Shooting two ADAM SANDLERS together for “JACK AND JILL”

To handle technical challenges of filming Adam Sandler opposite himself playing the titular twins “Jack and Jill,” the filmmakers turned first to director of photography Dean Cundey, the cinematographer who shot “Who Framed Roger Rabbit,” “The Parent Trap,” “Back to the Future,” and “Jurassic Park.”

“When an actor plays two characters in the frame at the same time, there are a lot of tricky things that occur – tricky, because the process usually requires you to do a shot with one character in the frame and then repeat the shot with the other character also in the same frame,” Cundey explains. “Sometimes, it’s a fairly simple process, as simple as a split. In those shots, the camera doesn’t move. In those, you film it twice, with the actor playing one character on one side of the frame, and then again, playing the other character on the other side of the frame. Then you go into the computer and put them together, almost like you’re taking two photographs and cutting them in the middle and pasting them down.”

From those simple shots, the process can get increasingly complicated. “We’ll move the camera, have them touch each other, hand each other objects – it’s a great way to keep the audience engaged,” Cundey continues.

Cundey describes a typical shot: “We’d shoot Adam as Jack. Then he’d go and get made up as Jill; we’d relight the set and we’d have to make sure that the lighting was right for where Adam would be standing as Jill. Adam would come in and we’d give him a little ear bud, so he could hear his performance as Jack, which he’d just done. We had a monitor set up so he could see what Jack was doing. Dan DeLeeuw, the visual effects supervisor, would make sure that the shots were going to work. The motion control technicians made sure we were getting the exact camera movement over and over again. Finally, the on-set compositor could put it together as we did it – show us how it’s going together so we could evaluate it and judge it. It was a very team-heavy process.”

“We used a computer-controlled camera – the computer is programmed to do the exact same move multiple times,” says DeLeeuw. “We could shoot once for Jack and do the same move again with Jill.” A good example, he notes, is the scene in which Al Pacino falls for Jill at a basketball game. “Not only do you have Jack and Jill, but the basketball players and the crowd behind them. As the setting gets bigger, so does the difficulty.”

It fell to DeLeeuw to create the illusion that Adam Sandler really does have a twin sister. “These effects took a lot of planning, right from the storyboard stage – but it’s also a comedy, so we all had to stay on our toes,” he says. “For many shots, we’d shoot Adam with a body double for Jill – the double would wear a green hood over his head, which we could remove later and replace with Adam, as Jill.”

Cundey explains how he worked in tandem with DeLeeuw: “The on-set process is the gathering of the pieces of the puzzle – the mosaic that is later put together by the compositors and post-production team. I had to make sure that the pieces are the right pieces – as the audience gets more and more sophisticated, you can’t do anything simply. You have to give them the pieces so they can do something interesting and unique.”

Cundey says that the production had a great asset in Adam Sandler. “As we got through the process, Adam learned more and more about how to do what we wanted to do, and he was a fast learner,” says Cundey. “The great thing about Adam and his creative process is that every new shot is an invention. We’d rehearse a shot and have a very good idea of what we wanted to do, but everything was subject to rehearsal and seeing how it played. The coolest thing about this production was being able to think on your feet – there’d be a new idea, and it would be up to [director] Dennis [Dugan], me, and the assistant director to figure out how we were going to do it.”

Opening across the Philippines on Feb. 22, “Jack and Jill” is distributed by Columbia Pictures, local office of Sony Pictures Releasing International. Visit http://www.columbiapictures.com.ph for trailers, exclusive content and free downloads. Like us at www.Facebook.com/ColumbiaPicturesPH and join our fan contests.

How stylists turned ADAM SANDLER into “JILL”

For the behind-the-camera crew of Columbia Pictures' new comedy “Jack and Jill,” the primary challenge was in making lead star Adam Sandler into two titular characters. The primary task went to makeup department head Ann Pala, hair department head Thomas Real, and costume designer Ellen Lutter.

In the film, Jack (Sandler) was living an almost perfect life, with the exception of one, annoying constant – his twin sister Jill (also played by Sandler). Every year he has to tolerate a Thanksgiving visit from his smothering sister, who doesn’t take long to turn his life upside down.

Pala and Real went through dozens of hair styles, textures, colors, and lengths (short, curly, and long), various nail colors and lengths, lip colors, skin tones, lashes, and teeth, all in different combinations. Working with three Sandler look-alikes, they created a number of different options for the filmmakers to choose from.

“Adam had played a girl in various sketches on ‘Saturday Night Live,’” says Pala, indicating that they had some idea of what might work with the actor. “The key factors in giving him feminine features were his eyes, cheeks, teeth, and bangs. We used nine different makeup skin tones to highlight and conceal.”

It was key to the filmmakers to try to create a real character in Jill. “Adam’s not playing a man playing a woman; he’s playing a woman,” notes Lutter. “It wasn’t a question of drag – we wanted to create a real woman, with specific features, character traits – it had to be genuine and natural. On the other hand, we were able to have a little fun because part of the character is that she looks exactly like her brother. We had the room to play and have some fun with Adam’s muscles and masculine demeanor – Jill is not a hyper-feminine character.”

