Repulsion (1965)

Peter's Nite
Microscopic portions of salmon, baked vegetables, brownies
Or, as Stuart would put it: "Dead rabbit, dead rabbit, dead rabbit..."

Polanski's "Apartment Trilogy" via Greenmanreviews:

One could easily get the impression from his films that director Roman Polanski does not recommend apartment life. Three of his films, forming an unofficial trilogy, concern characters -- apartment dwellers all -- who variously succumb to different kinds of insanity.

In Repulsion, Carol (Catherine Deneuve), a young Belgian manicurist, lives with her sister and her sister's fiancee in a London apartment. The couple go away on a vacation, leaving Carol alone in the flat. While they are away, Carol begins hallucinating that she is not alone in the apartment. A man appears in her dressing mirror for a split second then disappears. Hands reach out from the walls and molest her. She is unable to function otherwise, forgetting to eat and leaving food out to rot.

This culminates in a rape sequence where Polanski hints at the reality by including only the "real" sounds -- a clock ticking, Carol's own breathing and heartbeat, and the rustle of the sheets as she fights her "attacker." The trauma of this experience completes Carol's break with reality. When a friend later calls on her, concerned that she hasn't been to work, she takes him for an intruder.

Upon viewing Repulsion, many psychologists commended Polanski's accurate depiction of schizophrenia. They were surprised when Polanski admitted that he and co-screenwriter Gerard Brach had simply written Carol's behavior as a natural response to the circumstances. They had done no research.

Biography on Polanski:

Director, actor. Born Raimund Polanski, on August 18, 1933, in Paris, France. At the age of three, Polanski moved with his family to his father’s native city of Krakow, Poland. In 1941, his parents were imprisoned in various Nazi concentration camps, where his mother eventually died in Auschwitz. In order to escape deportation, Polanski lived with several different Polish families until he was reunited with his father in 1944.

As a teenager, Polanski developed his acting skills in radio dramas and films. In 1954, he enrolled at the Polish National Film Academy in Lodz, where his body of work consisted of short films and documentaries. Upon his graduation, he appeared in a number of movies—many of which were the work of famed Polish director Andrzej Wajda, including Lotna (1959), Innocent Sorcerers (1960), and Samson (1961). In 1962, he directed his first feature-length film, Knife in the Water . The international recognition that followed, including an Academy Award nomination for Best Foreign Film, gave Polanski the chance to bring his movies to a more mainstream audience. The following year, he moved to London, where his next offering, the psychological thriller Repulsion (1965), was considered equally compelling by critics and audiences.

In 1968, Polanski moved to Hollywood, making his American film debut with the classic thriller Rosemary's Baby, which featured exceptional performances by Mia Farrow and John Cassavetes. Despite his burgeoning film career, Polanski endured a devastating tragedy the following year when his pregnant wife, actress Sharon Tate, was brutally murdered by members of the Charles Manson cult. The extreme violence experienced by Polanski throughout his life was often reflected in his films, which tended to focus on the darker themes of alienation and evil—most notably, in the modern film noir Chinatown (1974), featuring John Huston, Jack Nicholson, and Faye Dunaway.

In 1977, Polanski was indicted on six criminal counts for having sexual relations with a minor. The alleged act took place with a 13-year-old girl, in the home of the actor Jack Nicholson. Both Nicholson and his longtime girlfriend, actress Anjelica Huston, testified against Polanski when the highly publicized case was brought to trial. Polanski pleaded guilty to one charge of unlawful sexual intercourse and underwent six weeks of psychiatric evaluation at a state prison in California. Although additional criminal charges were still pending, Polanski fled the United States after his discharge. (While authorities are not actively seeking him out, he does face the possibility of prison if he returns to America.)

