More in ‘Roman Polanski’

My former commander in the Israel Defense Forces, a gruff but funny paratrooper with an overdeveloped sense of the macabre, was fond of quoting the saying, “Just because you’re paranoid, doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.”
I thought about him last weekend as I watched the most recent offerings from two of cinema’s contemporary ...

• Rumors abound that Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak spent last Sunday and Monday in Jordan secretly meeting with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. His aides say he was on “vacation” (presumably not hiking the Appalachian Trail). [JPost]
• Film director Roman Polanski asked a judge to sentence him in absentia for having sex with a minor. ...

• Israel confirmed its condition for releasing Palestinian prisoners in exchange for captured soldier Gilad Shalit: mass deportation. Hamas is considering it. [Ynet]
• In an exclusive interview, Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas vowed to begin talks with Israel in the event of even a quiet five-month construction freeze that includes East Jerusalem. He also pledged ...

• Accused child-rapist and Holocaust survivor Roman Polanski was released from a Swiss jail to a condition of house arrest as he awaits potential extradition to the United States. The “house” in question is a stunningly beautiful ski chalet in Gstaad, Switzerland. [AP]
• Elliott Broidy, a California money manager whose main fund invested mostly in ...

So why is Roman Polanski in a Swiss prison cell? To hear author, intellectual, and seasoned provocateur Gore Vidal tell it, the famed director’s troubles have little to do with having drugged and raped a 13-year-old girl all those years ago. Polanski, Vidal tells The Atlantic in an interview published online yesterday, is being hounded ...

If Roman Polanski were making a movie about his own extraordinary life—beginning with his childhood escape from the Krakow ghetto during the Holocaust, tracing his catapult into Hollywood fame with Rosemary’s Baby, moving on to his pregnant wife Sharon Tate’s murder by the Manson Family, following his guilty plea to charges of sexually abusing a ...

In The Fearless Vampire Killers, Roman Polanski’s campy 1967 comedy, Shagal, a philandering innkeeper, gets bitten by the fair-skinned Count Von Krolock, then returns home to taste the blood of a buxom chambermaid. She quickly pulls out a crucifix, but Shagal replies, “Oy! Have you got the wrong vampire!”
On its own, the joke rings a ...