TinsHeadline Touches You

Raetsonwe Redundant and unnecessary.

TrueHello Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

Hayden Kane There is, somehow, an interesting story here, as well as some good acting. There are also some good scenes

Tony Bush ROSEMARY'S BABY (1968) Polanski's satanic chiller delivers a masterclass in creeping paranoia and growing unease. It pulls off that elusive achievement, the one whereby most of the action takes place in daylight hours in contemporary New York yet still managing to be eerie and spine tingling. The director knows his Hitchcock well and exploits accordingly whilst imposing his own singular stamp of identity throughout. The integration of bizarre arcane dream sequences and surreal events with a wholly modern environment helps form the spiritual core of this truly satisfying urban horror film. Technically and emotionally, it's a winner, and the years have done little to diminish its power.As in REPULSION (1965) before it and THE TENANT (1976) after it, the apartment (block) setting is as much a character as anything or anyone else. Across this concrete canvas, deftly, and in common with those other two films, ROSEMARY'S BABY manipulates audience sensibilities through recurrent interchanging beliefs – from this is really happening, to this is all in her mind, to this is really happening, to this is all in her mind, and so on. The ending is suitably creepy and haunting and will stay with you.So, it's cool, stylish, thrilling, scary, suspenseful – good stuff. I haven't seen it for a couple of years, but intend to revisit soon.Why bring it up? Ah, well, because I just sat through... ROSEMARY'S BABY (2014)...a 240 minute TV Mini-Series in two parts. And this is a diabolical travesty. For the most part, it seems to be intended as a showcase for the dubious acting talents of Zoe Saldana. Ms Saldana takes the central role of Rosemary. She also produces the show along with two of her family.In all honesty, Mia Farrow, who featured in the original, irritates me as an actress in ways that cause me to actively avoid films in which she appears. Apart from ROSEMARY'S BABY, that is, in which her cutesy, whiney, elfin, borderline-anorexic, drippy, fragile, neurotic flower-child persona fits the role and the film and the time to absolute perfection. In anything else, I have to avert my eyes, but in RB she's the ideal choice.Zoe Saldana is very pretty to look at. Outside of that, she irritates me here even more than Farrow in any film that isn't RB . Every other sentence she speaks is punctuated by a nervous and incongruous giggle that becomes really annoying after the first ten times it manifests. And it never stops. Just when you think it's gone, it pops up again. It's the most unnerving and affecting thing about this whole venture. I don't know how much creative control the girl had, but someone should have at least advised her to stop with the giggling every other line as it doesn't effectively represent dramatic punctuation. Maybe they did. Maybe they got fired for it. Lucky them.RB 2014 is one of the most sterile pieces of work I've seen for a long time. It's a resolutely flat, monotone one chord visual drone that is filmed without style, panache, flair or meaning. The script is mundane, the performances are mediocre and there is very little by way of tension or suspense. Actually, that's an exaggeration. There's nothing by way of tension or suspense.The original didn't really need overt special effects to make a point or illustrate anything. This version uses them sporadically – computerised hallucinations, flies, blood, gore, viscera, fire, scalded flesh, etc. It's all amateurish stuff, half-heartedly rendered, and fails to add any life or interest. Worse still, the trajectory of the fates of most of the characters is signposted in the most obvious ways.The one bright spot was seeing Carole Bouquet in a prominent role. She looks a little faded around the edges these days, but remains something of a vision of stylish beauty.Some might wonder why I watched it. Why I stuck with it until the bitter end – which, by the way, turned out to be a jaw-droppingly mindless conclusion consisting of a shot of a portly baby in a pram with luminous blue contact lenses blazing like lasers in place of his eyeballs. And this is scary and disturbing how, exactly? As opposed to laughable?Recently I have been watching HANNIBAL and FARGO and enjoying them. Good quality stimulating and intriguing US TV. HANNIBAL especially pushes the envelope in tone, style and content, with humour so black, serrated and malevolent it almost leaves bite marks. I had an idea that RB might be up to the same standard. Got that wrong.Stayed till the end because I'm a stickler. And an optimist. Didn't get any better. More fool me, perhaps.

