Carrie

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Stephen King, based on the few things of his I’ve read, doesn’t worry about anything except the straightforward story he’s straightforwardly telling.  He’s so single-minded that his work has integrity of a kind, and a fear-causing chemical ripples off his sentences.  His premise is that evil exists and has a complex character, worth exploring, not philosophically, but narratively.  The Nancy Allen character is completely, unironically, directly, energetically evil, and entertaining as such; the Amy Irving character, her best friend, isn’t as completely evil, but she’s as evil or moreso, because her evil is more twisted up, she’s a better liar, she’s colder-hearted.  DePalma’s direction is thrillingly operatic, so urgent yet patient that the movie isn’t very scary, yet is enthralling.  He mixes together evil and eroticism with a relentlessly unified, yet hard to pin down vision of things.  Amy Irving is presented as not evilly-beautiful, but as really beautiful.  He turns Sissy Spacek into the most innocent, vulnerable sex object there could ever be (given that children younger than Spacek’s character can’t be turned into sex objects without alarms going off in the viewers’ heads).  Spacek’s acting is powerful.