SO I DECIDED TO TAKE A BREAK FROM NEW YORK CITY FOR A WHILE. The timing seemed right, and I got a deal on the airfare. In the past week, I finished a major project at Nautica, and I did the best I possibly could on the LSAT, considering I only studied two months for it. Am I going to attend law school? Am I going to keep working at Nautica? I haven’t decided either of those things yet, nor am I in any rush to decide.

I’ve been back in South Florida since yesterday afternoon. It’s been quite the picaresque visit so far. First I drove to the local Wal-Mart, then I drove to the local K-Mart. I wish I could add something more interesting to that itinerary, but that’s really all there is to do in this part of South Florida.

Well, it didn’t help that it was Father’s Day. I drove with my cousin to Main Street, where all the buildings feature this beautiful Spanish style of architecture. Deep reds and oranges. Brick sidewalks and palm trees and big courtyards. I used to visit it all the time, and it always reminded me of Mexican cities in old Western movies. And yet Main Street has always been clean and graffiti-free. Go figure. Anyway, all the stores were closed for Father’s Day. Even the restaurants.

Lacking anything better to do, I regressed into my old time-wasting pastime from when I grew up in South Florida: I’ve been watching movies. Ever see Brian De Palma’s “Blow-Out?” Just watched it again. It is, in my opinion, superb. Right up there with the director’s other classics like “The Fury,” and “The Untouchables.”

I would get into the plot, but is the plot of a De Palma film really worth getting into specifics about? Suffice to say, it’s expectedly lurid: John Travolta plays Jack, a movie sound-effects technician (and ex-Internal Affairs cop) who’s recording ambient noise for a B-movie horror flick. As he’s waving his microphone off a bridge at the edge of Philadelphia, he witnesses a car plummeting into the lake below. Jack dives into the water to try to rescue the passengers. The driver is dead, but he manages to save the beautiful woman (“Dressed to Kill’s” Nancy Allen) who is trapped in the back seat.

Jack brings the unconscious woman to the hospital. The next day, the police arrive, and a weaselly-looking politician tells Jack to forget everything about the previous night. It turns out that the dead driver was Governor McNeely, who was planning to run for President. Jack agrees not to tell anyone about the woman’s involvement in the accident, in order to preserve the dead politician’s reputation.

However, when Jack examines his sound recordings from the previous night, he discovers that the tragic accident which killed Governor McNeely may not have been an accident at all. McNeely may have been the target of a conspiracy. Although Jack has the evidence, no one will believe him. Worse yet, a shadowy agent who played a pivotal role in the conspiracy (John Lithgow) has set out to silence anyone who knows the truth—including Jack and the mysterious woman!

Like I said, the plot of a De Palma film isn’t worth getting into. De Palma fans know that his films are only about 10% substance, while 90% is style and execution. “Blow-Out” is no different. It has some great individual sequences, including a long, opening tracking shot of a “Slumber Party Massacre”-style film within a film. Then there’s the harrowing underwater scene, where Jack has to free the frantic Nancy Allen from a car gradually filling with water. There’s a great series of shots when Jack is replaying the sound footage, trying to figure out whether what he heard was a blow-out, or a gunshot followed by a blow-out. Finally, there’s Travolta’s desperate slow-motion run up the stairs of Liberty Square, Tino Donaggio’s wonderful score drowning out the exploding fireworks in the night sky behind him.

In addition to its visual trappings, “Blow-Out” also has an interesting protagonist in the character of Jack. He was the best tapper in the business during his days with the King’s Commission. But a bad wire job of his led to a police captain’s death. Jack is a haunted man who still wants to use his considerable talents to do good. Unfortunately, he seems to have a knack for being too confident in his own skills, too confident in the technology.

No matter how hard Jack works to keep his bases covered, things inevitably go wrong. He’s a man who tries to maintain order in a hopelessly chaotic world, who must continue to fail until he learns his lesson.

Sad that “Blow-Out,” which was released in 1981, bombed so badly. According to books written on De Palma and his movies, the American public wasn’t ready to deal with conspiracies by politicans to kill other politicians. Or maybe, in the aftermath of Watergate, the public was sick and tired of politically-motivated conspiracies. Either way, “Blow-Out” didn’t deserve to be so badly-maligned. Preceded by 1978’s “The Fury” and 1980’s “Dressed to Kill,” and followed by “Scarface” (1983), “The Untouchables” (1987), and “Casualties of War” (1988), it’s an essential component of a great decade of films by De Palma.

Unfortunately, once we get to the 90’s, De Palma seemed to get stuck trying to breathe new life into shopworn ideas in flicks like “Mission: Impossible” and “Snake Eyes.” What happened to the griminess and dangerous sexuality that dominated his best films? We went from plots involving scummy photographers catching politicians in compromising positions with hookers to stealing C.I.A. computer lists. Huh? Ultimately, De Palma got typecast more as the guy who made cool camera moves than as a visionary filmmaker. Like John Travolta’s character in “Blow-Out,” he paid the price for being too good at his job.