by ·Comments Off on Pirates (1986, Roman Polanski)

Sex criminals are suddenly in the news, so let’s see what Polanski made before Frantic. A decade after Fearless Vampire Killers, this director with a great talent for composition and psychological drama insists on going in a direction where he has no talent at all: the action comedy. He’s aiming for Goonies meets Airplane and ending up with flabby, lifeless spectacle.

Walter Matthau (doing an accent) and his sidekick Cris Campion (Day of Reckoning) are shipwrecked pirates, rescued by the Spanish, and the first half of the movie is them figuring out how to turn the tables on their rescuers/captors (led by The Doctor of Kill List) and conquer the ship. When they succeed a fellow mutineer tries to rape the lovely Charlotte Lewis (The Golden Child) but he is killed by Cris, because sex crime is not okay! Ends right where it started, with pirate and sidekick stranded on a lifeboat (this was nine months after After Hours came out).

Krank is as shocked to be here as you must be to see him:

by ·Comments Off on The Ninth Gate (1999, Roman Polanski)

Of course I watch The Gate regularly, and have even seen The Gate 2 a couple times, but I never got a hold of parts 3-8, so it’s hard to draw connections here. Depp wears glasses throughout, so I assume he’s the Glasses character from the first two movies (Louis Tripp), continuing to investigate demonic texts, sent from “New York” to Europe by Frank Langella to authenticate a satanic book.

Whenever Depp finds new information or studies a new copy of the book, somebody ends up dead and something ends up missing, but he gains a floaty guardian angel in Emmanuelle Seigner and persists. The movie is all talk for eighty minutes until she floats down a staircase and karates a would-be thief – not that I’m complaining because it’s also a rare classy film about ancient books in an otherwise low-rent Shocktober.

Depp into trouble:

The best scene is this Spanish guy playing twins:

After we’ve lost Bookseller Bernie (a Depp buddy from Donnie Brasco to Public Enemies) and devilbook owner Fargas (of Pieces) and the probably-evil Baroness (Weisz’s mom in The Deep Blue Sea), Langella thinks he’s obtained all the devil’s power, and stupidly tries to prove his invincibility by setting himself on fire. After he burns up, Depp carries on his mission, and maybe the world ends, I dunno. This was the same year as Sleepy Hollow and The Astronaut’s Wife, the year he slipped from interesting actor to movie star.

by ·Comments Off on Bitter Moon (1993, Roman Polanski)

I wondered if this would be an appalling erotic thriller, but it turns out to be a weird sex comedy – the only film adaptation of culture philosopher Pascal Bruckner, with an outstanding Vangelis score. Cruise ship hottie Emmanuelle Seigner and her confessional husband Peter Coyote are weird to Hugh Grant, who finally bows out after Coyote starts going on about his wife’s clitoris. To Grant’s credit, he tells his own wife Kristin Scott Thomas the details later on. The creepy couple aggressively tries to rope Grant into their whole thing, and tell him more stories (they’re in love, doing everything, “headed for sexual bankruptcy,” he falls out of love but she won’t leave so he torments her), and Grant is convincingly standoffish about it, until he stops telling his wife the details and starts making excuses to sneak off and hear more (Coyote ditches her on vacation then gets hit by a bus, she fucks up his spine while he’s recovering then gives him a loaded gun for his birthday). Hugh thinks his reward for hearing all these perverse cruelties will be to end up with Seigner, but she sleeps with his wife instead, then Coyote shoots Seigner and himself.

Coyote would star in an Almodóvar movie the next year… Seigner was married to Polanski, returning from Frantic… Grant and Thomas a couple years before Four Weddings stardom, but well after his Lair of the White Worm.

by ·Comments Off on Memorial Day shorts 2022

Owl (2019, Kelly Reichardt & Christopher Blauvelt)

A beautiful bird, silent in low light, turns its head in every possible direction.

