The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, March 16-22
Phantom of the Paradise (1974)
Directed by Brian De Palma
It’s the ol’ show-biz yarn—artist meets bigwig, crass commercialism ensues—à la De Palma. Expect the familiar beats: split screens, dizzying cinematography, balcony-reaching theatrics and sensationalism. But in a Hitchcockian twist, it’s a musical, one genre De Palma would never touch again, even if it’s one his bombastic style most easily feeds. Fully embracing rock’s surface-serving gusto, Phantom of the Paradise satirizes how easily the industry squanders that energy on disposable drivel in a highly literate takedown. For that, you can thank ace production designer Jack Fisk for aiding the mise-en-scène with an isolation chamber made of soundboards and an overlarge gold record desk, not to mention deliberately shoddy sets disgracing the Paradise stage. On the sonic end, Paul Williams tenders his trademark ballads before perfecting the formulaic nostalgia-porn songbook streamlined by his character, the Spector-like demagogue Swan. Here, exploiting talent to make crappy music is the Devil’s work, the primary victim being William Finley, whose Faustian cantata is traded for a frame-up, metal teeth, and howling vengeance. Seriously, if your music was butchered (literally, the audience is executed) by a retching diva named Beef, you’d be pissed too. Wildean bargains, on-stage assassinations, bloodshed in the name of a muse—that’s not just entertainment, that’s the hell of it. Max Kyburz (March 20, 7pm at the Museum of the Moving Image’s “See It Big! Jack Fisk”)