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Post by Ace on Jan 19, 2010 7:32:38 GMT -5
I'm creating a second topic just for reviews since there may be spoilers and this way those just interested in articles and news can avoid them.
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Post by Ace on Jan 19, 2010 7:38:15 GMT -5
First full review . It's from Telerama in France www.telerama.fr/cinema/et-pendant-ce-temps-roman-polanski-a-tourne-l-un-de-ses-meilleurs-films,51653.php Et pendant ce temps, Roman Polanski a tourné l’un de ses meilleurs films...Le 19 janvier 2010 à 9h59 - Il y a un passage proprement stupéfiant, dans le nouveau film de Roman Polanski, The Ghost Writer (sur les écrans le 3 mars), où l'un des personnages principaux, un politicien britannique joué par Pierce Brosnan, est rattrapé tardivement par la justice internationale, qui le soupçonne de complicité de crimes de guerre. Il est reclus dans sa luxueuse villa (de bord de mer), les médias encerclent la propriété pour quémander une déclaration, voler une image, et les Etats-Unis semblent sa seule terre de salut, puisque, paraît-il, le Tribunal international de La Haye n'y est pas reconnu. Coincé aux States... La situation rime incroyablement avec celle du cinéaste, enfermé dans son chalet de Gstaad – à cette symétrie près que les Etats-Unis sont au contraire le seul territoire qu'il ne tient pas à visiter. Et c'est sidérant parce que le film a été tourné bien avant la remise en branle de la machine judiciaire. Il y a des coïncidences qui laissent pantois. Si l'on doit juger l'homme sans tenir compte de l'œuvre, alors l'inverse est vrai, et ces similitudes mises à part, la curiosité un peu malsaine oubliée dès que les lumières s'éteignent, il faut surtout dire que le nouveau Polanski est son meilleur film depuis longtemps, un suspense où s'accordent la puissance de la mise en scène et la subtilité du script coécrit avec le romancier Robert Harris – il est arrivé que Polanski dirige des scénarios indignes de lui. Il y a tout ce qu'on aime chez le cinéaste, soit, notamment, un héros innocent, « nègre » chargé de rédiger les mémoires d'un ancien Premier Ministre anglais, précipité dans un univers dont il connaît mal les codes, où tout est double sens, dissimulations et trahisons. Ewan McGregor (que j'ai souvent trouvé un peu fade) est impec' en jeune homme un peu trop sûr de lui qui perd une à une ses certitudes, comme le spectateur qui le suit à travers ce rébus. Kafka peu à peu mène le bal. Pour une fois, l'imbroglio politique a du corps : Adam Lang, alias Pierce Brosnan, parfait lui aussi, est une sorte de Tony Blair bis, dont l'obstination à lutter contre le terrorisme, à la grande satisfaction de ses alliés américains, lui a fait outrepasser ses droits – ce dont ses successeurs et ex-amis Travaillistes s'emparent aujourd'hui... Avec Polanski, tout est affaire d'habitat. Le cinéaste tourne en studio, n'a que faire des scènes d'action et des poursuites en voiture (ce n'est pas L'enquête !...), mais il a l'art de rendre inquiétante une chambre à coucher post-moderne battue par la pluie – avec, de l'autre côté de la baie vitrée, plein de gens qui s'agitent mystérieusement –, une piaule d'hôtel borgne, la résidence nouveau riche d'un consultant de la CIA, etc. Le héros parcourt ce dédale immobilier en comprenant lentement que le monde est dirigé par des forces qui nous dépassent – et que ces forces sont aussi inquiétantes qu'apparemment paisibles. The Ghost Writer fait froid dans le dos, et c'est très bien ! ============================================ Bablefish translation Meanwhile, Roman Polanski has filmed one of his best films ...There is a passage narcotic properly in the new film by Roman Polanski, The Ghost Writer (on March 3 screens), where one of the main characters, a British politician played by Pierce Brosnan, is caught late by international justice , who suspect him of complicity in war crimes.He is holed up in his luxurious villa (beach), the media surrounding the property to a statement begging, stealing an image, and the United States seems his only ground of salvation, since, apparently, the International Tribunal The Hague is not recognized. Caught in the States ...The situation with the rhymes incredibly filmmaker, locked in his chalet in Gstaad - this symmetry around the United States are instead the only territory that does not visit. And it is astonishing because the film was shot well before handing in motion the judicial machinery. There are some startling coincidences. If we must judge the man without taking account of the work, while the reverse is true, and these similarities aside, the slightly morbid curiosity forgotten when the lights go out, he must above all that Polanski's new film is his best since a long time, a thriller where the consensus power of staging and the subtlety of the script co-written with novelist Robert Harris - it has happened that Polanski directs scenarios unworthy of him. There's everything you love from the director or such an innocent hero , "negro" in charge of writing the memoirs of former Prime Minister of England, thrown into a world which is unfamiliar codes, where everything is double sense, dissimulation and treachery. Ewan McGregor (as I often found a bit bland) is impec' a young man a little too sure of himself that loses by one, its certainties, like the spectator who follows him through this puzzle. Kafka gradually leads the pack. For once, the political imbroglio has body: Adam Lang, aka Pierce Brosnan, too perfect, is a kind of a Tony Blair, who insisted the fight against terrorism, to the delight of his American allies, he was overstepping his rights - which his successor and former Labor seized friends today ... With Polanski, everything is a matter of habitat. The filmmaker turns in the studio, does that make action scenes and car chases (not !...), investigation but he has the art of making a disturbing bedroom post modern-beaten by the rain - with the other side of the bay window, lots of people who mysteriously agitated - a pad of shady hotel, residence nouveau riche a consultant for the CIA, etc.. The hero travels the maze slowly appreciating real estate that the world is ruled by forces beyond ourselves - and that these forces are also worrying that apparently peaceful. The Ghost Writer is chilling, and it is great!
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Post by Ace on Jan 20, 2010 21:40:18 GMT -5
www.hitfix.com/blogs/2008-12-11-awards-campaign-2009/posts/first-look-the-ghost-writer-s-critical-prospects-should-overshadow-any-polanski-controversy'The Ghost Writer's' critical prospects should overshadow any Polanski controversyPosted on Wednesday, Jan 20, 2010 By Gregory Ellwood There has been much speculation about Roman Polanski's new thriller "The Ghost Writer" since the controversy over his possible extradition to the United States began in Sept. And considering the commercial prospects of the material, its easy to see why. Based on the Robert Harris novel of the same name, "Writer" centers on a celebrity ghost writer (Ewan McGregor) who is hired to help finish the autobiography of a disgraced ex-British Prime Minister (Pierce Brosnan). While the writer visits the PM in the states to work on the book, the former British leader is indicted by the World Court for his handling of terror suspects while in power. Needless to say, all hell goes loose politically, professionally and within the PM's personal life. As the days progress, the writer begins to tie together some of the more powerful people from the PM's life into a possible conspiracy. Is it real or all just the crazy speculation of an over-zealous author? Polanski, who who an Oscar for directing "The Pianist," ended up completing the picture while under house arrest in Zurich over the past two months. Summit Entertainment, which co-financed the film will released it here in the states shortly after its debut at the Berlin Film Festival. Polanski certainly won't be there, but it will be a media mob scene for reactions to the picture. Is it a hit? Does it tell us anything about the filmmaker's current legal struggle (really, someone will ask that)? Or more importantly, s it actually good? Well, having been lucky enough to screen "The Ghost Writer," I can say it may be one of the most commercial and entertaining films from Polanski in decades. "The Pianist" may be his artistic tour-de-force, but "Writer" is an elegantly constructed thriller with a subtly and sophisticated surprise ending that sticks with you days after seeing it. I'm unable to provide a full review, but its worth noting that the cast is exceptional with Tom Wilkinson (pretty much perfect), Pierce Brosnan and Olivia Williams as stand outs. In fact, critical and audience reaction should overshadow any negative press on Polanski's situation. This is one of those rare winter/early spring flicks that should play for quite awhile as word of mouth spreads. It could certainly be a much bigger "Tell No One" in terms of its commercial prospects. Not a blockbuster mind you, but a strong moneymaker for U.S. distributor Summit Entertainment. With that in mind, Summit released a new poster for the film today. They smartly avoided the old floating heads motif, but McGregor with a manuscript flying to the winds seems a bit to literal for a marketing sell. Additionally, it wouldn't hurt to suggest the triangle that Williams (as the PM's wife) and Kim Cattrall (as his long time Sr. assistant) bring to the mix. This will play to adults, but something just a tad hipper could have helped with the twentysomething art house set. Then again, that "Avatar" poster is pretty lame too and that hasn't affected it's run has it? Summit is no doubt much more focused on the trailer and TV spots. As of now, "The Ghost Writer" opens in limited release on Feb. 19 and is pretty much a must-see for any true movie fan. Accompanying controvery or not.