Lutter says that when it came to Jill’s clothes, “Adam likes to be very comfortable, but being comfortable has nothing to do with being a woman. We tapped into the lightness of the character – and that’s where we had all our fun. Adam would always say, ‘I know you guys like Jill better,’ and it was true!”

Still, dressing Sandler as Jill wasn’t as simple as putting him in a dress. “Everything had to be manipulated – whether it was adding a detail around the neckline, or something with the arms, or working with the waist to build some hips. Everything had to be altered and adjusted to play with the proportions. It’s not like the clothes were just hanging around.”

Opening across the Philippines on Feb. 22, “Jack and Jill” is distributed by Columbia Pictures, local office of Sony Pictures Releasing International. Visit http://www.columbiapictures.com.ph for trailers, exclusive content and free downloads. Like us at www.Facebook.com/ColumbiaPicturesPH and join our fan contests.

ADAM SANDLER plays the dual roles of “JACK AND JILL”

Director Dennis Dugan re-teams with Adam Sandler for the eighth time on Columbia Pictures’ new comedy “Jack and Jill.”

In the film, Jack (Sandler) was living an almost perfect life, with the exception of one, annoying constant – his twin sister Jill (also played by Sandler). Every year he has to tolerate a Thanksgiving visit from his smothering sister, who doesn’t take long to turn his life upside down. As the weekend intrusion starts stretching into a month, the siblings fight, tease, and bicker in the way only twins can. When it becomes clear Jill is never leaving, Jack sets into motion several schemes that he hopes will return Jill to where he loves her most – the other side of the country.

“What I found interesting was that somewhere partway through the production I thought of Adam as playing Jack, but I thought of Jill as if she were her own person. Adam didn’t walk around off-camera acting like Jill, but after a while, it was as if Jill was a woman we hired who happened to look remarkably like Adam.”

In the film, Sandler plays Jack, an advertising executive who is one commercial away from hitting the big time – or, if the deal falls through, unmitigated disaster. Into this turmoil comes his twin sister, Jill – who always makes things more complicated than they need to be.

“I knew Adam would have no problem playing Jill. The part he worked at was to play Jack,” says Steve Koren, who co-wrote the screenplay with Sandler. “Jack’s the kind of guy who’s a little bit on edge – he’s had to work to make that guy different from who he really is.”

While writing the film with Adam Sandler, Koren found some interesting things. “Some twins actually create their own language when they’re little kids, so we invented a special, private language that only Jack and Jill speak,” he says. “We also found out that twins have a bond that is a lot stronger than some siblings, so we tried to incorporate as much of that as possible.”

Playing the dual role required an ingenious sense of timing from Sandler. “Part of the joke was that Jack and Jill would do the exact same things at the exact same time,” Koren explains. “What that meant, of course, was that Adam would do the scene once, and then he’d redo it as the other character. It was almost like a dance, a ballet; Adam had to have incredible focus and perfect timing. It was pretty incredible to watch.”

Describing the character and the plot of the film, Koren explains, “Jill had only two constants in her life – taking care of her parents and the love of her bird, Poopsie. She’s sacrificed her personal life. When she comes to visit Jack for the holidays and won’t leave, Jack tries to help her find a guy – a guy who he hopes will get her out of his house.”

Opening across the Philippines on Feb. 22, “Jack and Jill” is distributed by Columbia Pictures, local office of Sony Pictures Releasing International. Visit http://www.columbiapictures.com.ph for trailers, exclusive content and free downloads. Like us atwww.Facebook.com/ColumbiaPicturesPH and join our fan contests.

AL PACINO pokes fun at himself in “JACK AND JILL ”

Legendary actor Al Pacino parodies his screen persona as he plays a bigger-than-life version of himself in Columbia Pictures' new, rambunctious comedy “Jack and Jill.”

In the film, advertising executive Jack (Adam Sandler) was living an almost perfect life, with the exception of one, annoying constant – his twin sister Jill (also played by Sandler). Every year he has to tolerate a Thanksgiving visit from his smothering sister, who doesn’t take long to turn his life upside down. When she won’t leave, Jack tries to help her find a guy – a guy who he hopes will get her out of his house.

Of course, nothing goes as planned. Instead of a date, Jill gets an impossibly unlikely suitor. In the story, Jack needs Al Pacino to agree to do a commercial – and if he can’t get Pacino, Dunkin Donuts will take their business elsewhere. Just as he’s wondering what he’s going to do, who should fall for Jill but the Oscar®-winning actor himself? Just one catch – in the movie, the character of Pacino is suffering from a nervous breakdown.

For the role of Al Pacino, the filmmakers decided to get Al Pacino. “Al Pacino isn’t really playing himself – he’s playing an obsessive actor who has gone a bit off the deep end and is losing his marbles,” says screenwriter Steve Koren. “So, when he falls for Jill, he goes overboard. He’s willing to go to any length to get the girl. The trouble is, Jill’s just not all that into him. She knows more about ‘American Idol’ than she does about Al Pacino.”

Pacino plays the character in a way that is very different from the man he is in real life. “He’s an actor who’s losing control,” says Pacino. “He has had an overload of work and it’s starting to take hold of him and affect his mental capacity. He’s clearly in the middle of a breakdown. That’s the track I’ve taken in order to play myself as somebody else – it’s all heightened and exaggerated as to make it believable in a comedy. However, I tried to keep it real so that the madness is real.”

