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Review: ROMAN POLANSKI: WANTED AND DESIRED / Marina Zenovich (2008)

August 24th, 2008 by Scott Marks

Photo Credit: LA Times Collection, UCLA Library Department of Special Collections

Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired (2008)
Directed by: Marina Zenovich
Written by: Joe Bini, Peter G. Morgan and Marina Zenovich
Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1
Running Time: 99 min.

Rating: ★★☆☆☆

Since when does being a Holocaust survivor excuse one from raping an underage girl? That, and a publicity hungry judge eager to be a celebrity by association appear to be director Marina Zenovich’s prime arguments in her documentary defense of director Roman Polanski. They’re not enough.

In 1977, Polanski was hired to photograph young girls for Vogue magazine. (That’s like giving John Gacy a clown suit, a length of rope and a Cub Scout.) He brought his subject/victim, a 13-year-old girl named Samantha Gailey, to Jack Nicholson’s house (Jack was out of town), got her naked in a jacuzzi, plied her with champagne and Quaaludes and proceeded to “consensually” rape her. Ms. Gailey has since publicly forgiven Mr. Polanski.

According to Det. Phil Vannatter, the upstanding law enforcement agent who tried his best to keep O.J. behind bars, “(Polanski) did not perceive having intercourse with a 13-year-old girl as against the law. That was not in his culture, you know. It was a ’so what’ type of thing.”

On March 11, 1977 the film director was arrested for rape by use of drugs. Eleven months later, citing Judge Laurence J. Rittenband’s incompetence, Polanski fled to Paris and hasn’t set foot on American soil since, not even to pick up his best director Oscar for The Pianist. Admittedly, Rittenband is a piece of work. The tough sentencing senior judge loved celebrity trials and the limelight it afforded him. He ordered his bailiff to keep a scrapbook of his star-studded encounters. Rittenband even went so far as to solicit reservations from the media for a seat in his courtroom.

The lawyers that argued the case, Douglas Dalton for the defense and prosecuting attorney Roger Gunson, are given too much screen time. Dalton, still defending his ex-client, states, “People have the right to their own opinion, but they don’t have the right to their own facts.” Richard Brenneman, former writer for The Santa Monica Evening Outlook remembers a nasty joke that circulated at the time of the trial: The only reason Gunson was selected was “because he was a Mormon and the only member of the D.A.’s office that hadn’t had sex with an underage girl.” There comes a point in the film where the haggard Dalton and the still youthful Gunson alternate so many talking head close-ups, it looks like a dialog between Royal Dano and Phil Donahue.

Continue reading Review: ROMAN POLANSKI: WANTED AND DESIRED / Marina Zenovich (2008)

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The Life of Rielle Hunter: Filmmaker and John Edwards’ Mistress

August 9th, 2008 by Scott Marks

“Where do I put the quarter?”

Joel Wicklund from Chicago, Illinois writes, “I know you do gossip here Scott, but isn’t it usually entertainment related?”

Excellent question, Joel! What is more entertaining than seeing a politician, Republican or Democrat, tripping over his own penis while purporting family values and using his cancer-stricken wife for photo-ops in a henious attempt to attract the sympathy vote? Talk about a great gossip yarn: Love, hate, violence, action, death… in a word, emotion! What Sam Fuller would have done with this material, particularly when you consider the tabloid angle.

God Bless the National Enquirer! I am proud to say that the National Enquirer has been a welcome visitor to my home for almost 30 years. The initial allure was eye-catching headlines like “Adam and Eve Were Astronauts,” or “Boy, 9, trapped inside refrigerator forced to eat own foot to stay alive.” (The latter headline came from a National Lampoon parody, but you catch my drift.) They also manage to unearth mounds of Hollywood dirt. When it comes to gossip, I’m like a celebrity Dirt Devil sucking up every crumb of conjecture and the Enquirer has the dirtiest floors in town.

Continue reading The Life of Rielle Hunter: Filmmaker and John Edwards’ Mistress

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John Edwards admits to affair, but denies the bastard is his

August 8th, 2008 by Scott Marks

After doing his best to moonwalk away from the press, John Edwards has finally admitted to what the National Enquirer has known all along: the former presidential candidate did have an affair. Rielle Hunter says that Edwards is the one, but he swears that Francis Quinn Hunter is not his son…er, daughter.

Edwards told ABC News that he lied repeatedly about the affair with 42-year-old Hunter (while his wife battled cancer) but said that he didn’t love her. Nice guy!


