Well I haven't written a movie review in a long time, so what shall I tear apart for my first day back in the Blogosphere (a.k.a. useless writing storage place).
I think what I'm going to tear apart is all the people who hate the director Roman Polanski.
Almost no one understands that the entire Polanski story (the murder of his wife by the people in the picture, the sex with the young teen girl, his flee from the country, then his recent arrest in Switzerland and subsequent release) was about fame and the truly sick obsession America and her people have with it. Maybe it's because so many years ago Emerson wrote that biography was going to be the only American form of literature, and somehow that has turned into "Fame is the only form of American literature."
Polanski actually made the story better and more famous by doing what he did. He actually extended the story, so that it still has relevance thirty or forty years later.
Oh. Yes. Everyone calls him a coward because he didn't want to face his sentencing. What they don't know is that he had already been sentenced by the corrupt judge who was in charge of his case and had already served out his sentence in jail. The judge and his bailiff used a subtle illegal tactic to put Polanski in jail "for observation," for up to forty days. Polanski's lawyer, the prosecutor and the judge, and the family of the victim had all agreed that this would be enough and, especially important to the victim, it would end all the coverage. Well the judge decided, after the fact, that he wasn't satisfied and wanted to punish him some more, so he pulled the prosecutor and Polanski's lawyer into his chambers and told them what he was going to say and what they were to say in response. The judge planned to jail him, and then start deportation proceedings, which seems oxymoronic.
The judge held press conferences with the Hollywood press and loved seeing his picture in the papers. He was an ass-sucking viper, just as bad as the papparazzi, and he didn't want to let the Polanski fade, because the case was his ticket to the front pages. A more recent example of a judge that loved the media attention was Ito, in the OJ case. That case would never have taken a year if it had not been televised.
The victim, who is now a middle aged woman, said in the documentary that the judge ruined her life. Polanski said at the start of the documentary, that he fled the country because of the corruption of the judge, and for no other reason. And I believe him. The fact that he voluntarily went to jail for "psychiatric observation" shows that he didn't want to leave the country, or stop making movies. For fuck's sake, his wife is buried in L.A.
Everything points to the corruption of the judge. But here in America we don't believe that judges are corrupt, or have the freedom to do almost anything they want, or that corruption exists outside Washington D.C. Law & Order has persuaded us that judges are sensible, reasonable, arbitrators of good law. Even when they're making terrible decisions or decisions that are based on personal feelings, they hide those decisions behind the obfuscation of law.
But they aren't saints, and we need to find a way to remove them from their positions of power. We cannot have simpletons and vanity cases in the position of sentencing people to death, or, in the case of Roman Polanski, jailing them and then start deportation proceedings at the same time.
So Polanski jumped bail. Hopefully whoever put it up got their money back somehow. And the victim, whoever she was, has moved on, from an encounter that her mother forced her to do and changed the course of her life, because Polanski thought she was "just" a young pretty girl and could give her the same drugs that everyone else was using.
The only thing I question are two things: In Bugliosi's book about the Manson killings which is called Helter Skelter, I think, he said that Polanski went into the crime scene and retrieved some "sex movies" he had made with Sharon Tate. Why was he allowed to do that? And after having your wife and baby killed by a demented bitch with a knife, why would you give drugs to a young girl, whether she looked 18 or 25?
But this could be the same question asked of those parents who sent their kids to "play" and "sleep over" with Michael Jackson.
Hollywood SUCKS!