Lejink
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Of the Nicolas Roeg films I've seen thus far "Eureka" is in many ways the most conventional. Probably this is due to its being based on real-life events, to wit, the horrific murder in his palatial house of a powerful and super-wealthy man just as the Second World War is nearing its close.
Before we get to that, there's an eerie, atmospheric prologue set in the Yukon twenty years earlier where Gene Hackman's Jack McCann character achieved his one goal in life, to strike gold and become rich beyond his wildest dreams. Fast forward those twenty years and he's married to his now dissolute wife, Jane Lapotaire with an impulsive adult daughter, played by Theresa Russell, waited on hand and foot, living the life of luxury on his own private island in the Bahamas named Eureka after the word he uttered when making his lucky strike.
But of course, great wealth doesn't guarantee great happiness and so Jack's peace of mind is beset on two fronts. Firstly his impressionable daughter has fallen in with a handsome, libertine go-getter, Rutger Hauer's titled Frenchman Claude van Horn. Jack thinks Claude is literally a gold-digger and is provoked to extreme rage and violence against him when he learns the couple have secretly married. His other concern is that he's being pressurised by his up till now trusted business partner who's now in tow to a shady mobster who wants to open up Eureka to gambling, like a second Cuba.
How this self-made man confronts head-on both of these problems and the disastrous consequencies which follow, determines the outcome of the movie, culminating in his horrific killing and the subsequent trial of van Horn, the verdict coincidentally falling due on the day the war actually ends.
Like I said, this Roeg film is perhaps easier to follow than others in his catalogue, but naturally he throws in a few curve-balls along the way and elsewhere demonstrates his undoubted directorial bravura. The depictions of sex and violence are graphic, especially the drunken orgy scene masterminded by van Horn and the nightmarish slaying of McCann in his own bed but these are contrasted with the opulent depiction of the trappings of wealth and the matter-of-fact gravity of the extended courtroom trial.
I personally felt that rather like McCann himself, the film peaks at the moment he hits the motherlode, in a remarkably staged scene with McCann literally awash in his new wealth. There are strong performances by Hackman, and Hauer, in particular with Joe Pesci warming up on the sidelines for his future gangster roles under the direction of Scorcese.
Yes, the film is uneven with occasionaly overripe dialogue and some confusing plot-shifts but it certainly works as a study of greed, power and the corruption of wealth.
Perhaps the moral here is that it's better just to let the rainbow fade rather than chase the pot of gold you imagine is at the end of it.
Before we get to that, there's an eerie, atmospheric prologue set in the Yukon twenty years earlier where Gene Hackman's Jack McCann character achieved his one goal in life, to strike gold and become rich beyond his wildest dreams. Fast forward those twenty years and he's married to his now dissolute wife, Jane Lapotaire with an impulsive adult daughter, played by Theresa Russell, waited on hand and foot, living the life of luxury on his own private island in the Bahamas named Eureka after the word he uttered when making his lucky strike.
But of course, great wealth doesn't guarantee great happiness and so Jack's peace of mind is beset on two fronts. Firstly his impressionable daughter has fallen in with a handsome, libertine go-getter, Rutger Hauer's titled Frenchman Claude van Horn. Jack thinks Claude is literally a gold-digger and is provoked to extreme rage and violence against him when he learns the couple have secretly married. His other concern is that he's being pressurised by his up till now trusted business partner who's now in tow to a shady mobster who wants to open up Eureka to gambling, like a second Cuba.
How this self-made man confronts head-on both of these problems and the disastrous consequencies which follow, determines the outcome of the movie, culminating in his horrific killing and the subsequent trial of van Horn, the verdict coincidentally falling due on the day the war actually ends.
Like I said, this Roeg film is perhaps easier to follow than others in his catalogue, but naturally he throws in a few curve-balls along the way and elsewhere demonstrates his undoubted directorial bravura. The depictions of sex and violence are graphic, especially the drunken orgy scene masterminded by van Horn and the nightmarish slaying of McCann in his own bed but these are contrasted with the opulent depiction of the trappings of wealth and the matter-of-fact gravity of the extended courtroom trial.
I personally felt that rather like McCann himself, the film peaks at the moment he hits the motherlode, in a remarkably staged scene with McCann literally awash in his new wealth. There are strong performances by Hackman, and Hauer, in particular with Joe Pesci warming up on the sidelines for his future gangster roles under the direction of Scorcese.