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Leagues (2015, Lucrecia Martel)

Low POV shots through tall grasses as a motorcyclist bitches at some kids that they can’t let their cows eat on community land. The kids go indoors where they learn about measurement and ownership of land. This felt like an educational piece even before the onscreen text told us that things are bad for Argentinean kids. Martel killing time before Zama.

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A Therapy (2012, Roman Polanski)

One of of those auteur advertisements for a fashion brand, but this one is… good. I mean every minute of this is better than any minute of Carnage. Helena Bonham Carter arrives for her therapy appointment and sets to recounting her dreams (“doctor, what does it mean?”) while Ben Kingsley becomes transfixed by the fur coat she entered with, walking to it unseen by his patient and trying it on.

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The Stendhal Syndrome or My Dinner with Turhan Bey (2020, Mark Rappaport)

Joan Crawford in Humoresque, “the greatest closeup ever made.” Mark references his own Rock Hudson movie. While researching orientalism he discovered Turkhan Bey, an Austrian-Turkish-Jewish-Czech actor. Discussion of stars and their admirers, the possibility that Mark is the last person in history to swoon over Bey before his work is forgotten. This was charming, with Mark’s casually delivered voiceover and carefully composited picture – the first of his cinema-history video-essays I’ve watched.

by ·Comments Off on The Tragedy of Macbeth (1971, Roman Polanski)

Thought I’d pair this with the Coen version, not realizing the latter wouldn’t come out till early next year. A terrific looking movie, reportedly in part due to newly-designed anamorphic lenses – almost technically impeccable, a few dubbing issues. I like the idea of turning parts of the monologues into voiceover, although it means the actors have to silently react to their overheard thoughts, which is harder to pull off than speaking the lines. It gets gruesome between Macduff’s slaughtered kids, the king’s guards being dismembered, and a man taking a crossbow bolt to the forehead – also some clumsy clanking armor battles (these are all compliments). The only time I felt the 1970’s was in the “dagger I see before me” scene.

Polanski’s first film after his wife was murdered – he’d been prepping What? but thought it’d appear crass(er), and Hugh Hefner(!) was looking to add respectability by getting into the Shakespeare business and losing a bunch of money. Opens with the witches on a beach… the second prophecy scene is zany, and culminates in a good mirror scene.

In the chronology of filmed Macbeths, Werner Schroeter’s obscure hourlong TV version came out the same year, a TV miniseries the year before, but there hadn’t been a major film since Throne of Blood. The next would probably be in ’79, the TV movie with Ian McKellen and Judi Dench. Never heard of a single person in the cast, besides MacB (Frenzy star Jon Finch). Lady M Francesca Annis would star in back-to-back sci-fi epics Krull and Dune. Macduff would become a Gilliam regular, and Banquo was in Dennis Potter’s Cream in My Coffee.

Macduff would like some revenge please:

by ·Comments Off on Frantic (1988, Roman Polanski)

I grabbed Frantic back when I was watching a bunch of Polanski movies, then forgot about it… until one day, having misjudged the length of a flight due to time zone calculations being difficult while my mind is addled from dramamine, I watched the 45-minute Tarkovsky then found myself with a free hour, so as I often do when tired, I reached for the dumbest thing on my hard drive.

Ford, after telling everyone in sight that he’s after “the white lady:”

It’s quite a silly premise, though overall somewhat sturdy, with some convincing particulars for an 80’s movie. Harrison Ford’s wife (The Horde’s psychiatrist in Split) is kidnapped after grabbing the wrong suitcase at the Paris airport, so HF tracks down the drug mule suitcase owner (Emmanuelle Seigner, the future Mrs. Polanski) to unwind the conspiracy, figuring out that the captors are after a nuclear bomb triggering device. Along the way, we’ve got a woman in black on a Paris rooftop (I didn’t take Polanski for a Feuilladian) and music by the late Ennio Morricone, and nightclub scenes by Grace Jones, who must’ve sponsored this movie.