In the movie, the character of Pacino is starting to lose his grip on reality. He has been mulling an offer to play Don Quixote in “Man of La Mancha” on Broadway – and when he meets Jill, he endows himself and Jill with characteristics of the characters. “In ‘Man of La Mancha,’ Don Quixote is a madman who believes himself to be a knight, and he believes Dulcinea to be a princess, even though she’s an ugly peasant. He falls madly in love with her by endowing her with virtues she doesn’t really possess,” Pacino explains. “When my character meets Jill, he does the same thing. She becomes his Dulcinea. In a sense, my character unconsciously uses her as a tool to find out if he indeed wants to play the part of Don Quixote. He gives Jill all the traits of the character Dulcinea so he can rehearse it, try it out, and see if it fits. He doesn’t even know he’s doing it, but there’s method in his madness.”

In addition, Jill represents something that the character of Pacino feels he has lost. “Our character of Pacino is at a crossroads,” says director Dennis Dugan. “He’s kind of lost in Los Angeles. The thing that’s missing in life is who he used to be – a sense of home and roots. Suddenly, here’s a woman who comes to him at the height of his fame and reminds him of who he used to be. He needs to go back to his home, and he thinks Jill is his ticket.”

“I love the idea of playing an older movie star, clinging, trying to get back to what it was that made him do this thing in the first place,” Pacino continues. “My character is a guy who just wants to go back home, wants to be simple again, but will never be able to be that way again. And no matter how crazy he is, his instincts are still working as an actor – if he engages her in the same way Don Quixote engages Dulcinea, he can find out if he can really play the part in ‘Man of La Mancha.’ It’s subtle and unusual, but this is the actor’s journey out of madness.”

Dugan says that working with Pacino was, of course, a completely unique experience. “I didn’t know what to expect – he’s obviously a serious actor – but he embraced the insanity,” says Dugan. “He played his version of Pacino in a truly brilliant way. He’s a genuinely nice guy and he had a terrific attitude about the whole thing.”

Naturally, the real Pacino provided exactly what you’d expect: a tremendous actor, having the time of his life. “Al was at the top of his game – Adam would throw something at him, and Al would catch it and fire it right back,” says Dugan. “He embraced the way we work, which I think is different from the way most sets work. But Al was never thrown off by any of it – he stood in there and hit it as hard as he could.”

Opening soon across the Philippines, “Jack and Jill” is distributed by Columbia Pictures, local office of Sony Pictures Releasing International. Visithttp://www.columbiapictures.com.ph for trailers, exclusive content and free downloads. Like us at www.Facebook.com/ColumbiaPicturesPH and join our fan contests.

KATIE HOLMES PLAYS SANDLER’S WIFE IN “JACK AND JILL”

Katie Holmes stars opposite Adam Sandler in Columbia Pictures’ uproarious comedy “Jack and Jill.”

In the film, Jack (Sandler) was living an almost perfect life, with the exception of one, annoying constant – his twin sister Jill (also Sandler). Every year he has to tolerate a Thanksgiving visit from his smothering sister, who doesn’t take long to turn his life upside down. As the weekend intrusion starts stretching into a month, the siblings fight, tease, and bicker in the way only twins can. When it becomes clear Jill is never leaving, Jack sets into motion several schemes that he hopes will return Jill to where he loves her most – the other side of the country.

Holmes joins the cast as Erin, Jack’s wife and mother to their two children. “She’s a very busy wife and mother,” Holmes explains. “When Jill comes to town and creates a lot of mayhem within the family, she’s the one who’s trying to keep it all together.

“It was wonderful to see Adam transform into Jill,” she continues. “As a woman, it was nice to have conversations with a man about shaving legs, how pantyhose and heels feel, and all of the tougher parts about being a woman. Adam was a great sport – it was really, really fun.”

Holmes has showcased her ability as an actress to play a wide spectrum of diversified roles. She has appeared in several notable films ranging from the action blockbuster “Batman Begins,” directed by Christopher Nolan, to critically acclaimed art house pictures such as Ang Lee's “The Ice Storm” and Peter Hedges' “Pieces of April.”

Holmes was most recently seen on the big screen in “Don’t Be Afraid of The Dark” and “The Son of No One.” On television, she portrayed First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy in “The Kennedys,” opposite Greg Kinnear as President John F. Kennedy.

Holmes has worked with some of Hollywood's most prominent and talented directors. Her credits include “Wonder Boys,” directed by Curtis Hanson; “Thank You for Smoking,” directed by Jason Reitman; “The Gift,” directed by Sam Raimi; “Abandon,” directed by Stephen Gaghan; “Go,” directed by Doug Liman; “Phone Booth,” directed by Joel Schumacher; “First Daughter,” directed by Forest Whitaker; “Teaching Mrs. Tingle,” directed by Kevin Williamson; and “Disturbing Behavior,” directed by David Nutter. 2008 marked her Broadway debut in Arthur Millers “All My Sons” opposite John Lithgow, Dianne Wiest and Patrick Wilson. Her portrayal of Ann garnered glowing reviews and established her as an accomplished actress on both screen and stage.

