From Monthly Film Bulletin No. 507, April 1976. –- J.R.
The Man Who Fell To Earth
Great Britain, 1976 Director: Nicolas Roeg
A stranger from another planet lands in New Mexico; calling himself Thomas Jerome Newton, he sells a series of rings to various jewellery stores and soon amasses a small fortune. He approaches Oliver Farnsworth, a homosexual lawyer in New York specializing in patents, shows him his plans for nine inventions destined to transform the communications industry, and concludes an agreement whereby Farnsworth supervises Newton’s World Enterprises Corporation and communicates with Newton, who wishes to maintain his privacy, chiefly by phone. Dr. Nathan Bryce, a chemical engineering professor, becomes intrigued by the corporation and decides to learn more about its master-mind. When Newton faints in an elevator, unaccustomed to the acceleration, the attendant, Mary-Lou, nurses him back to health and becomes his lover, tempting him into a taste for gin. After building a house on the lake where he landed and inaugurating a private space program, Newton hires Bryce as a consultant, and the latter discovers with a hidden X-ray camera that Newton s metabolism is not human. Newton intimates that he came to Earth because his race was dying from a lack of water and that his space program is designed to return him to his wife and children. Read more
From Monthly Film Bulletin, April 1975 (Vol. 42, No. 495). — J.R.
My Pleasure Is My Business
Canada, 1974 Director: Albert S. Waxman
Deported from America by a U.S. senator who wants to keep her
away from his son-in-law, Gabrielle, a promiscuous movie star and
sexual liberationist, is flown to the country of Gestalt. After
confering with his aides, the corrupt Prime Minister decides to admit her
into the country, thereby hoping to deflect some of the charges of
immorality laid against the government. Gabrielle is accorded a
luxurious suite by a North African hotel manager in exchange for
the promise of sexual favors, and applies for a job as sexual
therapist with pudgy psychiatrist Freda Schloss, who turns out to
want the therapy herself. While the Prime Minister and his
henchmen plot ways-of arresting her for prostitution,
Gabrielle picks up an artist in a cafe and makes love with
him in his flat, looks up an old French girlfriend who acts
in porn films (along with the local police chief), and attends
a wild costume party given by another old friend. Cornered
by the police when she returns to her hotel, Gabrielle
persuades them to drop the charges by reminding the
police chief of his skin-flick activity. Read more
This appeared in the May 21, 1993 issue of the Chicago Reader. Although the YouTube link given below no longer works, I can happily report that it’s out now on DVD. — J.R.
STAR TIME
*** (A must-see)
Directed and written by Alexander Cassini
With Michael St. Gerard, John P. Ryan, Maureen Teefy, and Thomas Newman.
I doubt that any current media buzz term is more ideologically polluted than “family values.” Even its alternative, “suitable for the whole family,” doesn’t contain the same puritanical lies. The egregious false assumptions built into this phrase as it’s now used are breathtaking: that families are all alike when it comes to their values; that these shared values are somehow independent of — and therefore free of — the sex and violence purveyed by Hollywood movies (“sex and violence” invariably viewed as an irreducible entity that also mysteriously includes profanity); and that, because they eschew sex and violence, “family values” are uniformly good and healthy. These assumptions seem predicated on the notion that everything bad that happens in society necessarily occurs outside the home, on the streets. Never mind that statistics show that an inordinate amount of lethal violence occurs during national holidays, in homes, between family members; this is factored out of the discussion along with the inconvenient fact that babies (and therefore families) are generated by sex, not storks. Read more
