The Screengrab : rosemary's baby

Roman Polanski: Wanted in Los Angeles, Desired in Turin

Phil Nugent — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 16:00:00 GMT

For almost a year now, Marina Zenovich's documentary Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, which deals with the Los Angeles criminal case that turned the director of Chinatown and Rosemary's Baby into a fugitive from American justice, has been kicking up dust in both film and legal circles. In 1977, Polanski was arrested on six felony counts arising from charges that he had drugged and raped a thirteen-year-old girl at a private photo shoot he had arranged at his friend Jack Nicholson's house. In a plea bargain, Polanski, who had been staring down a possible life sentence if convicted on all counts, pled guilty to a single count of "unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor", and expected to receive probation, a sentence that would have been in keeping with recommendations made by psychiatrists advising the court. In the end, Polanski fled the country, though only after spending 42 days locked up in a maximum-security prison where he was to receive a "psychological evaluation." What the documentary, which draws on interviews with both defense and prosecution attorneys involved in the case, makes clear is that Polanski skipped out only after deciding that he couldn't trust the judge, Lawrence J. Rittenband, a starstruck jackass whose delight at being at the center of a high-profile case had turned to distress over the bad publicity he was getting from Hollywood reporters chastising him for going easy on a rich pervert filmmaker with a "Children of the night!" foreign accent. (The subtitle of Zenovich's film is a sly reference to the different ways that Polanski was regarded in America and in Europe.) On two occasions, Rittenband demanded that the lawyers play-act scenes with him for the benefit of the reporters, and reneged on deals he'd made when he didn't like his press clippings. (Rittenband has since died, but in the movie, retired Deputy District Attorney Roger Gunson, who speaks about Polanski as if he were something he'd found sticking to his shoe, recalls warning Polanski's lawyer about Rittenband and says that if he'd found himself at the legal mercy of a freak like Rittenband, he probably would have been on the next plane himself.) Now lawyers for Polanski have filed a request the dismiss the outstanding warrant against him, citing the evidence of "a pattern of misconduct and improper communications" revealed in the film. If the charges are dropped--a move that Polanski's alleged victim calls for in the film--the 75-year-old winner of the 2002 Academy Award for Best Director (for The Pianist) will finally be able to visit the U.S. for the first time in thirty years. A spokeswoman for the District Attorney's office told reporters that she couldn't comment on the new developments because the D.A. was s till waiting to be served with the motion. She knew all about it, though. Saw it on the TV news.

While he waits for the results of the Los Angeles Superior Court hearing scheduled in January, Polanksi is maintaining his regular schedule of getting his feet kissed in Europe. He recently showed up at the Turin Film Festival, site of an enormous career retrospective thrown in his honor. Neil Harris reports that "At the nearby Museo Nazionale del Cinema, the gantry that snakes around its spectacular five-storey exhibition hall is decorated with blown-up photographs from the director's own collection. Viewed together, they offer fascinating insights into the making of such iconic masterworks as Repulsion, Chinatown and Rosemary's Baby. A snap from the latter's set sees its star Mia Farrow visibly delighted by a chart breaking down her performance into separate components. Polanski, whose directing style has not always inspired descriptions of his actors as being "visibly delighted", rolled into town to co-star in a Q & A session with director Nanni Moretti (The Son's Room), the festival's artistic director. Describing the challenges he's placed in front of himself on some projects, Polanski said that "Telling stories is not enough. I need something more difficult to achieve." He also admitted to the odd failure or two. The most spectacular of these on his resume is Pirates, the $40 million bellyflop that Polanski had actually been working on before his arrest and that was finally released in 1986, only to serve as a reminder to the world that if you're working on an expensive project that you've conceived for Jack Nicholson to star in and find yourself making it with Walter Matthau in the lead, something has gone terribly wrong. "It was a nightmare from beginning to end. Every day something new would go wrong," Polanski recalled of the shoot, adding, "I should have got a special award just for finishing it." Or maybe, as Chico Marx might put it, he should have been offered a really special award in exchange for agreeing not to finish it.

Screengrab Presents: The 25 Greatest Horror Films of All Time (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 20:30:00 GMT

20. RE-ANIMATOR (1985)

This 1985 instant-midnight-movie classic just about killed off the concept of the underground-horror-cult-item by being too perfect; a beautifully executed, straight-faced H.P. Lovecraft update with farce timing and gory slapstick, it hit its marks with such stunning aplomb that it's hard to think of a similar film that wouldn't be embarrassed to be compared to it. That includes pretty much every subsequent attempt by the first time filmmaker Stuart Gordon, previously known as founding director of Chicago's Organic Theater Company, to follow it up, though its star, Jeffrey Combs, has managed to keep the spirit of Herbert West alive through his performances in other movies -- especially Peter Jackson's The Frighteners, where his deranged, ghostbusting FBI agent is a scene-stealing fusion of Dr. West, Fox Mulder, and Hazel Motes.