In 1996, Holmes landed the role of Libbets Casey opposite Tobey Maguire and Sigourney Weaver in Lee's award-winning drama “The Ice Storm” while in Los Angeles for pilot season. A year later she was cast as Joey Potter on the TV series "Dawson's Creek," opposite James Van Der Beek and Michelle Williams. The show quickly became the highest-rated series on the WB network throughout its six-season run.

Opening soon across the Philippines, “Jack and Jill” is distributed by Columbia Pictures, local office of Sony Pictures Releasing International. Visit http://www.columbiapictures.com.ph for trailers, exclusive content and free downloads. Like us at www.Facebook.com/ColumbiaPicturesPH and join our fan contests.

Twice the fun, twice the mayhem in Adam Sandler's “JACK AND JILL”

Adam Sandler's twin sister is coming for the holidays...and it aint pretty. Columbia Pictures presents the outrageous comedy “Jack and Jill” from director Dennis Dugan and starring Sandler, Katie Holmes and Al Pacino.

When you get together with your family for the holidays, everybody has that one family member who drives you crazy. They mean well, and you love them, but still…

For Jack (Sandler), that’s his sister – his twin sister – Jill (also played by Sandler). Growing up, their lives were incredibly intertwined. But ever since Jack moved away, they have moved in different directions. Jack has become a highly motivated and successful ad executive in L.A., while Jill was the one who stayed back east and took care of their parents. Now, they see each other only once a year, at Thanksgiving, when Jill comes to L.A. for a visit. Time and distance have taken a toll on their relationship – and now Jack finds himself enduring Jill’s annual visit, rather than enjoying it.

Still, it’s just a couple of days, right? Wrong. Jack and Jill get off on the wrong foot – just like always – and the only way Jack can make things right is to ask Jill to stay on through Hanukkah, giving her some time to enjoy everything L.A. has to offer, from game shows to horseback riding. Still, Jack isn’t exactly pleased that his sister is extending her trip…

And adding to Jack’s stress is the fact that things aren’t going all that well at his ad agency. His biggest client, Dunkin Donuts, is demanding that Jack deliver Al Pacino to perform in a new Dunkaccino commercial. Jack wonders how in the world he is going to get Pacino – does he even do commercials? – and his quest is intensified when he finds out that the famous actor is having a nervous breakdown and losing his mind. Having played one too many roles, the actor is starting to confuse reality with the parts he is playing and is acting out in some increasingly erratic ways.

When Jack takes Jill to see the Lakers, he approaches Pacino about the commercial, but is stunned when Pacino is much more interested in talking to Jill. It turns out that Jill reminds Pacino of everything he left behind – his boyhood home in the Bronx, his childhood – and for Pacino, who is preparing to play Don Quixote on stage, something clicks. Because he’s having trouble with reality, suddenly, Jill isn’t Jack’s wacky sister… she’s Dulcinea, Don Quixote’s idealized romantic love – and Pacino must conquer her affections to realize his quest.

Trouble is, Jill isn’t interested. But Pacino will not be brushed aside so easily. Inviting himself to Jack and Jill’s surprise birthday party, he sweeps Jill off her feet and takes her for a private party at his home – but Jill still isn’t biting, which only inflames Pacino’s passion (and insanity). It’s not clear who’s more upset – Jill, from the experience, or Jack, who thinks his chance to get Pacino could be over, or Pacino, who is completely losing it for Jill.

For Jack, now the shoe is on the other foot: he has to try to convince Jill to extend her trip even further and give Pacino one more shot. It’s a move that sets in motion a wild, outrageous series of events that reveals to Jack who the most important people in his life are – and have always been.

Opening soon across the Philippines, “Jack and Jill” is distributed by Columbia Pictures, local office of Sony Pictures Releasing International. Visithttp://www.columbiapictures.com.ph for trailers, exclusive content and free downloads. Like us at www.Facebook.com/ColumbiaPicturesPH and join our fan contests.

Love 'em or hate 'em... They're comin' at ya! Adam Sandler is both JACK & JILL!

There's a pretty good number of people that hate Adam Sandler. But! There's a waayyy bigger number that loves him, and I am on of them! Hah! Suck on that!

I don't give a flying "F" if you hate him but we've got something exciting to look forward to. Sandler's new feature showcases him in two classic nursery rhyme characters, Jack and Jill. 

This hilarious offering of Columbia Pictures presents the new comedy together with Katie Holmes and Al Pacino.

In the film, Jack (Sandler) was living an almost perfect life, with the exception of one, annoying constant – his twin sister Jill (also played by Sandler). Every year he has to tolerate a Thanksgiving visit from his smothering sister, who doesn’t take long to turn his life upside down. As the weekend intrusion starts stretching into a month, the siblings fight, tease, and bicker in the way only twins can. When it becomes clear Jill is never leaving, Jack sets into motion several schemes that he hopes will return Jill to where he loves her most – the other side of the country.

