Are you kidding me? Repulsion? Ooo the male gaze is so intolerable I think I'll stab to death the next guy who tries to come through this door. Ludicrous.

I'd rather watch Chevy Chase's entire oevre than sit through that POS ever again. Polanski's made some insufferable films, but that takes the cake.

Totally NOT CRAP.

Repulsion has been critically lauded as a great film. Many psychologists have pointed to it as a fairly accurate depiction of criminal sexual psychosis stemming from paranoid schizophrenia and a history of repeated forcible rape at an early age. Polanski himself has said the main character was based upon a young woman he had known in Paris.

Polanski has made many many great films.

punch_the_lion wrote:Ace,

What about Repulsion, Rosemary's Baby and Tess? All three films with female protagonists Polanski makes the viewer sympathize with. I disagree that he doesn't care about the characters unless you can cite a specific example.

His horror films do tend to explore the darker side of human nature, which is why they would seem bleak. Contrast that though with The Pianist, a very hopeful film about surviving the experience of the Holocaust.

Or even his last film, Oliver Twist. I think he is getting mellower with age.

You'd say he cares about rosemary?! Did we watch the same movie? he cares more than enough to torture her, sure. He cheapens our sympathy here, it seems to me. BUT THAT'S THE POINT, it's a cruel and shallow point at heart. is that brilliant then, i don't know?

There are so many better ways of displaying the darker side of human nature... without all this glamorous coating... his movies are just alienating, i find, that's all.

Yeah he's definitely prone to sensationalism at times, but his early films and some of his more recent work are much more thoughtful than those few movies he made during his middle career when he became caught up in pandering to Hollywood sensibilities.

Have you ever seen "The Fat and the Lean"? It's kind of a Socialist parable about the class struggle. I thought that for a student film it was pretty damn good.

How about Knife in the Water, his first feature? Again it's a parable of sorts which explores issues of domination and control. The older man unwittingly brutalizes the younger man, then benevolently invites him to participate in a boating trip. Once the young guy has been brought aboard the boat, the older man presses him into servitude, prompting a fierce ego struggle due to issues of authoritarian control and sexual rivalry. Good film, not overly sensationalist.

Rosemary's Baby was just another of those Satanism thriller movies of the '70s, like The Exorcist or The Omen. I think it was really no better or worse than either of those, but it seems apparent that Polanski wasn't trying to make anything more than a big Hollywood thriller.

The Fearless Vampire Killers was a fun movie that I saw as a reactionary piss-take on the whole horror monster/supernatural/satanism genre. As silly as that movie was, it had some great ideas, like the Jewish vampire who wasn't repulsed by crucifixes, but by the Star of David.

I really liked The Tenant, even though that one was a bit over-the-top with the melodrama and the morbidity and everything. The excessive, unremitting creepiness was one of the things I find so interesting about that movie.

Chinatown was undeniably a masterpiece.

Last Polanski movie I watched was Frantic. That movie seemed to follow a very '70s Hollywood-style thriller formula, but similar in style and tone to something like The Killing of a Chinese Bookie by John Cassavetes (who was a friend and frequent collaborator of Polanski). It was good, but not spectacular. There was a lot of Harrison Ford running around being Harrison Ford. If you like Harrison Ford, you'll probably like it.

That Pirates thing was a piece of crap, but for all the great stuff he's done, I think he can be allowed one or two stinkers.

When you mention Polanski, people usually acknowledge his most extreme material and tend to gloss over more sensitive works like Macbeth, Tess, Bitter Moon and The Pianist. Maybe that has something to do with his connection to the Manson family.

tocharian wrote:Are you kidding me? Repulsion? Ooo the male gaze is so intolerable I think I'll stab to death the next guy who tries to come through this door. Ludicrous.

I'd rather watch Chevy Chase's entire oevre than sit through that POS ever again. Polanski's made some insufferable films, but that takes the cake.

looks like you're probably very alone in that stance. and you're "criticism" is a little silly, don't you think? i mean, you could apply that same mockery of melodrama to practically anything shakespeare has done and it would seemingly apply. do you think the plot alone is what we like about polanski or shakespeare or most anybody's work in theater or film?

repulsion is an excellent film that has a lot more going for it than it's ludicrous plot (execution, cinematography, score, influence, psychological plot devices, etc.). if you thought it was bad, you did. whatever. at least you like jules dassin, right?

Colonel Panic wrote:

Last Polanski movie I watched was Frantic. That movie seemed to follow a very '70s Hollywood-style thriller formula, but similar in style and tone to something like The Killing of a Chinese Bookie by John Cassavetes (who was a friend and frequent collaborator of Polanski). It was good, but not spectacular. There was a lot of Harrison Ford running around being Harrison Ford. If you like Harrison Ford, you'll probably like it.

.