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Post by Ace on Jan 26, 2010 7:28:16 GMT -5
www.excessif.com/cinema/critique-l-homme-de-l-ombre-the-ghost-writer-5655798-760.html La critique d'Excessif FIVE STARSA sublime political thriller in the form of a paranoid puzzleThose which expected a simple illustration of the novel of Robert Harris can go their way. The interest of this history of handling between a literary ghost (Ewan McGregor) and a former sulfurous Prime Minister (Pierce Brosnan) is born first of all from the report/ratio which the spectator draws up between what he imagines and what he sees with the screen. Obviously, Roman Polanski maintains the institutional links there with her catalogue of films and her biography. Under the tinsels of a marked out kind (the political thriller), it joins again with its obsessions sets of themes and formal, between Kafka and Beckett: the theatre of the absurd, the setting in scene of the master-slave relations, the humiliation and the murder set up in standards. First with the last scene, one finds all that constitutes the gasoline of his cinema and his paranoiac drifts where the world divides between put out of order interiority and threatening outside. The moral ambivalence of the marked politician of war crimes evokes the torturer in the young girl and death (1994). The political sudden starts, the tragic wait-and-see policy and the existential destitution convene the Pianist (2002). The police investigation full with indices obscure brings back with the ninth door (1998). The insular context, the beach with the abandonment and the exercise of seduction return to the Knife in The Water (1962) and to Cul of Bag (1966). Especially, the death of the preceding negro - as that of Simone Choule there is more than thirty years now -, guilty voyeurism and cloistering in a hotel room point out Répulsion (1965) and the Tenant (1976). The autocitations are so obvious that the film enthusiast is conditioned, in an almost automatic way, to connect films, to see beyond the images, to compare the fiction to reality. A little with the manner of Tess, turned in 1977, just after the charge of rape of minor. In the man of the shade, there is Ewan McGregor in the skin of Novel and Pierce Brosnan in that of Polanski. Two empty barks of the same species, two toys of persecution, two ridiculous puppets become shades through which the scenario writer probes his personal torments, psychological, sexual. The supporting characters who spread themselves around them exhaust in a vipers' nest while showing themselves at the same time worrying and grotesque, angels and demons. Moreover, the first part resembles a purgatory of direction. Preferring to let run the bizarrery in the plan instead of the surligner, Polanski answers the disorder by questions of setting in scene (choice, duration, measurement, distance). The continuation, more tended, makes it possible Polanski to enter the sharp one of the subject and to be interested in two strong topics (the exile and the scandal) by posing a recurring question at his place: where can one hide to escape his enemies? It is as from this moment that the spectrum of Gregor Samsa (the Metamorphosis, of Kafka) seizes the hero who attends impotent the collapse of all his certainty. Impossible not to see a personal resonance there. With regard to the exile, Polanski knew only that, by leaving its country after having carried out its first feature film, while putting in scene in Great Britain, in the United States, in France, before electing Switzerland like nightmarish premonition. As regards the scandal, its life and its career were affected in years 60-70 by tests that it forever overcome. One can also make the economy of the analysis and appreciate this film for his distractives qualities. The reward for those which like the police rebuses, it is a final twist which one does not see coming and who gives a tragic dimension to all that preceded (which is which? Who handles? Who lies? Who invents?). Locking up the tiny history in a capital loop, the conclusion is the same one as in the Tenant, carried out there is now more than thirty years. It is a whole curse which reappears of its ashes. Seemingly, of water ran under the bridges. However, from the cinema as in the life, nobody escapes his past. www.excessif.com/cinema/critique-l-homme-de-l-ombre-the-ghost-writer-5655798-760.html La critique d'Excessif FIVE STARSUn sublime thriller politique en forme de puzzle paranoïaque. Ceux qui s'attendaient à une simple illustration du roman de Robert Harris peuvent passer leur chemin. L'intérêt de cette histoire de manipulation entre un nègre littéraire (Ewan McGregor) et un ancien premier ministre sulfureux (Pierce Brosnan) naît tout d'abord du rapport que le spectateur établit entre ce qu'il imagine et ce qu'il voit à l'écran. A l'évidence, Roman Polanski y entretient des liens organiques avec sa filmographie et sa biographie. Sous les oripeaux d'un genre balisé (le thriller politique), il renoue avec ses obsessions thématiques et formelles, entre Kafka et Beckett : le théâtre de l'absurde, la mise en scène des relations maître-esclave, l'humiliation et le meurtre érigés en normes. De la première à la dernière scène, on retrouve tout ce qui constitue l'essence de son cinéma et de ses dérives paranoïaques où le monde se divise entre l'intériorité déréglée et l'extérieur menaçant. L'ambivalence morale du politicien accusé de crimes de guerre évoque le bourreau dans La jeune fille et la mort (1994). Les soubresauts politiques, l'attentisme tragique et le dénuement existentiel convoquent Le Pianiste (2002). L'enquête policière pleine d'indices abscons ramène à La neuvième porte (1998). Le contexte insulaire, la plage à l'abandon et l'exercice de séduction renvoient à Le Couteau dans l'eau (1962) et à Cul de Sac (1966). Surtout, la mort du précédent nègre - comme celle de Simone Choule il y a plus de trente ans maintenant -, le voyeurisme coupable et la claustration dans une chambre d'hôtel rappellent Répulsion (1965) et Le Locataire (1976). Les autocitations sont tellement évidentes que le cinéphile est conditionné, de manière presque automatique, à relier les films, à voir au-delà des images, à assimiler la fiction à la réalité. Un peu à la manière de Tess, tourné en 1977, juste après l'accusation de viol sur mineure. The Ghost-writer de Roman Polanski Dans L'homme de l'ombre, il y a Ewan McGregor dans la peau de Roman et Pierce Brosnan dans celle de Polanski. Deux écorces vides de la même espèce, deux jouets de persécution, deux marionnettes dérisoires devenues ombres à travers lesquelles le cinéaste sonde ses tourments personnels, psychologiques, sexuels. Les personnages secondaires qui se répandent autour d'eux s'épuisent dans un nid de vipères en se montrant à la fois inquiétants et grotesques, anges et démons. D'ailleurs, la première partie ressemble à un purgatoire de sens. Préférant laisser couler la bizarrerie dans le plan au lieu de la surligner, Polanski répond au trouble par des questions de mise en scène (choix, durée, mesure, distance). La suite, plus tendue, permet à Polanski d'entrer dans le vif du sujet et de s'intéresser à deux thèmes forts (l'exil et le scandale) en posant une question récurrente chez lui : où peut-on se cacher pour échapper à ses ennemis ? C'est à partir de ce moment que le spectre de Gregor Samsa (La Métamorphose, de Kafka) s'empare du héros qui assiste impuissant à l'effondrement de toutes ses certitudes. Impossible de ne pas y voir une résonance personnelle. En ce qui concerne l'exil, Polanski n'a connu que ça, en quittant son pays après avoir réalisé son premier long-métrage, en mettant en scène en Grande-Bretagne, aux Etats-Unis, en France, avant d'élire la Suisse comme prémonition cauchemardesque. Pour ce qui est du scandale, sa vie et sa carrière ont été affectées dans les années 60-70 par des épreuves qu'il n'a jamais surmontées. On peut aussi faire l'économie de l'analyse et apprécier ce film pour ses qualités distractives. La récompense pour ceux qui aiment les rébus policiers, c'est un twist final que l'on ne voit pas venir et qui donne une dimension tragique à tout ce qui a précédé (qui est qui ? Qui manipule ? Qui ment? Qui invente ?). Enfermant l'histoire minuscule dans une boucle majuscule, la conclusion est la même que dans Le Locataire, réalisé il y a maintenant plus de trente ans. C'est toute une malédiction qui renaît de ses cendres. En apparence, de l'eau a coulé sous les ponts. Pourtant, au cinéma comme dans la vie, personne n'échappe à son passé. Romain LE VERN
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Post by Andrea on Feb 1, 2010 17:00:05 GMT -5
A 19 out of 20 stars rating from France www.filmsactu.com/critique-cinema-the-ghost-writer-8819.htmPris récemment dans le tumulte de l'actualité mais absent du grand écran depuis cinq ans, Roman Polanski revient en force sur le devant de la scène avec The Ghost-Writer, un thriller politique imparable qui ne devrait pas passer inaperçu. A partir d'un scénario remarquablement écrit, le cinéaste construit un suspense haletant digne des plus grands chefs d'oeuvres du genre et laisse s'exrpimer tout le génie de sa réalisation, d'une précision et d'une classe immenses, sans jamais céder à la moindre surenchère. Au moment où on l'attend le moins, il signe rien moins que l'un des meilleurs films de sa carrière, un thriller parfait qui se double d'une fantastique leçon de cinéma. Quant à Ewan McGregor, cela faisait longtemps qu'il ne nous avait pas autant enthousiasmé. Roman Polanski a beaucoup fait parler de lui ces dernières semaines, et pas pour les meilleures raisons. Au-delà des polémiques, le fait est que huit ans après Le Pianiste, son dernier chef d'œuvre en date, on en aurait presque oublié quel immense cinéaste il est. The Ghost-Writer vient brutalement nous le rappeler comme pour remettre les pendules à l'heure, ce qui en l'occurrence est loin d'être déplaisant en ce début d'année un peu avare en chocs cinématographiques. Avec une aisance presque déconcertante, il signe un long métrage virtuose situé quelque part entre le thriller politique et le polar hitchcockien, auprès duquel un Jeux de pouvoir ou toute autre récente incursion américaine dans le genre fait pâle figure. Son secret ? Une maîtrise absolue de la narration et de la mise en scène au service d'un scénario en béton armé. The Ghost-Writer porte à l'écran un roman publié en 2007 par Robert Harris, journaliste politique dont les œuvres ont déjà inspiré plusieurs films, tels que Fatherland en 1986 ou Enigma en 1994. Fin connaisseur des dessous parfois peu glorieux du monde politique britannique, il s'est largement impliqué dans l'adaptation de ce thriller impertinent et très documenté puisqu'il en co-signe le scénario avec Roman Polanski. Si Harris se défend d'avoir pris pour modèle l'ancien Premier Ministre Tony Blair pour élaborer le personnage d'Adam Lang interprété par Pierce Brosnan, les allusions ne trompent pas et font sourire plus d'une fois. Le côté playboy, la suspicion de connivence opportuniste avec les Etats-Unis, l'accusation de criminel de guerre établie à l'encontre du politicien fictif sont autant de clins d'œil soigneusement disséminés qui participent à relever l'intrigue. Mais là où The Ghost-Writer se montre supérieur à bien des thrillers, c'est dans son approche tout en subjectivité de cet univers complexe dont le traitement au cinéma ou à la télévision n'échappe que trop rarement à un certain manichéisme Les tenants et les aboutissants de l'enquête nous sont ainsi dévoilés du seul point de vue de l'écrivain fantôme, le « ghost writer » sans nom chargé de rédiger les mémoires de l'homme des hautes sphères. Ce procédé narratif, trop souvent délaissé dès qu'il est question de polar au profit d'une avalanche stérile d'informations destinée à noyer le spectateur, s'avère être ici d'une efficacité redoutable grâce à la magie de la réalisation extrêmement rigoureuse de Polanski. Pas un seul instant le réalisateur ne se perd dans des effets de style - visuels, sonores - pompeux, leur préférant la pureté et la précision du cadre pour raconter une histoire à laquelle il croit. Cette sobriété s'étend aux prestations d'acteurs, toutes plus réjouissantes les unes que les autres qu'il s'agisse de Pierce Brosnan, de Kim Cattrall, d'Olivia Williams ou de Tom Wilkinson. Ewan McGregor quant à lui se révèle absolument idéal dans la peau de l'écrivain, ce Monsieur tout le monde avenant et décontracté, en ce qu'il crée instantanément l'empathie nécessaire pour permettre au réalisateur de déployer toute l'étendue de son génie. Superbement écrit, réalisé et interprété, The Ghost-Writer se charge ainsi insidieusement d'une tension croissante que les rebondissements successifs ne viennent jamais désamorcer. Soit exactement ce que l'on attend d'un vrai, d'un grand thriller. google translation: Recently Caught in the turmoil of the news but absent from the big screen for five years, Roman Polanski is back in force on the front of the stage with the Ghost-Writer, an unstoppable political thriller that should not go unnoticed. From a screenplay written remarkably, the filmmaker builds a breathless suspense worthy of the greatest masterpieces of the genre and leaves s'exrpimer the genius of his achievement, accurate and a great class, but never yield to the slightest bidding. When we least expect it sign anything unless one of the best films of his career, a perfect thriller that doubles as a fantastic lesson in cinema. As for Ewan McGregor, it was not long that we were not so enthusiastic. Roman Polanski has a lot of talk in recent weeks, and not for happy reasons. Beyond controversy, the fact is that eight years after The Pianist, his latest masterpiece to date, we have almost forgotten what a great director he is. The Ghost-Writer has brutally reminded us as to put the record straight, which in this case is far from being unpleasant in the beginning of this year a little stingy in shock cinema. With an almost disconcerting ease, he signed a virtuoso feature located somewhere between the political thriller and Hitchcock thriller, with which a power games or any other recent U.S. incursion into the genre is pale. His secret? An absolute mastery of storytelling and directing the service of a concrete scenario. The Ghost Writer-door to screen a novel published in 2007 by Robert Harris, a political journalist whose works have already inspired several films, such as Fatherland and Enigma in 1986 in 1994. Connoisseur underwear sometimes unglamorous world of British politics, he was heavily involved in the adaptation of the thriller sassy and well documented since he co-wrote the script with Roman Polanski. If Harris defended his model for the former Prime Minister Tony Blair to develop the character of Adam Lang played by Pierce Brosnan, the allusions are unmistakable, and smile more than once. Playboy side, suspicion of conniving opportunist with the United States, the prosecution of war criminals set against the fictional politician are all winks carefully scattered involved to raise the plot. But where The Ghost Writer, is superior to many thrillers, is in its approach while subjectivity of this complex world whose treatment at the movies or on television too often escapes to a Manichean The ins and outs of the investigation and we have unveiled the only point of view of the ghost writer, the "ghost writer" unnamed responsible for writing the memoirs of the man from above. This narrative process, too often neglected when it comes to crime fiction in favor of a sterile avalanche of information intended to drown the audience, here proves to be very efficient at using magic to achieve extremely rigorous Polanski. Not a single moment the film is lost in style effects - visual, aural - pompous, preferring the purity and precision of the frame to tell a story which he believes. This simplicity extends to the services of actors, all the more gratifying than the other whether Pierce Brosnan, of Kim Cattrall, Olivia Williams or Tom Wilkinson. Ewan McGregor in turn proves absolutely perfect in the skin of the writer, the gentleman across the world and casual rider, in that it creates instant empathy necessary to enable the director to deploy the full extent of his genius . Superbly written, directed and performed, The Ghost Writer-loads and insidiously a growing tension that successive twists never come defuse. Exactly what one expects from a true, a great thriller.
