Nicolas Roeg’s 1985 film adaptation of Terry Johnson’s fanciful, satirical play — about Marilyn Monroe (Theresa Russell), Albert Einstein (Michael Emil), Joe DiMaggio (Gary Busey), and Senator Joseph McCarthy (Tony Curtis) converging in New York City in 1954 — has many detractors, but approached with the proper spirit, you may find it delightful and thought-provoking. The lead actors are all wonderful, but the key to the conceit involves not what the characters were actually like but their cliched media images, which the film essentially honors and builds upon. The Monroe-Einstein connection isn’t completely contrived. Monroe once expressed a sexual interest in him to Shelley Winters, and a signed photograph of Einstein was among her possessions when she died. But the film is less interested in literal history than in the various fantasies that these figures stimulate in our minds, and Roeg’s scattershot technique mixes the various elements into a very volatile cocktail — sexy, outrageous, and compulsively watchable. It’s a very English view of pop Americana, but an endearing one. (JR) Read more
From the Chicago Reader (April 7, 1995). — J.R.
Tank Girl
**
Directed by Rachel Talalay
Written by Tedi Sarafian
With Lori Petty, Malcolm McDowell, Naomi Watts, Ice-T, Don Harvey, Reg E. Cathey, Scott Coffey, Jeff Kober, Iggy Pop, and Ann Cusack.
I wasn’t exactly encouraged by the opening sequences of Tank Girl, a spin-off of a British comic book with a postapocalyptic setting. The movie starts with a kind of music-video visual dribble, set to the pounding strains of Devo’s “Girl U Want,” a song whose chanting refrain (“She’s just a girl — the girl you want”) seems to promise the kind of machocentric SF soft-core porn dished out by Barbarella 27 years ago. I’d been prepared for a steady influx of contemporary rock and rap and the concomitant collapse of any believable vision of the future, but this particular anthem seemed designed to cater only to guys. My expectations were raised, however, by the first appearance of Lori Petty, in the title role of Rebecca Buck — a hard-nosed renegade punk who clearly wouldn’t let herself be palmed off as a bimbo. But Kesslee, the movie’s arch-villain (played by the original movie punk, Malcolm McDowell), brought me back to the facetious S and M rhetoric of the glib and cutesy Barbarella. Read more
