The Parallax View

05-Sep-08	The Parallax View (1974)	Dvd
	Director: Alan J. Pakula
	imdb: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0071970/

Seen this for the first time today. After the first scenes, I thought the film would go towards Antonioni's Blowup (1966) and Coppola's The Conversation (1974); after one character shows another a photo, asking "Have you seen this photograph?", I almost hoped it would. But it doesn't. There is the same sense of paranoia found in Coppola's film of the same year though, and Capricorn One (1978), and the same 'look' of those films. The end is similar to that of Arlington Road (1999), the film influenced by the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995, which, incidentally, contains one of my favourite scenes: a short one in which a very spooky Joan Cusack suddenly appears behind another character at a public phone (in the same way seen in many films by Brian De Palma).