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Pedro Gonçalves

'The Ghost Writer': Polanski Escapes into His Cinema Nightmares - TIME - 0 views

  • From his debut work at the Polish Film School, a one-minute shocker called Murder that showed a sleeping man being stabbed to death in his apartment by an intruder, to his new thriller The Ghost Writer, Polanski has plumbed the themes of isolation, persecution and claustrophobia
  • If an auteur is a director with an obsessive personal vision — or, in simple terms, a man who keeps remaking his own movies — then Polanski is the very auteuriest. Even if he weren't drawn to pictures about hunted, holed-up men, he could hardly avoid the connection between iconography and autobiography, for his life is at least as notorious as his films. As a child, with his Jewish parents in concentration camps, he survived the Nazis by hiding and running. In Hollywood, his blond starlet wife Sharon Tate was slaughtered by Charles Manson's own Satanic gang. Then, after his great success with the knotty, despairing Chinatown (still his best film), there was his 1977 sexual encounter with a 13-year-old; when he thought he was sure to serve a long jail term, he fled the U.S., never to return. He seemed secure living in Paris, making films in France and Germany, until a visit to Switzerland last Sept. led to his detention on an international arrest warrant. He completed the editing of The Ghost Writer while under house arrest.
  • The kinship to Polanski's oeuvre is clear enough. The Ghost could be a blending of the director's 1976 The Tenant, in which he starred as a man who rents an apartment where the previous tenant committed suicide and soon believes the neighbors are scheming to force him to kill himself, and the 1999 The Ninth Gate, in which a book dealer sleuths through a antique volume that might be the Devil's autobiography.
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  • Lang, who becomes the focus of a war-crimes investigation in Europe, may be condemned by his past to remain in the U.S. — even as Polanski is condemned by his to keep out.
Pedro Gonçalves

'The Ghost Writer': Polanski Escapes into His Cinema Nightmares - TIME - 0 views

  • Harris, who worked for the Sunday Times and the BBC when Blair came to power, was once friendly with the P.M. but later soured on his political decisions, especially Blair's support of the Bush Administration's plan to invade Iraq. (With some ghoulishly good timing, Blair had to spend six hours last month defending his Iraq record in the Chilcot Inquiry.) The book, published in 2007, was widely seen as Harris's score-settling.
    • Pedro Gonçalves
       
      It's a SUV, not a sedan, and the very same car that appears at the beginning of the movie
  • One difference between Hollywood and European films: the first has to keep you jazzed every minute, while the second assumes that, having bought your ticket, you'll stick around through the simmering accumulation of details.
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  • The Ghost Writer is as comforting in its temperate pace and eerie mood as it is chilling in its plot particulars. Polanski feigns interest in the genre's requisite chases, but he's best at stranding the Ghost in wide frame, on a turbulent island, and tightening the noose around his neck as he gets closer to an awful truth.
  • McGregor brings all his charm and intelligence to the vague figure of a Hitchcock hero who slips into circumstance and chicanery until he morphs into a Polanski victim.
  • we should hail a movie that recalls creepy political thrillers of the mid-'70s, back when some films were made for grownups and the comfortable catharsis of a happy ending was not required — think of the panoramically cryptic worldview of The Parallax View and Three Days of the Condor, and of course, Chinatown.
  • The Ghost Writer may not be major Polanski, but it sure is essential Polanski.
Pedro Gonçalves

Movie Review - The Ghost Writer - Writer for Hire Is a Wanted Man - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • this high-grade pulp entertainment is too delectably amusing and self-amused, and far too aware of its own outrageous conceits to sustain such a dolorous verdict
  • Based on the novel “The Ghost” by Robert Harris, who shares screenwriting credit with Mr. Polanski
  • Mr. Polanski is a master of menace and, working with a striking wintry palette that at times veers into the near-monochromatic — the blacks are strong and inky, the churning ocean the color of lead — he creates a wholly believable world rich in strange contradictions and ominous implications
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  • The parallels with Mr. Blair and Lang spice up the story, especially as references to Iraq, torture and the Central Intelligence Agency are folded into the mix and placard-waving protesters gather outside Lang’s hideaway.
  • he’s delivering this pulpy fun at such a high level that “The Ghost Writer” is irresistible, no matter how obvious the twists
  • Everything — including Alexandre Desplat’s score, with its mocking, light notes and urgent rhythms suggestive of Bernard Herrmann — works to sustain a mood, establish an atmosphere and confirm an authorial intelligence that distinguishes this film from the chaff.
  • Unlike many modern Hollywood and Hollywood-style thrillers, which seek to wrest tension from a frenzy of cutting and a confusion of camera angles, Mr. Polanski creates suspense inside the frame through dynamic angles and through the discrete, choreographed movements of the camera and actors. He makes especially effective use of the enormous windows in Lang’s house through which the sky and ocean beckon and threaten.
  • “The Ghost Writer” seems to be as much about Mr. Polanski’s life as, well, that of Tony Blair, which only means that there are amusing points of convergence.
  • The image of Mr. Brosnan abruptly leaning toward the camera like a man possessed is worth a dozen Oscar-nominated performances.
  • And the way, when Lang chats with the Ghost — his arms and legs open, a drink in hand, as if he were hitting on a woman — shows how an actor and his director can sum up an entire personality with a single pose.
Pedro Gonçalves