 John Edwards’ mistress, Rielle Hunter

Certain that he isn’t the father, Edwards has yet to take a paternity test. He swears that it couldn’t be him because of the timing of the affair and the birth. This from the same man who told reportes in October 2007 that, “The story is false. it’s completely untrue, ridiculous.”

According to the Associated Press, “Edwards acknowledged the affair on Friday afternoon, traditionally a slow-news period even when the Olympic Games’ opening ceremonies are not preoccupying millions of Americans.”

Asked whether the affair would damage Edwards’ future aspirations in public service, David Bonior, Edwards’ campaign manager for his 2008 presidential bid, said: “You can’t lie in politics and expect to have people’s confidence.”

Since when? It sure worked wonders for Bill Clinton.

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Review: UP THE YANGTZE / Yung Chang (2007)

June 21st, 2008 by Scott Marks

The Yu family on the banks of the Yangtze

Up the Yangtze (2007)
Written and Directed by Yung Chang
Photographed by Shi Qing Wang
Starring: Cindy & Jerry
Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1
Running Time: 93 min.
Rating: ★★★★☆

Warm jazz and those slow, smooth camera moves the Italians are best known for. Instead of taking a cruise on the Po, we’re about to chart a body of water that makes Italy’s longest river look like a tributary.

Known in China simply as “The River,” the mythic Yangtze is undergoing the largest engineering endeavor since the Great Wall. Luxury-liners packed with tourists take so-called Farewell Tours before the area is flooded by the Three Gorges Dam. “Imagine the Grand Canyon turned into a Great Lake,” documentarian Yung Chang posits in the film’s opening narration.

Officials follow the “what’s good for the dam is good for the nation” party line while Chang argues, “all serious studies show that mega-dams like the Three Gorges ultimately have greater negative effects than positive.” In 2002, Chang, his parents and grandfather booked passage on one of the farewell cruises. He got the idea of filming the tourists and ship’s crew on a surreal journey up the Yangtze via Gosford Park.

Godard wrote, “I have always tried to make what is called documentary and what is called fiction two aspects of a single movement, it is the relation between the two that produces the true movement.” Chang does a skillful job of finding the drama in the lives of his two leads. The narrative follows two teenagers, Yu Shui, daughter of a family of subsistence farmers who live along the river and Chen Bo Yu, a cocky middle class urbanite.

The way Yu’s father barks for rice and bosses her around, she is pretty much a slave at home. Living in squalor, she might as well go to work and get paid for it. Wanting to get an education, but knowing her family needs quick money Yu is exploited by her uneducated parents and forced to set sail.

Chen Bo Yo comes from an upper middle-class single family household and his shipboard director looks down his snoot at only children, thinking them spoiled and lazy. Like a drill sergeant backed by an all you can eat buffet, the boss intends to whip his young employees into shape by offering each and every one of them a degree in his “University of Life.”

The first task is assigning new hires Westernized, passenger-friendly names. Yu translates to “Cindy” while Chen turns out to be Chinese for “Jerry.” Upper management instructs them never to talk politics with guests and if they must reference a person’s size, substitute “plump” for “fat.”

Jerry’s relative affluence lands him a spot on deck while Cindy is chained to a sink as a galley slave. Behind the bar, his good looks and ability to schmooze make him a natural performer. Down below the bewildered peasant girl is shown no mercy by her supervisor whose tough love motto is “If her family is poor she should work even harder.”

In the meantime, scads of plump American and European gawkers who paid good money to take a vacation amidst decay, line the decks to watch the flood level warning markers float past. While ruddy-faced Midwesterners dress up in authentic period attire, an old-timer parked at a piano croons, “It’s so easy, to speak Chinesey.” It will take you weeks to shake this bouncy ditty from your shower repertoire.

It’s not the definitive statement on ugly American tourists. That distinction goes to Les Blank’s deadpan documentary Innocents Abroad which follows forty average Joes on a whirlwind tour of Europe. It would make a fine companion piece with this film.

Jerry knows how to work the crowd: avoid the young and the old because they don’t tip. Even Cindy learns how to play the game. In an effort to get her to assimilate (and make he look more womanly) a colleague teaches Cindy how to dress up and wear makeup.

Cindy’s parent make a couple of trips to visit their daughter. One can sense a hint of resentment when the father compares Yu’s glitzy workplace to his own accommodations. This lessens with the second visit where both parents appear sporting new duds.

Chang approaches his subjects as if they were first time actors playing roles in a shipboard odyssey. Both characters’ stories are compelling, but it’s the way in which Chang sets them to pictures that makes the film so remarkable. Not since Gunner’s Palace has a documentary demonstrated such formal cunning.

