remake).  And, goodness knows, Little Women was great with Katharine Hepburn as Jo in 1933 and with Winona Ryder as Jo in 1994.

A lot of the announced remakes are of TV shows. For every small-screen success remade as a big-screen bomb (think Bewitched or Starsky & Hutch) there are surprisingly good updates such as The Brady Bunch and Get Smart.

My vote for the Worst. Remake. Ever. would probably be Warren Beatty's Love Affair (a remake of Leo McCarey's 1939 Love Affair and his 1958 An Affair to Remember) which likewise inspired Nora Ephron's enjoyable rethink Sleepless in Seattle.

Favorite/least favorite remakes? Your thoughts on the eternal remake trend?

Megan Fox (of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen," the summer's biggest earner.

By the slimmest of margins this summer's box office topped last year's ($4.254 billion to 4.2 billion), while attendance is down by 13 million, or 2.39 %. So says box-office tracker Paul Dergarabedian of Hollywood.com, attributing the disparity in the two figures to higher ticket prices.

Sequels and reboots accounted for three of the box-office top five. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen  (#1) has made nearly $400 million; Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (#2) nearly $300 mil and Star Trek (#5) more than $250 mil. Up (#3 with $289 mil) and The Hangover (#4 at $270 mil) round out the top five.

Like many industry analysts, Dergarabedian characterizes this as a "starless" summer -- pointing to the fact that box-office powerhouses are not attached to the top-five films. I beg to disagree. It's more that stars from a younger generation dominate the biggest earners. Transformers' Shia LaBeouf and Megan Fox are two of the reasons for the film's success as Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson and Rupert Grint are for Harry Potter's.  Certainly Hugh Jackman (X-Men: Origins, #7) is a star, as is Ben Stiller (A Night at the Museum, #8), and Sandra Bullock (The Proposal, #9), Tom Hanks (Angels & Demons, #10), Johnny Depp (Public Enemies, #14), Katherine Heigl and Gerard Butler (The Ugly Truth, #16), Brad Pitt (Inglourious Basterds, #17) and Meryl Streep (Julie & Julia, #18). 

The biggest surprise of the summer is that Julie & Julia (which through last weekend had made $70 million and is on track to hit the $100 million mark) has outgrossed both the action film The Taking of Pelham 1,2,3 and the confrontational comedy Bruno.

Analysts credit 3-D movies (and the premium price of a ducat) for helping the summer box-office, especially in the cases of Up and Final Destination. Did you see any films in 3-D? Your thoughts?

What surprises and trends do you see?

Audrey Hepburn and Fred Astaire in "Funny Face."

We go to the movies hungry for the stories. Often we leave thirsting for the clothes. When they see The September Issue, R. J. Cutler's mesmerizing documentary about Vogue magazine's powerhouses editor Anna Wintour (the model for Miranda Priestley in The Devil Wears Prada) and creative director Grace Coddington, moviegoers are likely to spike a fashion fever. (Cutler's film, which contrasts Wintour's dictator style with Coddington's dreamy approach, opens here September 11.)

Movies and fashion -- and movies about fashion -- have been hand in glove ever since the 1920s when producer Sam Goldwyn -- furious that the sudden drop of hemlines made his new releases look out of date -- asked Coco Chanel to design clothes for his female stars in order that his films look in vogue. Soon studios would sell the patterns to dresses worn on screen by Joan Crawford and, later, Elizabeth Taylor, to department stores which would sell thousands of copies. The voile gown Crawford wore in Letty Lynton sold more than 32,000 units for Macy's. The strapless number worn by Taylor in A Place in the Sun sold upwards of 50,000, boasted designer Edith Head, who said that she went to a prom in 1952 (the year after the movies release) and saw "17 Elizabeth Taylor dresses waltz past." More recently, the much-coveted emerald green slip gown worn by Keira Knightley in Atonement became a best-seller at vendors such as Red Carpet Prom.

There are at least four kinds of fashion films. There are those, like Lady in the Dark, Funny Face, The Devil Wears Prada, Sex and the City and The September Issue, that take places in the world of fashion mags There are those like Funny Face, Darling, Mahogany and Zoolander that have as their central characters fashion models. There are those, like Designing Woman and A New Kind of Love are about fashion designers. And then there are those starring the It Girl or It Boy of the moment -- Ginger Rogers, Fred Astaire, Gary Cooper, Lauren Bacall, Audrey Hepburn, Grace Kelly, Julie Christie, Warren Beatty, Diana Ross, Diane Keaton, Jude Law or Beyonce -- that make the moviegoer want what he or she is wearing. Edith Head always said that her most influential designs weren't the high-fashion numbers she confected, but the more vernacular looks, such as the black turtleneck, jeans and loafers worn by Audrey Hepburn in Funny Face, which established the Beatnik uniforn worn by everyone from coffeehouse habitues to Michael Jackson.

Your favorite fashion movie? Ensemble? Look? I love the way Astaire wore his necktie as a belt -- a design of his very own design seen in films such as The Barkleys of Broadway and The Bandwagon. You?

A father (Viggo Mortensen) and his son, survivors of the apocalypse, in "The Road."

