You know how people say a movie is dream-like? Polanski Unauthorized is dream-like in the sense that it is a disjointed sequence of events, jumping from decade to decade. You might come out of it with nothing more than a general feeling: that the infamous director and sometime actor Roman Polanski is a oily creature, slimier than a salamander and more distasteful than a mouthful of caster oil.
You can make some sense of it if you know something of his history--something more than he is a fugitive from the U.S. legal system. He was found guilty of having sexual relations with a minor--a 13-year-old girl whom he supplied with alcohol before having sexual relations with her. He was in his forties.
Sounds like something out of American Beauty, but his excuse, in this movie, is that she was not a virgin. If you recall, the character played by Kevin Spacey recoiled from accomplishing the seduction of the young girl because she was inexperienced.
How does one measure the ick factor here? After all, Woodie Allen had a young girl in bed in his Manhattan. Is genius an excuse?
Yet I digress and that's easy to do. This film was directed by its star, Damian Chapa. Chapa doesn't look like Roman Polanski. He is physically doughy where Polanski seems thin. He does project a discomforting sort of playboy charm, one cultivated by men in search of women willing to take the casting couch route to fame.
The fractured segments touch on the Nazis in Poland, his mother's death in a concentration camp, his meeting with Sharon Tate, her tragic and horrific death and his filming of Rosemary's Baby. If you aren't familiar with the details of Polanski's story, you might be easily confused although long before the middle of the film, you'll be too bored to care.
Polanski Unauthorized is an uninspired impressionistic docudrama that is more vanity production than anything else.
On the prowl in this locale since 22 June 2008:
13 February 2009
01 February 2009
MOVIE REVIEW: Fate Brings The Betrayal
Looking for a Laotian tutor, Ellen Kuras found a friend and an epic story, one that she could not have planned. That story, the documentary The Betrayal (Nerakhoon), must have been hard to make sense of at first, not knowing how it would unfold over the decades, but Kuras has made it a cohesive bittersweet tale.
This is not the the 1983 Jeremy Irons movie, Betrayal, based on the late Harold Pinter's play about Pinter's real life love affair. This documentary is a more devastating and universal tale about immigration.
The Laotian tutor was Thavisouk Phrasavath, the eldest son of a family whose American dream turned out to be a nightmare of sorts, one that stretches out over two decades.
"A time will come when the universe will break, piece by piece and the world will change beyond what we know," is a Laotian saying. In the beginning, Thavi's father, a former officer in the Laotian army, is recruited by the CIA during the Vietnam War and became part of the United States covert operations in Laos. When the American forces evacuated from Laos and Vietnam, Thavi's father, like many former allies, became the enemy. With his father sent to a communist re-education camp, the 12-year-old Thavi was harassed and arrested because of his father's political status. Fearing for his life, Thavi escaped by swimming across the Mekong River to a refugee camp in Thailand.
Two years later, his mother and siblings follow. Then in 1981, with no word from his father, Thavi, his mother and siblings, immigrate to the United States. Yet there, they find their sponsors leave them in a Brooklyn slum next to a crack house.
Four years later, in 1985, Thavi meets Kuras and she soon begins filming this story about hope, hardship and betrayal, when cultural values clash and a happy ending seems unimaginable, even when the unimaginable comes true.
As one would expect from a cinematographer, Kuras supplies beautiful imagery--pastoral scenes from Asia and grittier scenes in the U.S., in some ways transforming our ideas of the war-torn country of Laos with the land of plenty America.
Sometimes we fall into important things when we are looking for something else. In the case of Kuras, one is sure she had no idea how the story would develop or end 23 years ago, but this story, slow in developing and followed up through friendship and cultural respect is one worth telling.
In English and Laotian, this documentary is nominated for an Academy Award for best documentary and was nominated for the grand jury prize at the Sundance Film Festival.
This is not the the 1983 Jeremy Irons movie, Betrayal, based on the late Harold Pinter's play about Pinter's real life love affair. This documentary is a more devastating and universal tale about immigration.
The Laotian tutor was Thavisouk Phrasavath, the eldest son of a family whose American dream turned out to be a nightmare of sorts, one that stretches out over two decades.
"A time will come when the universe will break, piece by piece and the world will change beyond what we know," is a Laotian saying. In the beginning, Thavi's father, a former officer in the Laotian army, is recruited by the CIA during the Vietnam War and became part of the United States covert operations in Laos. When the American forces evacuated from Laos and Vietnam, Thavi's father, like many former allies, became the enemy. With his father sent to a communist re-education camp, the 12-year-old Thavi was harassed and arrested because of his father's political status. Fearing for his life, Thavi escaped by swimming across the Mekong River to a refugee camp in Thailand.
Two years later, his mother and siblings follow. Then in 1981, with no word from his father, Thavi, his mother and siblings, immigrate to the United States. Yet there, they find their sponsors leave them in a Brooklyn slum next to a crack house.
Four years later, in 1985, Thavi meets Kuras and she soon begins filming this story about hope, hardship and betrayal, when cultural values clash and a happy ending seems unimaginable, even when the unimaginable comes true.
As one would expect from a cinematographer, Kuras supplies beautiful imagery--pastoral scenes from Asia and grittier scenes in the U.S., in some ways transforming our ideas of the war-torn country of Laos with the land of plenty America.
Sometimes we fall into important things when we are looking for something else. In the case of Kuras, one is sure she had no idea how the story would develop or end 23 years ago, but this story, slow in developing and followed up through friendship and cultural respect is one worth telling.
In English and Laotian, this documentary is nominated for an Academy Award for best documentary and was nominated for the grand jury prize at the Sundance Film Festival.
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