Seigner, screaming out the ass of a getaway car:

by ·Comments Off on Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood (2019 Quentin Tarantino)

Lena Dunham was a Manson cultist! Aha, the ex-boyfriend of Sharon Tate is played by Emile Hirsch – I’ve seen a bunch of his movies (including some great ones) but I never recognize him. Same goes for Scoot McNairy, who played Business Bob. Dunno what Kevin Smith’s daughter or Demi Moore’s daughter look like, but they were both in there somewhere.

Mostly I watched the movie so I could finally read all the articles about the movie…

ScreenCrush: “Cliff is actually the type of guy Rick plays on television.”

Roger Ebert: “a movie not so much about an era but about the movies of that era”

The movie’s wikipedia is surprisingly good, and I found an in-depth article on a music site about the song the ranch girls sing while dumpster diving.

Slashfilm has a LOT about the movie’s songs – I found it while searching for the “Behind the Green Door” novelty song DiCaprio sings badly on television in flashback (which is period-correct).

Burt Reynolds was supposed to play the blind ranch owner, but he died while rehearsing his lines. Pitt’s character was partly based on a stuntman who worked with Reynolds. And this is Tarantino’s second movie about a stuntman – the last one starred Kurt Russell (here he played the stunt coordinator on the Bruce Lee set) and Zoe Bell (she played Kurt’s wife whose car is wrecked by Pitt – and she’s the actual stunt coordinator of this movie).

For balance, The New Yorker was not impressed, says Tarantino is racist, sexist, and a wannabe cult-leader.

The Atlantic responds (“Charles Manson was a white supremacist, a fact that does tend to put a lot of white people in a movie”), attacking the New Yorker, and ending with a hilarious Brad Pitt anecdote.

by ·Comments Off on Cul-de-sac (1966, Roman Polanski)

I follow a lotta must-see movie lists, and supposedly one of my core interests is the Criterion Collection. Movies that are generally accepted as great, released in pristine quality with valuable extras – it’s a no-brainer. At the halfway point of every month I reload their site all day until the new disc announcements appear, and I agonize over which titles I need to buy during the next half-price sale and which are okay to rent from netflix (in the increasingly rare case that they’re actually carried).

And yet it’s not unusual for a month to go by where I watch no Criterion blu-rays, and I think I’ve figured out why that is. I think in the back of my mind, when the Criterion discs come out they lose their sense of urgency. This movie is now readily available in a near-ideal form, so no need to worry about that. Perhaps the wealth of extras is actually hurting as well – I know when I watch Red I’m gonna have to watch another hour’s worth of (really great!) bonus material, which takes up extra time. I’m always threatening a Criterion Month to catch up, but somehow that never happens, while Shocktober and Cannes Month and the Shorts Project and Rock Docs and TV shows and my random decision this month to watch six adaptations of Crime & Punishment go off without a hitch.

So damn it, I’m declaring that from now until Shocktober is Criterion Month.

I watched a fair number of Polanski films in the last couple years, and am starting to make sense of his style. The Apartment Trilogy is dark and weird, but at least two of the three films have bits of heightened silliness. Carnage and Fearless Vampire Killers are ridiculous, and I thought I was supposed to take Ghost Writer seriously as a drama, but perhaps not. I wouldn’t say Cul-de-sac is one of my favorites, but I get its mood: a hostage thriller with the tension constantly undercut by comic situations and performances.

After a robbery gone wrong, gorilla thug Lionel Stander and mortally wounded Jack MacGowran (the nutty Professor in the following year’s Fearless Vampire Killers) hole up at a castle on the shore, not realizing that the tide would trap them there for the next day. The castle dwellers include insecure author Donald Pleasence, introduced being dressed as a woman by young wife Francoise Dorléac (Catherine Deneuve’s sister in life and in The Young Girls of Rochefort). Lionel alternates between seeming quite menacing and seeming like a dumb guy with nowhere else to go, after he’s disowned by his crime bosses via phone and his partner dies, lumbering into scenes of marital discord like a disfigured remake of Knife in the Water. Stressed, Pleasance alienates his wife and the friends who come to visit while Lionel is still waiting for word from the bosses (pretending to be a drunk uncle or something). Pleasance does finally transform from emasculated dress-up doll to heroic man of violence, shooting a marauding Lionel, but it doesn’t last – he’s freezing up moments later, and Francoise flees, leaving him to his freakouts.