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Post by Ace on Feb 11, 2010 11:59:36 GMT -5
Rolling Stone3 1/2 stars www.piercebrosnan.com/pdf/gw.pdfROLLING STONE Peter Travers 3 ½ starsThe Ghost Writer Ewan McGregor, Pierce Brosnan, Kim Cattrall Directed by Roman Polanski INTHE CRAPTACULAR MONTH of February, when Hollywood typically drowns us in all-star drool like Valentine's Day, it's indecent luck having two films in play directed by indisputable masters. First Scorsese's Shutter Island, and now Roman Polanski's The Ghost Writer. The Polish director, currently under house arrest in Switzerland awaiting possible extradition to the U.S. for having unlawful sex with a minor in 1977, is in deep doo-doo. But not, in this critic's view, as a filmmaker. The Ghost Writer, based on the Robert Harris bestseller, shows Polanski in brilliant command of a political thriller that ties you up in knots of tension while zinging politics and showbiz like two sides of the same toxic coin. Polanski, who won a 2002 Oscar for the Holocaust themed The Pianist, is in a playful, prickly mood here that recalls his early work on Rosemary's Baby and Chinatown. Ewan McGregor grabs and runs with his juiciest role in years as the Ghost, a writer hired to pen the memoirs of Adam Lang (Pierce Brosnan), the unseated British prime minister now taking refuge in America after being accused of war crimes back home. Any resemblance between Lang and Tony Blair seems purely intentional, since Harris, who wrote the script with Polanski, is on the record as becoming disillusioned with Blair after the PM allegedly teamed up with President Bush to hand over suspected terrorists for torture by the CIA. One reviewer of Harris' book cheekily labeled it The Blair Snitch Project. Like Polanski, Lang is in exile. The former PM is holed up in a Cape Cod beach house with his manipulative wife (Olivia Williams) and an executive assistant (Kim Cattrall) who doubles as his mistress. Don't be thrown by off with the Sex and the City star's Brit accent - she was born in Liverpool. And it's fun to see Cattrall play covert sexuality for a change of Samantha pace. The Ghost knows he's in over his head. His specialty is ghosting for rock stars and other celebs du. trash.. There's another chilling detail: The writer who started the book with Lang has been found dead under mysterious circumstances. Since Polanski couldn't travel outside certain legal jurisdictions, he used Berlin for London and the island of Sylt in the North Sea to fill in for Martha's Vineyard. But the kick in this sexy, addictive thriller comes in the telling. As the media swarm outside Lang's beach house, everyone inside feels a trap closing in. No one but Polanski could find the adrenaline rush in such maddening claustrophobia. There are moments when you damn near jump out of your seat as the Ghost snoops around looking for incriminating truth and a chance to have the wife of his subject. All credit to a finely tuned Brosnan for packing so much intensity and wayward wit into his scenes with McGregor. Their verbal duels make for a dazzling game of cat-and-mouse. Polanski's skill with actors hasn't waned. Even the smallest roles are expertly played. Timothy Hutton scores as Lang's American lawyer, and Jim Belushi nails the role of the Ghost's scandal-hungry publisher. Best of all is Tom Wilkinson as Paul Emmet, a Harvard law professor whom the Ghost believes holds the key to Lang's links with the CIA. After an action-packed pursuit of the Ghost on a ferry, the movie ends on a note of shocking challenge. You can feel Polanski's excitement to be working on a film that echoes 1970s classics such as Three Days of the Condor and The Parallax View. Whatever happens to Polanski in real life, his reel life is in excellent shape. The Ghost Writer is one of his diabolical best.
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Post by Ace on Feb 12, 2010 12:31:46 GMT -5
Time Out www.timeout.com/film/reviews/88293/the-ghost.html4/5 stars Merging the creepy and the comic and blending the familiar with the fantastical, Roman Polanski’s ‘The Ghost’ is a pulpy thriller with its finger on the pulse of modern times. It’s also the veteran Polish director’s first film since being detained in Switzerland last year pending possible extradition to the US, and followers of Polanski’s life and career may relish its bleak but ironic representation of a life lived in the glare of the media and its suggestions of corruption at the heart of American justice. Coming just days after Tony Blair’s appearance at the Chilcot Inquiry, this adaptation of Robert Harris’s 2007 novel feels spookily on the money, even if its plot is largely a teasing exaggeration. The film, like the book before it, tells of an ex-British Prime Minister, Adam Lang (Pierce Brosnan), holed up with his wife (Olivia Williams) and assistant (Kim Cattrall) in a rich friend’s Martha’s Vineyard home, working with a replacement ghost writer (Ewan McGregor) after the first one died mysteriously. At the same time. he's facing possible charges for war crimes at the International Criminal Court. Harris’s book contained enough nods towards the Blairs, New Labour and the Special Relationship to make clear they were all on his mind. Here, the same associations are not overplayed – but Brosnan flashes enough of the giveaway, toothy smile and Williams, in a great sultry and even seductive performance as the ex PM’s wife, clearly has Cherie on the mind. Harris adapted his own book, so unsurprisingly it’s faithful, right down to much of the dialogue. The film preserves Harris’s far-fetched, conspiratorial plotting about sinister machinations behind the scenes of the British and American governments, and there are moments when you have to suspend disbelief, not least during a crucial plot turn that involves someone tapping a character’s name and ‘CIA’ into Google and miraculously coming up with the goods. But oddly enough it’s this same wild-eyed, teasing edge that makes it entertaining as well as provocative, ditching the po-faced in favour of the rabble rousing. The story might be shaky but it's always fun and Polanski’s noir-ish direction is on top form. He gives us a brooding atmosphere of dread and isolation from the first scene, in which we see the original ghost writer’s car abandoned on the deck of the ferry on which he was last seen alive. Polanski keeps a complicated story moving at a brisk pace but also pauses to indulge the wintry desolation of the modernist beachside house where Lang and his crew are sheltering from the world. For such a wild story, it’s never less than compelling and maintains its themes of duplicity and guilt throughout, lending special attention to the escalating fear of McGregor’s character, something of a Hitchcockian fall guy, as a jobbing British writer increasingly biting off more than he can chew in this sinister, foreign world. Occasional humour –including any smiles raised by McGregor and Cattrall’s wobbly southern English accents – fends off any creeping pomposity and Polanski leaves us with a final image to die for. Author: Dave Calhoun Time Out Online Berlin Film Festival 2010
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Post by Ace on Feb 12, 2010 15:58:29 GMT -5
www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr/film-reviews/the-ghost-writer-film-review-1004067685.storyHOLLYWOOD REPORTER The Ghost Writer -- Film Review By Kirk Honeycutt, February 12, 2010 03:30 ET "The Ghost Writer" Bottom Line: Polanski is in a Hitchcock mode here with a sleek though superficial thriller. BERLIN -- Roman Polanski is a filmmaker who could envelop an old lady's stroll along a boulevard with a sense of anxiety and dread, so it's a little odd that he hasn't made more thrillers in his career. "The Ghost Writer," an out-and-out thriller with international politics and war crimes as its background, gives him a springboard to take a deep dive into all the moody atmosphere, breathtaking betrayals, words loaded in double meanings and heart-stopping threats that make the genre so cinematic. 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. Summit Entertainment has a sure-fire boxoffice hit domestically. The film should do equally well in overseas territories. It didn't need the publicity boost of Polanski's well-chronicled legal woes, but one of the peculiarities of our world is that this can only help. 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. It's one of the story's amusing conceits that this figure is a writer. Not an investigative journalist or high-minded novelist, mind you, but a guy who "ghosts" celebrity memoirs. His last one was about a magician. This time the ghostwriter (Ewan McGregor) hits the jackpot -- only he constantly wonders, What have I gotten myself into? The jackpot is a former British prime minister, Adam Lang (Pierce Brosnan), and it's a quick job with a lucrative payday. He has two reasons to worry. Moments after landing the job, a former cabinet minister accuses Lang of authorizing the illegal rendition of British subjects for torture by the CIA. Secondly, he is the second writer on the job. The first one, Lang's longtime aide, drowned under suspicious circumstances. Had he stumbled upon a dark secret in Lang's life that cost him his life? So the ghostwriter -- he is not given a name -- confronts a manuscript in sore need of rewriting plus the possibility that it contains a hint of what may have caused its writer's death. He also confronts an unusual working arrangement. More Berlin coverage It seems the ex-PM is holed up in a seaside town on an island off the eastern U.S. The Lang compound has an icy decor and a kind of sterile warmth against wintry weather that pounds the shore with winds and rain. The former British leader is cut off from the world, living in a security bubble with a frosty wife Ruth (Olivia Williams); an aide Amelia (Kim Cattrall), who may be his mistress; and an always present if not oppressive security detail. The drumbeat from the outside world over the war crimes allegations hits the compound with greater force than the storms, bringing protestors and reporters. The writer struggles to make sense of the small contradictions in his client's story, mixed signals from his wife and a perceived threat lurking "out there" that never quite reveals itself. This is not the kind of thriller that requires a lot of action. Rather, unease creeps into every word and deed. The very shape and feng shui of the house's interiors feel all wrong. Every human being the ghostwriter encounters seems to be dealing from the bottom of the deck. 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. In the press notes, Harris pleads his work is fiction even as he is quick to point out his connection to Blair and his wife. So he's having it both ways. So, ultimately, does the film. About Town gallery 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. The film benefits from cameo appearances from Jim Belushi, Eli Wallach and Tom Wilkinson that propel the anonymous writer's hasty investigation into his client. Alexandre Desplat's music prowls around underneath the scenes, channeling Bernard Herrmann's music for Hitchcock, while Pawel Edelman's cinematography emphasizes cool colors and a barren seaside landscape.