Director Dennis Dugan re-teams with Sandler for the eighth time on “Jack and Jill.” “What I found interesting was that somewhere partway through the production I thought of Adam as playing Jack, but I thought of Jill as if she were her own person. Adam didn’t walk around off-camera acting like Jill, but after a while, it was as if Jill was a woman we hired who happened to look remarkably like Adam!”

Opening soon across the Philippines, “Jack and Jill” is distributed by Columbia Pictures, local office of Sony Pictures Releasing International. Visi thttp://www.columbiapictures.com.ph for trailers, exclusive content and free downloads. Like us at www.Facebook.com/ColumbiaPicturesPH and join our fan contests.

So, will you be watching? I know I am! :o)

Brian De Palma: Carlito's Way

I used to think Carlito's Way was, to quote the popular interpretation, an "apology" for Scarface, a toned-down, mature take on that film's criminal excess that depicts a gangster trying to redeem himself rather than climb the ranks of the underworld. After revisiting that film, however, I can better see what De Palma was doing with his first, more grandiose view of the criminal underworld and, with unorthodox focus, how it affected America's rising Latino population. Nevertheless, this film, with its ever-moving but graceful camera, bold use of color and flagrant romanticism, not only proves the superior view of criminal life but also stands as perhaps De Palma's finest achievement as a filmmaker and the best balance of his confrontationally probing camera and the mainstream Hollywood elegance of which he wanted to be a part.

This mix of the daring with the quotidian might explain why so many mistook the film for a mildly original take on a tired subject. But to see how the film subverts and analyzes clichés, one need look no farther than the opening, a monochromatic framing device that spoils all pretense at suspense by showing the titular hero murdered by way of introduction. De Palma uses the sequence not only to set in motion his aesthetic approach—using his Steadicam shots as POV representations of Carlito's view, up to and including the slow pivot upside down and pull back as Carlito's soul leaves his body—but to make sure that we spend the film not wondering what happens to Carlito but why this doomed scenario occurs.

As the film moves into flashback, we see Carlito (Al Pacino), a convicted heroin dealer, getting out of prison after serving five years of a 30-year sentence. His lawyer and friend, Dave Kleinfield (Sean Penn), gets him off not for good behavior or truly appealing the case but pointing out D.A. corruption. Pacino uses the court scene to get out his hoo-hah mania he exhibited in the previous year's Scent of a Woman (a movie I maintain is Animal House with stunt casting and a sense of self-importance). He carries on about being a changed man, shouting over the judge who has to take it because he, too, was complicit in the evidence tampering that put Carlito away. "I've been cured! Born again, like the Watergaters," Carlito shouts gaily and sardonically, and it's impossible to see the sincerity underneath his spiel. But Pacino soon calms down, and his Carlito proves to genuinely wish to quit the game, to quietly exit the world where he built up a considerable reputation.

The contrast between Tony Montana and Carlito Brigante is less a means of making one a response to the other but of establishing them as polar opposites. Tony, young, brash and oblivious, climbs the ranks of Miami's criminal underworld through sheer brutality. His mantra, "The World is Yours," summarizes his approach: seize power until you sit in a king's throne, regardless of what you sacrifice to get there. Carlito, on the other hand, is older, wiser and wearier. Like Tony Dayoub says in a brilliant piece tackling the mirror effect of the two films, he is "almost but not quite the elder statesman Tony could have grown into had he outlived his impetuous youth." Tony also noted the color-coding of the two Hispanic protagonists, a key reversion of usual white-black color significance. Tony, who wears ostentatious white suits, is the villain, his clothes reflective of his drug of choice, his desire to be seen in Miami's underworld and, perhaps, his attempt to join the privileged race he thought he could by and screw his way into. Carlito, the one wants to get out of the game and go straight, wears stereotypically villainous black. But this is his futile means of trying to disappear in his surroundings, hoping to quietly move out of the underworld after becoming disillusioned with it. Carlito just needs $75,000 to retire. Tony Montana spent more on wing collars.

But, of course, one does not merely walk away from crime, and De Palma highlights the naïveté of this facile camouflage by colorizing the mise-en-scène to such an extent that the film occasionally looks like it came right out of Old Hollywood. Blue-lit nights expose him, as do the bright-red walls of smoky dives and the chrome-plated realm of the nightclub Carlito invests in to raise the money he needs to escape to the Caribbean for a new start. (Incidentally, the club, El Paraiso takes its name from the food stand Montana opened in Scarface). That club brings out the fatalistic romanticism of the movie, a weak approximation of Carlito's escapist fantasy that looks like a mock-up of a cruise liner interior and feels, for all its coke-addled disco dancers, more like a perpetual high school dance than a cesspool of drugs, sex and crime. The innocence under its veneer of tacky '70s "class" somehow makes the place more constricting and repellent, as if the building too is aware of its fate but still locked into its servicing role.


