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

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.

Also, for "contradictory" and "spry" read "intoxicating" and "self-immolatory" or something, I dunno, it's all a big fantasy-reality mindfuck inflicted both on her and on the audience (Deneuve, a whore? That thug, her ideal of masculinity?) and its explorations of what fantasy can do (and what it privileges) are preferable imo to Polanki's exploration of what pure repulsion does.

Organizers of the Zurich Film Festival say director Roman Polanski has been taken into custody on a 31-year-old U.S. arrest warrant.

The organizers say Polanski was detained by police Saturday. Zurich police couldn't immediately confirm the information.

The festival said in a statement Sunday that Polanski traveled to Switzerland to receive an award for his lifetime of work as a director. They said he was arrested in relation to a 1978 U.S. request, without specifying.

Polanski fled the United States in 1978, a year after pleading guilty to unlawful sexual intercourse with a 13-year-old girl.

Hadn't heard about him for a couple of years and now twice in two days: first, Susan Atkins dies, the next day, he's in the news again - ???

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.