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Post by Ace on Feb 12, 2010 16:01:21 GMT -5
Part article/part review www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-ca-polanski14-2010feb14,0,4861252.story 'Ghost Writer's' real-life parallels haunt the movie and director Roman PolanskiSimilarities to former Prime Minister Tony Blair and the lead character in the upcoming film are unmistakable, as are the character's legal troubles and Polanski's.Roman Polanski By Reed Johnson February 14, 2010 As Pierce Brosnan and Ewan McGregor describe it, there was no need for the cast of Roman Polanski's "The Ghost Writer" to have long, philosophical discussions about the movie's creepy real-life parallels. It wasn't necessary, for example, to dissect Brosnan's character, a hazily sinister British ex-prime minister who's a dead ringer for Tony Blair, or to over-analyze his seething, neurotic wife, played by Olivia Williams as a cross between Cherie Blair and Lady Macbeth. It was all pretty obvious and pretty amusing. Nor did the film's director have to belabor the eerie prescience of Robert Harris' novel, the movie's source material, in forecasting the ugly political fallout from the Iraq war torture scandals. Of course, it did help that the director is a well-known connoisseur of grim ironies and bizarre happenstance, even when it occurs at his own expense. This septuagenarian French-Polish auteur, according to his actors, on set fully lived up to his reputation as an obsessive craftsman, a master architect of paranoid dreamscapes, and a benevolent control freak who repays his colleagues' allegiance and hard labor by helping them attain their best. "I'm working with Polanski, I've seen everything the man's done, I know the dark controversy around his life," Brosnan recalled in a phone interview recently. "And yet he was right there. And once you know that the man works at a very high frequency, and you know that the set is his, and the camera is his, and you are his, then you have a great time." Since Polanski started directing short films in Poland, his movies often have invited (or taunted) viewers to read them partly as encrypted diary entries and partly as Kafkaesque parables about the victimization of the weak and innocent by the powerful and unprincipled (or vice versa). But none of Polanski's films has more brazenly connected this worldview to contemporary politics than "The Ghost Writer," a taut psychological drama wrapped inside a thriller with black-comic elements that opens Friday in Los Angeles. And few have been more tantalizing -- some might say "brash" -- in hinting at biographical connections between the film's story line and the checkered circumstances of the director's own life. Yet however haunted the movie is by Polanski's personal demons, the principal actors found the director to be as supportive and personable as he is notoriously demanding. "He doesn't care how long a scene is, he doesn't care how long it takes you. He pushes you to make it real," said McGregor, speaking by phone while en route to the Berlin International Film Festival, where the movie was scheduled to have its world premiere Friday. Meanwhile, Polanski, as most of the world knows, remains under house arrest in Switzerland, where he is fighting extradition to California to face sentencing after pleading guilty more than three decades ago to having unlawful sex with a 13-year-old girl. In the latest legal twist, Polanski's attorneys have said they will appeal last month's decision by a Los Angeles County Superior Court judge denying his request to be sentenced in absentia. (Polanski was not available to comment for this story.) "He's a taskmaster, and he can put the fear of God into you if you're not prepared, if you don't know what you're doing as an actor," Brosnan said. "It was amazing watching him work. The camera is his alchemy chest, and the viewfinder is his kind of wand, and it's always there." The movie's premise, involving a fateful collision of politics, celebrity and media, is of a conspiratorially minded bent so severe and dramatically plausible as to make John le Carré read like "Winnie-the-Pooh." Its linchpin is the title character played by McGregor, a cynical hack and Everybloke who has landed a blockbuster contract to pen the memoirs of the controversial former P.M. Adam Lang (Brosnan). Lang, a vain, charming, born actor, is living in exile in the United States, on a remote, sublimely bleak New England island (actually shot in northern Germany) to avoid being sued in Britain for his alleged complicity in the mistreatment of prisoners in the "war on terror." (Reader, a pause is suggested here to reflect on the similar shadings of Polanski's own existence.) As Polanski turns up the flame of suspense, the ghost finds himself sucked into the vortex of the Langs' difficult marriage and global political intrigue. He also stumbles onto some unsettling signs of what really happened to his authorial predecessor, whose nasty end is depicted in the movie's opening minutes. McGregor said he immediately "got a handle" on his jaded, Fleet Street-hardened character and relished his impertinent humor. "There is mischief in him, for sure, and a lot of that comes from Polanski, because he is a mischievous chap himself," he said. The ghost and the British former first couple create a classic Polanskian dramatic triad all by themselves, locked together in their claustrophobic isolation. But they're not the only ones rattling around the Langs' swanky-spooky seaside home, which Williams describes as a "mausoleum of Modernism." The lip-smacking supporting cast includes Mr. Lang's curvaceous personal assistant ( Kim Cattrall), an enigmatic Harvard professor (Tom Wilkinson) and a mysterious neighbor played by Eli Wallach, popping up in a brief scene in his best wild-eyed mode, hissing cryptic pronouncements like a refugee from a lunatic asylum or a Harold Pinter play. As if it needed any more assistance from Tony Blair, last month "The Ghost Writer" got a mild PR boost when the ex-prime minister appeared before a British inquiry panel into the 2003 Iraq invasion, firing back at his critics and prompting angry street demonstrations -- events that the movie unnervingly foreshadows. For the actors, treading the line between the stylized theatricality of the fictional world and the troubling realities beyond the movie frame was all part of the challenge, and the fun, of making the film. The script made everything "crystal clear," in Brosnan's words, so everybody was in on the joke. Brosnan said that Polanski had given him six photos of Blair, including one that depicted the prime minister with what the actor described as a "clenched-teeth, chipmunk-style, little-boy-lost-in-the-woods, 'I didn't do it, I didn't do it' " expression. That helped Brosnan shore up his decision to play Lang as "a tragic, lost, broken man." Williams, probably best known to U.S. audiences as teacher Rosemary Cross in Wes Anderson's "Rushmore," acknowledged that her initial encounters with Polanski's directing style could be a bit nerve-racking. "He is the only person I've worked with who will stop a take and say, 'No! No! No!' It's sort of disconcerting at first," she said, laughing. Then during one scene she noticed that Polanski was sitting with his head in his hands. Uh-oh, she thought. But when she questioned him, the director told Williams that he does that whenever he's trying to remember what he saw in his mind when he envisioned the scene before filming it. Williams suggested that it was a too-rare pleasure to perform in a movie where the emotional and thematic currents are cleverly hidden in plain sight rather than announced with flashing neon. "I have a problem with a lot of modern scripts because people say what they're feeling all the time," she said. "The age of therapy has kind of killed subtext." The most prominent subtext of "The Ghost Writer" involves the possible fate of its enigmatic director, the man characterized in an HBO documentary as both "wanted and desired." Asked for her thoughts about Polanski's legal travails, Williams responded with a polite "no comment." McGregor said that he'd been "very upset" for Polanski, worried about Polanski's young children, and concerned as to whether the film would be finished. (Polanski reportedly completed the edit using DVDs brought by friends, including while he was being held in jail.) Brosnan said he and the director "spoke briefly about the loss of wives. I lost a wife, and this man lost his wife in the most barbaric fashion. He spoke tenderly and openly about the light and the love that he still carries for Sharon" [Tate]. "The only question," Brosnan said, "is why now, after all these years? Why now did they close the door and rein him in?" But not completely reined in, not yet, according to Harris, who proposed the idea of adapting "The Ghost Writer" to Polanski after a planned screen version of Harris' novel "Pompeii" fell through. Harris said that in mid-January he brought a finished copy of the "Ghost Writer" film, which Polanski hadn't seen, to the director's Swiss residence. "I took a bottle of champagne and we watched it together," Harris said. As for the latest ominous twists in the Roman Polanski saga, Harris said the director is dealing with the situation and never complains aloud. "He's tough," Harris said. "I think his view is it's not the worst thing that's happened to him." reed.johnson@latimes.com Copyright © 2010, The Los Angeles Times
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Post by Ace on Feb 12, 2010 16:09:31 GMT -5
www.guardian.co.uk/film/2010/feb/12/roman-polanski-ghost-writerRoman Polanski's deft take on Robert Harris's political thriller is the director's most purely enjoyable film for years 4 out of 5 Peter Bradshaw Friday 12 February 2010 21.00 GMT A Manchurian Candidate for the 2010s ... Pierce Brosnan in Roman Polanski's The Ghost Writer Roman Polanski's latest movie happens to be about a public figure, once hugely admired, now disgraced, fearing extradition and prosecution and confined to virtual house arrest in a vacation spot for rich people. Did the director, when he shot this film, get a chill presentiment of how personal it was all going to look? Maybe. But it didn't stop him making 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. His leads are Ewan McGregor and Pierce Brosnan, actors from whom Polanski gets the best by keeping them under control. McGregor is the journo, never named: cynical, boozy and miserable in the classical manner. He makes a living ghostwriting the autobiographies of raddled showbiz veterans. In the current publishing scene, his business is booming, but even he is astonished to be offered the job of ghostwriting the memoirs of the former British prime minister Adam Lang, now living with his formidable wife Ruth (Olivia Williams) in his American publisher's palatial beachfront home. A possible war-crime prosecution for assisting the rendition of terror suspects means Lang may never be able to leave American soil. And his last ghostwriter has been found drowned – an awful fate that resonates, sickeningly, with TV images of waterboarding. Could it be that the dead man discovered something dangerous about the ex-PM and his super-powerful, super-rich American friends? 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. Brosnan's Lang is an alpha-ego, substantially accustomed to American mega-celebrity status, smugly nurturing his Blairish sense of entitlement and resentment, yet with a weird blankness and smileyness that resurfaces continually: a Brit tendency to ingratiation that he can never quite conquer. As with Harris's novel, part of the enjoyment is gleefully imagining Tony and Cherie, in the parts of Adam and Ruth, pacing around like characters in some reality TV show from hell. Polanski has a terrific scene in which McGregor drives the dead man's car and the sat-nav "remembers" his previous journey and guides him, ghost-like, to a vital clue. 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. And there's a wonderful final image of the windblown London street – faintly hyperreal in the manner of Hitchcock's Frenzy – where something horrible has happened behind the camera. This very involving movie shows Polanski is far from finished as a film-maker.