That romanticism explodes as Carlito tries to make his peace with former partners and to rekindle a relationship with Gail (Penelope Ann Miller), a dancer with whom he broke up before going to prison. He did so not to hurt her, but he broke her heart anyway, and the chemistry between Pacino and Miller subverts the usual male chauvinism of the mob world: when he first tracks her down, Carlito stands on a rooftop across from the dance studio in the pouring rain holding a trashcan lid over his head as a low-rent umbrella. In this moment, De Palma's appropriation of Hitchcock's voyeurism transmutes from obsessive quest for power into pure, innocent longing. This is not a man who feels his love "belongs" to him but someone who never stopped caring for her. After they reconcile, Carlito watches her dance with another man with a smile on his face, completely non-threatened by the harmless display, even when other men raise objections to seeing his woman dance with someone else. Carlito feels like a better man around her—note that Montana wanted to feel white around Elvira, who constantly brought up and mocked his Hispanic background, while Gail is the only person to call Carlito by the Anglicized name "Charlie"—and one almost forgets the inevitability of his attempts to escape when watching the two of them plan their retirement.

Yet Gail soon discovers how trapped Carlito is within the system, and her voiced complaints often make plain the self-evident truths Carlito cannot quite see. For all his talk of not recognizing the mid-'70s world of cocaine and disco in relation to the sociopolitical revolution he left behind, it is Carlito, not everyone else, who has changed. Bound by a code of honor not to rat on his allies and to remain loyal, Carlito never snitched on his old partner, who appreciates the gesture but feels no financial or personal debt to his old partner despite the fact that he got filthy rich while Carlito was away. For all Carlito's efforts to avoid violence and crime, such things seem to find him anyway. He gets roped into going to a drug deal with his young cousin that goes awry, and later he must deal with Benny (John Leguizamo), an upstart little shit clearly looking to make his name by tearing down Carlito. Benny is reminiscent of Tony Montana, a connection that then links back to Carlito when another gangster accurately tells Carlito "This guy is you 20 years ago."

Torn between his sense of code, his awareness of the vicious nature of the streets and his desire to go straight, Carlito can't ever seem to win: he reacts stubbornly when he shouldn't, agreeing to help an increasingly unstable Dave settle his own debts out of the loyalty he owes the lawyer for springing him. On the flip-side, he shows clemency for Benny, the man who, frankly, he should have killed, an idea that antithetical to a normal sense of morality*. But we're talking about the criminal world, where rules have been warped and ethics muddied. Bewildered by these conflicting notions of right and wrong, Carlito occasionally voices his pressure, saying, "The street is watching. She is watchin' all the time," as if the city itself is bearing down on him, waiting for his moral tug of war between desire for self-improvement and perceived obligation to others to stretch him to the breaking point before delivering the coup de grâce.

To De Palma and writer David Koepp's credit, they do not let Carlito off the hook for wanting to do the right thing. In the aforementioned drug deal with his cousin, Carlito knows instantly that something is off in the bright red pool hall where the deal occurs. De Palma's camera has rarely been better as it sets up Carlito as a knowledgeable killer. Just because Carlito wants out does not mean he was just someone who got caught up in the trade: as POV shots dart to an ajar door where a thug awaits and the camera moves around the pool table as Carlito sets up a trick shot as an excuse to keep circling and take stock of the whole room, we see how professional he is in this underworld. He's skilled enough to know what's about to happen and to position himself to kill his way out of the situation. In The Godfather Part III, Pacino's Michael growls, "Just when I thought I was, they pull me back in," but that is just Corleone's usual obliviousness to his own culpability. Carlito is not someone who just "made a few mistakes" in life, but he genuinely wants to reform where Michael wishes to have his cake and eat it too. It is Carlito, far more than Michael, who is trapped by something not of his design.

By the same token, it's almost impossible not to sympathize with him, also as a result of the most elegant camerawork of De Palma's career. He creates a tone so romantic that a conversation between Carlito and Gail through the crack of a chain-bolted door is not intimidating but teasing and charming, to the point that when he kicks the door in after a playful striptease involving a mirror, it's a comic, even loving payoff rather than a tense moment of sexual dominance. De Palma has used a circling shot more than once, but here the camera actually dips and tilts as it revolves around the kissing couple, swooning with them. The camera moves incessantly but does so with grace, a beauty that feels far more natural than the more forced and restrained formalism of, say, The Untouchables. At last, De Palma finds the perfect balance between his mainstream aspirations and his underground, morally probing aesthetics, a union bolstered by the fact that, for once, De Palma is using his camera to poke around the moral implications of his characters in a wholly un-ironic fashion. It's not the first film of his to be sincere, but it is the first to channel his penchant for deconstruction entirely into the characters and genre clichés, gently picking apart stereotypes to see the humans who inspired them.

But even with De Palma's masterful camerawork, the film wouldn't work without an understanding lead performance, and Pacino clearly demonstrates he knows exactly where De Palma is coming from for the second time. He acted like a Pre-Code madman in Scarface, but here he is so gentle that I remember the softer, vulnerable side to Pacino from the '70s. In his prime, no one had better control of what he could say solely through his eyes, and that skill returns here. His longing, anger, despair and fantasy dances across his face in beautifully understated terms, and he delivers lines with quiet force. I don't know that Pacino has ever been more heartbreaking; his whole performance is like the look of devastation on his face in Dog Day Afternoon when his lover publicly rejects him, stretched out over two and a half hours. When he first hugs Gail after reuniting, he softly smells her, triggering his memory with its most connected sense, and his ragged breath is as stoic a display of unspeakable joy as exists in the movies. When Dave drags him into a ludicrous attempt to bust an Italian mob boss out of prison, Pacino's face registers disgust more than anger at the addled lawyer's horrific change of plans and eventual betrayal, a recognition of the uselessness of the code that binds him and seems to let everyone else behave as he pleases

