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

Kind of surprised Chinatown is so loved.

rosemary's baby is one of my favorites of all-time

Kind of surprised Chinatown is so loved.

― Alex in SF, Friday, October 17, 2008 1:02 AM (5 months ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

er what?

It's great, but I don't think its his best film by any stretch.

I voted for Knife in the Water, back in the day. Such a beautiful movie.

dvd advice: skip repulsion. the current dvd is pan & scan and looks like shit.

There isn't a Criterion version of Repulsion? That sucks.

Kind of surprised Chinatown is so loved.

It does diagnose what's most wrong with America; when it's set, when it was made, now.

Albacore Insurance Group

"It does diagnose what's most wrong with America; when it's set, when it was made, now."

I don't think it does that any better than oh let's say Who Framed Roger Rabbit though. Rosemary's Baby is just a better movie IMO. Repulsion too, but I can understand why people couldn't get into that as much.

I think RB is a solid #2, like everything that got votes cept Pirates and
Two Men and a Wardrobe (unseen). Preferred Tess to FVK but it's been awhile.

FVK is fluffy. It's kind of hard to imagine it being made by the same guy who did the Tenant.

well, his interest in changing up was a common trait that more current directors w/ talent should investigate. (Wes Anderson, how bout a spy thriller)

oh his Macbeth is one of the 5-6 best Shakespeare films, probably.

Never actually seen that. I should. Do you count Kurosawa as Shakespeare btw?

nah, not quite. Goes in the "variations" column with Forbidden Planet.

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 :-/

All movies are made by slimeballs

It's in the union bylaws

Every movie production must feature at least 25% slimebag produced content

Thought that was only in Canada

"All movies are made by slimeballs"

Sitcoms, too.

Carnage was ok. Foster overracting a bit much, and since all you have in this kind of movie is the acting, when one of the four actors is distracting it becomes a bigger problem than it might otherwise be. Winslet's character seemed underdeveloped compared to the other three. Waltz and O'Reilly are great, deliver some much-needed laughs.

Liked Foster, bcuz I haven't even bothered to see much she's in the last 15 years, and that is a scarcely exaggerated Park Slope Parent, really.

Venus in Fur is both superficially "stagier" and more cinematic.

there was just so much vein-popping straining going on w her

my wife's review: "I'm glad we don't live in New York" lol

My list and comments.

Oh my, The Tenant is an easy second behind the obvious winner.

I have unwatched copies of The Pianist and Tess (not to mention Oliver Twist) that I should get around to someday.

I have good-ish memories of Bitter Moon and Death and the Maiden. Anyone seen them lately?

I thought Frantic was terrific but only saw it once, on release. I'd like to see it again.

...an opinion I've already put in this thread. I need to remember, "just quit posting."

From the Criterion Daily:

Back in August, a woman identified only as Robin became the third woman to accuse Roman Polanski of sexual assault after Samantha Geimer and Charlotte Lewis. On October 3, two days before the New York Times blew the Harvey Weinstein scandal wide open, a fourth woman, Renate Langer, accused Polanski of raping her in 1972 when she was fifteen. Last week, Marianne Barnard became the fifth woman to come forward and, as Martha Ross reports for the Mercury News, her call to have Polanski expelled from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has been met with considerable support.

Whatever the outcome, films such as Rosemary’s Baby (1968) and Chinatown (1974) will endure, even if the context in which they’re viewed now or in the future evolves. The Cinémathèque française will present its Roman Polanski retrospective from October 30 through December 3, and Polanski, now eighty-four, will evidently carry on working. He’s “returned to Poland for the first time since the country's top court rejected a U.S. extradition request last year to shoot a documentary about his life in wartime Krakow,” according to Nick Holdsworth in the Hollywood Reporter. Polanski, Horowitz (working title) will be “about his childhood and youth in the southern Polish city with his longtime friend, the photographer Ryszard Horowitz.” The AP notes that they’ve specifically visited “the site of the former ghetto where he was held as a child by the German Nazis. His mother was taken from there to her death at Auschwitz, and later his father made him flee the ghetto.”

Relevant links here:

https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/5058-the-daily-in-the-works-polanski-cuaron-and-more

Just seen Tess and I think it's my favorite, really beautiful, glad I didn't pass on it. Tenant is probably my second.

for a debut feature-length film, Knife in the Water is outstanding

This has been out since February, but I just stumbled over it last week.

http://www.amazon.ca/Big-Goodbye-Chinatown-Years-Hollywood-ebook/dp/B07QSPPLQQ

Waiting for the price to come down, will certainly read it then.

Just finished it a couple weeks ago, and while I think the author sometimes presumptively gets inside his protagonists' heads in a way that kind of turned me off, and while its denouement is a little sharper than I'd hoped for, it's not merely the love letter to New Hollywood the subtitle suggests.

tragic he’s not dead yet

He will be. His films will go on, so you'll have to come to terms with that.

(xpost) I don't think I have any illusions about that period. I'm sure the Peter Biskind book barely touched on the horrible stuff that went on off-camera (if that's what you mean). And as I've said many times, the more self-indulgent films of the era are almost unwatchable by any standard except repeated exposure to them at a young age (i.e., why I can still watch, say, Save the Tiger).

I will watch a Roman Polanski movie no sooner than the day he dies, I decided quite some time ago.

i read that book, it was fairly interesting but the writing was frustratingly florid

(xpost) Intrigued by the marker; I would have thought that people are either okay with watching his films or not okay with that, regardless of the timing.

(xp) yeah, I think that's kinda where I was trying to go with the bit about needlessly inserting himself into the mindset of the players

"tess" is a decent historical costume drama but dang it LOOKS gorgeous

How does nobody vote for FVK? Bloomin Bad Brains even wrote a toetapping toon with the title

Fearless Vampire Killers is amusing and well-made, doesn't deserve the terrible reviews I've read; I saw both it and Tess on the big screen. My vote would have been for Cul de Sac.