Saw Blow Out (1981), a Brian De Palma twist on Blow Up by Antonioni. In Blow Up, a photographer accidentally takes a photo of an assassination. In this film, Blow Out, an audio engineer records some tape which proves that an accident was actually a murder. The film is uneven, at turns lurid and crass, but sometimes fleetingly sublime.
The protagonist is played by John Travolta who acts like an overgrown teenager. The script he's given forces him to claim that he was always an AV geek, a science nerd. I get the impression he's supposed to be a nebbish guy swept up in bigger events, or a nervous, driven kind of guy, as in The Conversation, but he's played with Travolta's easy cool-guy charm and it's a strange sell for me. The scene is completely stolen by a small-time blackmailer for me anyway. I loved that horrible little guy!
The film involves a lot of prostitutes, blackmail, borderline-pornographic horror films, a lot of sleazy tawdry stuff. From De Palma's other films, I get the sense that this is his jam, like Tarantino: he loves glittery trash. But there's sequences in the film that also evoke Hitchcock. There's a scene near the climax where a woman is hauled up some stairs. We just see the woman and her attacker, and the big broad side on the stairs lit up with flashing lights. It's very classy, very restrained, and then, shortly after, the camera revolves around the main characters as fireworks go off overhead, a surreal and wonderous image that evokes the indulgences or Baz Luhrmann. There are sequences that are wooden and dull or silly, but others that are taught or quiet or well-observed. An uneven film. I should see more of De Palma, to see if I like him or not.
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