The Ghost Writer | Movies | EW.com - 0 views

  • a well-made, sleekly retaliatory, pleasurably paranoid tale in praise of enterprising (and also brave) investigative journalists and in condemnation of political skulduggery in general and right-wing Anglo-American collusion in particular.
  • Meanwhile, at the shoreline, a severely modern, concrete bunker of a beach house filmed on German location tries to distract us from the evident fact that we're really not on Martha's Vineyard. After all, the director, a wanted man in the U.S., can't set foot there
Pedro Gonçalves

The Ghost Writer | Film review | Film | guardian.co.uk - 0 views

  • a gripping conspiracy thriller and scabrous political satire, a Manchurian Candidate for the 2010s, as addictive and outrageous as the Robert Harris bestseller on which it's based. Polanski keeps the narrative engine ticking over with a downbeat but compelling throb. This is his most purely enjoyable picture for years, a Hitchcockian nightmare with a persistent, stomach-turning sense of disquiet, brought off with confidence and dash.
  • McGregor is the journo, never named: cynical, boozy and miserable in the classical manner.
  • Resemblances to Tony and Cherie Blair are very far from coincidental: both Harris and Polanski have clearly calculated that a libel lawsuit would make for an uproarious day in court, precisely the sort of legal appearance that Mr Blair does not care to make, in fact or fiction. This consideration adds a kind of meta-pleasure to the narrative.
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  • The film incidentally gives us the ghost of the late Robin Cook, fictionalised as ex-foreign secretary "Richard Rycart".
  • The Ghost Writer may not be a masterpiece, but in its lowering gloom (it rains almost continually) the film has some of the malign atmosphere of Polanski's glory days.
Pedro Gonçalves

The Ghost Writer -- Film Review - 0 views

  • This is certainly one of the director's most commercial films in a while, perhaps since his great thriller "Chinatown," although a comparison to that film with its Robert Towne screenplay so rich in early 20th century California social and political history would not serve "The Ghost Writer" well. This is a slicker, shallower exercise. It's hypnotic as it unfolds, but once the credit roll frees you from its grip, it doesn't bear close scrutiny.
  • In "The Ghost Writer," Polanski most clearly means to evoke Hitchcock. Like the master, Polanski builds his scenes through ominous music, the rhythms of his editing, a heightened sense of place and a central figure, an innocent, who struggles to gain control of a living nightmare.
  • There is another ghost here too, that of Tony Blair. Lang happens to share many characteristics with the former British PM especially an all-too-cozy relationship with the American president that threatens his legacy. Polanski's co-writer, Robert Harris, who also wrote the novel on which the script is based, is a political journalist who was once close to Blair.
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  • McGregor hits all the right notes as a man with a conscience and sense of professional pride who is in way over his head. He's smart but not too smart and doesn't always make the right moves. Brosnan gets the politician's arrogance perfectly as well as the duplicity lurking so close under the surface. Williams nearly steals the show as the wily, controlling wife that senses her control is at last slipping.
Pedro Gonçalves

'Inception': Only good if you're young? | EW.com - 0 views

  • Henry Jenkins argues that familiarity with video games makes Inception easier to understand. That last point is quite interesting: is Inception the first great video game movie? Not based on one specific game, but rather, on the whole stylistic structure of video game storytelling?
  • Jenkins points out how much of Inception rests on the notion of different “levels,” and of worlds within worlds. (More than a few people have pointed out the similarity between Inception‘s “Snow” dream and an early level in Modern Warfare 2.
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