Reveries and dreams have always been a staple of De Palma's films, but usually in a literalized, nightmare form. Here, the dreams are less literal and more yearning, and the only nightmare comes with the impossibility of their fulfillment. A symbolic shot of Carlito trapping a cockroach under a glass and letting it go reflects the error of leaving Benny alive and outraged, but the roach might as well be Carlito, trapped at the mercy and amusement of forces so vast they feel existential. The film climaxes with a nimble cat-and-mouse chase through the subway that ends in the only dastardly cruel twist in the film, impressive considering we know the true outcome already. But as the film returns at last to its framing device as Carlito fades from this world, the last shot settling on a billboard advertising a Caribbean getaway. As Carlito dies, the subjective view of this poster alters, the woman dancer frozen in a snapshot suddenly turned into a dancing Gail, the dream fatalistically actualized in hallucination. As this shot holds over the credits, Joe Cocker's "You Are So Beautiful" begins to play, the gravel-voiced singer undercutting his ode even as the pained growls make it all the more sincere. It's the perfect swan song for the film, a plaintive yet doomed piece of (capital- and lowercase) romantic genre film, in which the last shot is both bitter and beautiful. In a sense, Carlito's Way may be the cruelest film De Palma, who delights in tricks and dramatic catastrophe, ever made, a lengthy explication of a dream that does not come true. But if it is so rending, that is only because, better than any other film in his canon, the director makes us truly care for his characters, and his cosmic sense of irony is at no one's expense, save poor Carlito's.

*Elsewhere, though, Carlito's clemency is more justifiable and even redemptive. An old associate (Viggo Mortensen), now paraplegic from being shot, wears a wire to a conversation with him as the D.A. looks for any excuse to put Brigante back in jail. By rights, Mortensen's character should be promptly shoved into the nearest river tied to a concrete wheelchair. But Carlito relents: he looks at the man who has had so much taken from him by the life Carlito has come to despise, and he pities the paraplegic wreck. Not only is it a true moment of forgiveness, it is also a practical moment of conscience compared to the fatal mistake of letting Benny go: releasing Lalin is a shrewd move that proves to cops that he really is reforming, not simply grandstanding to return to crime.

Brian De Palma: Scarface

That Scarface enjoys a position in the pop culture lexicon that only strengthens with each passing year serves as a validation of its deliberate excesses and its transparently critical view of upper-class decadence in the '80s and the yuppie love for this outrageous lifestyle. Scarface updates Howard Hawks' 1932 original in a way few remakes do: it truly guts the original and places the update firmly within its own time period not only in its references but its aesthetics. In the process, it continues the mounting sociopolitical dissatisfaction creeping its way back into Brian De Palma's work, peeling back the veneer glossed over the whole decade and marking the start of the director's open hostility to the changing social landscape of the 1980s.

What De Palma does best with Scarface is demonstrate that those old gangster films (which his protagonist openly acknowledges as an influence on his young mind) were as much glamorizations of violence and decadence as anything being shunned by contemporaneous critics. Those pre-Code pictures came out during the Great Depression, times of hardship and desolation; yet the films showed well-dressed criminals living the high, fast life. When the film came out in 1983, America was just starting to recover from its worst economy since the depression, and De Palma films inside ritzy clubs and absurdly lavish mansions. And like the mainstream culture looking to flashy pop culture touchstones like Miami Vice for comfort, so too did the masses in the '30s enjoy those gangsters up on the screen (hell, they liked real-life gangsters like Dillinger). Scarface was De Palma's way of showing the public face of the '80s, and it's no wonder so many viewers hated being shown their cultural "values" in such harsh terms.

By making the protagonist of the film not an American crime lord but a Cuban immigrant working his way up through violence and smuggling, De Palma gets to pull back and view his social targets with a clearer view. Montana arrives as seemingly the ideal anti-Communist, a man who viciously decries Castro's takeover and the rise of a society where the individual is told what to do. Yet Tony's entire life is a story of taking and giving orders; if he hates the Communist system, it is because he never gets to be the one telling others what to do. In America, if he pays his dues, he can call the shots someday.

De Palma portrays this irony as a condensation of anti-Communist hypocrisy, the idea that the rule of the rich is acceptable because of lingering belief in the exaggerated American Dream, in which the poor and ignored put up with abuse in the hopes of attaining that one-in-a-million Alger Hiss story that puts them on top. Tony, a ruthless criminal before he gets off the island, comes to Miami with this perverse goal of making it at all costs, and he soon rises to the top by sinking to the bottom of the underworld.

Though not nearly as fine-tuned as Scorsese's later take on similar material with GoodFellas, De Palma updates the operatic web of intrigue propelling the Godfather films from Shakespearean deceit and Machiavellian schemes to the brutal back-and-forth between coke-addled, paranoid psychopaths who can order deaths without batting an eye but turn into quivering blobs of jelly when the tables turn. Well, not all of them do, but is that any better? Is it better to get in one last attack like a caged animal or to try to play on human empathy in one's final moments?

