Review of Blow Out (1981) by Ryan H — 24 Jul 2012

I feel like such a philistine for seeing this before Blow-Up. However, I had this film and not Blow-Up, so what was I supposed to do? Get off my back. Anyways, I really loved De Palma's style in Blow Out.

It's a completely entertaining movie that lets you get lost in its world of murder and conspiracies. To me it's like watching a Tarantino film, either you get lost in it and enjoy yourself or you never give yourself up to the world and wonder what it's all about.

I felt like what's done better in Blow Out than most thrillers is keep up with the characters and not have them blatantly do things just to move the plot forward. The scene in the subway where Burke takes Sally is thrilling because Jack doesn't have some special intuition that tells him what platform they're at and Sally doesn't have the brains to tell him.

It's a one way conversation and we want them to get each other the information so badly but if it happens too soon then it would be silly and illogical. I liked that they set up certain character traits for the thrilling ending to make sense as well.

Sally doesn't watch the news because she finds it depressing, and it also seems like her ditzy character would do. She thinks that she knows more than movie makeup artists and Jack just smiles when she tells him.

She wants to believe what people tell her so when she does something bad it doesn't seem so bad. So when we hear she doesn't watch the news it doesn't seem like some big setup for the ending where she wouldn't actually know the reporter on the news.

The opening shot is great. It's basically the same idea behind the opening shot of Halloween: a subjective camera shot behind the eyes of a killer and he even holds up a knife like Michael. We discover the shot was just the opening to another film they were making in this film and Jack's doing the sound for it.

The last part of the shot shows a topless girl in the shower screaming before she gets stabbed and they decide they have to take out her scream. It sounds awful. Didn't they know her scream was so bad before they shot the scene? No, because they were only interested in her tits.

That whole conversation they have is pretty funny. In two years they worked on about 6 films together. 6 films! Later we see Jack outside trying to get some sounds with his boom mic and recorder to use later, when suddenly a car goes off the bridge and into the water.

The boom mic scene was pretty funny. He hears little sounds from other places and moves to them just when they pop up, then go away when he's done with them. The whole beginning's pretty goofy and fun, but then when the car goes off the bridge Jack finds himself in some shit.

It takes a pretty good transition into serious filmmaking. I really like Jack. When he gets into the hospital he finds Sally and tells her she looks pretty and she gets shy saying she doesn't have any makeup on.

He's being genuinely kind to her, but at the same time he really wants to talk about what happened. Everyone's acting so strangely and he doesn't understand why. When he listens over the tape he made he discovers a gun shot before the blow out.

From this the mystery of the story is unfolded little by little. Like what I said before, I really like that Jack doesn't seem to have superior knowledge just because he's in the film. He knows a ton about sound, but that's it.

There's a scene where we discover Burke has erased all the tapes and has royally screwed Jack to make everyone think he's insane. There's not a single moment here when Jack thinks that someone has done this.

Instead he thinks the police have screwed him over because of his previous work trying to uncover dirty cops. It plays great with the dramatic irony. His relationship with Sally grows and they kiss, but there's not some out of place sex scene.

I just really liked the story along with the film. The cops want to keep things under wraps because the governor (?) was with another woman at the time. Someone payed off a marriage detective to make the guy look like a cheater, so he puts a girl in the car with him and he pays off a guy to have him get in a wreck so that the story becomes big news.

Apparently this politician was so high that he was considered to be a presidential candidate in the future. Burke just happened to be crazy. He claims he didn't mean to kill him when he shot out the tire, but it was done right on the bridge.

What else was going to happen? Then when the girl was saved he decided to kill other women to make it look like a randomly killing when he kills Sally. The guy's a lunatic. He does all of this because of loose ends.

He doesn't want to get caught. But the ending gets really silly again and I wasn't so sure about that. Jack gets in a wreck because he drives through the parade and gets in a wreck. He wakes up at night and Burke still hasn't killed Sally! It just so happens he's going to kill her after Jack wakes up again.

And even though Jack just went crazy and almost killed everybody he was not handcuffed or guarded. Then when Sally's on the roof screaming Jack can hear her but no one else can. That makes sense since he's a sound guy, but there are also people on a roof next to her that should hear it.

I also don't see the point of the American flag in the background of the big stabbing scene other than for comedic purposes. If it's all supposed to go back to silly then it was just jarring and not very well executed.

I thought everything after that was great though. Sally doesn't survive and Jack never gets the evidence of the politician being killed and Jack puts Sally's scream in a movie, which will haunt him his entire life.

It's great, I just think the transition to the exciting conclusion could have been done in a much better way.