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June 25, 2018

in honor of #balls i'll be making a #donation to the #Orchiectomy club in your name @jimmyfallon PLUS Professor Snape's #Film #Quiz



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WATCH Willy and Toots DeVille (3 videos - lost and found again - thanks aggiespoenk) PLUS Interview (also gone)


WATCH Willy and Toots DeVille (3 videos - lost and found again - thanks aggiespoenk) PLUS Interview (also gone)


Video 1ère||




Charles Dumont, Edith Piaf, Doc Pomus Connexion!
  http://i.ytimg.com/vi/MJshooqelpw/0.jpg
||You recorded ||Le Chat Bleu|| in  ||Paris||  because of || Edith Piaff | ?| 

||Yeah, it was for the chance to work with
||||Charles  Dumont||
who'd written music for  
|| Edith |and| Doc Pomus ||

Ouais, c'était pour avoir la chance de travailler avec||||Charles  Dumont||

 le composeur qui avait écrit la musique pour
||Edith |et|Doc Pomus ||


 «Un reve de mon vie» ||
Télévision Française   || 1982 || 
What you see in Video 1ère is a still very junk-dependent (although in this film, a junkie with a full dose, and as fine as wine and more healthful and alive than you or I or ten friends--the unfair trade-off that junkies make in lieu of anything approximating real health). 


The Willy DeVille of 1982, whom without knowledge of such encumbrances would perhaps be appraised as a Rock Star with epic centering, or confused for unwarranted extra charm which his looks do not require to be unfair to most men--or perhaps simply demonstrating his oft-sung  savoir faire  in these dreamy vignettes as instant Parisian peripaticienne engaging in crepuscular discussion avec one of his many (and to me, his most charming of charms), obscure collectibles,  le compositeur pour Edith Piaf, et Doc Pomus, Charles Dumont (throw in Little Willie John's Parisian Aunt and he'd have hit the French Derby trifecta). |
||| 

|| Here is the subtly, almost criminally sly insertion of the most delicate scent of Piaf film scenes in what is an  initial weaving of what will elegantly transform into an Edith Piaf narrative, replete with flash forwards,  flashbacks, and moody placemarker referencing for a story Willy relates through the piece (as you suddenly realize, this is not a dated Rockumentary but a French soul-mining, and luckily one that pulls back before any typical franco-overarching can do it damage). I tried to imagine this appearing on my 1982 screen, and just couldn't...I could only picture myself in my first girlfriend's living room grimacing at John Stossel...slightly realizing that the Internet has not been thought up yet.
 ||You know the first day I walked into the studio and they were working with an orchestra, and I heard the strings playing one of my songs. I had to go into the bathroom and shed a tear. Seeing these guys playing their instruments, with long white hair hanging down over their collars, looking like what classical musicians are supposed to look like, doing a song I wrote, really got to me. 
Video 2ème
2ème  ||



Willy DeVille  ||
Charles Dumont  ||
compositeur pour  Edith Piaf || Doc Pomus ||  
«Un reve de mon vie» ||

Télévision Française   || 1982 ||




I will continue to research more backstory on the origin/creation of this tribute to legendary Punk Soul Dracula-man, Willy DeVille, through his gravel-road, Howlin' Wolf Meets Barrio Gangbanger - magic, North of Miles Davis, but not much - vocal chords,  the same sorely missed Willy Deville whom I also called a friend and neighbor in the early-90s witchy Quarter, and as featured in Lech Kowalski's brilliant document of the final days of Johnny Thunders (whose shocking reality came home to us all the more for its unexpected almost filmic intrusion into our otherwise oblivious Vieux Carre life one April). 


Junco pardner, barely by definition (although I've never met a man who shared the excitement of the fool's  transitory few hours deliverance that a pill brings). 
I thought I was over my mourning from week of his (to me) unexpected, premature death, but certainly this document, more appropriately described as clairvoyant verite into his ultimate inquisitiveness and acquisitiveness, proves that theory wrong--happily.
read both halves of interview conducted 2006, in which Willy goes into great depths on his New Orleans move (why), and more interestingly, regarding this video--on Charles Dumont (Doc Pomus musical co-composer, and most famously, or obscurely known to not just me, I assume, but as Edith Piaf's favorite go-to compositeur of her late chansons (which I also look forward to digging and updating this blog upon finding--gladly).




||Roughly  our conversation could be divided into the early years, the middle part, and what's going on now||E nviron notre conversation pourrait être divisé en les premières années, la partie du milieu, et ce qui se passe maintenant||
||
||Willy is always "doing" something to keep moving on musically, personally, and whatever else is needed for growth as an artist||
  
||Willy est toujours «faire» quelque chose à garder de passer musicalement, personnellement, et tout autre élément nécessaire à la croissance en tant qu'artiste||

Where did it all start for you, you were born in New York right?
No I was born in Stanford Connecticut (laughs); nobody's born in Manhattan. We moved there when I was 13 or 14, but I had been coming into town since I was about 12… I had fallen in love with the city.
The bright lights and all…
Nah, it was the musicians. Everywhere there was music it was amazing. But it was everything else too, you know, the smells of pizza … Somewhere else than where you are always looks better to you, and we all come from some little itty bitty place. I don't want this to sound like those, he came from a small town and made it big stories right, but it's more about having a dream and having the patience and the, oh I don't know what (me: "perseverance") yeah, to make it happen, you know, and that's what I feel like it's always been.
Why music, what was it about music that grabbed you?

