Nicholas Roeg

10:02am

Active member
Nicolas Roeg

The Criterion Collection has just recently announced they'll be putting out Bad Timing and The Man Who Fell To Earth. The latter is one of my all-time favorite films (and is being released on DVD for the third time). Any other Roeg fans out there? Criticism? Recommendations?

edit: realize I've misspelled 'Nicolas' in the thread title... accept and move on!
 
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michael

Bring out the vacuum
I've only seen The Man Who Fell To Earth and Don't Look Now, but thought both were good. Both were pretty disturbing too.

I really enjoy the OTT 70s cinematography in both flicks, which I can admittedly see would be pretty easy to giggle at if you're not getting into them.

In fact when I saw that Top 10 films thing I thought of Don't Look Now straight away. Which is a bit weird given I've only seen it once maybe 5 years ago and have no desire to watch it again!
 

blissblogger

Well-known member
Performance is fabulous, i can quote huge swathes of the dialogue complete with accent and intonation

Walkabout, also wonderful, makes me sob uncontrollably--the John Barry theme music is so poignant. Strangely that's one O/S/T that's never been released, i don't think
 

francesco

Minerva Estassi
"Eureka" is also fantastic. Well, anything I have seen from Roeg is fantastic, expecially "performance" and "don't look now".
 

k-punk

Spectres of Mark
About time we mentioned Don't Look Now....

How have we got this far down the thread without mention of Don't Look Now? The film with possibly the most shocking ending ever, all the more powerful for the fact that the hall-of-mirrors, cavern-of-echoes narrative has horribly pre-figured it (but we, like the Donald Sutherland character, can only work that out at the very moment it is too late). Like most of Roeg's films, it is about time; the illusion of the future collapsing into a continual compulsion to repeat a past that was never present.

Eureka, his 'remake' of Citizen Kane, is also an underrated masterpiece, as is his version of Heart of Darkness (until Malkovich ludicrously arrives as Kurtz) - perhaps the only thing he has done since the late 80s of any merit.

What happened to Roeg, I wonder? Just another casualty of the Restoration I suppose. But no-one sums up more the decline of British cinema: a figure like Roeg - experimental AND popular, an avant-mythographer - is totally unimaginable now (just compare all those Vinny Jones-style Lad Gangster flix to Performace, you'll see what I mean).

I learn from Iain Sinclair's book on Crash that Roeg was once slated to direct an early version of the film: imagine that, back in the 70s, the Westway....
 

francesco

Minerva Estassi
k-punk said:
I learn from Iain Sinclair's book on Crash that Roeg was once slated to direct an early version of the film: imagine that, back in the 70s, the Westway....

That goes in the "ideazone" of masterpiece that never are. Also because sadly the Cronemberg film is (except a few moments) disappointing (also Crash should have been ambiented in the '70, not in the '90, where he makes for various reasons little sense, but seems Cronemberg had a very limited budget to do the film...)
 

k-punk

Spectres of Mark
I like Cronenberg's Crash, but think that Sinclair is right when he says it comes from a 'world without news' --- that captures its decontextualized delirium perfectly I think. Whereas all of Ballard's work is anchored very firmly in time and place; Crash is very much a novel of the early 70s in London (a novel so time-bound in fact, that it has been considered one of THE moments at which the 60s ended). As Sinclair also observes, the loss of Liz Taylor as the libidinal centre in Croneberg's Crash gives the film a peculiar hollowness... All of which makes the lost possibility of the Roeg Crash film even more intriguing....
 

jenks

thread death
agree with all the recommendations upthread but would also add Insignificance - the one where marilyn/ einstein and others all in the same hotel - not only is it marvelllously scripted it is also perfectly shot - there is a great (literal) kissoff to the movie and when i first saw it on video, i rewound it and started watching again straightaway.
he seems to have great casting - hackman in eureka is compelling in a a way he hadn't been since the conversation
also i see roeg as an anti-merchant ivory - if he goes back to the nineteenth century/edwardian era it's not pretty and it's not accompanied by opera.
i think he ended up making a lot of straight to video/late night tv only stuff with theresa russell.
like others on this list he is alos a massive conrad nut - nostromo as the critical text in all this.
 