19. EYES WITHOUT A FACE (1959)

Georges Franju's nightmare classic was first released in the U.S. in 1962 in a re-edited, English-language version called The Horror Chamber of Dr. Faustus. In a time when foreign films really had to fight for American distribution, this was a peculiar kind of triumph that demonstrated that it was possible for certain special films to bridge the audiences that responded to the critical theories of Andre Bazin and those who were more at home with Joe Bob Briggs. The restored version that has since become the standard text even here makes it clearer that the movie (about a mad doctor's attempts to restore the once-beautiful, then damaged and now slate-blank face of his daughter) is an attack on unthinking scientific experimentation that draws on the deliberate tapping-into-the-irrational of the Surrealists and such films as Cocteau's Orpheus -- but it's still a movie about a guy whose hobby is stripping the kissers off kidnapped women until he gets eaten by his own attack dogs.

18. MARTIN (1977)

After many failed attempts to successfully follow up on Night of the Living Dead, and two years before returning to the zombie well with Dawn of the Dead, George Romero made this riff on the vampire genre in his beloved Pittsburgh. The title character, played by twenty-six-year-old John Amplas, is a forlorn, alienated young man who appears to be a serial killer and wishes he were a vampire. In its own odd way, Martin, more than any other film of its time, anticipates the Goth subculture of Anne Rice and the post-punk concept of vampires as creatures of morbid romantic fantasy, though it's an ironic comment on that kind of attraction, not a celebration of it: at key moments, Romero shows us Martin's fantasies of himself as a suave, literal lady killer with seductive powers, before staging his murders as the unpleasant messes they actually are. Romero himself turns up in a cameo as a priest who, sought for guidance by an Old World relative of Martin's, turns out to be less interested in hearing the man out than in raving about The Exorcist.

17. ROSEMARY’S BABY (1968)

If Charles Grodin doesn’t exactly spring to mind when you think of the great stars of horror, then you’ve never seen Rosemary’s Baby. Kicking off the 1970s devil movie craze two years before the start of that morally ambiguous decade (and one year before director Roman Polanski’s wife Sharon Tate was murdered by the minions of real life demon Charles Manson), Mia Farrow dramatized the worst-case-scenario fears of young mothers everywhere as the title character in a defiantly downbeat movie where motherhood is perverted, the fetus is the villain, the bad guys win and we get to see Ruth Gordon naked for the first (but, thanks to Bud Cort and Hal Ashby, certainly not the last) time in her distinguished career.

16. THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE (1974)

These days Leatherface is just another lovable lunk in the horror franchise Hall of Fame, right up there with Jason and Freddy Krueger, but despite all the sequels and remakes, the impact of his 1974 debut is undiminished. There's nothing complicated about the plot: five young people traveling across Texas in a van happen upon a seemingly deserted farmhouse where they make the sudden and violent acquaintance of the hulking butcher and cross-dresser Leatherface and the rest of the demented Sawyer clan. Tobe Hooper's film derives much of its power from its grimy, snuff-film authenticity; it looks as though it may have been discovered moldering in the attic of the decaying Sawyer farmhouse. When Leatherface revs his chainsaw while closing in on a victim in the deep, dark woods, you can only think, yep, that would certainly scare the living shit out of me. Leatherface's final dance of death in the early morning rays of the sun is perhaps the seminal image of hillbilly horror. Much has been made of the movie as metaphor for any number of things – Vietnam, Watergate, feminism, the collapse of the counterculture, the dissolution of the nuclear family and possibly the 1973 World Series for all I know – but as flat-out unrelenting exploitation of the modern suburbanite's fear of backwoods people, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre has few peers.

Click Here For Part One, Three, Four, Five, Six & Seven

Contributors: Phil BOOOOO!-gent, Andrew OsBurning-in-Hell, Baron Scott Von Frankendoviak

Aronofsky Takes Up Residence In Riverview Towers

Andrew Osborne — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 19:00:00 GMT

If Lost is too straightforward and predictable for your television palette, take heart: The Hollywood Reporter reported last week that indie film darling Darren Aronofsky is currently developing a series for AMC, the network that's recently out-HBO-ed HBO with edgy, critically-acclaimed new shows like Mad Men and Breaking Bad.

The psychological thriller (originally an HBO project, as it happens) is being scripted by John J. McLaughlin (screenwriter of Aronofsky’s upcoming film, Black Swan) and unfolds within the titular Riverview Towers apartment complex, presumably located somewhere south of Colorado’s Overlook Hotel and Twin Peaks’ Great Northern, east of The Kingdom hospital and within shrieking distance of Zuul's old haunts, Room 1408 of the Dolphin Hotel and the building where Rosemary had her baby.

As a fan of Aronofsky’s Pi, a foe of the humorless, overrated Requiem For a Dream and an unashamed defender of The Fountain, I’m curious to see whether Riverview Towers plays to the director’s edgy, imaginative strengths or disappears up its own psychological abyss like David Milch’s recent disaster of self-indulgence, John From Cincinnati. Here's hoping for the former, although I suppose the latter could be equally entertaining in its own way.