Neely OHara I've seen the original perhaps a dozen times over the years and find it to be a fairly decent film for the time-period (1968). I rather well like it actually.It is true to the time, Mia Farrow is great, I love Ruth Gordon and how pushy the two oldies are and how smarmy John Cassavettes is. It totally works.This re-make stumbles and falls. Face first.Zoe Saldana plays Rosemary like she's still stuck in 1968. I don't know any women in this day and age who would behave like such sniveling, crying, Stepford wives. Half the time she has no clue what's going on around her, the other half she's sobbing and making a truly unattractive crying face and blubbering all about.She has no life except to support her husband's ambitions (not an actor this time but writer). She has one friend who ends up getting brutally killed in a kitchen accident in the second episode of the two-parter. This is one of a number of deaths (but more personal because it is her best friend) that Rosemary endures surrounding her once she and her husband move into this creepy building owned by Roman and Margaux Castevet who semi-adopt Rosemary and her snarky chin-less husband (who always has a five day growth of beard) in a weirdo sex-cultish inappropriate kind of way.This is different from the original film because the couple was considerably older, more like grandparents to the nubile Rosemary. In this version there are even lesbian undertones between Rosemary and Margaux and of course later we know what Roman has been up to as well. Though I might be confused by this since Roman is Steven Mercato and he is also supposed to be the Devil? In the original is was a beast who rapes Rosemary. In this version it is Steven Mercato/Roman Castevet.Rosemary keeps finding out things that are horrible and terrifying (like all the people dying around her including her best friend whom she just sobs over a little and promptly completely and totally FORGETS) and is going to make her stand but never does because someone gets killed or dies unexpectedly and she has to go to a funeral. She gets preoccupied by her baby shower with all these weird older people (and none of her own friends and neither she nor her husband have any family either). Then when she finds out that they are "all satanic witches" (though this material nor the original makes no actual distinction between witches who have no devil and are not satanic and just dumps all witches into the believer and follower of Satan category - how very 1600's of them)her husband acts like she's lost her mind and she's having a break- down. She cries and sobs and whines and howls and keens through the entire thing.There's a brief moment when Rosemary looks things up on the internet but it is glossed over. This Rosemary is no feminist, she is a pregnant mess, crying and weeping uncontrollably and unable to make a decision or take care of herself. And she is totally her husbands (and everyone's) bitch which in 1968 was offensive but in 2014 is ridiculous.This re-make does not work in the 21st century. Satanists aren't witches and anyone with Google can find that out in a heartbeat. Witchcraft and spells have absolutely NOTHING to do with Satanism. Witchcraft is part of pagan earth-based religion. Satanism is a reversal of Christianity. I would have hoped in altering things from the source material for this version they might have gotten that right.I can excuse the 1968 version for its ignorance but not this version. This makes it insulting to any pagan or witch to be lumped in with Satanists once again when no pagan belief system even has a Devil- figure.Hollywood recycles another classic original film into a weak and pandering re-make that is tiresome and laughable.Jason Issacs mugging with his evil-eye staring had me nearly laughing out loud at how sneeringly comical it was.For the record New York City is much creepier than Paris. I even felt bad for Paris to have to co-star in such a crappy re-make. And all French people, though fortunately almost none are in the film. How interesting that you can go and live in Paris and everyone is British.As a curiosity this would be amusing if it was about an hour and half shorter. As it stands you'll be rolling your eyes and checking the time as you snore toward the end.

spencergrande6 Remaking one of the great films (not just horror) of all time is not a very good idea, and almost certainly was going to be met with resistance and negative feedback and groans of lack of imagination nowadays. But "Rosemary's Baby" does present some interest as a modern updated take on the original 60's set story.How does the story and Rosemary's actions change in the modern world? What with the internet and cell phones and instant information, and maybe most importantly, a strong independent "modern" woman. The casting of Zoe Saldana as Rosemary, famous for her tough as nails action heroines she's been known to play, would seem to suggest this.None of this means anything however. The movie does open with Rosemary chasing down a burglar, resulting in a cop calling her brave and reckless, suggesting he needs more cops like her. Yet this leads nowhere. Never again does Rosemary do anything rash or without someone's permission. If the movie were to suggest that her independence had been taken from her, then yes maybe that would be interesting but that's not what's here.Instead we get a basic retread, expanded upon here and with some added gore there, with a fresh city that really amounts to nothing other than some French accents. Rosemary doesn't every really feel out of place here, except one time near the beginning when she suggest that she can't stay at a party because everyone is speaking French. But then everyone speaks English and that's that. Everything is plot contrivance without any new raison d'etre (I had to). Much like the recent wasted attempt at a "Carrie" remake...

wes-connors In Paris, an attractive pregnant woman jumps out of her apartment window, and splatters her bloody body on the sidewalk. Next, also attractive American ballet dancer Zoe Saldana (as Rosemary "Ro" Woodhouse) suffers a miscarriage. She and her struggling writer husband Patrick J. Adams (as Guy Woodhouse) will eventually be "connected" to the couple in the opening scene. They move to Paris, where Mr. Adams gets a professorial job. An unholy combination of providence and happenstance arranges for Saldana to have her purse snatched, which leads to a meeting with eerie Carole Bouquet (as Margaux) and her weird husband Jason Isaacs (as Roman Castevet). The wealthy couple decides to set the younger couple up as parents to a new version of "Rosemary's Baby" (1968)...Many of the changes are plausible and interesting, but they add nothing and bring along a new set of problems. For example, introducing a parallel couple works, but it does make the villains seem less powerful and mysterious. The biggest strength is the expanding of the character played by Mr. Adams, but we jump from him being suspicious (like when he encounters his parallel) to participating wholeheartedly (we guess, from the ending of part one). One of the oddest additions is how Saldana, director Agnieszka Holland and filmmakers give the relationship between "Rosemary" and her attractive sponsor a Lesbian vibe. They kiss several times and Ms. Bouquet even gets to cure a headache by sensuously stroking Saldana's chest...The second half of NBC's two-part TV Movie re-make of writer Ira Levin's classic novel, which was originally directed by Roman Polanski and starred Mia Farrow, covers the "troubled" pregnancy of Rosemary. The interesting revisions introduced in the first half become increasingly uninteresting. The hint of a Lesbian romance between Ro and her sponsor is cast to the wind. Instead, the character seems to go for Guy. Some of the story becomes (unintentionally) laughable, such as the scene where Ms. Saldana chows down on the guts of a chicken. The cat "No-Name" is a real scene stealer. Viewed in a singular sitting – minus many commercials – the film starts out intriguing and drags down as the revisions become predictable. Filmmakers might have been wise to consider an abortion.**** Rosemary's Baby (5/11/14, 5/15/14) Agnieszka Holland ~ Zoe Saldana, Patrick J. Adams, Carole Bouquet, Jason Isaacs