 Well according to my mom I was singing before I was talking right. I mean I don't even come from a musical family, but it just always seemed so natural to me. You know I grew up and I had older brothers, four and six years older, so there was always music around, on the radio at breakfast as we ate our corn flakes, or American Bandstand. I still remember listening
Listening to the radio and the songs I would get you know like images of the story in my head, like reading a book and you imagine what's going on. I would see the music like that too, in my head while listening…
There's something that happens to me when I sing, (a slight hesitation as if he's unsure about talking about this, like how's this going to go over), this is going to sound weird right, but it's like I don't know where the voice comes from for different songs, but it's just there. I described this to a friend once and he said it sounds like voice shifting, where a masking spirit comes over people and sings through them…
That sounds like what happens to Native singers when they sit around the big drum and are playing. They sing in this high falsetto, that nobody can talk in, and that they sure don’t talk in…
Did you say native, like native American? Cause you know that I'm part native...
Which part? No, no, I mean which nation, sorry.
Iroquois, I'm part Iroquois, part Basque, a little of this and a little of that. I'm a real street dog.
Heinz 57
(laughs) Yeah right. I prefer street dog.
Did you ever hear any of that stuff Robbie Robertson did with Red Road Ensemble about, I don't know a dozen years ago… He's an Iroquois..
That's right he's from up around near you. Isn't he?
Yeah Grand River Six Nations reserve
There was this album he made with John Hammond that changed my life.
Robbie made an album with Hammond?
Yeah him and Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks, Levon Helm, or Lee-von,( laughs) back in 1962, it was called So Many Roads It's still around on CD you've gotta to hear it, it's amazing.
So how did it all start for you; what was your first band, was it Mink DeVille?
Nah the first band was The Royal Pythons. Wanted it to be different from what everyone else was doing, electric this and strawberry that. But actually, you know I went over to London for a couple of years, real obvious American with my Pompadour hair, kicked around until my money ran out than came back here.
I had only been back a bit when a buddy called me up, and they were out west in San Francisco, he'd had to leave town cause he'd gotten in trouble with the cops, and he said I should come out there it was really amazing, he'd already met Lighting Hopkins' drummer. So I bought a 57 Chevy Van and drove out. 
I used to really like the work of Tom Waits back in the late seventies and early eighties, that sort of trash can jazzy/blues, and I was thinking there were similarities in your music, maybe not style, but intent.
Yeah? Maybe it's something about the band and how we work together; when we set up on stage it's not with the audience in mind, but so that we can see each other, and look around and have fun… if we're not having fun, nobody else is going to have fun are they. So we want to be in contact with each other all the time.
Tom's music is like that too, there's that quality of being really tight, but so tight that you're loose.
I want to tell you something about Tom. Back in 1980 I was banned in Boston. I had done something or other foolish, and this guy, a booking agent who if you pissed off could guarantee you'd never work Boston, said "Willy DeVille will never work Boston again." Well Tom was playing in Cambridge Mass. and we were traveling with him. Tom refused to go on, not only if we weren’t allowed to play, but also if we didn't get equal billing. He really put his balls to the wall for us. This agent guy was making this huge fuss about it, but Tom just said "Willy gets equal billing or I don't play." So they gave us equal billing.
Can you do me a favour, I want you to say thank you to Tom from me in what you're writing. I want that out there. A lot of people don't understand where Tom's coming from, with some of his stuff, but I think when you’re an artist you just aren't going to be satisfied with doing the same stuff over and over again. You want to do something new to surprise people with. Whether they like it or hate it…
One of the first teachers I had always talked about making people have an opinion, you don't want anybody being ambivalent about your work
You had a good teacher
The last thing you want to hear is that your work is "nice".
Yeah that's for sure. You know and that's what people have got to understand about anybody who's serious about this stuff, it may sound selfish, but we can't keep doing the same stuff over and over again. We need to keep trying different things.
The curse of originality
Yeah (laughs) I'm a singer/songwriter, and the front man, so I have to deal with all these different facets, taking the flak and so on. It's hard to keep the passion going sometimes, and if you can't keep changing it up, it would be damn near impossible.
Why did you leave New York for New Orleans
I was tired of being 'Willy DeVille'...
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Thanks to Author: Richard Marcus
Published: May 15, 2006
Part 2 Interview
Why did you leave New York for New Orleans?
I was tired of being 'Willy DeVille', walking out of my building and having to be the guy who was up on stage all the time, even when I wasn't performing. I wanted to get away from that. So I got down there and it was this famous guy had come to town, and I didn't want that. So I decided to do an album with a bunch of the musicians from down there, the music of New Orleans.

