Femme Fatale
2002 Directed by Brian De Palma
Synopsis
A woman tries to straighten out her life, even as her past as a con-woman comes back to haunt her.
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I still can't decide if this is one of the best or worst films I've seen. It's brilliant either way. Can't wait for Passion. Rebecca Romijn can't act but this film is all about De Palma.
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This review reportedly contains spoilers. I can handle the truth.
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I can see why some love this film while others find it unwatchable. To me, this delivers exactly the kind of self indulgent and willingly artificial entertainment I look for from Brian De Palma. Two days later, this movie keeps growing more interesting in my mind. It's no Dressed to Kill, but I like it a lot. I've said it before, but in my teens and early twenties, I could never understand why people liked De Palma because everything looked to so fake and anochronistic. For whatever reason, I'm now at a place where I savor every weird decision he makes and find myself thrilled and giddy at how nearly all the scenes in this film play out. Nobody makes movies like De Palma. And it's good to know he still had the magic in 2002 after the disappointing Raising Cain. I hope he can squeeze another couple of these out before he's done.
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A slightly underrated De Palma film. Nicely paced and trashy, it manages to be appropriately cast but at the same time it's that casting that puts a ceiling on how good this can be.
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After massively disappointing sci-fi pic Mission to Mars, De Palma returned to his comfort zone and delivered one of the finest films of his career. With glitzy thriller Femme Fatale he explores themes he's been dealing with before; we've got a heist, a conning identity stealing lead, multiple perspectives, erotic touches and twists that are brought together in a highly stylish way. You can trace parts of the story to his earlier films, but the structure is fresh enough for it to not come across as a rehash of old material -- the tried and tested formula still works really well. De Palma is one of those directors who take the film medium to its limits, using it to tell…
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Even better as a rewatch, there is something irrepressibly appealing about the construction of this movie. The first sequence is perfection, a dance to the music in rhythm, editing and shiny, amazing details (everything is competence, but the cat? details like the cat are fantastic!)
I don't mind the bluntness of the theme one bit. I like the very first shot with her watching a movie this movie references and, face unseen for a long time, coming into focus from the blurred reflection. I don't mind that the fact that this is programmatically built as/from noir sort of gives away the twists. I even liked the car chase, though they usually bore me and though I think more than one…
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A slightly underrated De Palma film. Nicely paced and trashy, it manages to be appropriately cast but at the same time it's that casting that puts a ceiling on how good this can be.
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Even better as a rewatch, there is something irrepressibly appealing about the construction of this movie. The first sequence is perfection, a dance to the music in rhythm, editing and shiny, amazing details (everything is competence, but the cat? details like the cat are fantastic!)
I don't mind the bluntness of the theme one bit. I like the very first shot with her watching a movie this movie references and, face unseen for a long time, coming into focus from the blurred reflection. I don't mind that the fact that this is programmatically built as/from noir sort of gives away the twists. I even liked the car chase, though they usually bore me and though I think more than one…
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amazing score by mr. sakamoto as usual.
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This review reportedly contains spoilers. I can handle the truth.
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Like Verhoeven, De Palma's genius lies in making films that are what they satirize (as Jake Cole and many others have noted but just as many have not). And so Femme Fatale is a Hitchcockian (or, at this point, De Palma-esque) erotic thriller mounted with bravura technical virtuosity but also a surprising flash or two of sincerity. Rebecca Romijn–fresh off a terrific performance in McTiernan's excellent, equally misunderstood Rollerball–plays, deliciously, the part she was born to play (and another one besides), while De Palma reinvents "Bolero" for the screen like the maestro he is (with the help of Ryuichi Sakamoto, of course). What's better than the opening heist scene at Cannes? I'll tell you: the shockingly, I mean jaw-droppingly well-staged…
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A different reality from one scene to the next, fantastically embracing cinema as a hyper-stylized dream in which certainty is lost but not missed.
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This review reportedly contains spoilers. I can handle the truth.
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If you've never thought of dialogue as a crutch before (why do you think so many foreign films are so much more hypnotic than English films), perhaps you should take a look at how stuffy and purposefully minimal De Palma's use of it is in Femme Fatale. It's one of a rather bountiful variety of tricks in the director's most recent throwaway - and easily his best work to date (hyperbole alert!). To call the film trash is understating - and mis-stating - its relatively unique nature. De Palma has crafted the suspense tactic into an entire movie, a cinematic taffy: ever spinning, and growing thicker and thinner, alternately, on coherence. Occasionally using split screen to illustrate two viewpoints, occasionally…
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If I was to teach a film class, I would emphasize this.
This formula, or method, has helped many American HBO movies and Japanese anime over the years.
When starting out, you want to show your character doing something. The best way to grab your audience and to introduce your character is to show him/her engaged in a hyper-tension action scene; let it be a heist or a murder. It has to be unique and meticulous, with some "cinematic touch" in your hands.
We call this particular exercise a "set piece".
Also, in every episode, you got to have at least two good sex scenes, involving your own fetishes. They have to last long enough for you to savor it. As long as it is "acceptable", it can involve a form of rape, or even a threesome.
We call this approach, as Godard put it, "a gun and a girl".
Now, go make your own movie.