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

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 :-/

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

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.