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Post by Ace on Feb 12, 2010 17:27:42 GMT -5
www.screendaily.com/reviews/the-ghost-writer-aka-the-ghost/5010703.articleSCREEN DAILYDir: Roman Polanski. Fr-Ger-UK. 2009. 128mins. A stylish, precise salute to Hitchcock’s thrillers but still bearing all the hallmarks of Roman Polanski’s distinctive style, The Ghost Writer is an effortless take on Robert Harris’ best-selling novel and a film lover’s delight. Ewan McGregor is a rediscovery in the title role of the Ghost and thankfully Pierce Brosnan doesn’t deliver an impersonation of Tony Blair After the very disparate The Pianist (2002) and Oliver Twist (2005), The Ghost Writer marks a move back to Polanski’s pacy terrain of Frantic (1998) or even The Ninth Gate (2000), all peppered through with Alexandre Desplat’s entrancing retro score and even some breezy comic moments. While fans of the troubled auteur will come away sated, however, Polanski may need all his notoriety to muster the might of the domestic multiplex for this low-tech political thriller — Frantic took $17m in the US, with The Ninth Gate only returning $18.6m, despite Harrison Ford and Johnny Depp respectively leading the charge. Wider audiences in the US could remain elusive. Internationally, the outlook is brighter. While the book — about a former UK prime minister and his wife who cosied up to a warmongering US regime — was interpreted as a thinly veiled attack on the Blairs, Polanski, working with Harris on the screenplay, has extracted any whiff of Tony and Cherie from his film, to its immense benefit. A Blair-weary UK public should respond enthusiastically, as will co-production territories France and Germany (despite the film’s setting — an island styled after Martha’s Vineyard or Nantucket — The Ghost Writer was shot entirely at Studio Babelsberg and on location in Germany). Ewan McGregor gives his best performance in years as the titular ‘Ghost’, hired at the last minute to script the memoirs of former British prime minister Adam Lang (Brosnan) after the original author, the PM’s former press secretary, suddenly commits suicide. Polanski’s operatic opening, on a car ferry, is an immediate attention-grabber. Ensuing sequences in a rain-soaked London witness the Ghost auditioning for the job at a powerful publishing house and introduce a subdued Timothy Hutton as the Langs’ personal lawyer. However grey London is, it is outshadowed by the former prime minister’s steely grey windswept retreat — a glass-walled bunker on “an island off the Eastern seaboard”. En route to start his job — with the prerequisite impossible timeframe in which to complete the memoirs — the Ghost discovers that Adam Lang may be indicted for crimes against humanity at the International Criminal Court over state-sanctioned torture during his tenure as PM. At the seaside house in the decidedly off-season, the Ghost is introduced first to the icy Ruth Lang (Williams) and later to a preoccupied Adam by his suspiciously close PA, the Hitchcockian blonde Amelia (Cattrall). The plot suitably thickens until our beleaguered, fairly ordinary hero (his last book was a magician’s memoirs called I Came, I Sawed, I Conquered) finds himself in the middle of a maelstrom in which a car’s satnav must play a decisive role. The locations — inauthentic as they may be — and the elements are almost as central to The Ghost Writer as the events which take place on screen, and Polanski has mastered his forces here in an orchestral manner. The austere camerawork from DoP Pawel Edelman, who has worked with Polanski since The Pianist, complements Albrecht Conrad’s design, and Desplat’s score is a delicious through line. McGregor is a rediscovery in the role of the Ghost, while it is an enormous relief to witness Brosnan delivering the book’s cipher and not another tedious impersonation of Tony Blair. A difficulty, though, is Olivia Williams’ performance as Ruth Lang; she is convincingly angry, but it is a furious, one-note performance. The Ghost is required to be initially attracted to the former PM’s wife, not terrified by her — or at least, not wholly. As a final note, locations and set design are notably more convincing than the accents of the supporting cast. It may be a small world, but a US secretary of state with a European accent still seems some way in the future, despite Governor Schwarzenegger’s inroads in California. ================================ [cough*Kissinger*cough]
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Post by Ace on Feb 12, 2010 19:32:09 GMT -5
Variety
(alas not by Todd Macarthy)
By DEREK ELLEY
'The Ghost Writer'
Pierce Brosnan stars as Adam Lang in director Roman Polanski's suspense-thriller, 'The Ghost Writer.'
(France-Germany-U.K.) A Pathe (in France)/Kinowelt (in Germany)/Contender (in U.K.)/Summit Entertainment (in U.S.) release of an RP Films, France 2 Cinema (France)/Elfte Babelsberg Film (Germany)/Runteam III (U.K.) production, with participation of Pathe Distribution, Canal Plus, StudioCanal, France Televisions. (International sales: Summit Entertainment, L.A.) Produced by Roman Polanski, Robert Benmussa, Alain Sarde. Co-producers, Timothy Burrill, Carl L. Woebcken, Christoph Fisser. Executive producer, Henning Molfenter. Directed by Roman Polanski. Screenplay, Robert Harris, Polanski, from Harris' 2007 novel "The Ghost." The Ghost - Ewan McGregor Adam Lang - Pierce Brosnan Amelia Bly - Kim Cattrall Ruth Lang - Olivia Williams Paul Emmett - Tom Wilkinson Sidney Kroll - Timothy Hutton John Maddox - James Belushi Richard Rycart - Robert Pugh Old man - Eli Wallach Rick Riccardelli - Jon Berthal
The best thing that can be said about Roman Polanski's pic version of Robert Harris' bestseller "The Ghost" is that auds won't need to read the original novel. With a few exceptions, and necessary tightening, it's pretty much all up on the screen -- page by page of plot, line by line of dialogue -- in one of the most literal adaptations (by the British journo-turned-novelist himself) since the Harry Potter series. Low on sustained tension, and with a weak central perf by Ewan McGregor in the titular role, "The Ghost Writer" looks set for moderate biz at best in Europe, with much briefer haunting of North American salles.
Pic's literalism is also its biggest handicap. Eight years since his last major success, "The Pianist," the 76-old-helmer brings not a jot of his own directorial personality or quirks to a political pulp thriller whose weaknesses (let alone lack of any real action or thrills) are laid bare when brought to the screen is such a workmanlike, anonymous way.
With Polanski himself unable to travel Stateside or to Blighty, the largely New England-set story was entirely shot in Germany -- and sometimes looks like it. Despite the abundance of art direction and props to convince viewers that the locations are in wintry Martha's Vineyard and not Sylt, northern Germany, interiors -- especially of the central house -- look unmistakably modern-Teuton in their clean lines and small details.
Some second-unit work was done in the U.K. and France, and post-production finished while the helmer was under house arrest in Gstaad, Switzerland -- probably the first such instance of remote direction since imprisoned Turkish director Yilmaz Guney in the '70s.
Sans any front-end titles, story gets right down to business as the body of Michael McAra washes up on the shores of Martha's Vineyard. McAra had just finished ghost-writing the memoirs of former Brit prime minister Adam Lang (Pierce Brosnan), to whom he was an old friend-cum-political advisor, and the publishers, who've ponied up $10 million for the tome, urgently need another ghost to jazz up the tedious manuscript.
Repped by his young American agent, Rick (Jon Berthal), a successful British ghost writer (McGregor) -- unnamed both here and in the novel -- is interviewed by U.S. publishing exec John Maddox (James Belushi, in a ripe but brief cameo) and Lang's Washington attorney, Sidney Kroll (Timothy Hutton). The Brit is hired on the spot for a month's work for $250k, and flown to a luxurious private house in Martha's Vineyard, where Lang is based during a U.S. lecture tour.
But the ghost is already suspicious of what he's getting into, after being mugged in a London street immediately after the meeting. At the New England coastal retreat, McAra's manuscript and Lang himself are guarded around the clock in a security operation run by Lang's (very) personal assistant, blonde iceberg Amelia Bly (Kim Cattrall, with an almost flawless cut-glass Brit accent). Mooning around, with her claws mostly sheathed, is Lang's wife, Ruth (Olivia Williams).
Harris' novel made headlines at the time for its barely disguised similarities between Lang and former Brit p.m. Tony Blair, as well as between Ruth and Cherie Blair. But Brosnan is much more movie-star Brosnan than a Blair stand-in (was Michael Sheen unavailable?), though Williams, in the pic's best performance, adopts subtle hints of Cherie in her wardrobe and tart manner.
As the ghost starts interviewing Lang for color and juicy tidbits, the heat is turned up when Lang's onetime foreign minister, Richard Rycart (Robert Pugh), demands Lang be brought to trial for war crimes. Rycart claims Lang colluded in the kidnapping of four alleged Pakistani terrorists and their handover to the CIA for torture, during which one died. When the ghost learns that McAra had also uncovered a deeply buried truth about Lang's political past, he begins to fear for his own life as well.
All the ingredients are here for a rip-roaring political thriller, with corruption in the highest places and a cast of sexy and/or suspicious characters, but for the first hour there's little accumulated atmosphere or any sense of a bigger story hiding in the wings. Polanski simply transfers Harris' undistinguished prose direct to the screen and, though the pace picks up marginally in the second half, there's little wow factor in the revelations as they appear.
With McGregor a sappy lead and Brosnan hardly believable as a British ex-politician, it's Williams who provides the most pleasure in a gradually evolving role that at one point takes on a calculated sexiness. Tom Wilkinson hints at what the movie could have been in a beautifully played scene with McGregor that's packed with polite menace, and 94-year-old vet Eli Wallach pops up in a strongly delivered cameo.
More music by Alexandre Desplat, whose score is notably absent during the initial first hour, could have helped a little. Widescreen lensing by Polish d.p. Pawel Edelman ("Oliver Twist," "The Pianist") is fine at capturing the bleak wintry exteriors and cool, geometrical interiors. But what the picture most needed was a complete cinematic rethink and, yes, even some action to move it along.
