Roman Polanski

luka

luka

Well-known member
chinatown made no impression on me whatsoever. i remember repulsion having some nice clothes in it however.
 
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viktorvaughn

Well-known member
crackerjack said:
It barely sets foot in Chinatown itself. It exists more as a background spectre, a warning about the futility of good intentions. Probably spends about 5 mins there at the end - but don't let that put you off.

The best 'actor' in the film is actually a director - John Huston - who plays a kind of Beelzebub.
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I guess Chinatown is a kind of signifier or otherness a bit like in that Mexican film called Japon which has nothing to do with Japan..
 
S

scottdisco

rip this joint please
'Lenny' Seymour made a very fair (obvious, but his phrasing amused me) observation re Poirot on thee British telly once

Don't ask me why and shit, but I was watching Poirot the other night. I said don't ask me why. The episode was centred on the 'Chinatown' of the East End, on opium dens and aristocratic murder. A community of about 300 Chinese people in Limehouse is turned into a massive phalanx of criminality and upper bourgeois addiciton. At one point, in a moment of delicious socialist realism, the cynical Chief Inspector Japp starts to bang on about the "evil Orientals" while the blue-eyed noble Captain Hastings says something like, "I say, Poirot, these Orientals are dashed inscrutable". And Poirot is all "Yes, mon ami", his eyes suffused with anthropological curiosity, liberalism, humanity, and yes - understanding. He himself, an examplar of European individualism, eccentric in the extreme, supremely rational, stood against a background of indistinguishable 'yellow' folks, a blur of seductive decadence exuding sweet and pretty music to lure and entice sweet, fragile white women like Billie Carleton to their deaths. This mysterious substance from the East sucked the vitality out of one, reduced the morally upright Lord to the status of a wraith, an ambiguous flaneur. It was decadence, the stuff of high camp fiction in Wilde and Conan Doyle. It would have been impolite to refer to the Opium Wars or the Treaty of Nanking.
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empty mirror

empty mirror

remember the jackalope
craner said:
Sorry to be OT, but what's your favorite Polanski film and why?
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favorite: rosemary's baby

why? i am a sucker for witch/satanism films. score is amazing. mia farrow is extremely watchable. creepy vibe. and it is just campy enough.

second: knife in the water

why? tough question. because it is like a snow globe? like, totally contained.



i do love china town but i never forget that i am watching a film. and repulsion is fantastic but maybe a little too manipulative? seriously all i remember was a hyper-tense moment when a phone was ringing. should probably watch that again. not sure i was in my right mind at the time.

macbeth may be my favorite film of a shakes' joint.

bitter moon left no impression at all.

that's all i've seen.
 
IdleRich

IdleRich

IdleRich
"The gangster Dave Courtenay (according to him, at any rate) was found not guilty of a murder in a Chinese takeaway, and on being asked by the judge if he had anything to say about his acquittal said 'yes, I did it'"
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That was the example I was thinking of as well but a quick trawl through the internet couldn't corroborate it at all - reckon he made it up the dumb wannabe twat.

So as far as most legal experts are concerned, eyewitness testimony is basically on its way out as a valid form of legal evidence...
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Interesting point not taken up by anyone there. Despite the fact that this must be one of the cornerstones of proof in the past this feels right to me, it's so hard to definitively identify someone you've seen once in a stressful situation, especially if it was dark. Certainly I would find it so and I can't believe that I'm totally out of the ordinary.
What's that short story where all the witnessess identify this very distinctive looking man as the murderer and it seems that it's an open and shut case - then the defence brings out its witness, the suspect's identical twin, and the jury have to find him not guilty as there is no way to tell which one was the criminal?
 
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Buick6

too punk to drunk
I though people drugging, raping and prostituting themselves is normal behavior for Hollywood.

I mean look at Paris Hilton, Zac Efron, Mel Gibson, Pam Anderson, Tommy Two-tone etc..etc..etc..etc...
 
woops

woops

is not like other people
Not much love for Bitter Moon in this thread.
I found it very memorable after first watching and when I watched it for the second time recently it was still very good.
The American writer does horrible with some style. It's impressive how the unpleasantness mounts up. The use of Paris as a setting is great.
 
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