Roman Polanski, or pardon me but your poll is in my neck.

I want to hear your top 5-6 then.

I'm forgetful! Top of the head: Welles' Othello, Olivier's Richard III, Polanski, Almereyda's Hamlet, Chimes at Midnight, then maybe Dieterle's A Midsummer's Night Dream, the Soviet Hamlet from the '60s, and Branagh's Henry V.

Never seen Almereyda's Hamlet. Recall liking Branagh's quite a bit, plus it reminds you that the actual play is long long long (there is a Northrop Frye line about the play being so long cuz no one ever shuts the fuck in it.) Taymor's Titus is good for a very minor play. Can't argue with the first two at all though, Welles and Olivier are stone classics.

Richard III might be the funniest of the tragedies too.

ooh yeah Polanski's MacBeth is fantastic. vividly remember watching it in high school English

Welle's Othello also somewhere near the top, Morbz has a good list there

all the film versions of macbeth i've seen are good -- kurosawa's is my fav kurosawa, welles's is great and bizarre (like "caligari" filmed on a star trek set), and polanski's is just a brilliant realization of the play, probably the best polanski i've seen after repulsion and RB.

morb's list would be close to mine (though i haven't seen the soviet hamlet yet -- according to imdb it's called "gamlet"!!), with chimes easily taking top honors.

Welles' Macbeth >>>> Polanski's Macbeth >>>> Welles' Othello

Yeah -- Chimes at Midnight and the William Richert-Keanu Reeves bits in My Own Private Idaho are my favorite screen Shakespeares.

No Keanu Reeves bits are my favorite anything.

the William Richert-Keanu Reeves bits in My Own Private Idaho are my favorite screen Shakespeare.

you've said this before and I am nonetheless still alarmed at your toleration for this terribly misguided claptrap. I don't think Keanu even understands a single line he says in that movie.

haha x-post

His diffidence dovetails nicely with Hal/Scotty's. I didn't say it was a good performance.

The best thing I can say about those sequences is Keanu was even worse in Much Ado About Nothing.

I smell a poll!

Alex, Branagh is a lot hammier than Keanu in that movie.

wasn't there some well-known shakespeare critic who called keanu reeves's hamlet (no not kidding, had a brief run in london) the best hamlet ever?

haha, from wikipedia:

He made news by refusing to take part in Speed 2: Cruise Control and choosing to play the title role in a Manitoba Theatre Centre production of Hamlet in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Reeves got surprisingly good reviews for his interpretation of one of Shakespeare's most famous characters. Roger Lewis, the Sunday Times critic, wrote that "He quite embodied the innocence, the splendid fury, the animal grace of the leaps and bounds, the emotional violence, that form the Prince of Denmark...He is one of the top three Hamlets I have seen, for a simple reason: he * is* Hamlet."

(roger lewis, btw, is the guy who wrote that semi-recent anthony burgess biography where he repeatedly refers to burgess as a "complete fucking fool.")

Pretty sure that first episode of Slings & Arrows has a Keanu in Canada bit in it.

hmm I've never thought of Hamlet as an idiot manchild before but I guess its possible

i've often thought of Hamlet as an idiot manchild.

A fairly eloquent idiot manchild though, which would seem to exempt Keanu.

fuck u haterz :)

hm, thanks guys, i'm getting some Shakespeare dvds for my roommate for his bday but had no idea what to get

i considered going to Winnipeg for that Hamlet

http://criterion_production.s3.amazonaws.com/release_images/2266/483_box_348x490.jpg

Coming (standard & Blu) in July.

sweet!

I woulda voted macbeth in this

i still can't believe how hard Frantic suckerd, AFTER those awesome first 30-40 minutes.

suckerd :)

never seen chinatown

waht?

the tenant is his best, ftw.

or okay, not his best, but his most intersting

oh i would have voted for tess

Repulsion really isn't very good imo, worth it for Deneuve but the conceit never really convinced me and the ending was quite weak.

