thebadfilmsideblog - Tumblr blog

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not me reading back through my posts and finding typos everywhere

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tommy doodle dump (including height comparison ;P)

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aw shit, now what

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a lot of positive reviews on the movie say something about how bowie was perfectly cast blah blah (he would have been better cast in 1983 when his hair colour/texture actually matched the book description but okay so he was depressed and on drugs that doesn't make you a good actor)

but what they neglect to mention is

this will never not be funny to me

[thebadfilmsideblog]

guys its tommy

(poem is musée des beaux arts by w. h. auden, it's the one in the book and the movie. the rest of the poem sucks though)

[thebadfilmsideblog]

yet another tragedy of the man who fell to earth (1976) is that it had a genuinely quite beautiful cover.

look at that. the watercolour style parallels the style of the cinematography in all the landscape shots, the colours are really nice, the shapes are aesthetically pleasing and lead the eye down the page, and i honestly quite like the reflection of newton's alien form in the water (even though it's one of the worst character designs i have ever seen with my own two eyes). it does a really good job of being a movie poster as well as an artwork on its own, both things that the film itself fails miserably at.

it might be a little wacky and the lower half might not really hold up under close inspection, but i really like it.

[thebadfilmsideblog]

ooh baby we're back in business for sure

so after my rage-fuelled obsession with the movie had died down i kind of forgot about it for the most part. (that is a lie. i am lying.) but one day i somehow discovered that it was based on a BOOK and set out to read said book out of morbid curiosity. (i expected it to be just a novel version of the movie, and i wanted to see how an author could create something so empty using words. i was wrong of course, but that's not the point.) i figured it would be at the secondhand bookstore, but i looked there to no avail. i did, however, find another novel by the same author (walter tevis); the steps of the sun. i flipped to a random page and it appeared to show the protagonist whining about how his testicles don't work. this was unpromising.

i then read the man who fell to earth on internet archive, where it is available entirely for free. you just have to make an account and then while you're reading you have to click “renew” once every hour. it took me somewhere around 4-5 hours to read i think. and it was really good.

genuinely. it was a fantastic book. (i ended up later buying it from the regular bookstore because it turns out that walter tevis also happens to be the author of the queen's gambit, that book about chess which has a show based on it, so all his books got a new life thanks to one of them being adapted.)

the book, much like the film, follows an alien called thomas jerome newton who comes to earth to save the few remaining people on his planet, except that this planet has been ravaged by nuclear war. it's also got a name: anthea. a minor issue with the novel is that it contains a lot of info-dumps, even right from the start, but compared to the unexplained torrent of bullshit in the movie, this is a fucking relief. after the pawn-shop scene which plays out pretty similarly to the movie but with more fun, relatable anxiety about being an alien and having to talk to service workers, we get some fairly unimportant and rather strange information about the alien's biology, which is also very silly and kind of fun despite being unoriginal and making no sense. remember, the year was somewhere around 1963 and the man who wrote the book was an english professor at a university. for example, antheans don't have an appendix, or wisdom teeth, or fingernails. don't ask me why. they're basically just humans but taller and thinner and with a lot of parts missing. (i like it though, it's silly.)

the rest of the book actually has a plot, similar to the vestiges of a plot in the film, wherein newton becomes fabulously wealthy, moves to the middle of nowhere with the main girl, builds a rocket-ship, hires nathan bryce who suspects him to be an alien, unrelated to this gets captured by the government, etcetera. these things are actually explained as they happen, and make sense without you having to read a guide alongside the book. in addition to the plot, there are also characters with distinctive personalities. i read the book partly aloud to my friend, and gave the characters actual voices (something i never do when reading aloud). the characters have noticeable changes throughout the novel, and each of the main trio forms a connection with the others. there is no romance plot whatsoever, which was lovely. the characters are very human, very relatable, and very ordinary, despite one of them literally being an alien. they have mundane struggles with life, work, relationships, and addiction, which are not, in my opinion, romanticized or used for spectacle. there are also themes, mainly those of isolation and alienation. it may not be the most thrilling book, there may not be a mystery or a romance or action, so if that's what you want, go read james bond. (the movies are even good, for the most part.) but while walter tevis may not have written an epic spy thriller, or a murder mystery, or an erotic romance, he did write a very beautiful little book about humanity. PLEASE READ IT IT'S SO GOOD PLEASE—