People like Dr, John, Eddie Bo, Champion Jack Dupuis and all sorts of others. Victory Mixture is still one of the albums I'm proudest of; I think its one of the best records I've ever done. And you know what; I don't think there's more than one or two originals on it. It's all old stuff, music from New Orleans.

I remember as a kid I used to go see these shows where there would be like four or five bands on a bill, and it was great, and I thought wouldn't that be a great thing to do. So I got in touch with all these guys I had made the record with and we did this great tour of Europe.

The travel, buses, and planes; and the accommodations had to be some of the worst I've ever experienced, but the shows themselves were great. At the end of each show we'd throw Mardi-Gras rows out to the audience, you know strands of purple and gold beads, and they'd never seen anything like it and they loved it.

You do a lot over in Europe, what's the attraction?
Well I don't want to sound like one of those guys kvetching, but have you seen what's on the charts over here?
Wait a moment I have gotten something written down, where is it, yeah, here: 'Striving for Mediocrity'.

(laughter) Yeah, that's it. I mean over there they still talk about Eddie Cochran and all the great old stuff as if it's still alive. There's a passion that's missing too often over here.

You recorded Le Chat Bleu in Paris because of your liking for Edith Piaff, is that right?
Yeah partially, but it was for the chance to work with some incredible people as well. Charles Dumont who had written a lot of the music for Edith, and Doc Pomus. You know the first day I walked into the studio and they were working with an orchestra, and I heard the strings playing one of my songs. I had to go into the bathroom and shed a tear.

Seeing these guys playing their instruments, with long white hair hanging down over their collars, looking like what classical musicians are supposed to look like, doing a song I wrote, really got to me.

When I did this album I wanted to make music that would stand the test of time. I take what I do seriously, but at the same time I have fun making every album I do. If that's not there, if you're not enjoying the album how can you expect anyone else to?

It may sound selfish but I'm playing the music I want to, and everyone else can kiss off as far as I'm concerned.

On Le Chat Blue we had all these great people involved, you know, and we thought we had something great. I came back to America, and my label at that time said, "well we think we should put it on the shelf for a while." This was right before Christmas for God's sake, when you know people are going to be buying stuff, so I asked them what the problem was?

They said they had never heard anything like it before and didn't know what to do with it.

We had Charles Dumont, Elvis's goddamned rhythm section, and they say they've never heard anything like it.

I was heartbroken and angry. Finally Maxine from my distributor in France phones and he says, Willy what's going on? So I told him.

He said don't worry we'll release it over here. We did, and then it became a matter of not what are we going to do with Willy Deville, but who the hell let him get away. As an import it was wracking up great sales here. Capital finally went and released a copy of it, but never did too much work on it.

I remembered what Nietzsche said, which was he never could understand why they had signed us in the first place. They were the Beatles and the Beach Boys, safe bands, and they hired a bunch of guys who looked like street toughs who looked like they were going to kill them.

(He laughs)

I wanted to ask you about the album you made with Mark Knopfler, I can't remember its title ("Miracle" Willy supplied) how did that come about?


Was he assigned to produce you by your label or did it come about some other way?
It was Mark's wife Lourdes who came up with the idea. She said to him that you don't sing like Willy and he doesn't play guitar like you,
Nobody plays guitar like him.

That's for sure, but you really like his stuff so why don't you do an album together?

So I went over to London to do this album. It wasn't easy because we didn't want it to sound like a Dire Straits' album, and his guitar playing is so unique that it was hard to do. But nothing good is going to be easy. I know that I spent the whole time really trying to impress Mark, I wanted it to be good.