Mike D'Angelo at Sundance: Part 1

Peter Smith — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 19:50:00 GMT

Mike D'Angelo reports from the Sundance Film Festival:

Sundance is playing things close to the vest this year, for some reason. Upon my arrival late Thursday night — too late, alas, to catch the opening-night attraction, In Bruges, which everyone who did see it seems to think is ill-served by its hyperactive trailer — I picked up a copy of the Salt Lake City Weekly, expecting to find my friend Scott Renshaw's capsule reviews of perhaps two dozen films that had been screened for local press before the festival proper even began. Instead, there only was a page of wild guesswork, advance screenings having apparently been scuttled. Nor were Friday's press screenings particularly appetizing, as most of the morning and afternoon was devoted to soporific-sounding selections from the World Documentary section. Did I really want or need to learn anything further about Mumia Abu-Jamal? (In Prison My Whole Life.) Would Up the Yangtze, about China's Three Gorges Dam project, be any more illuminating than Jia Zhang-ke's 2006 Venice prizewinner Still Life, just now opening in limited U.S. release? Hoping the homegrown docs might be more energizing, I stuck my head into Traces of the Trade, a personal-essay film in which the director and nine relatives tour the locations where their ancestors purchased slave labor with rum and molasses, but fled after forty minutes of unbearably self-indulgent white-liberal guilt.

As I write this, most of the potentially heavy hitters are still to come. Today, however, people are buzzing, with good reason, about yet another documentary, Marina Zenovich's Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired. (Full disclosure: I roomed with Marina at Cannes a few years ago, though we barely spoke since I tend to fall asleep at festivals within fifty-two seconds of hitting my room.) As the title suggests, the film focuses on Polanski's 1977 arrest for "unlawful sexual intercourse" (plea-bargained down from rape) with a thirteen-year-old girl and his subsequent flight from justice just hours before he was due to be sentenced, resulting in what may well be lifelong exile in France. Even for those familiar with the general details of the case, though, Wanted and Desired will likely prove revelatory. Zenovich dutifully provides basic psychological context for Polanski's odious conduct — mom murdered by Nazis, pregnant wife slaughtered by Manson Family — and wittily illustrates various points with well-chosen clips from Rosemary's Baby, Chinatown, The Tenant, and other favorites. Ultimately, however, she's less interested in Polanski's crime than she is in the outlandish farce of judicial corruption that the banal crime somehow inspired. If you've ever run into a celebrity and found yourself instantly transformed into a babbling cretin, this fascinating film will provide some solace: At least the celeb's life and freedom weren't in your shaking hands.

S-Horror?

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 17:00:00 GMT

As we gear up for another spring full of rampaging monsters and psychopathic serial killers, Desson Thompson in the Washington Post wonders if something elemental to the whole concept of the horror movie isn't missing: the victim.

After the usual handwringing over the 'torture porn' generation, the artist formerly known as Howe goes on to make some pretty compelling points: the horror films of today — even the stylized, artsy ones influenced by or coming from the J-horror movement — tend to focus entirely on the means by which the victims are dispatched: intricate traps, complex schemes, gruesome tortures, gigantic monsters. Very little attention, on the other hand, is given to providing the audience with an identification figure: while in previous horror films we were at least able to identify with the person going through such terrifying treatment (as in Rosemary's Baby) or with the person doing the terrorizing (as in Psycho), the modern-day horror film has lost its focus, one way or another, on humanity and gives us precious little to care about beyond the novelty of learning how the next victim will snuff it. "When we think of the horror classics", says Thomson, "we don't recall the gruesome acts so much as the people who weathered them. Think of Rosemary Woodhouse, the determined mother in Rosemary's Baby, who faces the prospect her baby has been fathered by the Devil. Remember Regan MacNeil, the sweet pre-teen of The Exorcist, whose satanic transformation forces heroics from two soft-spoken priests. Even Jack Torrance, the demented murderer at the heart of The Shining, affects us because he's a husband and father gone horribly awry, not some abstract ax wielder."

Providing a much-needed antidote for this alienating inhumanity in the horror genre, he claims, are a new wave of Spanish horror directors, presaged by Guillermo del Toro in the disturbing Pan's Labyrinth and followed up by two of his proteges, director Juan Antonio Bayona and screenwriter Sergio G. Sanchez, whose dark, moody The Orphanage is enjoying limited release in the U.S. They both cite the Spanish cultural heritage of the Day of the Dead (which is "not something that you look upon as horrifying or sad or terrible but as a way to conciliate with death; you bring death home instead of trying not to think about it", according to Sanchez) and the country's all-too-recent emergence from the shadows of fascism as reasons why this brand of non-gory, emotionally powerful, human-centered horror is hitting home with their audiences.

Whether or not The Orphanage will trigger a string of "S-horror" hits in the U.S., they're doing quite well at home; the movie was last year's highest-grossing film in Spain, outstripping even the blockbuster foreign imports like Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End.