++
Two-part miniseries starring Zoe Saldana as young mother-to-be Rosemary Woodhouse, who unwittingly finds herself in the midst of a coven of baby-killing witches. Transplants the action of Ira Levin's novel from New York to Paris, seemingly for no reason other than to differentiate itself from Roman Polanski's original adaptation, next to which this version pales into insignificance. Good enough on its own to maintain mild interest -- provided, of course, the unnecessarily explicit and violent scenes with which the story is regularly punctuated serve their purpose in keeping you awake. (Neither Levin nor Polanski needed to resort to such tactics.) Despite its 240-minute length, the film adds very little to the story; its few embellishments -- a meaningless lesbian kiss, for instance, or the idiotic trope of a character who hallucinates then acts as if nothing unusual happened -- distract from the suspense rather than adding to it. No standouts among the performances, either, and Carole Bouquet is certainly no Ruth Gordon as Rosemary's overly-solicitous neighbor. The credits oddly state that the film is based not only on Levin's novel, but his sequel, Son of Rosemary, as well, though one would be hard-pressed to find any material drawn from the latter work, which, after all, takes place more than 30 years after the events of this story.
Two-part miniseries starring Zoe Saldana as young mother-to-be Rosemary Woodhouse, who unwittingly finds herself in the midst of a coven of baby-killing witches. Transplants the action of Ira Levin's novel from New York to Paris, seemingly for no reason other than to differentiate itself from Roman Polanski's original adaptation, next to which this version pales into insignificance. Good enough on its own to maintain mild interest -- provided, of course, the unnecessarily explicit and violent scenes with which the story is regularly punctuated serve their purpose in keeping you awake. (Neither Levin nor Polanski needed to resort to such tactics.) Despite its 240-minute length, the film adds very little to the story; its few embellishments -- a meaningless lesbian kiss, for instance, or the idiotic trope of a character who hallucinates then acts as if nothing unusual happened -- distract from the suspense rather than adding to it. No standouts among the performances, either, and Carole Bouquet is certainly no Ruth Gordon as Rosemary's overly-solicitous neighbor. The credits oddly state that the film is based not only on Levin's novel, but his sequel, Son of Rosemary, as well, though one would be hard-pressed to find any material drawn from the latter work, which, after all, takes place more than 30 years after the events of this story.
RSS Feed