Bad Timing

1980 // UK // Nicolas Roeg // May 25, 2010 // Digital Projection (Webster University Moore Auditorium)

[Bad Timing was screened on May 25, 2010 as a part of the Webster University Film Series' retrospective on the early films of Nicolas Roeg.]

[Note: This post contains spoilers.]​

If you have ever harbored a nagging suspicion that there's something a tad creepy about Art Garfunkel, then Bad Timing serves as a resounding confirmation of those qualms. If, however, your conception of the soft-spoken folk musician is bookishly benign, then his presence in Nicolas Roeg's curious film is likely to deliver an uncanny jolt, particularly when Garfunkel's character, psychology professor and profiler Alex Linden, is revealed to be a twisted obsessive and rapist. The most fascinating aspect of Bad Timing is how skillfully Roeg--working from a script by Yale Udoff--essentially achieves a noir bank shot off Garfunkel's public persona, and more generally off of his audience's assumptions vis-à-vis relationships and gender. For roughly the first half of the film, the story seems to be about a meek academic who is used and abused by Milena (Theresa Russell, all thighs and eyes), a self-absorbed party girl and compulsive liar. Then the emotional contours of the tale begin to subtly shift. The jarring, seemingly arbitrary flashbacks that Roeg sprinkles throughout the film start to accumulate into a more truthful picture of Alex and Milena's rotten relationship, and—presto!—the story is actually about a damaged woman who is controlled, stalked, and ultimately assaulted by a sociopath. It's a fake-out, but not an especially galling one. Roeg's disjointed storytelling technique is preoccupied with concealing not the mystery surrounding Milena's drug overdose, but the inevitably violent clash between her negligent personality and Alex's disturbed need to control and possess her. It's not clear there was ever love there, so let's call it a tale of lust gone sour, amplified by Roeg's relentless cutting and peculiar (at times even silly) scoring choices. While it can't hold a candle to Don't Look Now in terms of atmospherics or emotional vigor, it's still nasty, daring stuff.

Walkabout

1971 // UK // Nicolas Roeg // May 22, 2010 // Theatrical Print (Webster University Moore Auditorium)

[Walkabout was screened on May 22, 2010 as a part of the Webster University Film Series' retrospective on the early films of Nicolas Roeg.]

The most remarkable thing about Roeg's directorial debut—other than the fact that such an unabashedly poetic and self-assured work could be anyone's directorial debut—is the density of the thing. This is a film that is richly layered with meaning, and yet Roeg achieves such thematic bulk while hewing to an approach that is fairly realistic. Sure, there are heavy-handed cross-cuts, and much gooey lingering on ripe orange sunsets, and narrative digressions that range from the obscure to the weirdly comic. However, there's not much in the film that one could categorize as surrealistic or avant-garde, at least in the mode of Jodorowsky or Lynch (or, for that matter, later Roeg). It's fascinating, then, that there is such ample room for disagreement on what Walkabout is, well, about. There's some embracing and critiquing of cultural myths in there: the ignorant savage, the noble savage, the wilderness as utopia, the wilderness as wasteland. There are obvious themes of colonialism, civilization, and, yes, communication. What resonates strongest for me is the allegory of a sexual awakening (and the fear and confusion it engenders), but this is but one fragment of what makes the film such a compelling experience. Certainly, the closing scenes add a heaping dose of wistfulness, a bittersweet eulogy for those times and places to which we cannot return and are almost certainly idealized in our minds. The thematic correspondence between Roeg's film and Terence Davies' exquisite Of Time and the City is only underlined by their shared quotation (at the end and beginning, respectively) of A.E. Housman's A Shropshire Lad:

Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?

That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.

Ponyo

2008 // Japan // Hayao Miyazaki // May 9, 2010 // Blu-ray - Disney (2010)

While it possesses neither the unexpected gentleness of My Neighbor Totoro, nor the apprehensive grandeur of Spirited Away, Ponyo surely deserves a position close behind those Miyazaki masterpieces, even if it never attains such perfection itself. Certainly, there are stray elements in this alternately grounded and oneiric fable that never quite fit together comfortably, and the conclusion feels unaccountably limp and vague after all the fretting about a "world out of balance" provoked by our titular fish-girl's giddy escape. On the other hand, Miyazaki's tendency to elide crucial details about his fantasy cosmologies seems far less of a stumbling block here than in his other works, if only because Ponyo privileges unadulterated joy and the subtleties of the parent-child relationship over world-building. Together, Miyazaki's film and Henry Selick's Coraline gave us more thoughtful ruminations on growing up than the rest of the decade's kiddie fare combined. On a second viewing, what's striking about Ponyo from a visual standpoint is the spectrum of drawing styles. Consider the shots above; would you assume that they came from the same film, if it weren't for that conspicuous shock of orange hair? Given how closely Miyazaki himself supposedly labored on the animation, it's hard not to conclude that this diversity is intentional. The cruder, almost doodle-like style seems to predominate when Ponyo is caught in the protean state between goldfish and little girl. The visual approach to Sosuke and a now-human Ponyo at play, meanwhile, invites comparisons to Charles Schultz's precocious tykes, albeit given roundness of form and a richly realized environment as only Miyazaki can.