But, yeah it was his wife Lourdes who was responsible more than anyone else for that album. She's a really great lady, really nice. I still really like that album, especially "Southern Politician".
In an interview with you on theLive In The Lowlands DVD you talked about Mark's reaction to the song "Storybook Love"…
Oh yeah that was funny. I played him what I had and he looked at me and said how did you know about that. I said what, and he said that he was working on a movie with Rob Reiner called the Princess Bride and I'd just written a song that told the story. He got on the phone and phoned Rob and told him, and Reiner said to get it out to him as soon as possible. So we did it up rough and sent it off and he loved it.
The next thing I know I'm standing backstage and listening to Dudley Moore and Liza Manelli introduce me before going out to sing "Storybook Song" at the Oscars. There I was standing backstage with Tom Selleck and Karl Malden, waiting to onstage. It was weird…
Yeah I saw that awards show, I think I watched it just to see you. I remember thinking wow, and to quote a line from the movie My Cousin Vinnie"Oh and you blend (laughter)
Yeah it was a really strange experience. But you know Tom Selleck was really nice. When I got off stage he leaned over and squeezed my knee and said "you did great." That was really nice of him you know. Malden was a little more standoffish. I went up to him afterwards to tell him how much I liked his work and he just kept saying, "That's so nice of you to say that". But I guess if you're always getting that, it must be tiring (pause) I wouldn't know. (laughter)
Well I guess I should be letting you go soon, but I wanted just to find out what you've got planned for the future. When I saw you in the DVD you were walking with a cane and in some pain, and I was hoping that's nothing permanent.
No that was just temporary, I had to have hip replacement surgery, which is a bitch to recover from but now it's pretty much better. I got to tell you I'm in the best shape I think I've been in my entire life. You know I've got to keep exercising the leg to help it heal so I go for walks every day, and, I bet you never thought you'd hear this coming out of Willy DeVille's mouth, I've been thinking of going to the "Y" to work out. (laughs)
We've never been to Japan or Australia, so we want to do a tour of those countries. I've got a little sister who lives out in Australia who I haven't seen in ages, so I'd like to see her. There aren't many of the family left any more, so that would be a good thing. Anyway she's so proud of her big brother.
Nina (his wife) and I can make a trip to Japan into our second Honeymoon. I've wanted to go out there before but the idea of the travel was just too much.
Yeah I just saw Arlo Guthrie in concert and he talked about his recent tour out to Australia. He said the trip was brutal. Fifteen hours stuck in a little cabin breathing bad air.
Oh shit and I thought you were about to tell me it wasn't that bad.(Laughs) It doesn't matter. You know there are people there who want to see us, so I figure we owe it to them to come over and do our music for them (Author's note: I've since learnt that it's an Australian record company, Raven, that's been responsible for re-releasing a lot of Willy's older material, with all sorts of bonus features.)
I've also been working on a book. It's about all the people I've known who are no longer around, the ones that didn't make it for one reason or another. It's going to be funny, but it's also going to be dark at the same time. These were all friends of mine and they were great people, but well things happened. So I want to write about them, and tell their stories.
That reminds me about something else, you know I look at pictures of you now and they're so different from ones 20 years ago. You don't look as angry, more at peace.
I'm more comfortable in my own skin now than I have ever been. So that could be it.
Whatever it is, it hasn't diminished your passion. Where does that come from?
My passion comes from my music, which is an expression of the passion I feel from making music. There's this feeling you get of absolute silence when you know that the crowd are listening, and that silence is louder than anything else I've ever heard in my life. Those are my moments of absolute bliss. I feel sorry for people who can't feel those moments of euphoria. But in order to feel passion you have to be passionate about something in the first place. For me that's music. 
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June 23, 2018

John Phillips - The Man Who Fell To Earth [Soundtrack Demo] 1976

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13 Nicolas Roeg Movies Ranked From Worst To Best by Shane Scott-Travis (because i couldn't read it on his site)

All 13 Nicolas Roeg Movies Ranked From Worst To Best

by Shane Scott-Travis
“Nicolas Roeg is a chillingly chic director.”
– Pauline Kael
Born in 1928, polymath filmmaker Nicolas Roeg – who turns 90 on August 18th of this year – began his cinematic career as a camera operator (early credits include Ken Hughes’s The Trials of Oscar Wilde [1960] and 2nd unit photographer on the David Lean classic Lawrence of Arabia [1962]), before moving on to being a cinematographer 

(François Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451 [1966], and Richard Lester’s Petulia [1968] rank among his most noted works as DP)

and then later, of course, as composer, editor, writer, and director.

 “When I first encountered cinema it was with a sense of wonder,” Roeg told Time Out in an interview back in 2006. That sense of wonder was evident in the first film he helmed as director, the narrative-shattering, censors-be-damned arthouse exercise/crime drama Performance (1970).

 Much of what’s present in Performance (which was co-helmed by Donald Cammell) would come to characterize all of Roeg’s finest films; a narrative shell game of skewered chronology; elliptical and often jolting representations of fleeting memories; nightmarish variegations of sound and image, often kaleidoscopic abstractions and juxtapositions like shiny smashed glass once used to reflect the subconscious now reconstituted into Roeg’s expressive idiosyncratic style.

 An almost immeasurable influence on many current mainstream filmmakers, particularly those with an experimental angle; 

Danny Boyle, Gaspar Noé, François Ozon, Lynne Ramsay, Ridley Scott, Steven Soderbergh, and Ben Wheatley, to name just a few.
The following list examines Roeg’s feature films.

