There are those who will scream Chinatown when I say it, but for me nothing says Roman Polanski quite as much as the embarassingly awkward striptease scene in Bitter Moon.

For those of you lucky enough to have avoided the movie, it's about how a crippled Peter Coyote can be forced to watch the marginally attractive but thoroughly untalented wife of a director flounce around a cruise ship at night. In the scene to which I referred above, Coyote is tied to a chair, necessary only because I think at this point in the film he's not yet been crippled. His famed trustworthy whisper, now heard on every extra-governmental investigation show on television, is silenced by duct or some other variety of tape. Emmanuelle Seigner, in her second major movie role payoff for agreeing to marry a man who lives by the rule "If there's grass on the field, don't play ball," then undertakes the most overwraught, pretentious modern dance striptease I've ever had the misfortune of seeing. And believe you me, I've seen a few. She looks like an epiliptic Twila Tharp in a raincoat and thigh highs trying to fight her way up a greased half pipe after three roofies. I wanted to crawl out of my skin when watching it, and I can put up with pretty much anything that results in a naked lady.

Of course I'm against statutory rape, but I have to admit that my delight in any negative publicity Polanski receives stems at least as much from his sex crimes as that cinematic one.

And so it is that I bring this to your attention. For those of you who haven't heard, Polanski is suing the publishers of Vanity Fair for a story they ran in 2002 claiming that he made "tasteless and vulgar" advances on a Scandanavian model shortly after his wife, Sharon Tate, was murdered. Lewis Lapham, editor of the magazine, took the stand to relate his recollection of the events.

"Mr. Polanski pulled up a chair between myself and Beatte Telle and began to talk to her in a forward way... began to praise her beauty, romance her. At one point he had his hand on her leg and said to her 'I can put you in the movies. I can make you the next Sharon Tate.'"

It's a line that obviously begs the response, Dead?, and is worth laughs on its own. But Lapham then slammed the mole-faced midget with this zinger:

"I was impressed by the remark, not only because it was tasteless and vulgar, but also because it was a cliche."

And how.


Peter Coyote, above, doesn't know whether to be aroused or massively resentful of having to pretend to respect the "talents" of a pair of tits on feet.

Analogcabin @ 9:09 AM
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