I am led to believe that Polanski subsequently got a lot better but for some reason Repulsion's finished second in this poll :-/

Woah woah woah, why don't you think Repulsion is good? It's far and away my favourite.

I watched it with a friend (who's BIG into film) under the impression that it was a great lost classic. Deneuve's performance (and general air of glacial smouldering cool) was infinitely alluring but the remainder of the movie felt like a let-down, especially towards the end. It just didn't force home a promising conceit with any sort of elegance. We both agreed that it wasn't a particularly affecting experience, and that even one's focus upon and belief in Deneuve begins to waver as events unfold. It remains the only Polanski I've seen, but it wasn't a particularly enjoyable (or memorable) experience for me. I'm not dissuaded from seeing others.

I fell asleep when I tried to watch Repulsion. All his other movies are among my favourites. Don't understand this.

Hm, I'm not sure what exactly 'force home a promising conceit with any sort of elegance' means. How can you 'force home' something with elegance? I'm not sure it does lack elegance at any rate - for me, the film-making is exquisite; every camera angle is perfectly poised, and the balance between quietness and interior violence very 'elegant', if that's the descriptor we're using.

I can understand that perhaps Deneuve's psychosis seems a little arbitrary, if that is the conceit that you mean, but then isn't everything arbitrary? I thought that the manner of expression of that psychosis was very convincing.

Well, the film seemed to use cheap shock tactics to "escalate" her psychosis, such as the rabbit carcass, the deadly strike with the poker, the final scene with the hands etc...none of them really seemed to fit in with the prior mood of the film, and their shock value was actually diminished by this IMO. A little hamfisted. My main qualm with the film was that it made me feel profoundly indifferent to the denouement. The first 2/3 had actually been quite tense, quite nicely observed, if not the most riveting hour of film I've seen. I'll need to see it again, mind, this was over a year ago.

Repulsion was made in '65, dude. shit was shocking as fuck back then.

admittedly, i once wrote a 15-page term paper on disembodiment and psychosis in Repulsion, The Tenant and Rosemary's Baby, so my bias is more towards the shock of those films.

i mean, i can't even WATCH The Tenant any longer. it scares the hell out of me.

Don't think that the rabbit carcass was a shock tactic - along with the sprouting potato it is a measure of time and yes, an indicator of the rise of psychosis, but a fairly quiet one. I think if it was on its own then *maybe* I could agree, but it goes with the general disintegration of everything over time.

Also, the shift in mood is necessary - you go through life attempting to maintain your mind until, under pressure, it snaps. What is going to happen next, everything stays the same?

Hmm. Well, at any rate, the hands were B-movie bad. :P

Like I say, I'll need to see it again, but I wasn't overtly moved by it. Needed to be subtler, more incremental, and more devastating. In the end it was just a series of mournful vignettes concerning a lady at increasing odds with a slightly unnatural physicalisation of sexuality. It's almost like sex in that movie is a tangible presence, a character, rather than a verb, a natural engagement of humans. There was no sign of internal struggle, only complete desolation and opposition. I guess that's the point of the movie, but it didn't make for a well-rounded hypothesis on human nature.

I tend to look at the results of this poll as such:

Apartment Trilogy: 19 votes
Chinatown: 13

Anyway, Deneuve was in a film just 2 years later that was 3x as shocking, 5x as good, 10x as devastatingly psychological, and in colour. So ner.

(and a film moreover with a FAR more interesting take on sexuality, especially the contradictory and spry sexuality of its still-glacial star)

Belle du Jour?

Much as I love that film, your choices and descriptions are a real give away that you've never been a female.

I don't even think BDJ holds a candle to Bunuel's even-later masterpieces, but that's the comparison with Repulsion that I probably won't be able to shake, even though they ARE fairly different sorts of film.

Kael's original review (I think she also wrote a later capsule review) is interesting, inasmuch as it's part of a very long essay titled "On the Future of Movies."