so the thing about the book is that while it is a fantastic, genuinely quite well-written (though dated) sci fi novel with a plot and honestly very likeable characters and themes that make you think instead of pretending to make you think, it does have one problem. it puts into high relief just how absolutely fucking awful the movie is, worse than i could have thought, worse than the world could have known. it is my sincere belief that the screenwriter HEARD of the book from a friend and then read it in it's entirety…during an acid-fuelled fever dream. (not as unlikely as you'd think honestly.)

but the problem with that theory is that that upon rewatching the film, there are several incredibly specific elements from the book which somehow ended up in the movie. this includes the painting of the fall of icarus and its accompanying poem, the hundreds of identical wedding rings which newton sells in the beginning to make enough money to meet with the lawyer, the shiny fingernails??? (sidenote i feel like bowie just kept putting on more nail polish as filming went on, his nails seem to get shinier every scene), the fucking oatmeal cookies (why), and probably others. this means that the filmmakers read the book and decided to replace all the themes and metaphors with surface-level spectacle, all of the plot-relevant internal monologue with shots of characters staring at one another or into space, and all of the dialogue with sex. (and everyone else was too high to argue, i suppose.)

this is such a tragedy that i can hardly comprehend it. there are even flashes, within the film, of what it could have been if nic roeg hadn't been entirely absorbed in making a cheap-looking, disjointed, “artsy” pile of garbage with an r rating slapped on to garner some kind of reaction. i would call it a porno, but that's an insult to porn directors. instead i will call it what it is, which is pathetic.

in one scene which appears to be entirely original wherein the two main characters (because nathan bryce is a sidenote of a sidenote in this movie and serves only to make bowie look prettier than he is in the ending scene) are hanging out in the hotel room and mary-lou (in the book she's called betty jo but they changed her name and aged her down about twenty years so that they could make her have sex with the main character) asks what newton does for a living and he replies, “oh, i'm just visiting,” and mary-lou, delighted, says “oh! a traveller!” and newton (bowie) gives this sweet smile and for a moment i could pretend that everything was going to be fine, except it wasn't, and the girl immediately begins blabbing again. i just wish that they had included more lines like these, more actual fucking dialogue, because it was the part of the book which i liked the best, along with the possibly-unintentional comedy.

one final thing to note before i close out this chapter is that in the book newton is constantly described as being incredibly fragile, with bones like a bird's, barely able to withstand earth's gravity (that being 3 times the gravity of his own planet, which actually checks out scientifically, and interestingly implies that anthea is slightly smaller than earth) to the point where even being bumped into would probably injure him. being bumped into. so like. if he had sex like he does in the movie he would genuinely probably just fucking die.

stay tuned for more, hopefully i don't lose this manic pixie dream bitch energy by tomorrow morning.

[thebadfilmsideblog]

now that that's out of the way, we can begin our descent into purgatory. mine began, unbeknownst to me, on a sunny afternoon a few years ago when i befriended another teen in the neighbourhood, but that's a story for another time.

no, the story truly begins about a year and a half ago with…honestly, i have no idea. i was newly obsessed with david bowie and innocent to the horrors which i would discover as time went on. i discovered that he had been in movies other than labyrinth. (a blessing, because at that point i refused to watch the thing, believing it to be some kind of propaganda from the devil himself. i have since seen it and can promise it is much better than the man who fell to earth, though not the masterpiece of cinema some deranged individuals claim it to be.) i decided to watch the movie where he was pretty and played an alien, for i have not changed in the regard that i enjoy aliens and i enjoy looking at pretty boys.