Camera (color, Panavision widescreen), Pawel Edelman; editor, Hurve de Luze; music, Alexandre Desplat; production designer, Albrecht Konrad; supervising art director, David Scheunemann; art directors, Cornelia Ott, Steve Summersgill; set designer, Michael Fissneider; costume designer, Dinah Collin; set decorator, Bernhard Henrich; sound (Dolby Digital/DTS Digital), Jean-Marie Blondel; visual effects designer, Frederic Moreau; assistant director, Ralph Remstedt; casting, Fiona Weir. Reviewed at Berlin Film Festival (competing), Feb. 12, 2010. Running time: 126 MIN. The Ghost tabmarker Ewan McGregor Adam Lang tabmarker Pierce Brosnan Amelia Bly tabmarker Kim Cattrall Ruth Lang tabmarker Olivia Williams Paul Emmett tabmarker Tom Wilkinson Sidney Kroll tabmarker Timothy Hutton John Maddox tabmarker James Belushi Richard Rycart tabmarker Robert Pugh Old man tabmarker Eli Wallach Rick Riccardelli tabmarker Jon Berthal With: Tim Faraday, Marianne Graffam, Kate Copeland, Soogi Kang. (English dialogue)
With: Tim Faraday, Marianne Graffam, Kate Copeland, Soogi Kang. (English dialogue)
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Post by Ace on Feb 12, 2010 19:32:55 GMT -5
www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/features/haunted-by-the-present-1898176.htmlThe IndependentHaunted by the present The spirit of the Iraq Inquiry hangs over Roman Polanski's new film, 'The Ghost', which premiered in Berlin last night By Geoffrey Macnab Saturday, 13 February 2010 In icy Berlin this week, there have been plenty of requests for interviews with Roman Polanski, whose new film The Ghost premiered yesterday. Of course, although some of the more absent-minded media hadn't noticed it, Polanski is far away in Switzerland, under house arrest in Gstaad, still facing the consequences of that statutory rape charge more than 30 years ago. He wasn't in town for the film's packed press conference. In his absence, the film's stars and producers fielded respectful, generally softball questions, agreeing among themselves what a demanding but talented craftsman the Pole is while largely declining to discuss his private life. The Ghost isn't vintage Polanski but is still a strangely potent and disorienting film that works on many different levels. The politics are foregrounded. It may be coincidence that the film is receiving its first screenings bang in the middle of the Chilcot inquiry in the UK and at a time when yet more damaging revelations about Britain's security services are emerging in the press. Nonetheless, the screenplay (which Polanski co-wrote with novelist Robert Harris from Harris's novel) is full of elements that will seem instantly familiar, especially to British viewers. There are very obvious parallels, too, between the story that The Ghost tells and the current plight of the Polish director. The film is about an ageing celebrity in retreat, with the media pack in pursuit of him. The celebrity in this case isn't a film-maker suffering the effects of a sex scandal from long ago. It's a politician who has been accused of war crimes. Adam Lang (Pierce Brosnan) is an ex-British prime minister who during his time in power, it is alleged, handed over suspected terrorists for torture by the CIA. The US is a safe haven for Lang: his American friends won't give him up to the war crimes court. The irony is apparent. For Polanski, the situation is quite the reverse. Europe provided him with sanctuary (at least until his arrest last September) while America was the place he most needed to avoid. Lang is the ostensibly progressive politician who has cosied up to the right-wing US president. He is an ex-student actor who is able to smile for the cameras, even when accused of sending young British soldiers to their death. In Berlin yesterday, the issue that preoccupied the press conference was less the Polanski sex scandal from the 1970s than the events leading up to the war in Iraq and ex-PM Tony Blair's part in them. Harris joked that the book he published as fiction in 2007 now seemed like documentary. The outspoken writer went on to rail against his erstwhile friend Blair and his part in the rush to war in Iraq. "There is a lot of disquiet in Britain about that war. There was surprise that Tony Blair didn't make any gestures towards those who had lost people in the war," Harris commented. "People talk about the verdict of history in politicians as if it is going to come in 20, 50 or 100 years' time but the verdict of history generally comes now. I think there is a sense that we have the verdict on this war and its legality." Polanski, though, isn't a British parliamentary reporter or political correspondent. You're never quite sure how seriously to take the politics in the film. At times, the indignation of the film-makers at the ruthless, cynical behaviour of the politicians seems evident. However, The Ghost is also a rip-roaring thriller with hints of John Buchan's The 39 Steps and Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep about it. The film-makers don't seem sure whether they're preaching at us or trying to entertain us. The plot twists begin to multiply. Lang's ghostwriter's paranoia is likely to be shared by audiences as they try to work out which of the characters is to be trusted. Inevitably, the cheating extends to Lang's private life too. What Polanski does capture very effectively, perhaps as a result of his own long experiences, is the fraught and complex relationship between the media and their prey. "The pack is on the move," we're told as the news crews and journalists descend on the remote US island where Lang is living in a huge modernist house. We even feel a certain sympathy for him when the helicopter appears at his front window and the photographers' long lenses are trained on him. Brosnan captures the strange mix of unctuous charm, defiance and vulnerability that characterises the ex-prime minister. As the ghostwriter, Ewan McGregor again affects the Dick Van Dyke-like cockney accent he used in Woody Allen's Cassandra's Dream but he gives a far more effective performance here. He is the cheeky, quick-witted outsider, trying to cope as he is drawn into an ever more baffling and threatening world. The film has barely started when he is mugged and robbed. There are plentiful echoes of Polanski's own earlier movies. As in his thrillers Frantic and Bitter Moon, there is a melodramatic quality – a desire to push beyond realist conventions. Certain sequences, notably the final one, are deliberately very stylised. There is the same queasy claustrophobia here that is found in a film like Cul de Sac. McGregor has some of that mix of arrogance and innocence that characterised Jake Gittes in Chinatown. The bleak, deadpan humour is recognisable too. Now well into his seventies, Polanski doesn't have quite the energy to lift The Ghost beyond the realm of the conventional conspiracy thriller. In its lesser moments, the film is stagey and old-fashioned. The in-jokes about the publishing world are heavy handed. The plotting relies heavily on coincidence and on what Hitchcock used to call McGuffins: scraps of paper, photographs with telephone numbers written on the back. The Ghost was made in Europe, at Babelsberg Studios in Berlin and on location. Its re-creation of the US never rings true. Even when the plotting creaks, though, we're aware of its director's inventiveness and intelligence. Polanski supervised the final part of the editing of The Ghost after his arrest. The media obsession with him since then shows little sign of abating. That is one reason why there is such curiosity about his new film. However, for the movie's duration at least, audiences should be able to forget about the current notoriety of its director. Whatever his travails, Polanski is still capable of turning out a well-crafted and intelligent thriller with bite and irony. The Ghost is released on 16 April
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Post by Ace on Feb 13, 2010 19:49:56 GMT -5
entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/film/film_reviews/article7025883.eceFrom The Times February 13, 2010 The Ghost at the Berlin Film Festival A spooky echo of real life Wendy Ide 4/5 stars It’s almost impossible to disentangle The Ghost, the latest film by Roman Polanski, from the director’s current troubles. Under house arrest in Switzerland, he is not permitted to attend the film’s premiere at the Berlin International Film Festival. But even without his presence, this classy adaptation of Robert Harris’s political thriller is a white-hot ticket. Whatever you think of Polanski as an individual, he is one hell of a film-maker. And with this immensely enjoyable, satisfyingly convoluted thriller he demonstrates exactly why he is still a force to be reckoned with. From the opening scene it is clear Polanski had complete control, whether or not he was behind bars when he finished it. A score from Alexandre Desplat, channelling the neurotic noodling of Philip Glass, creates an immediate tension in a seemingly banal shot — the unloading of a car ferry. But one vehicle remains stationary. Its driver, we eventually learn, drowned accidentally after downing the best part of a bottle of whisky. How much classier it is to reveal the death this way rather than to chuck a body at us in the first few minutes. There’s an echo of this towards the very end of the film, when another key character dies just out of frame. Related Links * Timing right for Polanski's political thriller The drowned man was the ghostwriter of the autobiography of a former British Prime Minister, Adam Lang (played with toothy insincerity by Pierce Brosnan). Ewan McGregor plays the replacement “ghost”. He’s a cynical hack, with no interest in politics but a great deal of interest in the generous fee. Then, ensconced within Lang’s tight operation on a windswept, sand-blasted corner of Cape Cod as a political storm rages outside, this ghost rediscovers his long-dormant investigative instincts. Polanski returns to a theme he was drawn to in Chinatown and Frantic: one man, in over his head, unravelling a seemingly endless web of conspiracy, corruption and intrigue. The screenplay, co-written by Polanski and Harris, is first rate. This is a nail-biter spiked with shots of mordant humour yet the main asset is a stunning turn from Olivia Williams as Lang’s wife. It’s not until the very end that you realise just how staggeringly good she is. On general release on March 19
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Post by Ace on Feb 17, 2010 16:51:46 GMT -5
www.cnbc.com/id/35445825Polanski casts well in 'Ghost Writer' By: The Associated Press | 17 Feb 2010 If Roman Polanski has great insights on the notion of exile, he did not put them on-screen in "The Ghost Writer." What the director, a fugitive from America for decades and now under house arrest in Switzerland, did put on-screen is a faithful, fairly absorbing adaptation of Robert Harris' political thriller "The Ghost." The movie pokes along at times, in contrast with the snappy pace of Harris' novel. Yet Polanski cast his film well — particularly with Pierce Brosnan as a Tony Blair-esque former British prime minister, a supporting player in the story but a larger-than-life figure who enlivens and dominates "The Ghost Writer" every time he enters the picture. The film certainly has a higher profile than most of Polanski's work since the early 1990s, other than 2002's "The Pianist," which earned him the best-director Academy Award. "The Ghost Writer" arguably is the most populist film Polanski has done since 1988's "Frantic," starring Harrison Ford. Adding intriguing parallels are Polanski's long absence from America and the potential exile of Brosnan's Adam Lang, who faces the prospect of an expatriate's life in the United States after he's accused of war crimes back home. Then there's the sudden twist Polanski's life has taken after nearly three decades in France, where he fled in 1978 to avoid sentencing for having sex with a 13-year-old girl. He was arrested last fall in Zurich as he arrived to receive an award from a film festival, and he now awaits a decision on whether he'll be extradited to the United States. Polanski's bound to get a box-office bounce out of his troubles, at least. Likewise, headlines swirling around Lang suddenly make his dreary memoirs look like the publishing event of the year. After the drowning death of a longtime aide overseeing Lang's book, the publisher hires a veteran ghostwriter (Ewan McGregor) to punch up the tedious tome. This guy without a name — referenced in the credits merely as "The Ghost" and often called "man" by Lang, who has trouble remembering people's names — arrives at the New England estate where the ex-PM and his people are holed up just as huge news hits (it's Martha's Vineyard in the novel, some posh unidentified island here). Lang has been accused of turning terrorist suspects in Pakistan over to the CIA for torture, prompting protests, calls for a war-crimes trial and a flurry at his publishing house to transform the book into a tell-all account of the war on terror. Olivia Williams is perfectly matched with Brosnan as Lang's ferociously intelligent and sardonic wife, while Kim Cattrall is all crisp efficiency and cat-fight-ish rivalry as Lang's chief aide and presumed mistress. With Harris as screenwriter, the film adheres closely to his story, though he and Polanski add a few more conventional cloak-and-dagger tidbits than the novel contains. Polanski also injects some macabre touches — among them a dubious ending that elicits chuckles partly because of its wicked humor, partly because it's a rather silly and dismissive send-off to the film's protagonist. Then again, McGregor is a bit of a blank throughout, continually outshone by co-stars, even those with barely more than walk-on roles. That may nicely suit a ghostwriter whose own voice is subsumed so he can chronicle the lives of others. Yet considering that McGregor's at the center of almost every scene in the film, it makes for a pretty thin leading man. We're supposed to care what happens to this guy, but ghostlike, McGregor is a wispy presence, subordinate to almost everyone else on screen. That includes Tom Wilkinson as a slick, haughty academic with CIA connections and James Belushi as a fiercely funny bull of a publishing executive whose company paid $10 million for Lang's memoirs. Timothy Hutton, though, fails to register much as a shark-like attorney representing Lang. Brosnan and Williams are the real highlights, both such dynamos that you feel their absence and yearn for their return during the long stretches when McGregor is mucking about on his own. Shot in winter with Germany standing in for New England, the film captures the feel of the bleak Massachusetts coast in offseason, when the tourists have gone home. The film showcases one of the best scenes in the book, as McGregor's ghost uses a car-navigation system to retrace the fatal path of his predecessor. It's a cool sequence, though as other movies inevitably toy with the technology, Hollywood no doubt will find a way to turn it into a cliche. "The Ghost Writer," a Summit Entertainment release, is rated PG-13 for language, brief nudity/sexuality, some violence and a drug reference. Running time: 128 minutes. Two and a half stars out of four.