Kim Morgan on Repulsion:

The obscure, slippery and decayed complexities of such desire are conveyed brilliantly in Repulsion. The diseased atmosphere of Carol's womb is meticulously created with Polanski's use of camera angles, sound effects and images of clutter. Though music is used effectively, Polanski relies more on amplifying the sounds of everyday life--the ticking of a clock, the voices of nuns playing catch in the convent garden, the dripping of a faucet--to convey the acute awareness Carol acquires in response to her fear. Polanski also dresses the film with pertinent details that further exemplify both Carol's madness and the aching passage of time: Potatoes sprout in the kitchen, meat (rabbit meat, no less) rots on a plate and eventually collects flies, various debris of blood, food and liquids form naturally around Carol. The film's inventive use of black-and-white film, wide-angle lenses and close-ups creates an unsparing vision of sickness, and Deneuve's performance is effectively mysterious. The viewer, however, is able to empathize with Carol, which is how she lures us into her web in the first place. As Polanski cameraman Gil Taylor muttered during filming, "I hate doing this to a beautiful woman."

Yet one loves to do this to a beautiful woman, especially one like Deneuve--at first. Deneuve's loveliness makes Carol's madness more palatable (her unfortunate suitor thinks she is odd, but he can't help but "love" this gorgeous woman), but eventually it becomes horrifying. Carol is not simply a Hitchcockian aberration of what lies beneath the "perfect woman," she is the reflection of what lies beneath repressed desire--in men and women. Polanski has a knack for casting women who are nervously exciting (Faye Dunaway in Chinatown is a blinking, twitching mess), and therefore dangerous to desire. He makes one insecure about longing for them. Deneuve is certainly nerve-racking. She is so physically flawless that she often seems half human: An anemic girl, she can barely lift up her arm, yet at the same time she is highly sensual, an ample, heavily breathing woman with more than a glint of carnality in her dreamily vacant eyes. Deneuve makes one feel the confusion of a corrupted child: She is an arrested adolescent who, like an anorexic, cannot face her womanliness without visions of perverse opulence and violence. Carol is the personification of sexual mystery--she is what lurks beneath the orgasms of pleasure and pain. What Polanski finds intriguing and revolting is perceptively female, making Repulsion a woman's picture more women may want to know.

My Beautiful Laundrette (1985)

Nora's Nite

Screenonline:

Originally shot for television in six weeks on a low budget, My Beautiful Laundrette (1985) was directed by Stephen Frears, from author Hanif Kureishi's first screenplay. Originally shot on 16mm, it was so well received by critics at the Edinburgh Film Festival that it was internationally distributed for cinema on 35mm. Heralded as one of Britain's most commercially and critically successful films of 1986, it earned Kureishi an Oscar nomination for Best Screenplay.

My Beautiful Laundrette was ground-breaking in its bold exploration of issues of sexuality, race, class and generational difference. It also sparked controversy, particularly within the Asian community, which was disgusted by its perceived degrading representation of Pakistanis. At a New York demonstration by the Pakistan Action Committee, banners called the film "the product of a vile and perverted mind".

Much of the outrage was targeted at the homosexual affair between Omar and Johnny, whch develops from a genuine mutual fondness through the buzz of sexual experimentation, before hinting, at the end, at something deeper. On the way, it survives several obstacles, including Johnny's racist connections and Omar's resentment.

The film highlights a dilemma at the heart of the immigrant experience - the desire to belong to Western society while maintaining a clear sense of Pakistani identity. The two brothers, Nasser and Papa, demonstrate this cultural conflict. An ardent intellectual socialist, Papa belongs to old school Pakistan because, like most first generation immigrants, he believes fervently in education combating racism and is vehemently against the greed and conservative economics of Thatcherism.

Shakespeare in Love (1998)

MOVIENITE 10TH ANNIVERSARY BLOW OUT!!!!!!
Pamela's Nite

Tom Stoppard via New York Times:

Born in Czechoslovakia in 1937 and educated in India and England, Tom Stoppard has consistently brought an insider-outsider's amused detachment to playwriting and a buoyant theatrical athleticism to philosophy, physics and semantics. Born in 1937, he became an international celebrity with his first produced play, "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead" (1967), which re-told Shakespeare's "Hamlet" from the perspective of two hapless courtiers on the sidelines of the main events. The verbal pyrotechnics and philosophical game-playing that animated Rosencrantz" have been part of his signature ever since.