I saw Frantic once on TV about 10 years ago, but i remember it as not much more than an homage to Hitchcock and his "innocent man on the run" plots.
But i'm curious why you are saying that Cassavetes and Polanski were friends and frequent collaborators. They only worked on one film together and by all accounts did NOT get along on the shoot. Right? Their respective approaches to filmmaking are pretty different from one another. I'm curious, Panic, where you are getting this?

I cast my NC vote for RP way early in this thread. Again, this poll is about his FILMS, not his sexual tendencies.

he made some real cool movies, so not crap.

I’m talking about his movies, ok.

It’s like people think that Polanski has done something brave and interesting by making films about female characters with no pluck, agency, or sense. Oh, poor beautiful women, so pure, so helpless, see how the world grinds them underfoot? Bull-shit. Maybe if Polanski made a film about a woman and a not a slack-jawed cipher (see Catherine Deneuve in Repulsion, Natjassia Kinski in Tess, Faye Dunaway in Chinatown) I’d be impressed.

Colonel Panic wrote:Many psychologists have pointed to [Repulsion] as a fairly accurate depiction of criminal sexual psychosis stemming from paranoid schizophrenia and a history of repeated forcible rape at an early age.

You can project any number diagnoses onto Deneuve’s vacant character, I suppose. A good film might provide some explanation for her idiocy. In Repulsion, she’s just a porcelain doll that goes nuts cuz she can’t take all those filthy filthy men and their filthy filthy looks.

Dr. O' Nothing wrote:

Colonel Panic wrote:

Last Polanski movie I watched was Frantic. That movie seemed to follow a very '70s Hollywood-style thriller formula, but similar in style and tone to something like The Killing of a Chinese Bookie by John Cassavetes (who was a friend and frequent collaborator of Polanski). It was good, but not spectacular. There was a lot of Harrison Ford running around being Harrison Ford. If you like Harrison Ford, you'll probably like it.

.

I saw Frantic once on TV about 10 years ago, but i remember it as not much more than an homage to Hitchcock and his "innocent man on the run" plots.
But i'm curious why you are saying that Cassavetes and Polanski were friends and frequent collaborators. They only worked on one film together and by all accounts did NOT get along on the shoot. Right? Their respective approaches to filmmaking are pretty different from one another. I'm curious, Panic, where you are getting this?

I cast my NC vote for RP way early in this thread. Again, this poll is about his FILMS, not his sexual tendencies.

For some reason, I thought Cassavetes worked with Polanski on more than one movie (in a non-acting capacity) but it seems I was mistaken. Guess I should have checked IMDB before posting that. I thought Frantic conveyed much of the same tone as The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, in that it was a story of a guy who became stuck in a situation beyond his control that seemed to get worse and worse the harder he tried set it straight. I originally mentioned the obvious Hitchcock influence in that post, but I guess I must have deleted that line before posting. It was late and I was getting pretty tired when I wrote that.

I agree that the great tragedy of Polanski's life and his personal character flaws often overshadow objective judgments of his films on their own merit. This is unfortunate because many of his movies do exhibit a great deal of sensitivity.

tocharian wrote:You can project any number diagnoses onto Deneuve’s vacant character, I suppose. A good film might provide some explanation for her idiocy. In Repulsion, she’s just a porcelain doll that goes nuts cuz she can’t take all those filthy filthy men and their filthy filthy looks.

The very last shot in the film is a slow pan across the devastated apartment, with the camera finally coming to rest on a family portrait. Everybody in the picture looks happy except for Catherine Deneuve, who appears disturbed and distant. The father in the picture also appears to be the same man as the phantom who attacks her in her nightly rape fantasies. The camera slowly zooms in to her troubled eye in the photo, establishing unity with the opening shot in the film, which had also been an extreme close-up shot of her eye.

One common criticism of Repulsion that I do agree with is that the ending appears to posit her sister's boyfriend, an abusive cad who has also been established as a philandering married man, as a sort of "hero" of the story. In the last scene of the film. When her sister and the boyfriend return home to the trashed apartment, the sister finds her hidden under an overturned sofa, catatonic with fear. Immediately her sister breaks down and starts crying hysterically. The boyfriend yells rudely at the sister, then slaps her. He then takes charge of the situation while the sister remains weak and ineffectual. The man overturns the sofa, tenderly lifts up the girl (in much the way one would handle a child) then carries her out of the trashed apartment to "safety" while her sister continues to bawl. The message seems to be that all men are assholes a lot of the time, but a woman's only alternative is to go nutzo, destroy an apartment and kill a couple of them. I agree that that scene is a weak point in the film. It adds yet another element of hopelessness and disgust to an already heavy-handed story. But I felt that overall the film was a pretty good thriller.

Colonel Panic wrote: The father in the picture also appears to be the same man as the phantom who attacks her in her nightly rape fantasies.

The man's got a thing for father rapists, I'll give you that. Arlo Gutherie would be pleased.*





*This is an allusion to the song "Alice's Restaurant", not an allegation about the Gutherie clan