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Post by Ace on Feb 18, 2010 16:10:38 GMT -5
somecamerunning.typepad.com/some_came_running/2010/02/the-ghost-writer.htmlBy Glenn Kenny (formerly of Premiere) Regular readers of this blog have probably figured out that as far as movies are concerned, I'm not necessarily the world's biggest content freak. Nevertheless, I experienced several moments during my viewing of Roman Polanski's The Ghost Writer during which I purred with appreciation over the fact that I was finally watching a contemporary thriller that was actually about something. And by "about something," I don't mean the world-historical events that power the film's plot, e.g., the British/American alliance in the Iraq war, controversies over extraordinary rendition and enhanced interrogation and/or torture and so on. These elements are handled scrupulously, sardonically, and with a bracing sense of reality that, say, Brian DePalma could never come close to mustering with his ill-executed Redacted. But for all that, those points constitute a sort of Unified Field MacGuffin. No, the something I refer to is, well, humanity and its foibles—emotions, alliances, betrayals, and how all that stuff can and does play out on a world-historical stage. The setup is simplicity itself: a hard-drinking hack of a ghost writer (Ewan MacGregor) half stumbles into a lucrative assignment revising the memoirs of a controversial and perhaps soon-to-be-disgraced former Prime Minister Adam Lang (Pierce Brosnan). Initially this "ghost" is not particularly wary of the fact that his predecessor, a one-time intimate of the politico, died in what one might call mysterious circumstances. And he has enough on his hands at first dealing with Lang's bluff prickliness/prickiness, not to mention Lang's secretary/mistress' protectiveness of the original manuscript, and Lang''s wife's aloof machinations and overall discontent. And then, of course, things get complicated. Many of Polanski's best thrillers largely take place in tightly circumscribed, potentially claustrophobia-inducing environments—think the close quarters of Knife in the Water's boat, or the seemingly increasingly narrow halls of Repulsion's apartment—and The Ghost Writer is often at its most effectively creepy when its characters are stuck in Lang and company's modernist nightmare house, practically hemmed by enormous windows looking out on bleak landscapes, and festooned with severe modern art pieces (it's everything the set of Kenneth Branagh's terribly misbegotten remake of Sleuth wanted to be, and couldn't). Polanski's ever-mindful manipulation of space is combined with (no surprise) pretty dynamite acting. MacGregor, getting to speak in his own accent for the first time in too long, underplays nicely; Brosnan just nails a particularly obnoxious state and sense of entitlement; Kim Cattrall as the secretary is gorgeously aloof and miles away from the Sex and the City nonsense; and Olivia Williams is even more piercing here than she was in An Education (it helps of course that this is a better movie). This makes the emotional and intellectual give-and-take of the varied exchanges unusually engrossing, as Polanski all the while ratchets up a thoroughly nuanced mood of menace. That mood reaches a certain apogee when a one-time acquaintance of Lang's, an academic with possible American intelligence ties played with marvelous unctuousness by Tom Wilkinson, says to MacGregor's character, "A less equable man than I would start to find your questions impertinent." Only MacGregoer's character and Lang ever actually come out and say exactly what they mean at any given time in this story; and yet they still end up lost to each other. These are apt circumstances in which to stage a paranoid thriller. The film's punchline is mordantly funny, and ballsy, and has a slight echo of a Polanski classic, the name of which I won't drop at this juncture. So is this that much-vaunted thingamabob, the "return to form?" Depends on what you call form. As much as I love many of his pictures, I never considered Polanski to be a terribly consistent filmmaker even at his supposed creative peak. For instance, his followup to Repulsion, Cul-de-sac, was good for a few laughs (and had a great cast), but was for the most part predigested Beckett with a kinky, kicky B-movie component. (I make that sound better than it actually plays, I know.) His post fleeing-from-America filmography is even spottier, although I'm a big partisan of Bitter Moon. All that said, its more-muted-than-usual erotic component aside, this does often play like, well, a vintage Polanski thriller, with vintage Polanski themes, even—MacGregor as the attractive stranger who, among other things, interrupts a fraught marriage does recall the setup of Knife in the Water a bit, no? And I think it does, finally, belong on the director's top shelf. I only wish that Summit, the picture's U.S. distributor, hadn't looped in words such as "bugger" and "sod" so they could make the one-"fuck"-only quota they needed to get the film its PG-13 rating. It's not as if the kids are going to be particularly interested in this item to begin with.
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Post by Ace on Feb 18, 2010 17:19:25 GMT -5
By KENNETH TURAN Los Angeles Times
LOS ANGELES -- Roman Polanski's been in the news a lot lately but not for the best of reasons. Between his September arrest in Switzerland and the media rehashing of the case that made him flee the U.S. in the first place, it's been possible to forget that his powerful gifts as a filmmaker were what made him famous in the first place.
With the deliciously unsettling "The Ghost Writer," however, a dark pearl of a movie whose great flair and precision make it Polanski's best work in quite a while, the 76-year-old director forcefully reminds us what all the fuss was about.
Made by a filmmaker suddenly returned to the height of his powers, "The Ghost Writer" is a thriller wrapped around a roman a clef about contemporary politics wrapped around Polanski's perennial blanket cynicism about the helplessness of individuals against the entrenched strength of the powerful. His effortless blending of personal preoccupations with audience preferences recalls, as so much of this film does, the classic work of Alfred Hitchcock.
It's not only that Alexandre Desplat's driving score reminds us from its opening moments of the dynamic compositions of Hitchcock composer of choice Bernard Herrmann, it's that "The Ghost Writer" is the kind of impeccable adult entertainment, able to alternate edge-of-your-seat episodes with bleakly comic moments, that Hitchcock used to specialize in and that Polanski himself realized so successfully in "Chinatown" and "Rosemary's Baby."
Like that last film, "The Ghost Writer" is based on a successful novel, this time written by Robert Harris, who collaborated with Polanski on the screenplay and retained the book's focus on a former British prime minister and intentional dead ringer for Tony Blair named Adam Lang (Pierce Brosnan) and the ghost writer (Ewan McGregor) hired to pump up his memoirs.
Both actors do excellent work, as do co-stars Kim Cattrall and Olivia Williams, but what is especially noteworthy is the care taken by Polanski and casting director Fiona Weir with every single performer who appears on screen, from a knockout cameo by 94-year-old Eli Wallach to featured players such as Tom Wilkinson, Timothy Hutton, David Rintoul and James Belushi to an irresistible moment by Polanski's daughter Morgane as a hotel receptionist trapped in period costume.
These people not only act beautifully, they all work in concert with the director toward creating the across-the-board mood of nagging unease, of nefarious doings just outside our line of sight, that has always been one of Polanski's strengths.
Starting with the opening shot of a somehow unnerving ferry docking at an unnamed American island (its supposed to be Martha's Vineyard, though exteriors were shot on the German island of Sylt), everything in this film feels suspect, even nominally blameless items like a car's talkative satellite navigation device and a pair of silent Asian housekeepers named Dep and Duc.
Before we meet Dep and Duc or their employer, the former prime minister, we're taken into the world of the never-named ghost writer, who is up for the job because the body of the previous writer, a close associate of the P.M. named Mike McAra, has washed up on shore after apparently falling off that ferry.
The new ghost admits to knowing nothing about politics (his last book was a magician memoir entitled "I Came, I Sawed, I Conquered") but he's hired by a team that includes Belushi's bullet-headed publisher and Hutton's wily attorney because he promises to emphasize the human side of the man.
Adam Lang proves to be something of an airhead, someone who prefers exercise to all else, but the two women in his life are anything but dull. Lang's wife Ruth ("An Education's" excellent Olivia Williams) would be acerbic and protective under the best of circumstances, but she is feeling especially edgy because she suspects her husband's having an affair with his svelte blond personal assistant Amelia (a tart Kim Cattrall).
No sooner does the ghost arrive at Lang's American island retreat than a bombshell drops: The former P.M. is accused of ordering the kidnapping of suspected terrorists and handing them over to the CIA for torture, a charge that if true would make him liable to prosecution for war crimes by the International Criminal Court in Geneva. "What," the ghost screams over the phone to his agent, "have you gotten me into?"
McGregor, a busy actor who doesn't always pick his projects carefully, is excellent as the Ghost With No Name. It's a tricky role, demanding he hold our interest as a decent and capable everyman while allowing for him to be gullible enough to get caught up in the powerful undertow of forces beyond his control.
More than that, the film elegantly hints but never pushes that there just might be some kind of extrasensory connection between this ghost and the one who came before.