We watch as two of the Yu’s homes are gradually swallowed by the mighty river. Upon leaving their second shack, a series of dissolves shows first the entrance and then the roof become engulfed. Eventually, all that’s left is a body of dirty water with a cruise ship drifting lazily in the background. It’s the most subtle and effective use of cinema I’ve seen all year.

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Jonathan Demme replaces Scorsese on Bob Marley documentary

May 23rd, 2008 by Scott Marks

Martin Scorsese had agreed to direct the authorized biography of reggae legend Bob Marley after completing Shine A Light, but had to back out due to scheduling conflicts.

Jonathan Demme has replaced Marty as director on Tuff Gong Pictures and Shangri-La Entertainment’s documentary.

The untitled film is slated to be released worldwide on February 6 2010, to commemorate the 65th anniversary of the reggae icon’s birth.

Demme, who won an Academy Award in 1992 for The Silence of the Lambs, previously collaborated with Shangri-La on the Neil Young documentary Heart Of Gold. Demme said he was “thrilled and humbled” and will meet the Marley family to discuss the project.

“I am truly joyful about being included in this project and by the chance to team up with Ziggy Marley and my good friends at Shangri-La Entertainment,” Demme said. Marley’s eldest son Ziggy will act as executive producer.

“My family and I are very excited to have Jonathan on board,” Marley said. “His empathy with my father’s body of work and his unique understanding of the musical documentary form makes me confident that this film will be the ultimate celebration of my fathers’ life.”

Demme, who is no stranger to music documentaries, said Marley was “one of the greatest human beings of modern times” and that he hoped the film would be a “worthy vessel” for Marley’s “spiritual and musical brilliance”.

Famous for such reggae classics as No Woman, No Cry and I Shot the Sheriff, the Rastafarian performer died of cancer in 1981 at the age of 36.

Scorsese, who is currently filming the drama Ashecliffe, is also preparing films about Beatles guitarist George Harrison and former U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt.

Links:
Martin Scorsese photos

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Roman Polanski: New documentary examines the artist as a child rapist

May 6th, 2008 by Scott Marks

How do you separate the artist from the child rapist?

As a contemporary filmmaker, Roman Polanski has few peers. After Goodfellas, Bitter Moon was the best film of the 1990s. As a human being, he’s scum.

Thirty years ago Polanski was arrested at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel and charged with raping the girl at the home of his friend, Jack Nicholson. Polanski admitted the statutory rape of a thirteen-year-old Samantha Geimer, but instead of dealing with his henious act, Polanski fled to Paris before he could be sentenced.

Filmmaker Marina Zenovich has spent five years tracing every aspect of the case for Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, which she hopes will shed new light on Polanski’s crime.

According to WENN, the film is due to be televised next month. I’m surprised that Roman didn’t ask that the film be televised on Nickelodeon or The Disney Channel. It’s surprising that Billy Ray Cyrus didn’t hire him as a babysitter for Miley.

In Manhola Dargis’ New York Times review Ms. Geimer asks, “”Who wouldn’t think about running when facing a 50-year sentence from a judge who was clearly more interested in his own reputation than a fair judgment or even the well-being of the victim?”.’Wanted and Desired answers Ms. Geimer’s bombshell question with shocks of its own, notably corroborating interviews from Douglas Dalton, Mr. Polanski’s lawyer, and Roger Gunson, the assistant district attorney who led the prosecution. Together these two former opponents pin the blame for Polanski’s flight directly on the presiding judge, Laurence J. Rittenband (who stepped down in 1989 and died in 1994). Aided and abetted by an avalanche of fluidly organized visual material, the lawyers fill in the appalling details of what was effectively a second crime, one largely perpetrated by a celebrity-dazzled judge and the equally gaga news media he courted. This crime left two victims, Mr. Polanski, who was denied a fair trial, and Ms. Geimer, who was denied justice. As she wrote, ‘Sometimes I feel like we both got a life sentence.”‘

Zenovich says, “In 2003, talk of his winning an Oscar (for The Pianist) and whether he’d risk coming to accept it started me thinking about this case because nobody knew exactly what happened. Fearing sensationalism, nobody would talk to me. It took five years. Eventually those involved realized I had good intentions and just wanted to tell the story. I met the girl’s lawyer and then Samantha Geimer, the girl herself. Why she consented, I don’t know. Even her mother talked to me. Now blonde, clear-eyed, 45, with three kids, Samantha lives in Hawaii and she basically has forgiven him.”

I haven’t.

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