A couple of relevant excerpts:

There is no way to estimate the full effect of Vietnam and Watergate on popular culture, but earlier films were predicated on an implied system of values which is gone now, except in the corrupt, vigilante form of a “Dirty Harry” or a “Walking Tall.” Almost all the current hits are jokes on the past, and especially on old films—a mixture of nostalgia and parody, laid on with a trowel. The pictures reach back in time, spoofing the past, jabbing at it. Nobody understands what contemporary heroes or heroines should be, or how they should relate to each other, and it’s safer not to risk the box-office embarrassment of seriousness.

...

The counterculture films made corruption seem inevitable and hence something you learn to live with; the next step was seeing it as slapstick comedy and learning to enjoy it. For the fatalistic, case-hardened audience, absurdism has become the only acceptable point of view—a new complacency. In “The Three Musketeers,” Richard Lester keeps his actors at a distance and scales the characters down to subnormal size; they’re letching, carousing buffoons who don’t care about anything but blood sport. The film isn’t politically or socially abrasive; it’s just “for fun.” At showings of “Chinatown,” the audience squeals with pleasure when Faye Dunaway reveals her incest. The success of “Chinatown”—with its beautifully structured script and draggy, overdeliberate direction—represents something dialectically new: nostalgia (for the thirties) openly turned to rot, and the celebration of rot. Robert Towne’s script had ended with the detective (Jack Nicholson) realizing what horrors the Dunaway character had been through, and, after she killed her incestuous father, helping her daughter get to Mexico. But Roman Polanski seals the picture with his gargoyle grin; now evil runs rampant. The picture is compelling, but coldly, suffocatingly compelling. Polanski keeps so much of it in closeup that there’s no air, no freedom to breathe; you don’t care who is hurt, since everything is blighted. Life is a blood-red maze. Polanski may leave the story muddy and opaque, but he shoves the rot at you, and large numbers of people seem to find it juicy. Audiences now appear to accept as a view of themselves what in the movies of the past six or seven years counterculture audiences jeered at Americans for being—cynical materialists who cared for nothing but their own greed and lust. The nihilistic, coarse-grained movies are telling us that nothing matters to us, that we’re all a bad joke.

Full essay is here, but (as clemenza noted) paywalled:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1974/08/05/on-the-future-of-movies

Interesting turn of events that the vigilante/rogue cop template she cites plus Watergate and Vietnam all soon coalesced into the "Rambo" series, more or less about a Vietnam vet cynically betrayed by an untrustworthy government that turns extra-legal vigilante.

Thanks for copying that. As I was driving home thinking about it, I did remember that that was her complaint--that the film went too far in saying everything is corrupt and rotten: "The nihilistic, coarse-grained movies are telling us that nothing matters to us, that we’re all a bad joke." I think there were other films where she had variations on the same idea--that it was too easy to just throw your hands in the air and say everything was hopeless.

Almost seems quaint now

draggy, overdeliberate direction

yeah no this is so wrong

is a close-up of the fish that Noah Cross serves Jake overdeliberat

e

n

Looked up Simon and Kauffmann's reviews between covers. Simon speaks very generally about the corruption/rot angle--the review is very laudatory, though. Kauffmann's review is making me laugh in view of what we've been talking about:

Towne has patently set up what he considers a moral symbology under the surface of his thriller--the "Chinatown" in each man's life or the "Chinatown" of America's soul, etc. I forsee such film journal items as "Between Two Underworld: Moral Ambiguity in Polanski's Chinatown," and "The Scent of Violence: Nicholson's Nose as the New Moby Dick." (In a time when Howard Hawks is compared to Samuel Beckett, which happened recently, burlesque is impossible.) Pundits of popular culture can find Deeper Meaning in absolutely anything; Towne has made it too easy for them.

I love Kauffmann...good old-fashioned snobbery I don't mind at all. Mea culpa, mea culpa. I think he did well to die before x, y, and z.

("Underworlds"--my error, not his.)

I know *I* overdo stuff like this, but I take issue with clemenza's assertion that there was a universal shared feeling (among Americans?) generated by a decade of history that was captured by one actor in one scene in one movie

maybe not back then but i think we can all agree that this neil breen scene works for the current moment

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V79qKOdCYZw