(PLEASE NOTE: absent from this ranking are his numerous shorts, made for TV projects, and Aria, a 1987 anthology film he contributed to), while also elaborating briefly on the societal impact of his considerable and often celebrated works. 

If Roeg is a new discovery for you, than treasures await, and if he’s already a name very familiar for you, perhaps revisiting some of this marvelous work is in order?

“Fierce, uncompromising, iconoclastic, dazzlingly original, [Nicolas Roeg] is British film’s Picasso.”
– Danny Boyle

13. Two Deaths (1995)
Adapted from Stephen J. Dobyns’s 1988 novel “The Two Deaths of Senora Puccini”, Roeg’s dialogue-heavy film relocates the action from Chile to Romania, amidst a violent revolution running rampant in the streets, spurred by Communist dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu, near the end of his reign. Running contrary to the upheaval outside is the lush mansion interior of the hedonistic doctor, Daniel Pavenic (the always excellent Michael Gambon), who’s hosting his annual dinner party for his dozen closest friends.

As the revolution rages, only three of Pavenic’s friends are able to make it to the mansion where, as events often do in a Roeg film, discourse turns to sexual obsession. Pavenic, it’s revealed, has a very shocking and psychologically disturbing, not to mention unhealthy, relationship with his house servant, Ana Puscasu (Sonia Braga).

Largely a chamber piece structured around a startling and lengthy conversation, Two Deaths should be more engaging than it ultimately is. Smartly directed, and with strong performances, it’s a relentless and often unruly picture, and sadly only a minor one in Roeg’s otherwise remarkable canon.

12. Puffball (2007)
Potentially a fan’s only affair, Puffball employs Roeg’s requisite stock of frightening imagery in this deeply unsettling, supernatural-tinged tale of Liffey (Kelly Reilly), a young architect relocated to the bucolic Irish countryside with her fiancé Richard (Oscar Pearce) where she plans to refurbish and restore a long gone to waste cottage.
Unfortunately for Liffey, her ambition restoration dream home is the former abode of elderly Molly Tucker (Rita Tushingham), an eccentric neighbor who lives with her peculiar adult daughter Mabs (Miranda Richardson) – mother of three girls, but desperately wanting a son.
When Richard, an American, takes a trip back to his old haunts in NYC, Liffey learns she’s pregnant, which doesn’t sit at all well with Molly and Mabs. Certain that their family should be the ones to have a child, Molly and her brood, also occult dabblers, have no problem using black magic to upset Liffey’s pregnancy.
While certainly considered a minor work in Roeg’s canon, The Guardian’s Philip French accurately details the films as “a curious mixture of Straw Dogs and Rosemary’s Baby”, and if that descriptor piques your interest, be sure to see it.
11. Cold Heaven (1991)
Northern Irish-Canadian writer Brian Moore’s 1983 novel “Cold Heaven” is the source material for this supernatural-infused thriller from Roeg (adapted for the screen by Allan Scott).
Alex (Mark Harmon) and Marie Davenport (Theresa Russell) are an unhappily married couple in Mexico for a medical conference/working vacay, where Marie is gathering the nerve to tell Alex that they’re through and that she will be leaving him to be with her lover, Daniel (James Russo).
Inexplicably (at least at first) haunted by an image of the Virgin Mary, Marie takes her time before revealing her intentions to Alex, and before she’s able to confess her affair he is involved in a boat accident. The events of which are so horrific and contradictory, they seem buoyed by the hand of God. With the aid of Sister Martha (Talia Shire) and Father Niles (Will Patton), Marie will, hopefully, ascertain the truth. Was it a miracle or something else?
Narratively sewed up, technically impressive, and never specific to any one genre, it’s also a film that’s been described, not surprisingly, as challenging and polarizing (like pretty much all of Roeg’s work).
“Cold Heaven starts out as a standard melodrama about adultery, continues as a head-scratching mystery thriller, takes a slow left turn into religious allegory, and winds up as a speculative and highly moral poem about marriage,” wrote noted film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, adding; “Trying to squeeze this plot into a genre would almost constitute an act of violence against movie and audience alike.”