Children of Men

2006 // Japan - UK - USA // Alfonso Cuarón // May 7, 2010 Format: Blu-ray - Universal (2009)

This was my first occasion to revisit Cuarón's despairing-then-hopeful thrill ride since its fumbled theatrical release and more recent best-of-the-decade accolades (the film appeared at #76 in Slant's countdown and claimed Reverse Shot's #19 slot). In retrospect, it's clear why Children of Men—and not the hot-and-bothered arthouse amble Y Tu Mamá También, or the auteurist blockbuster Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban—is the feature that secured the director's status as the most disciplined and effortlessly engaging of Mexico's big-name film-makers. Four years later, it's not Children's dense science-fiction world-building that most impresses, nor the technical bravado of those one-take action set pieces (especially given that the visceral, immersive impact of a first-time viewing can never be recreated). No, what's astonishing is the simplicity of the thing, despite the stable of screenwriters and the mammoth, textured character of Cuarón's near-future landscape. Compared to the other science-fiction achievements of the past decade, Children of Men is a tightly plotted thing, lacking any of the extraneous elements that so often bog down other entries in the genre. While it may be less thematically ambitious than either WALL•E or Moon, Cuarón film doesn't seem to have a single narrative fumble or pinch of flab. Everything serves its propulsive, harrowing observation of Theo's journey from apathy to heroism, an evolution that Cuarón and leading man Clive Owen make all the more potent by rendering it with perfect naturalism. If Children of Men's Abu Ghraib imagery now seems stale, consider that Arizona's recent enactment of a "Papers, Please" law lends the film's police-state treatment of illegal immigrants—excuse me, "fugees"—a new-found weight. It just goes to prove that a pitch-perfect dystopian fable never loses its relevance.

Carlito's Way

1993 // USA // Brian De Palma // April 9, 2010 // Laserdisc - MCA / Universal

While Carlito's Way bears that telltale De Palma touch of the Grand Guignol, it's positively staid compared to the excesses of the director's earlier Latino crime epic, Scarface. And therein lies the root of the former film's most conspicuous faults, for in tossing out the operatic lunacy while clinging to the shameless melodrama, De Palma neuters Carlito, rendering it essentially indistinguishable from any other gangster flick. That said, there's plenty to admire here. Presenting only the final chapter of an underworld titan's fall is an admittedly novel approach, and it's fairly remarkable how De Palma sketches in so much back-story with so little exposition. While the film's violence often seems dispiritingly obligatory, it's also presented as a nasty, messy business. Tellingly, Carlito often bests his enemies through bravado and trickery rather than brute force, and the film privileges the competing criminal virtues of preparation and adaptability. Pacino, with a laughably protean Puerto Rican accent, is fully in his post-Sea of Love self-parody phase here, but Sean Penn, behind child-molester glasses and beneath a Larry Fine 'fro, is deliciously loathsome as criminal defense attorney David Kleinfeld. Unfortunately, Carlito feels like a middling gangster drama from an aging stylist who is capable of much more. (see: Ridley Scott.) Most exasperating is De Palma's affinity for torpedoing the film's most appealing moments. This unfortunate tendency is epitomized in a scene where Carlito's ex-flame Gail (Penelope Ann Miller) enticingly suggests that he could break down her chained apartment door if he really wanted to ravage her. What song does De Palma use to cap this searingly erotic sequence? Joe Cocker's "You Are So Beautiful." Yeesh.

The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian

2008 // UK -  USA // Andrew Adamson // March 30, 2010 // Netflix Instant

It was probably a foregone conclusion that the dreariest of C.S. Lewis' Narnia books would make for a much more schematic, lifeless film than director Adamson's reverential but suitably vigorous The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. This tale of a royal youth deprived of his rightful throne by a scheming nobleman is pure fantasy paint-by-numbers. Without the series' talking animals—who remain its most charming trait, especially when placed alongside the dour mythological critters—and the parallel-world plot wrinkles, there wouldn't be much to distinguish Prince Caspian from countless other epic sword-and-destiny outings. Adamson is doing his level best to give Disney their own Lord of the Rings, but neither he nor the source material is up to the task. The Pevensie kids, who seemed so perfectly actualized in the previous film, now feel static and far less compelling. The most conspicuous problem is that neither the medium nor Adamson's crude Jackson-cribbing approach provide much room for Lewis' curious cosmology to unspool, and so we're left a mildly entertaining and largely anonymous adventure... and not much else.