Yes, the film is uneven with occasionaly overripe dialogue and some confusing plot-shifts but it certainly works as a study of greed, power and the corruption of wealth.
Perhaps the moral here is that it's better just to let the rainbow fade rather than chase the pot of gold you imagine is at the end of it.
Based on a recent play, "Insignificance", directed by Nicolas Roeg is a provocative, if for me, ultimately head-scratching exercise in alternative history and imagined meetings one night in 1954. It throws together four of the most well known people in America at that time, scientist Albert Einstein, actress Marilyn Monroe, star baseball player Joe Di Maggio and politician and the main driver of the era's Communist witch hunt, Senator Joe McCarthy.
The jumping-off point for the feature is the location shoot in New York with Monroe famously having her white dress billowing up around her waist for the movie, "The Seven Year Itch". Her then husband, Di Maggio was reportedly furious at seeing his wife being flaunted so brazenly, especially as off-camera there was an on-location crowd of actual citizens lapping it all up. The two reportedly had a huge argument over it in the lobby of the hotel where "The Actress" as she's credited, ends up, but the twist here is that Marilyn is instead shown visiting the hotel to meet Einstein who's in town to give a peace talk.
But the great scientist has had an earlier visitor that night, the too obviously heavily sweating (that was Nixon, no?) right-wing firebrand Joe McCarthy, a man to whom posterity will never assign greatness. He's there to force a very resistant Einstein to instead speak up for his anti-Communusm cause and will stop at nothing to get his way.
Marilyn surprises Einstein with her simplistic but nevertheless cogent explanation of his theory of relativity and the two kind of weirdly connect, even as we see old Albert isn't exactly immune to her physical charms.
The last to the party is Monroe's estranged husband, Di Maggio, portrayed as dumb, self-possessed and jealous, who trails his wife to Einstein's hotel room and suspects the worst. While this is happening, McCarthy is frolicking with a prostitute, the hypocrisy of which will be exposed when he encounters Monroe alone in Einstein's suite, Albert having earlier discreetly withdrawn. Although he doesn't identify her as the famous actress, he espies a blackmail opportunity but as we've seen, he can't resist the lure of the flesh when Marilyn seems to offer herself to protect Einstein's work and reputation. In a wave of self-disgust, he hits her in the stomach which threatens the baby she's carrying and whose birth could yet save her failing marriage.
It all ends in a seeming nuclear cataclysm, just after Marilyn astutely predicts the coming of the very topical in 1985, when the movie was made, neutron bomb...or does it?
The film is clearly sympathetic to the Monroe and Einstein characters as we see flashbacks of her life showing her being bullied as a child and being preyed on by boys and men as soon as she comes of age while Einstein is shown having guilty nightmares about his part in the atomic bomb. Di Maggio and especially McCarthy are portrayed as coercive boors although some of Di Maggio's blind love for Marilyn does show through.
I have to admit that beyond its identification with Albert and Marilyn, I struggled with the wider points the movie was presumably trying to make about post-War America. I didn't learn anything about the four principals I didn't already know. Quite why none of them are ever named escaped me too. I didn't even get the significance of the "Insignificance" title either and the fleeting appearance of a Native American Cherokee as a lift operator in the hotel with his "centre of the universe" credo seemed very forced too.
I've enjoyed many of director Roeg's earlier films and none of them are an easy watch, but here I guess he was bound by the content of the original play, which is probably where my problems of perception and understanding ultimately lay. Despite fine impersonations by Michael and Roeg's then wife Theresa Russell as Einstein and Monroe, I felt I needed Albert's brain to ultimately make sense of this one.
The jumping-off point for the feature is the location shoot in New York with Monroe famously having her white dress billowing up around her waist for the movie, "The Seven Year Itch". Her then husband, Di Maggio was reportedly furious at seeing his wife being flaunted so brazenly, especially as off-camera there was an on-location crowd of actual citizens lapping it all up. The two reportedly had a huge argument over it in the lobby of the hotel where "The Actress" as she's credited, ends up, but the twist here is that Marilyn is instead shown visiting the hotel to meet Einstein who's in town to give a peace talk.