"Jumpers" (1972) is a metaphysical murder mystery, while "Travesties" (1974), set in Zurich in 1911, imagines an encounter among Lenin, James Joyce and Tristan Tzara. Occasionally criticized for emphasizing intellectual cleverness at the expense of emotional substance, much of Mr. Stoppard's work in fact directly addresses the conflict between head and heart, between philosophical ideals and debunking reality -- themes eloquently pursued in "The Real Thing" (1982), "The Invention of Love" (1997), "The Coast of Utopia" (2001), a three-play cycle about 19th-century Russian intellectuals, and "Rock 'n' Roll" (2006), set in Czechoslovakia and Cambridge in the late 1960's and the 1990's. Mr. Stoppard's work as a screenwriter includes "Brazil" (1985) and "Shakespeare in Love" (1998)

Mel Gussow on Stoppard and Shakespeare via NYT:

With ''Shakespeare in Love,'' Mr. Stoppard takes a more leisurely approach, opening up his story to include the world of Elizabethan theater: its factionalism, chicanery, self-interest and rigidity. Periodically, Mr. Stoppard has touched on theatrical matters: the play within the play in ''The Real Thing'' and in ''The Real Inspector Hound.'' But in ''Shakespeare in Love'' the theater is center stage, and all contemporary resonances are intentional, as when an actor asks a producer his identity and the man replies, ''I'm the money.''

Queen Elizabeth herself, as incarnated by Judi Dench, proves to be a figure of surprising liberality, at least in the arena of theater and romance. In addition to Marlowe, John Webster is in the lineup as a youth with a sadistic streak, and there is more than a hint that the lady Viola will inspire a future Shakespearean comedy.

Rashômon (1950)

Stuart's Nite

Ebert on Rashomon:

Shortly before filming was to begin on "Rashomon," Akira Kurosawa's three assistant directors came to see him. They were unhappy. They didn't understand the story. "If you read it diligently," he told them, "you should be able to understand it, because it was written with the intention of being comprehensible." They would not leave: "We believe we have read it carefully, and we still don't understand it at all."
Recalling this day in Something Like an Autobiography, Kurosawa explains the movie to them. The explanation is reprinted in the booklet that comes with the new Criterion DVD of "Rashomon." Two of the assistants are satisfied with his explanation, but the third leaves looking puzzled. What he doesn't understand is that while there is an explanation of the film's four eyewitness accounts of a murder, there is not a solution.
Kurosawa is correct that the screenplay is comprehensible as exactly what it is: Four testimonies that do not match. It is human nature to listen to witnesses and decide who is telling the truth, but the first words of the screenplay, spoken by the woodcutter, are "I just don't understand." His problem is that he has heard the same events described by all three participants in three different ways--and all three claim to be the killer.
"Rashomon" (1950) struck the world of film like a thunderbolt. Directed by Kurosawa in the early years of his career, before he was hailed as a grandmaster, it was made reluctantly by a minor Japanese studio, and the studio head so disliked it that he removed his name from the credits. Then it won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, effectively opening the world of Japanese cinema to the West. It won the Academy Award as best foreign film. It set box office records for a subtitled film. Its very title has entered the English language, because, like "Catch-22," it expresses something for which there is no better substitute.
The first time I saw the film, I knew hardly a thing about Japanese cinema, and what struck me was the elevated emotional level of the actors. Do all Japanese shout and posture so? Having now seen a great many Japanese films, I know that in most of them the Japanese talk in more or less the same way we do (Ozu's films are a model of conversational realism). But Kurosawa was not looking for realism. From his autobiography, we learn he was struck by the honesty of emotion in silent films, where dialog could not carry the weight and actors used their faces, eyes and gestures to express emotion. That heightened acting style, also to be seen in Kurosawa's "Seven Samurai" and several other period pictures, plays well here because many of the sequences are, essentially, silent.
Film cameras are admirably literal, and faithfully record everything they are pointed at. Because they are usually pointed at real things, we usually think we can believe what we see. The message of "Rashomon" is that we should suspect even what we think we have seen. This insight is central to Kurosawa's philosophy. The old clerk's family and friends think they've witnessed his decline and fall in "Ikiru" (1952), but we have seen a process of self-discovery and redemption. The seven samurai are heroes when they save the village, but thugs when they demand payment after the threat has passed. The old king in "Ran" (1985) places his trust in the literal meaning of words, and talks himself out of his kingdom and life itself.