De Palma Blog-A-Thon: Considering De Palma Elsewhere in the Blogosphere (Part 4)

Posts might be light today considering my better half is sick in bed, and it's fallen to me to take care of the kids, house, and so forth. Truthfully, I've been doing this since Thursday, and am a bit stressed right now, as it is proving to be an obstacle to my own contribution to this Blog-A-Thon. But if the doctor is to be believed, I should be back up to full operation tomorrow. In the meantime, I'll leave you guys to chew on David Cairns' fascinating contribution to the Blog-A-Thon, up at his Shadowplay:

...De Palma addressed this comedic lack when he appeared at the Edinburgh Film Festival: after averring that he wasn’t afraid of anything, he admitted that he probably wouldn’t be making any more comedies anytime soon. And yet he practically began as a comedy director: that’s one word used to describe Greetings and Hi Mom! anyway, and then there’s the Tom Smothers movie and Phantom [of the Paradise]. I think maybe De Palma’s sense of humour is a little too outre for popular taste, like Polanski’s, and his technique doesn’t really lend itself to chuckles — I can recall a 360 degree pan in Wise Guys, and it didn’t really work as a gag-delivery mechanism. Plus Polanski and De Palma can’t help throw in unpleasant little details that make the laughter shrivel in your throat — here there’s a gratuitous tooth-pulling episode that leaves the Phantom with a ritzy set of steel gnashers. He doesn’t USE them, but there they are... Read more here.

Just two more days, so keep those submissions/contributions coming.