Won the golden bear in Berlin, playing with Lord Love a Duck and Masculin Feminin. First film appearance by Jacqueline Bisset (Day For Night, Under The Volcano) as one of the visitors. Donald Pleasence is campy here, but to be fair, it seems like he’s supposed to be. I only know him as the least-convincing part of such realist films as Halloween, Phenomena, Mr. Freedom and The Pumaman. If only I knew a Pleasence expert who could explain this guy’s methods. Lionel Stander is an actor with an interesting history. He worked throughout the 1930’s and 40’s (Hangmen Also Die, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, A Star is Born). His Eugene Pallette-like voice endeared him to Preston Sturges in the late 1940’s, then he was blacklisted for many years before showing up here.

David Thompson:

What Polanski created with Cul-de-sac was a cinema of the absurd, delving into situations of humiliation, role-playing, and betrayal, and evoking an unsettling atmosphere quite unlike anything else on the big screen. This is underlined by his then favorite composer Krzysztof Komeda’s haunting music, a nagging cross-mix of cool jazz and early pop electronica that continuously twists back on itself in repetitive phrases — even to the point where, when Teresa plays a gramophone record of the main theme, the needle becomes stuck … Polanski had previously approached the august Beckett about making a cinema version of his revolutionary Waiting for Godot. But the author saw no reason for something conceived for the stage to be adapted into a film and refused the rights. Nevertheless, Beckett’s exploration of universal human experience through a pair of philosophical bums had a great influence on the young Polanski, as did the disturbing plays of his contemporary Pinter, with their theme of, yes, imposition, laced with menace and black humor. Although he would downplay it, Polanski’s eventual casting of Jack MacGowran, who had acted in Waiting for Godot and Beckett’s Endgame, and Donald Pleasence, who was in both the stage and film versions of Pinter’s The Caretaker, suggests more than pure coincidence.

by ·Comments Off on The Fearless Vampire Killers (1967, Roman Polanski)

Fortunately Polanski has more kinda-horror movies so I can continue the spree of his films which I started last Shocktober. Made between Repulsion and Rosemary’s Baby, this one’s not quite up to their level. The lighting and composition are extremely lovely, but this aims to be a horror-comedy, and the editing’s too slow for comedy or action. It helps that when shots go on way too long Polanski will sometimes speed up the film, but he refuses to cut away for so long that sometimes I wonder if he doesn’t know what editing’s for. This approach would work well for the slow-burn dread of Rosemary’s, and I’ll bet viewers who watched this goofball movie at the time were ill-prepared for what would come next.

Polanski and Sharon Tate:

Our lead comedy duo is Professor Abronsius (the excellent Jack MacGowran of The Exorcist and Age of Consent) and his dim assistant Alfred (Polanski). They’re hunting vampires, hanging out at an inn where Alf lusts after hot innkeeper’s daughter Sharon Tate (of Eye of the Devil) and the locals downplay vampire activity, even denying there’s a castle nearby, which is of course home to dramatically well-dressed Count von Krolock (Ferdy Mayne of Pirates and Frightmare) and his handsome son Herbert (Iain Quarrier of Cul-de-sac), who are planning an attack on the town. The bumbling interlopers rescue the kidnapped Sharon and escape, but too late, as she has been turned and attacks Polanski in the back seat while the professor drives off. Great closing narration: “That night, fleeing from Transylvania, Professor Abronsius never guessed he was carrying away with him the very evil he had wished to destroy. Thanks to him, this evil would at last be able to spread across the world.”

Our heroes:

Count and son:

Also featuring innkeeper Alfie Bass (a ghost in The Bespoke Overcoat), his wife Jessie Robins (known to play characters named Fat Woman, Large Woman and Bertha), maid Fiona Lewis, who I just saw in Dr. Phibes Rises Again, and as the count’s hunchback, boxing champ Terry Downes.

Trying to blend in: