Rosemary's Baby Pt 2: This is Really Happening!

Rosemary's Baby print by Jonathan Burton. For sale here.50th Anniversary Three-Part Mini-Series
Occasionally we'll take a movie and baton pass it around the team and really dive in. 

Rosemary's Baby (1968) is 50 years old now but it feels both ancient and fresh. It's always alive when you watch it. Having seeped into the very DNA of both the movies and our nightmares, it deserves a deep dive. In Part One by Seán McGovern we watched as Rosemary (Mia Farrow) and Guy Woodhouse (John Cassavettes) moved into a strange new apartment building, saw a neighbor mysteriously die, and become socially entangled with an intrusive neighbor couple Minnie and Roman Castavet (Ruth Gordon and Sydney Blackmer), who are both eccentrically endearing and very possibly sinister. 44 minutes into the film we can scratch out "very possibly" and just make that sinister. Full stop. We return to Rosemary just as we realize she's been drugged by Minnie's chocolate mousse "mouse" and has begun to dream... - Editor

Part 2 by Jason Adams

44:21 It seems appropriate to jump right in in the middle of a dream about to turn nightmare, for what else is Rosemary's Baby but that?

44:21 So much of this sequence will come back to haunt us later when Rosemary makes her final horrific discovery...

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Rosemary's Baby Pt 1: Tannis, anyone?

50th Anniversary Three-Part Mini-Series
Occasionally we'll take a movie and baton pass it around the team and really dive in. If you missed past installments we've gone long and deep on Rebecca, Silence of the Lambs, Thelma & Louise, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, and A League of Their Own. Now... Rosemary's Baby - Editor

Part 1 by Seán McGovern

I'm delighted to take you through Part 1 of Rosemary's Baby, a terrifying personal favourite. 

00:01 William Castle, who in the pantheon of horror was basically a schlock-jock, produced the film but according to Mia Farrow, Castle was at one point going to direct. What would the outcome of that have been? Potentially not the paranoid horror we revere today but maybe something more gimmicky. William Castle was portrayed by John Waters in Ryan Murphy's Feud: Bette & Joan, and if that's not a fitting tribute I don't know what is.

01:00 In these short two minutes of opening credits are also the names of some of the twentieth century's best character actors: Ruth Gordon, Charles Grodin and Ralph Bellamy. The theme melody is la-la-la'ed by Mia Farrow herself, giving that girlish tone a chill that you'll also be humming all day...

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Hidden Streaming Gem: "Miami Rhapsody"

Hello! Robert here. The other night as I was enjoying my long Fourth of July weekend I was in the mood for a movie; something I hadn't seen, something light and funny, something for a summer night on the couch with a bottle of rosé. After clicking around on HBONow for a few minutes boy did I ever find what I was looking for: a gem of a '90s pseudo-intellectual rom-com called Miami Rhapsody. Won't you take a journey back in time with me and explore this strange little film?

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Beauty vs Beast: The Men In Rosemary's Life

Jason from MNPP here on another Monday afternoon with another round of our weekly "Beauty vs Beast" series - today happens to be the 49th anniversary of my favorite movie Rosemary's Baby. Roman Polanski's masterpiece (one of his several masterpieces) was dropped from beak of the devil's stork into the world on June 12th 1968, a wailing bundle of joy (with its father's eyes) that became the 8th biggest film of the year, scoring over 33 million at the box office (aka 230 million in 2017 dollars, putting it on par with what Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them made last year) and forever giving pregnant woman something shiny and new to worry themselves about. (All of them witches!)

This being my favorite film we've already devoted one of these columns to it - we faced off the womenfolk with Rosemary (Mia Farrow) taking on Minnie (Ruth Gordon) last fall. Gordon won, same as the Oscars. So this time around let's turn our attentions to their respective partners! There's no time like Right Now for "Sleazy White Men Who Think They Own Women's Reproductive Organs" after all, so I give you Guy Woodhouse (John Cassavetes), star of "Nobody Loves an Albatross" and a world-class creep, and Roman Castavet (Sidney Blackmer), door to door Satan salesman. Choose wisely, your womb will thank you...

PREVIOUSLY We took a quick trip to the Moors last weekend to put poor Jane Eyre through the wringer again but in the end Mia Wasikowska came out on top (and who wouldn't want to come out on top of Michael Fassbender) with 58% of your vote. Said Nick T:

"I'm so happy to cheer for Jane. It's a great performance (yay Mia!), and if Jane won't act as her own hype man then I'll happily do it tor her."

Beauty vs Beast: Age Ain't Nothing But A Couple of Numbers

Jason from MNPP here, wishing Jennifer Garner a happy 45th birthday with this week's edition of "Beauty vs Beast." I know Garner's got some fans up in here, and I know that we are all hoping she can pull her career out of this slump its been in - even when she's had a hit movie like Dallas Buyers Club most people found her role superfluous to the plot. Anyone who watched Alias knows she deserves better. I'm hoping for a post-divorce Kidman Bump. I contemplated tackling Juno for this competition since the film's turning 10 this year but there's no solid VS. there so instead we'll go back to her big hit in 2004 - 13 Going on 30, in which she abuses in two timelines a never more adorkable Mark Ruffalo...

PREVIOUSLY Turns out The Film Experience community loves F. Scott Fitzgerald's book The Great Gatsby as much as I do and we've got lots of opinions on the movie versions - as for which Daisy we prefer, it was Baz's blonde Carey Mulligan loved those beautiful shirts just a little more, to the tune of 51% over Mia Farrow's 49. Said Aaron:

"Call me crazy, but I thought Carey Mulligan nailed the vocal pitch of Daisy. She was sinewy, a bit aloof, yet girlish and sexy. I thought she reeked of money, as described in the book. It's an incredibly difficult part to nail, since so much of Daisy (in the book) exists through Gatsby's ideals and dreams. I think it's ok if the actress playing her comes off a little empty, cause I think that's the reality of Daisy herself.

There were a lot of things that didn't work in Luhrmann's version, but I thought the casting was solid for the most part (other than Tobey Maguire, whom I'm allergic to in everything). Edgerton and Debicki were especially good in the film as well."