Day 19: Two of the Weirdest Movies You Will Ever See

Friday, May 6, 2011

DAY 19, MOVIE 1:

The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976), directed by Nicolas Roeg. If you want weird, then look no further than The Man Who Fell to Earth. This film stars David Bowie as an alien named Thomas Jerome Newton, who travels to earth in search of water to bring back to his dying home planet. During his stay on Earth, he introduces a number of new inventions, which brings him millions of dollars in profit. He falls in love with a hotel employee, and becomes addicted to many aspects of life on Earth (most notably television and alcohol). What makes this film so weird is the combination of Bowie’s performance with the irregular story structure. Bowie plays Newton as a figure who knows he looks human on the outside, but on the inside he is far from it. You can tell by looking in his eyes, that there is something missing in the way he fits into the world around him. The story structure is also odd. This movie is very nonlinear, and doesn’t have any apparent rhyme or reason to the sequence of the scenes. If you’ve seen 21 Grams, then you’ll have an idea of what to expect here. The Man Who Fell to Earth is a movie that no two people look at the same way. Some will love it for being completely different from every other movie out there and its unique performances and infinite metaphors, while others will hate it for its lack of answers and linear structure. This is my third time watching the film, so obviously I like the strangeness of Roeg’s direction and Bowie’s performance. Seeing that this was made back in 1976, The Man Who Fell to Earth is the earliest example I can think of which experimented with such strangeness and sporadic nonlinear structure.

DAY 19, MOVIE 2:

Slaughterhouse-Five (1972), directed by George Roy Hill. All I knew about this movie before I watched it was that it is about a man who is unstuck in time. I had no idea if this meant he was living several eras of his life at the same time, or if he was jumping from place to place, or if he even had any control over his time travel. My questions were answered very early on. He doesn’t live multiple eras simultaneously; he randomly jumps from one time to the next with no control, rhyme, or reason. There are many times in his life that we get a window into, but the one event he keeps going back to is his time in a POW camp during World War II. And that’s really all there is to it. This movie was all concept and no substance. The movie is very easy to follow, I do credit George Roy Hill’s direction for seamlessly cutting from time to the next, without disorienting the audience. The downfall of this movie is that the novelty wears off fast. After a couple of jumps through time I was ready to see something new, but never did. Hill never added any insight from any of the characters as to what this man was experiencing. And after the first half hour I forgot this man was actually jumping through time, and thought this movie was merely structured similarly to The Man Who Fell to Earth. The meaning of the time travel itself was completely lost, until the very end where everything was wrapped up all too quickly in the most lifeless manner possible. Without any character development, or an overarching story of some sort, Slaughterhouse-Five was nothing more than an interesting premise turned into a very hollow film. I never read the book, so I have no idea if these problems are inherent in the source material. Even if I had read the book, I would still have these same criticisms for the movie, because I believe a book should be judged as a book, and a movie should be judged as a movie. So as far as movies go, you can skip this one.