Buick6

too punk to drunk
'Bad Timing' looks more interesting than 'MWFTE'..

'Don't look now' is a stellar example of post-Swinging 60s Brit-psych-horror.

It would be nice if the Brit's got back into making gothic-sexual-horror that they did so well with Hammer/Amicus etc in the late 60s up until the early 80s.

The last really good Brit horror flick was 'Xtro'!

I'm sick of UK films with 'lads', 'crims' and dated Brit-pop soundtracks. 'Layer Cake' looks god-awful!
 

michael

Bring out the vacuum
k-punk said:
How have we got this far down the thread without mention of Don't Look Now?
I mentioned it in the first reply in this thread, actually! :p

I learn from Iain Sinclair's book on Crash that Roeg was once slated to direct an early version of the film: imagine that, back in the 70s, the Westway....
Sounds great. Can't be worse than Cronenberg's, which I found very boring and un-provocative.
 

michael

Bring out the vacuum
Buick6 said:
It would be nice if the Brit's got back into making gothic-sexual-horror that they did so well with Hammer/Amicus etc in the late 60s up until the early 80s.
A friend in London is working on some kind of Amicus movie at the moment. Admittedly it'll be a zero budget, just done among friends type thing, but I thought it seemed like a kind of cool thing to have a go at.
 

labrat

hot on the heels of love
PHILIP LARKIN,LOVE AND DEATH IN HULL This documentary, directed by Ian Macmillan and aired last year on Britain's Channel 4, delicately presents the innate humor and self-thwarting neurosis of the dour poet. Dowdy misanthropes torturing each other, alcoholism, life painted in the limited color palette of British Leyland Motors: If J.G. Ballard's Crash had been made into a film in its own epoch, its sensibility could perhaps have felt something like this.
(lucy mckenzie-top ten from summer Artforum)
 

owen

Well-known member
roeg had an unusually acute awareness of what was interesting in pop, didn't he? very telling that bowie and jagger were terrible in everything else....i kind of disliked the stones until seeing performance and suddenly getting it (better than the records, really)....both have such presence in those films- because they're portraying personas they devised themselves? but it goes the other way as well- bowie's berlin period is almost him becoming what roeg saw in him.

don't look now is terrific, and insignificance is great and underrated....there's always so much pleasure in texture in his stuff, sad that british cinema is now dominated by the influence of clods like leigh and loach (and the gangster stuff is too awful for words) tho i do think lynne ramsay is kind of in that tradition

i could easily imagine his crash being better than cronenberg's- what i missed in that was the euphoria in the book- the film is such a grind, and ballard so overloaded and hyperactive...bruce robinson wrote a treatment for high rise in the late 70s, would have been tres 1979 if it had actually got made
 

mind_philip

saw the light
I think when Don't Look Now was released it was with The Wicker Man as the B feature... the high water marks of British Horror absent mindedly packaged together.
 

henrymiller

Well-known member
Strangely [walkabout's] one O/S/T that's never been released, i don't think

it has been out in the uk, blissblogger, a few years back. i think some barry collections have it too.

i love 'bad timing'. penman wrote about it in (of all places) screen. according to rocksbackpages, it was his interview with roeg (in vital signs) that got him sacked from the nme.
 

10:02am

Active member
mind_philip said:
I think when Don't Look Now was released it was with The Wicker Man as the B feature... the high water marks of British Horror absent mindedly packaged together.


Why absent mindedly?
 

jd_

Well-known member
Has anyone seen Track 29? I saw it last year and really liked it. It's hard to explain the premise without ruining the film but it's a surreal story set in the suburbs focusing on a woman and her husband who's obsessed with model trains.
 

k-punk

Spectres of Mark
Track 29 I always thought was the moment when Roeg really lost it... It's his collaboration with Dennis Potter, which should have been a dream ticket, but just didn't spark (it's actually based on Potter's early 70s TV play, Oedipus Schmoedipus, which Sphaleotas in particular always raves about)...
 

jd_

Well-known member
I trust your call on it not rating with his other films, I've only seen it and The Man Who Fell To Earth, but I got into it when I was watching it.
 
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