Speaking of connections, it is especially heartening to see a letter-perfect Wallach bring the same kind of brio to a small part as an island resident he brought to "Mystic River" back in 2003. That film was the start of a directing renaissance for Clint Eastwood, and with any kind of luck this film just might signal a new beginning for Polanski as well.
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Post by Ace on Feb 18, 2010 18:11:59 GMT -5
movies.nytimes.com/2010/02/19/movies/19ghost.htmlNY Times: Writer for Hire Is a Wanted Man By MANOHLA DARGIS Published: February 19, 2010 The darkly brooding sky that hangs over much of “The Ghost Writer,” the latest from Roman Polanski, suggests that all is grim and gray and perhaps even for naught. But 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. The world has gone mad of course — this is a Polanski film — so all we can do is puzzle through the madness, dodging the traps with our ironic detachment and tongue lightly in cheek. The Ghost of the title, never named in the film, is played by Ewan McGregor at his ingénue best. A writer for hire — his oeuvre is summed up by the vulgar wit of his latest effort, about a magician, “I Came, I Sawed, I Conquered” — the Ghost is tapped for cleanup duties. The initial ghostwriter behind the unfinished memoirs of a former British prime minister, Adam Lang (a superb Pierce Brosnan), has washed up dead on an American beach. The publisher wants a completed book and presumptive best seller, and Lang, an increasingly divisive figure at home and abroad, needs the kind of tidying up that such a media event might provide. The Ghost, an agreeable, convenient blank slate (no family, no history), seems the man for the job. And what nasty work it proves to be! Based on the novel “The Ghost” by Robert Harris, who shares screenwriting credit with Mr. Polanski, the film opens under a menacing cloak of darkness that rarely rises. An abandoned car in the first shot leads to the first ghostwriter’s beached body being lashed by ocean waters in Martha’s Vineyard, a macabre setup that in turn leads to the Ghost receiving a thrashing in London, as he’s insulted (by an editor who thinks he’s wrong for the job); bullied (by the publisher who wants a fast turnaround); and punched (by a mugger who snatches a manuscript, mistaking it for Lang’s). By the time the Ghost meets Lang, who’s holed up at Martha’s Vineyard, he is as jumpy as the rest of us. (The film was largely shot in Germany.) 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. Among the most initially confusing is Lang, a professional charmer whose beaming smiles, with their sinister undercurrent, and fits of rage convey depths that the Ghost soon begins to plumb, an endeavor that takes the shape of an investigation. This amateur sleuthing leads to unsurprising trouble, including with Lang’s wife, Ruth (Olivia Williams), a brainy beauty whose relationship with her husband holds its own secrets and is transparently meant to invoke that between Cherie Booth and Tony Blair. 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. Fingers are pointed, though sometimes it seems not only at Lang but also at Mr. Polanski, who is under house arrest in Switzerland awaiting word on whether he will be sent back to Los Angeles to face sentencing for having had sex with a 13-year-old girl in 1977. Certainly the shots of Lang’s detractors, with their furiously distorted faces and accusatory placards (“guilty,” “wanted”), gives the film an extra-cinematic tang, though as with so much here, it’s also evident that Mr. Polanski is having his fun. And 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. It’s easy to speculate that Mr. Polanski was attracted to the theme of rewriting one’s life history. Reading a work of art through the lens of biography is seductive, particularly when an artist ventures into the explicitly personal, as he did in “The Pianist,” his 2002 film about a musician who, like him, survived the Holocaust. But such interpretations can flatten poetry into prose and also serve as strategies to neuter artists, whose works of imagination are “revealed” as nothing more than banal facts. This isn’t to deny the personal in art, only an insistence on the elusiveness of creation. Mr. Polanski’s ventures into the horrific in films like “Repulsion” might have something to do with his history, but they are also a matter of affinities, inspirations, attitudes, competencies, tastes, pleasures. In this respect “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. Tracing the lines between fact and fiction makes for a dandy parlor game, one that Mr. Polanski obviously wants us to play, at least for a while, because such resonances have their rewards. They thicken the texture of the work, even if they don’t define it. Such thickening might seem especially critical with material as thin as “The Ghost Writer,” but these are the tools of a director working with every element at his disposal, including a colorful miscellany of emoting, popping, memorable faces (notably those of Kim Cattrall, Tom Wilkinson, Eli Wallach and David Rintoul). It would be easy to overstate the appeal of “The Ghost Writer” just as, I imagine, it will be easy for some to dismiss it. But the pleasures of a well-directed movie should never be underestimated. 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. Mr. Polanski’s work with his performers is consistently subtle even when the performances seem anything but, which is true of this very fine film from welcome start to finish.
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Post by Ace on Feb 18, 2010 18:22:58 GMT -5
movies.msn.com/movies/movie-critic-reviews/the-ghost-writer/#Review_0Kathleen Murphy, Special to MSN Movies, MSN Entertainment Polanski's 'Ghost Writer' Serves up Cinematic Caviar 'Tis the season of cinematic dreck -- those lackluster months between the year-end glut of awards-bait and the onslaught of summer blockbusters. A steady diet of junk food like "Edge of Darkness," "Dear John," and "The Wolfman" dulls the palate, upping our appetite for gourmet filmmaking. So it's a movie-lovin' pleasure to sink one's teeth into "The Ghost Writer," Roman Polanski's brilliant blend of political intrigue and his typically tragicomic reading of human vanity -- indelibly summed up in "Forget it, Jake, it's Chinatown." From the second it begins, "The Ghost Writer" signals directorial authority and precision, subtly codifying the film's existential style and substance. A ghostly white ferryboat looms out of the dark to discharge its load of cars, one vehicle after another driving off the deck, till only a stubbornly stationary BMW remains. We don't yet know the full significance of that car's abandonment, but its immobility, absent a driver, stirs rising dread. That dread informs every location in "The Ghost Writer": A deserted ferry landing or a narrow road winding through woods feels like ground zero for some imminent -- possibly metaphysical -- assault. The circuitous trajectory of Polanski's film is from fatal absence to absence, with human mortality so sure and incidental that it doesn't even require foregrounding. Here, as in the cruel ending of "Chinatown," a character may die off-screen, out of frame, but traffic -- the motion that fools us into believing we are headed somewhere -- rolls on. (Indulging Polanski's absurdist sense of humor, his ghost writer finds his way to a CIA "spook" with the assertive assistance of a pre-programmed GPS! Said spook is sequestered in a bone-white Colonial "box," situated deep in a dripping green forest, a perfectly surreal stage set.) A masterly remix of Robert Harris' political thriller novel "The Ghost," Polanski's 18th feature immerses us in a murky medium of corruption and paranoia, the "fish tank" world in which a former British prime minister (Pierce Brosnan), his sharkish wife (Olivia Williams, late of TV's "Dollhouse") and icebox mistress (Kim Cattrall) swim. (Harris' novel was notorious for glaring similarities to Tony and Cherie Blair; such parallels are beside Polanski's point.) Giving an intelligent, advisedly damped-down performance, Ewan McGregor plays a somewhat colorless writer hired on to ghost Prime Minister Adam Lang's memoirs -- his predecessor, driver of that deserted BMW, having become either suicide or murder victim. Identified only as "the Ghost," McGregor's writer aims to get at "the heart" of Lang's story. Could be he's got a leg up on the political angle, since the last memoir he ghosted -- "I Came, I Sawed, I Conquered" -- celebrated the life of a magician. Much of "Ghost's" claustrophobic action takes place inside the ex-PM's New England beach retreat, a tightly guarded bunker crouched under lowering pewter-gray skies. The prevalent drear and damp of the film's outdoor environs -- Germany standing in for Martha's Vineyard -- comes courtesy of painterly lensing by Pawel Edelman, who shot Polanski's "The Pianist" and "Oliver Twist." Inside Lang's concrete box, McGregor's ghost wanders from minimalist-modern landing to landing, bleak stage to bleak stage, auditing the melodramatic (and manipulative) antics of Lang and his entourage. (Kudos to Albrecht Konrad's flawless production design.) One wall of Lang's office is divided, half a dark barrier embellished by a smeary abstract painting, the other floor-to-ceiling glass. It's Polanski's powerfully unsettling, and probably very personal, metaphor for life lived in the public eye, for the double illusions of transparency and privacy. Perhaps that strange wall is even suggestive of a partially curtained movie screen. Every conversation with Lang, or anyone else in "Ghost Writer," is deliciously rife with omissions and diversions, thrust and parry. Pierce Brosnan deftly incarnates a leading-man politico, an actor blessed with shallow charm and easy patter. Offstage, Lang barely exists, so thoroughly is he "handled" by his brainy wife, his secretary-mistress, his bodyguards and unknown others behind the scenes. When he does exit the public eye, the political star's absence hardly registers, except as media sensation. As Ruth Lang, the reliably assertive Olivia Williams is all sharp edges, sexy in that smart, acid-tongued Brit style. Supplanted by Cattrall's minimally less acerbic allure, crying on the ghost's shoulder, she seems the perfect model of wounded wife -- though when the mask slips, you'd swear you'd glimpsed a Medusa. Ruth is only one of the mysteries, past and current, that the ghost writer probes in the faith he's on the track of some central, game-changing revelation about Lang's dicey political career, topped now by an indictment for crimes against humanity. Interrogating a retired academic (Tom Wilkinson, superb) reminiscent of Hitchcock's tweedy professors in "The 39 Steps" and "North by Northwest," McGregor's every attempt to unravel a decades-old political plot is checkmated by the kind of politesse that's hardened by an impenetrable, unflappable sense of self. It's a nasty, entertaining two-hander, with far more at stake than McGregor knows. That's the rub: our ghost-guide doesn't get that he's an expendable pawn, an invisible man by his very profession. Like "Chinatown's" detective, the truth-seeking scribe deceives himself into thinking he has become a major player in a drama with a beginning, middle and end. Scene by scene, performance by performance, this mesmerizing movie degrades our sense of what's real, what matters. That way lies the madness of "Repulsion" and "The Tenant." A cinematic measure of Polanski's existential despair, "The Ghost Writer" implies some Dantean circle of hell where we fill our days with one empty theatrical after another -- political, personal, whatever -- until we're hooked off the stage for good. What's certain is that on this director's bleakly beautiful stage, players, pawns, best-laid plans -- nothing is proof against sudden erasure, casualty of some new fiction, rife with busy ghosts convinced of their firm grasp on reality and their own fate.
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Post by SecondWind on Feb 18, 2010 18:53:05 GMT -5
The image of Mr. Brosnan abruptly leaning toward the camera like a man possessed is worth a dozen Oscar-nominated performances. Wow !! This is the best review I've read so far - and I've read many good ones, also in Germany. Any chance, his performance or the film could really get nomiated for the Oscars next year?
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