Often the end-of-the-world movie scenario spells the beginning of sky-high box-office. Look no further than Charlton Heston (who starred in Soylent Green, Planet of the Apes and The Omega Man), Mel Gibson (the Mad Max trilogy), and Will Smith (Independence Day, I, Robot and I am Legend, the Omega Man remake).

Anne Thompson looks further, noting that 2009 has seen/will see a number of dystopian films, from Terminator 4: Rise of the Machines and District 9 to the forthcoming animation 9 (soulful burlap dolls v. mechanical beasts), Roland Emmerich's 2012 ( an action/adventure with John Cusack trying to survive a global cataclysm) and John Hillcoat's The Road (a survivalist saga based on the Cormac McCarthy novel with Viggo Mortensen as a father who soldiers on with his son after the apocalypse).

Is there more apocalypse now than then? It seems like the most in about a decade., when the fears of the millennium and the Y2K virus were rampant. 1998/1999 saw Armageddon, Deep Impact, the first in the Matrix trilogy and Fight Club.

The end-of-the-world films that really get me are AI: Artificial Intelligence, The Ghost in the Shell and On the Beach.  For me the most haunting  dystopia movies (always a field day for art directors) are Brazil,  Metropolis, Soylent Green,  12 Monkeys, ...28 Days Later and Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome.

Do documentaries like An Inconvenient Truth (about global warming) and The End of the Line (about overfishing and the depletion of food fish) feed these scenarios of impending doom? Your thoughts? Nominations for most haunting end-of-the-world film?

The Hangover -- the Three Men and a Baby of 2009?

Your pick for the movie that best defines/encapsulates/represents the summer of '09?

I'd probably go for Up, which did very well in a poll conducted by Moviefone. Those 600,000 movie fans who voted went for Up as the best family film. But in the "Movie Most Worth Your Cash" polling, the edgy comedy The Hangover scored highest. Interesting that in a summer of so many sequels (Harry Potter) and reboots (Star Trek) that an original rose to the top of the poll. (In terms of box office, Transformers 2, Harry Potter and Star Trek top the charts.) The Least Worth the Cash category was led by the fossilized-on-arrival comedies Year One and Land of the Lost. While Moviefone voters cited (500) Days of Summer as the Best Movie No One Saw, I would go for The Hurt Locker.

You? Your thoughts on the movies of summer? Breakout performances? Memorable moments?

Ellie Greenwich, circa 1964

When I read that Ellie Greenwich, the poet of doo-wah-diddy and da-do-ron-ron, the legendary songwriter of "Chapel of Love," "Be My Baby" and "River Deep, Mountain High," had passed away at the age of 68, I was sad. Yet just thinking about her songs -- musical narratives that got characters from meet-cute to marriage in two minutes flat -- made me smile.

Wanted to share Ann Powers' lovely tribute to the legend who worked with everyone from the Shangri-Las to Neal Diamond to Ike and Tina Turner. A good way of celebrating her life and reckoning her impact on pop music is to see Alison Anders' Grace of My Heart, a fascinating account of a Brill Building beatnik, played by Ileana Douglas, inspired by the lives of Carole King and Greenwich. From Hair to Hairspray, Greenwich's storytelling lyrics have been widely imitated. She put the snap and crackle into pop.

Renee Zellweger

Over at Thompson on Hollywood, blogmeister Anne Thompson has some advice for Renee Zellweger, whose career has sailed slowly into the doldrums so often encountered by actresses of a certain age.

I know some readers are allergic to Zellweger, whose chipmunk charm is not universally beloved. (Consider Jezebel's Women Who Women Love to Hate.) But I've very much liked her since I saw her in The Whole Wide World (1996), in an astonishing turn as Novalyne Price, the real-life 1930s Texas scribe who gets involved with Robert E. Howard, creator of Conan the Barbarian. Shortly after came Jerry Maguire, where she brought pith and marrow to Cameron Crowe's Manic Pixie Dream Girl (cf: Kate Hudson in Almost Famous and Bridget Fonda in Singles). While I haven't liked RZ in everything, sure liked her dramatic depth as the daughter in One True Thing, her comic frivolity as  Bridget Jones, her send-up of Doris Day in Down With Love, her brittle Roxie Hart in Chicago and that Ma Kettle character she played in the otherwise tepid Cold Mountain.

As everyone knows, 40 is a dangerous age for actresses -- including Meryl Streep, who muddled through She-Devil and Music of the Heart before re-emerging -- much to her surprise -- as both Actress and Movie Star in Adaptation, The Devil Wears Prada, Doubt, Mamma Mia! and Julie & Julia. Similarly, Diane Keaton foundered after 40 until she found Nancy Meyer -- who created Baby Boom, Father of the Bride and Something's Gotta Give for her All it takes is one good role -- think of Susan Sarandon's Annie Savoy in Bull Durham (she was 42) -- to transform an aging babe into a bankable goddess. Sandra Bullock is having a very good year with The Proposal and buzz is promising on her next film, All About Steve. Diane Lane has found a niche in starting-over films Under the Tuscan Sun and Nights in Rodanthe. Would that Angela Bassett, Michelle Pfeiffer Meg Ryan and Zellweger find the right material.

Are you a Zellweger lover or hater? Favorite role? Career advice?