this turned out to be a big mistake. you see, i had very little warning as to how fucking shit the movie was.

i had been forewarned that there was mature content in the film, but not to the extent to which it was present. i had not been warned that the movie was over two hours long, nor that most of it was made up of disjointed sequences in which nothing happens.

i read the play-by-play of the film and still could not make heads or tails of it. the internet reviews were unhelpful (at that point i could only find the overwhelmingly positive ones which were so enraptured by bowie's pretty face that they fail to notice the distinct lack of a plot) and i had to bail on the film twenty minutes from the end, at the moment when an excessively drawn-out and visually overstimulating sex scene faded to black and was replaced by drunken table tennis. i am not even fucking joking.

freshly scarred from seeing things which i never needed to see including bowie's Entire Situation, i decided to write my very first (and only) rant review. a lot of the comedy still holds up and it's honestly a riot so i'm going to stick a bunch of screenshots in here. (this was from back when i used capital letters for anything other than Emphasis)

after writing all this i decided to also torment everyone in my immediate vicinity with my lamentations over the abysmal quality of the movie. fortunately, this was very few people, as i had no friends at the time. it got so bad that my mother outright banned the title of the film from speech, and i began calling it the Bad Film instead. because it's bad, and it's a film.

thus ends the first chapter of the descent. stay tuned.

[thebadfilmsideblog]

i rewatched the fucking movie with my idiot friends last wednesday, we watched it to the end, and now i guess i should finally become active on this blog. the first thing i will do is send links to reviews of the film, because i rediscovered the simple fact of their existence shortly before rewatching the film and i find that they are more informative, more artistic, and more entertaining than the movie itself.

while the positive reviews are often written in beautiful, flowery prose which does much more to invoke the occasionally competent camera work than watching it yourself, the negative reviews are just comedy gold. perfectly accurate and absolutely scathing. i find myself more artistically inspired by the 1980 gay community news - boston article (taking up an entire page to itself, slotted in somewhere between an article about taxpayers in massachusetts and one about the writer's high school boyfriend) than either of my experiences with the film.

this fact, while not particularly surprising, is sad.

anyway here're the links

https://archive.org/details/gaycommunitynews0816gayc/page/12/mode/1up?view=theater (gay community news boston, positive? review)

http://archive.spectator.co.uk/article/27th-march-1976/27/cinema (this thing, many weird spacing issues)

https://www.jstor.org/stable/community.28042741?seq=42 (philadelphia gay news, brief but scathing)

https://www.theringer.com/movies/2018/11/26/18111989/nicolas-roeg-director-dead-obituary-dont-look-now-man-who-fell-to-earth-walkabout (this one talks about all the films made by nicolas roeg, which might be interesting.)

https://reactormag.com/invention-is-the-mother-of-ruin-the-man-who-fell-to-earth/ (this one is excessively long and utterly lies about the film being a faithful adaptation)

…apparently that's it. i remember there being a lot more. i remember being enraptured by beautiful prose about david bowie being up to his eyeballs in cocaine. where did they go.

[thebadfilmsideblog]

back on my bullshit (finished my three-week period of mourning awhile ago) but i don't feel like explaining the plot of the fucking movie

maybe later

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i have not posted anything here because i've been distraught and i don't want to think about certain things at the moment. maybe i'll come back and actually do the backstory posts so that there is context when i post fanart of the stupid fucking alien idk

[thebadfilmsideblog]

i accidentally reblogged shit on here instead of my main blog and those are my only posts oops

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reblog to bonk the person you reblogged it from with a hollow cardboard tube

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WELCOME TO HELL

in this blog i hopefully will remember to come on occasionally to ramble about a piece of media called The Man Who Fell To Earth. there are two versions of this piece of media, the first being a novel written by Walter Tevis and published in 1963. the second is a film directed by Nicolas Roeg and starring David Bowie, from 1976.

the novel is surprisingly really good. the film is not. i might talk about it.

godspeed, soldier.