10. Track 29 (1988)
Track 29 (1988)
Another notable collaboration between Roeg and his then wife Theresa Russell is the somewhat scabrous Dennis Potter adaptation Track 29 –– itself a reworking of Potter’s 1974 television play, Schmoedipus. Relocating the action from London to North Carolina, Linda (Russell) is one day confronted by a young man named Martin (Gary Oldman), who claims to be her long-lost son.
Linda, deeply unhappy in her marriage to her ill-suited and unfaithful husband, Henry (Christopher Lloyd), she places her affections into Martin, whom she gave up for adoption years ago, when she was a desperate teenager. But a violent streak reveals itself in Martin, as does an unruly obsession Henry.
Track 29 deliberately confronts the viewer with kink, misogyny, and societal violence. It won’t sit well with its audience, nor is it supposed to. Tantalizing and perhaps tortuous, Track 29 will trouble you and turn in your mind for some time afterward, and that is the intent. In a conflicted and mixed review of the film Roger Ebert suggests that “…not every film is required to massage us with pleasure. Some are allowed to be abrasive and frustrating, to make us think.”

9. Castaway (1987)
Castaway (1986)
Famously adapted from Lucy Irvine’s 1984 book “Castaway”, which detailed her year spent on the isolated isle of Tuin (nestled in the Torres Strait, between Australia and New Guinea) with writer Gerald Kingsland, this inspired true story, is also Roeg’s most conventional and therefore easy to digest, drama.
Amanda Donohoe is Lucy, a London secretary who answers an ad and beats out over 50 other applicants to join the wealthy and reclusive middle-aged writer, Gerald (Oliver Reed) on a tropical isle and be his wife for one year.
Par for the course with Roeg in the director’s chair, the visuals are nothing short of mesmeric (particularly the underwater sequences) and do the exotic locations considerable justice. Donohoe and Reed are excellent in their roles, and watching as their personalities coalesce and also crash, and how that resonated in their emotional and mental states is astonishing to behold.
Unfairly ignored on its initial release, Castaway was denied a U.S. release, it’s not just a film from an auteur director unfairly shunned, but a brilliant turn from a notable cast. “Reed gives the performance of his career as a sexually frustrated middle-aged man in search of sun and sex,” wrote Variety at the time of the film’s original release, also adding that “[Reed] is admirably complemented by Amanda Donohoe as the determined but fickle object of his lust.”
Thanks to an elegantly restored 4K Blu-ray and DVD editions, Castaway can and should be appreciated anew by admirers of Roeg’s. Don’t miss it.

8. Bad Timing (1980)
Bad Timing
The scandalous, X-rated mini-epic Bad Timing (denounced unfairly as tasteless and misogynistic upon its original release) has been described by award-winning British author and cineaste Geoff Dyer “…as bonkers as it is beautiful”, and he’s not wrong.
Perhaps Roeg’s most polarizing film, it’s one that explores some very upsetting places as we get familiar with expat American psychiatrist Alex Linden (Art Garfunkel). Living in Vienna, and not a particularly likeable lad, Alex has a potentially dangerous, and certainly unhealthy sexual obsession with Milena (Theresa Russell), a married American woman with more than a few vices.
Also added to the jigsaw-puzzle-that’s-missing-a-few-pieces narrative is Harvey Keitel’s police inspector Netusil, a man convinced that Milena’s hospitalization isn’t as cut and dry as Alex has made it out to be, and this is illustrated via the detective’s fantasized replaying of what could have gone awry.
Told in Roeg’s atypical nonlinear fashion, Bad Timing may read as experimental arthouse inanity for non-fans or those not so adventurous. But Roeg takes pains to detail the voyeuristic psychoanalysis of a wronged relationship, as well as the wistful and lascivious elements of an affair; how despairing people still hold powerful passions, and how some actions are too horrible to be easily or ever forgiven.

 

7. The Witches (1990)
The-Witches
Roeg’s wildly imaginative and unabashedly odd adaptation of Roald Dahl’s 1983 children’s novel “The Witches” ushered in the 1990s with a dark and delectable fantasy.
Ably assisted by Jim Henson’s Creature Shop (Henson was also a producer, and unfortunately he and Roeg regularly disagreed with one another during the production), and a wonderfully OTT Anjelica Huston, The Witches tells the tale of 9-year-old Luke Eveshim (Jasen Fisher), who is staying at a resort with his recuperating grandmother Helga in Norway (Mai Zetterling).
His idle is ruined by other guests at the hotel, the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, led by one Miss Ernst (Huston) who also goes by the secret sobriquet of Grand High Witch. Luke is certain this society, secretly a witches coven, has a fondness for transforming children into mice.
The freakish fun of the Witches, which also zigzags into creepier waters at times, is also improved upon by Rowan Atkinson’s put upon hotel manager, Mr. Stringer. For inventive and ambitious fantasy for all ages, Roeg’s The Witches delivers. Perhaps the only real caveat here, and it’s one that ruffled Dahl’s feathers more than anyone else, is that it has a much more upbeat ending than the decidedly darker source material.

