Monday, May 19, 2014

Adventures In Baby Shitting

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Agnieszka Holland, the director of NBC's two-night Rosemary's Baby remake slash flop, is friends with Roman Polanski, supposedly. You know how Rosemary says in Polanski's film, as she tries to convince Dr. Charles Grodin of her insane circumstances, that there are plots against people? About halfway through this here new mini-series I began to consider that the whole thing might've been an elaborate plot. Polanski heard they were making it and managed to get his friend hired to blow that shit up from the inside. I hope he compensated her well. Maybe bought her the cabin next to his in Switzerland where she plans on retiring now that she should never work ever again.

What other excuse could there be for something so elaborately mangled from the ground up though? From every angle this thing's set to DEF-CON Stink. You know you're in trouble when your actors are more convincing playing dead than alive. Zoe Saldana is out-acted by an infant in aquamarine contact lenses. Where Polanski and Farrow got you right in there beside Rosemary, a strapped-down passenger alongside her on her ride to Hell, Saldana and Holland make you feel as if you're smacking your face on a windshield. 

Everything is incoherence - it sometimes strains effort-fully towards a Fulci-like inscrutability; perhaps it's taken notes from Ira Levin's sequel book Son of Rosemary and this is a dream, this is not really happening? Nobody's actions make a lick of sense, anyway - it's as if the story were updated and changed just to throw out everything that was so relatable once. For instance, look no further than the erasure of Rosemary's lapsed Catholicism from the story - I mean why not erase all semblances of tension from the story and then make it twice as long, right? That makes total sense. It's not like this story about THE DEVIL has anything to do with religion. It's apparently about sexy people kissing on satin sheets, and humpbacked handymen, and bobble-heads of the sentient and insentient sort - how silly of me for all these years for mistaking that.
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2 comments:

Prospero said...

I knew better and avoided that mess altogether.

Rob K. said...

The whole thing should've been aborted, the end result was stillborn anyway.