Coming out of that recession, De Palma views wealth and lauded social status with even more distrust than usual, practically equating extreme wealth with crime. When Tony, now a major player in dealer Frank's (Robert Loggia) operation, tracks down his mother and sister, Gina (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio), his mother knows instantly that the money Tony can so casually hand over from the pockets of his ostentatious suit came from criminal activity. Even taking her son's past into account, she leaps to the right conclusion so quickly that the film makes its point about Tony's richness being vile long before he explodes at the buttoned-down old money at a restaurant late in the film when he points out that the only difference between them and him is that he doesn't hide his face behind lazy plays at false modesty. Perhaps, however, De Palma is commenting on the setbacks put into place against immigrants and the poor, that the only way to advance out of the slums is through hollow acts like crime (or fame, which ties into the film's second life as a pop-culture icon for the hip-hop community).

According to actor Steven Bauer, during the premiere of Scarface, Martin Scorsese leaned over to him and whispered, “Be prepared, because they’re going to hate it in Hollywood. Because it’s about them.” He was right; already stumbling from the disappointing returns from Blow Out, De Palma suffered a harsh critical blow, though the commercial impact has been largely overstated. Considering that the director nearly found himself shoved into directing Flashdance before he manages to attach himself to this project, one need not reach far to come to the conclusion that De Palma had an axe to grind with some people signing the checks in town. Thinking of Scorsese's interpretation, we can see Tony Montana as a studio head, a coked-out madman caterwauling and passing final judgment on others to maintain his ludicrous sense of power.

Not nearly as savage an attack on the studio system as his following feature, Scarface nevertheless eats at the studios from the inside. Compared to his union of metacinematic satire and tragically Romantic thriller with Blow Out, Scarface plays it straight, straighter than De Palma ever had. He uses mostly crane shots to float around the area, no longer mired with his characters but coolly observing. Apart from the acknowledgment of old gangster movies and the general tenor of Pacino's performance -- outlandish in homage to the flamboyant styles of those classic gangster actors a good decade before Pacino started overacting as his stock-in-trade -- De Palma does not involve his usual trickery as much, his most "directorly" moments still working within the narrative and not examining the extra diegetic space around it.* The commentary is clear, but he hides it in plain sight.

Note the racial makeup of the cast, not just in the leads but -- and this is vital -- the supporting cast. For the big roles, De Palma casts Caucasians, from the Italians Pacino, Loggia and Mastrantonio to the half-white Abraham and Shenar. But he uses actors of Latino descent for the backup characters, like Manny*. If Pacino's entire performance hearkens back to Paul Mini's melodramatic work in Hawks' original or the ever-fiery playing to the rafters that typified Cagney's singular approach, his and the other major castings show an old Hollywood mentality. Could De Palma have gotten major distribution with a recognizable face in the lead, one that audiences could be reassured was really white under than tan and accent?

De Palma's direction shows a mild aesthetic satire not on the level of his experimental features, but he takes his advantage of the dwindling clout he'd barely built up with studios in the previous decades. In fact, I wonder if the film's budget and size is as much attributable to the rising star of its Oscar-winning writer, Oliver Stone, than its director -- as a sidenote, much of Scarface seems a dry run for Stone's own aesthetically and morally provocative social filmmaking stretching from the second half of the decade through the mid-'90s. De Palma has the most fun with a nightclub set he returns to throughout the film, a hall of mirrors constantly reflecting faces and bodies around these paranoid cocaine addicts as their mental breakdowns get visualized behind them. The best of these sequences, featuring an attempting hit on Tony, show off De Palma's mastery of suspense technique, using slow track pans on cranes and zoom-ins to keep narrowing the frame until Richard Belzer's bad jokes are as tense as the electronic music.

"Nothing exceeds like excess," Elvira remarks dryly to her husband's loud rants about her habits, and that's as much a maxim for the film as its ironic use of "The World Is Yours" in flashing lights in the sky and as the grim closing shot. Tony lines his mansion with red carpet, as if he's always showing up to his premiere. It presents a world where, as with the case of the real Scarface, a criminal can kill, smuggle and intimidate all he wants, but he can lose it all if he doesn't give the government its cut in taxes. Furthermore, for all Tony's hideousness, his one act of humanity seals his fate, not his countless acts of evil. This is a film where no one can be trusted, where Cubans fight each other over political allegiances, different Latino nationalities war for supremacy and the underlings plot against their bosses and vice-versa. As with The Godfather, the most sinister acts occur in the boardroom, where horrifying and detached decisions are made for a few dollars more. Man, how couldn't this be about the studios in the '80s?

*The one exception I spotted came when Tony's bored, coke-crazed wife Elvira (Michelle Pfeiffer), exasperatedly shouts at her husband, "Can't you stop saying 'fuck' all the time? Can't you stop talking about money? It's boring, Tony." It's not overt enough to be winking, but there's just enough suggestion in Oliver Stone's lines to imply the director and writer understand the absurdity of it all.
**A more in-depth look at the supporting cast and their roots in Latino TV and film can be found in Tony Dayoub's excellent and personal double-post on the film and Carlito's Way.