1970 half-Gangster/half-psychedelic movie
Rating: 15/20
Plot: Chas is a heartless thug of a gangster who ticks off his boss, Harry Flowers. Flowers sends other thugs to rough up Chas to punish him for his choices, and during the proceedings, one of those thugs is murdered. Chas is then forced to leave the gangster movie and enter a trippy rock 'n' roll video. He hides out in the basement of Turner, an aging rocker played by aging rocker Mick Jagger, and gradually the madness and counter-culture of Turner and his two female roommates assimilates Chas until boundaries are broken and identities merge.
Disorientingly lewd enough to, according to legend, cause a Warner Bros. exec's wife to vomit during a screening. Lots of color swirls, jump cuts, general choppiness, and experimental shots make this an interesting product of the late 1960's. The juxtaposition between the worlds of the gangster and the rocker is jarring but blurred mostly by eccentric offbeat style--jumpiness, weird angles, close-ups, crazy Moog music, psychedelic colors. That juxtaposition is a common theme with Nicholas Roeg, it seems. (See The Man Who Fell to Earth and Walkabout.) Like almost every other Roeg movie I've seen, it just seems incomplete; something missing is keeping it from being a really great film instead of just a really interesting one. (Note: co-directed by Donald Cammell) Visually arresting and thematically compelling, including a final twenty minutes that seems deliberately perplexing and left open to interpretation, this is something worth seeing again.
Lucyfer the Dog trying to stop me from watching Performance:
4 comments:
Congratulations to all of you! You just didn't have enough on your plate, huh?
This was a very strange film. It was sometimes interesting and sometimes simply repellant(?). You said it well in your review; it just missed being a very good movie. The self-indulgent and experimental style certainly didn't help. The most interesting thing for me was the knowledge that Jagger and Richards were writing one of my favorite songs, "Gimme Shelter", during the making of this film. A 13.
I love it when you pull up these old ones. I could easily rate this one lower as I started disliking this movie the more I thought about it. It, by the way, is exactly the type of movie I'd imagine you would really hate. Sort of like that 'Who Are You, Polly Maggoo?' movie I reviewed a week or so ago. Those all-style and no-or-convoluted-substance things.
Are you a Stones fan? I have Godard's movie about the Stones sitting on my shelf. It's been over there for a long time because it's a nonfiction dvd that I can have for 21 days and nobody else is putting it on hold so I can renew it endlessly. Who knows? I may never watch it.
I am a lower-teir Stones fan. They have a LOT of singles that I like, but I have never really liked a whole album of theirs... they are a little too R and B based for my taste. Kelly and I saw them in concert about 10 years ago, and Kelly fell asleep. I'm not kidding. I couldn't believe it. She wasn't even sleep-deprived!
By the way, did your brother really say that he hates The Beatles? After reading many of his movie thoughts and now hearing his views on my favorite music group, I'm thinking that we should never be in the same room together.
I've at least gotten my brother to acknowledge the importance of the Beatles, but yeah, he doesn't like them. You could survive in the same room together although you'd likely end up hating each other. Both of you are non-violent types though, so I doubt there would be bloodshed. His biggest problem is that he's opinionated and doesn't always state his opinions as opinions. It's hard to deal with, but he's gotten a lot better in recent years, mellowed a bit. So now instead of "The Beatles suck and are worthless," we'd get an "I just don't like the music of the Beatles." I still haven't gotten him to admit the genius behind the Beach Boys' best work. He has a tendency to hate anything popular without giving it a fair shot.
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