6. Insignificance (1985)
Adapted from Terry Johnson’s play, Roeg’s film occurs on a summer night in 1954, set in anonymous hotel rooms where the lives of four iconic figures; Marilyn Monroe (Theresa Russell), Albert Einstein (Michael Emil), Joe DiMaggio (Gary Busey) and Joe McCarthy (Tony Curtis) – though in the film they are simply and slyly referred to as the Actress, the Professor, the Ballplayer, and the Senator – fatefully intersect. 

These recognizable popular culture figures, in typical Roeg fashion, riff on grandiose ideas and floundering emotions. What begins as trivial digressions gains momentum and significance, buoyed by stellar performances (like Curtis’s McCarthy, witch-hunting endlessly in his mind, or Russell’s Monroe, who, despite her ditzy dilettante routine can still teach Einstein a thing or two about relativity).
On the surface Insignificance may not be the exacting pedigree of Roeg’s recognized masterpieces, but it’s still a vast, ingenious allegory on fame, life, love, obsession, jealousy, and substantially so much more.

 5. Eureka (1984)
Another of Roeg’s films to be unjustly ignored upon release, “Eureka was very bad timing,” he explains. “It was the early 1980s: Reagan and Thatcher were in, greed was good, and here was a film about the richest man in the world who still couldn’t be happy. Politically and sociologically, it was out of step.”

Inspired by compelling true events, Eureka tells the story of a Klondike prospector who hits it rich, the fictional Jack McCann (Gene Hackman), based off of Sir Harry Oakes, who was murdered in the Bahamas, on an island he owned back in 1943.

In Roeg’s film, Jack’s tale jumps back in forth through his life, and we find his dynasty from the gold rush put in jeopardy as his adult daughter Tracy (Theresa Russell) and her husband Claude (Rutger Hauer) scheme away to usurp his fortune, even his soul. 

Simultaneously to this almost Shakespearean betrayal are a pair of greedy, mob-tied investors Mayakofsky (Joe Pesci) and Aurelio D’Amato (Mickey Rourke), but even they seem subdued compared to JAck’s own inner demons.
Director John Boorman (Deliverance [1972]) famously described Eureka as “the best picture ever made — for an hour”, and Danny Boyle (Trainspotting [1996]) recounted how inspiring he found the film; “There was a couple of scenes [in Eureka] in particular, a death scene, and a kind of orgy, and I remember I just felt completely breathless, just unable to catch a breath at all… It’s not a bad thing to aim for.”
As beautiful, bizarro, and byzantine as Roeg’s finest films, Eureka is a film in need of a reappraisal. “One of the richest movie labyrinths since Citizen Kane,” writes Film Comment’s Harlan Kennedy, and he’s not at all wrong. It’s another dizzying tour de force, and perhaps an unexpected one. “What Roeg brings to the party is a flair for the sensational,” enthused Roger Ebert, “for characters who are larger than their weaknesses, who are connected to great archetypal forces.”

 4. Performance (1970)
Performance (1970)
Roeg’s directorial debut (co-directed with Donald Cammell) was a product of the psychedelic and very Swinging Sixties. Produced in ‘68, Performance didn’t get released until 1970 as Warner Brothers was cold footed to release a film with such graphic violence and strong sexual content.
Today viewed as the quintessential cult film, Performance is all hallucinations and psychologically complex melodramatics, geniusly shot and edited into a compelling and complex mosaic.
Also contained within its paranoia-addled mainframe is a zero cool British gangster template (a huge influence on the crime films of Guy Ritchie and Quentin Tarantino, amongst others), and one of the most influential and imitated soundtracks of that era (Ry Cooder’s slide guitar gets mad props).

The film stars James Fox as a violent, hair-trigger hitman from London named Chas. In a serious jam, Chas tracks down the semi-reclusive rock star Turner (Mick Jagger, in his film-acting debut), looking for a place to hideout.
Turner lives with two smokin’ hot scenester companions, Pherber (Anita Pallenberg) and Lucy (Michele Breton), and though Chas and Turner initially clash, their mutual fascination with one another, combined with their drug-enhanced psychological sparring results in a stunning blur of assimilation, self-loss, and identity thievary. Sensational strangeness abounds in this phenomenal mindfuck of a film.

 3. Walkabout (1971)
walkabout
“A meditation about living on earth, which finds beauty in the way mankind’s intelligence can adapt to harsh conditions while civilization just tries to wall them off or pave them over,” praised Roger Ebert, who wrote about the film many times, accurately and enthusiastically proclaiming that “Walkabout is one of the great films.”
Powerful visual compositions with an almost religious intensity permeates Roeg’s meditative, haunting, and at times eerily surreal story of survival in the Australian outback. Using James Vance Marshall’s 1959 novel “The Children” as a starting point, Roeg’s story involves a teenage girl (Jenny Agutter) and her little brother (Luc Roeg, the director’s son), who are left stranded in the wild after their father (John Meillon) suffers a breakdown and attempts to murder them before his own horrific suicide.
Aided by an Aboriginal boy (David Gulpilil) on his titular rite of passage journey, and Roeg’s exuberant visual dynamism, Walkabout is an exotic, inspiring, and absolutely unforgettable arthouse entry.
“One of the most original and provocative films of the 1970s,” wrote The Movie Guide’s James Monaco, adding that “Walkabout is set in terrain stranger and more awe-inspiring than that of any science fiction film.”

