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By Sreejith Kamalanayanan The political paranoia prevalent in the 70's, after the Watergate scandal, seeped into the early 80's resulting in Blow Out (1981), a suspense thriller by Brian De Palma. The film is marked by the stylistic influence of Alfred Hitchcock and thematic influence of 1966 film Blow-Up directed by Michelangelo Antonioni. Another influence is Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation (1974). Like the paranoia thriller, The Parallax View (1974), Blow Out also features an assassination of a presidential candidate, which forms the focal point of the narrative. Blow Out's protagonist is a sound effects technician named Jack Terry (John Travolta), who works in sleazy B-movies. Terry gets an assignment from his director. He must find a realistic 'scream' sound to be used in a horror movie. Terry sets out into the night recording various sounds near a bridge. On a sudden, a car careen off the road and drown into the creek. Terry c...

By Sreejith Kamalanayanan The Parallax View (1974) is the second installment in the Paranoia trilogy of the late Hollywood director Alan J Pakula. Klute (1971) and All the President's Men (1976) are the other two movies in the trilogy. I have seen the other two movies in the Paranoia trilogy; watched  Klute first and All the President's Men second and rounded off with The Parallax View. It didn't bother me that I watched the great trilogy breaking the order. After all, all of the movies can stand on its own. Upon finishing the trilogy, it occurred to me that Pakula is a master in absorbing you into his movies, making you believe in the conspiracy theory and let you immersed in the sense of paranoia of the film. He presents the conspiracy theory with a sort of realism and we would fall for it. In The Parallax View, the assassination of a presidential candidate is the center of the plot. The assassination opens the movie. He was shot by a waiter who falls in...