Today I am going to talk about the 1981 Brian DePalma film Blow Out. Why Blow Out? Well, I saw a YouTube video with Quentin Tarantino where he was talking about his desert island movies. He says that it’s one of the finest movies ever made, that Brian DePalma is the best director of his generation and that John Travolta gives one of the best performances of all time in the movie.
So, if Quentin Tarantino thinks that Blow Out is one of the finest films ever made, it must be pretty good right? Well, you’re about to find out what I think on today’s Movie Tuesday.
You can see a video version of this review here:
So, I love Quentin Tarantino’s movies. I know he said that Brian DePalma is the finest director of his generation, but that accolade certainly belongs to Tarantino now. It is also fascinating that 10 years after Blow Out, Tarantino cast John Travolta in Pulp Fiction and totally revived his career.
I really wanted to like Blow Out, and there was a lot about the movie I did like. But, I certainly wouldn’t put it up there as one of the greatest movies of all time. It is a film noir type story with John Travolta as the protagonist, Nancy Allen as the damsel in distress, Dennis Franz as the shifty sleaze bag—a roll he was born to play—and John Lithgow as the maniacal bad guy.
I remembered Lithgow as the guy from Third Rock from the Sun and thought casting him as the killer in season 4 of Dexter was genius. However, it turns out he already played a super creepy killer 30 years before Dexter.
In Blow Out, John Travolta plays a film recordist who, while out collecting ambient audio one night accidentally records a car careening off a road into a creek. He saves a lady from the car, but a gentleman in the car loses his life. It turns out that gentleman was the governor of Pennsylvania and a shoe-in to be the next President of the United States. John Travolta, after getting a bad feeling about the brush off he’s received from the cops and the governor’s people, reviews his audio recordings and realizes he’s captured a murder, not a car accident.
This sets him down a road of trying to prove what he’s witnessed. He’s joined on this journey by Sally, the lady that he saved in the accident. She was running a scam with Dennis Franz to entrap the governor in a compromising situation. Dennis Franz was there to take pictures. Little did she know that the objective of the evening had been escalated from embarrassing blackmail to murder by John Lithgow.
The movie has several twists and turns, some of which had me incredulous. Especially the final meeting between John Lithgow and Sally. I don’t want to ruin the movie because it really does keep your interest. It also does some interesting things with the filmmaking. I think that Tarantino must have especially liked technical realism of Travolta’s work as a movie recordist. He pieces together an animation from magazine photos with his audio soundtrack and the cinematic exploration of doing that in the analog age was interesting indeed. In fact, all of the analog gadgets that Travolta employs in getting to the truth seem like relics of a bygone age. To Tarantino, however, it was the exact same technology he was so in love with as a filmmaker at the end of the 20th century.
But, I think people’s taste in movies is a lot like their taste in music. When you see a movie is as important as the movie itself. It may speak to who you are at that point in your life. The significance of what DePalma did in the 70’s and 80’s probably had a profound impact not only on what Tarantino did in the 90’s but on cinema as a whole, but it’s hard for me, being 20 years younger than Tarantino to grasp that significance or appreciate it to the same degree. Nevertheless, if you’ve never seen Blow Out, it’s a quality flick. I give it a B+. That’s all. Goodbye.