But the great scientist has had an earlier visitor that night, the too obviously heavily sweating (that was Nixon, no?) right-wing firebrand Joe McCarthy, a man to whom posterity will never assign greatness. He's there to force a very resistant Einstein to instead speak up for his anti-Communusm cause and will stop at nothing to get his way.
Marilyn surprises Einstein with her simplistic but nevertheless cogent explanation of his theory of relativity and the two kind of weirdly connect, even as we see old Albert isn't exactly immune to her physical charms.
The last to the party is Monroe's estranged husband, Di Maggio, portrayed as dumb, self-possessed and jealous, who trails his wife to Einstein's hotel room and suspects the worst. While this is happening, McCarthy is frolicking with a prostitute, the hypocrisy of which will be exposed when he encounters Monroe alone in Einstein's suite, Albert having earlier discreetly withdrawn. Although he doesn't identify her as the famous actress, he espies a blackmail opportunity but as we've seen, he can't resist the lure of the flesh when Marilyn seems to offer herself to protect Einstein's work and reputation. In a wave of self-disgust, he hits her in the stomach which threatens the baby she's carrying and whose birth could yet save her failing marriage.
It all ends in a seeming nuclear cataclysm, just after Marilyn astutely predicts the coming of the very topical in 1985, when the movie was made, neutron bomb...or does it?
The film is clearly sympathetic to the Monroe and Einstein characters as we see flashbacks of her life showing her being bullied as a child and being preyed on by boys and men as soon as she comes of age while Einstein is shown having guilty nightmares about his part in the atomic bomb. Di Maggio and especially McCarthy are portrayed as coercive boors although some of Di Maggio's blind love for Marilyn does show through.
I have to admit that beyond its identification with Albert and Marilyn, I struggled with the wider points the movie was presumably trying to make about post-War America. I didn't learn anything about the four principals I didn't already know. Quite why none of them are ever named escaped me too. I didn't even get the significance of the "Insignificance" title either and the fleeting appearance of a Native American Cherokee as a lift operator in the hotel with his "centre of the universe" credo seemed very forced too.
I've enjoyed many of director Roeg's earlier films and none of them are an easy watch, but here I guess he was bound by the content of the original play, which is probably where my problems of perception and understanding ultimately lay. Despite fine impersonations by Michael and Roeg's then wife Theresa Russell as Einstein and Monroe, I felt I needed Albert's brain to ultimately make sense of this one.
This third episode dramatising and updating to the present day stories from the EC pulp-horror 50's comic range was an entertaining tall-tale told from the subjective viewpoint of a ne'erdowell named Ulric. A down-on-his-luck, he answers the call of an eminent scientist to be the first human guinea-pig for an experiment to transfer the genes of a cat to a human. So a cat is duly sacrificed to transfer its nine lives to a human and sure enough, when Ulric miraculously comes back from a point-blank shot in the face by the professor, it seems he has more to go.
Despite the obvious lure of an extremely long life, both the professor and his patient can't resist the lure of a quick buck and take Ulric to a fun-park, where he soon starts coining in the money as the man who cannot die. It's not long before greed tempts Ulric to dispose of his maker, especially after he's hooked up with the apparently dimwitted blonde who acts as the "magician's" assistant.
But when the not-so-dimwitted blonde makes her play, Ulric is left to use his last life to help secure his financial future, which sees him interred in a coffin. Only then does a sudden thought strike him and we learn that karma is rately instant.
Director Richard Donner has fun with the carnival setting and in particular, the ghoulish tendencies of the audience who bid high amounts of money for the thrill of actually killing someone.
Vividly told and laced with black humour, this was another entertaining entry in this high-quality series.
Despite the obvious lure of an extremely long life, both the professor and his patient can't resist the lure of a quick buck and take Ulric to a fun-park, where he soon starts coining in the money as the man who cannot die. It's not long before greed tempts Ulric to dispose of his maker, especially after he's hooked up with the apparently dimwitted blonde who acts as the "magician's" assistant.
But when the not-so-dimwitted blonde makes her play, Ulric is left to use his last life to help secure his financial future, which sees him interred in a coffin. Only then does a sudden thought strike him and we learn that karma is rately instant.
Director Richard Donner has fun with the carnival setting and in particular, the ghoulish tendencies of the audience who bid high amounts of money for the thrill of actually killing someone.
Vividly told and laced with black humour, this was another entertaining entry in this high-quality series.