 2. The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976)
With an abundance of unexplained skips in location and chronology and his cheeky trademark sophisticated style, Roeg’s adaptation of the 1963 Walter Tevis novel, “The Man Who Fell to Earth” is an ambitious and meditative marvel that was, of course, quite ahead of its time.
Described by Time Out as “the most intellectually provocative genre film of the 1970s,” and starring Thin White Duke-era rock icon David Bowie as Thomas Jerome Newton, an alien who’s doomed visit to Earth offers up a multifaceted and ultra-sophisticated inspection of American culture, heartbreak, and homesickness.
The film struck a chord with niche audiences, rendering it cult status pretty quickly (prolific sci-fi author Philip K. Dick became particularly smitten with the film, incorporating elements of it and of Bowie’s iconic eminence into his must-read 1981 masterpiece “VALIS”).
Bowie’s character is named for the English scientist Isaac Newton, discoverer of gravity, and as our protagonist in this mind-bending SF masterpiece, he makes discoveries as philosophically and psychologically substantial.
“The story unfolds in a daring sequence of narrative leaps,” writes The Guardian film critic Peter Bradshaw in his glowing five star review, adding that the film is “a freaky, compelling concept album of a film.”
Poignant, provocative, and deeply transfixing, genre films are rarely as meaningful, extravagant, or as ambitious as The Man Who Fell to Earth. Populist cinema this most certainly is not (when was Roeg, wearing his director’s hat, ever mainstream?), and though at times perhaps indecipherable, Roeg is a satirist and an artist of incredible breadth of view. When was sci-fi ever this iconoclastic and cool?
1. Don’t Look Now (1973)
“[Don’t Look Now] remains one of the great horror masterpieces, working not with fright, which is easy, but with dread, grief and apprehension,” 

writes Roger Ebert, adding that “few films so successfully put us inside the mind of a man who is trying to reason his way free from mounting terror.

Roeg and his editor, Graeme Clifford, cut from one unsettling image to another. The movie is fragmented in its visual style, accumulating images that add up to a final bloody moment of truth.”

After their daughter’s tragic death by drowning, grieving parents John and Laura (Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie) retreat to Venice in hopes of healing and finding peace in Roeg’s stunning arthouse horror Don’t Look Now, itself a very inspired and embellished adaptation of Daphne du Maurier’s 1971 short story.
Using a fragmented visual style involving abrupt cuts, unanticipated segues, ambiguous, often cryptic associations (the color red has never been so unsettling), Roeg creates a feeling of perpetual dread and impending doom.
This suffocating atmosphere that Roeg so expertly conjures is met with an unforgettable romantic interlude wherein John and Laura make love in one of the most brazenly erotic scenes in all of cinema. Controversial back in 1973, the love scene is still shocking and miraculous when viewed today, 45 years later.
Prolonged, explicit, and imitated many times since (perhaps most notably in Steven Soderbergh’s Out of Sight [1998]) the passion of the damaged couple is unmistakable, and their pre- and post-coital embrace of one another shows a passion and an affinity that feels absolutely genuine.

“[Don’t Look Now] is an example of high-fashion Gothic sensibility,” 

wrote Pauline Kael, remarking how  

“Venice, the labyrinthine city of pleasure, with its crumbling, leering gargoyles, is obscurely, frighteningly sensual here, and an early sex sequence with Christie and Sutherland nude in bed, intercut with their post-coital mood as they dress to go out together, has an extraordinary erotic glitter. Dressing is splintered and sensualized, like fear and death… Roeg comes closer to getting Borges on the screen than those who have tried it directly.” 

Wow!

In the years since its release Don’t Look Now is regularly regarded as one of the greatest British films of all time (a recent 2011 panel of industry experts organized by Time Out ranked it number one), often echoing sentiments articulated by the San Francisco Chronicle calling it “a haunting, beautiful labyrinth that gets inside your bones and stays there.”

Don’t Look Now is a troubling, stunning, and sensual masterpiece you’ll never forget, and it’s also the pièce de résistance of a major filmmaker at the height of his considerable powers.

Author Bio: 

Shane Scott-Travis is a film critic, screenwriter, comic book author/illustrator and cineaste. Currently residing in Vancouver, Canada, Shane can often be found at the cinema, the dog park, or off in a corner someplace, paraphrasing Groucho Marx. 

Follow Shane on Twitter 
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