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The Worst Film Ever

It’s not bad or unwatchable but despite the amplitude of the spectacle, the end result is underwhelming.

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

It is a whirlwind of delight --- attractive actors, stunning couture, spectacular sets and outrageous parties. It's a feast for the eyes. But what really makes this dramedy work is the acting.

Roeg has a troubled mind. Or at least is fond of entering troubled minds. His biggest quality is something i value a lot in a filmmaker: he paints his canvas, but he also designates where we seat to look at it. He builds the atmosphere and makes us a spaceship to enter it. That's our feeling. But than there's something more interesting he does. We think we are comfortable as the designated watchers of what he depicts, but what he does, mostly through camera work and editing (which is great in this film) is trying to push us into the game, and going through the same risks and trouble of the characters in the film. That will to place the viewer at the center of what matters is commonly tried these days, but i think Roeg was a visionary in his days, and that includes this film.We have a psychoanalyst, which is a shortcut for saying he is someone who works relations inside out. He is obsessed, has retroactive jealousy, and the film is the evolution of how he fights himself to make a convenient story that allows him to be with the woman, something he eventually fails to do. We know how the thing ends from the beginning, so the film uses the form of allowing us to know the ending point and than driving as in flashback to that point. The editing is frantic and somehow psychedelic, something Roeg might have learned in his London 60' experience. And the intention was precisely to make our visual mind work like the troubled mind of Garfunkel's character.An extra significant point, something Ted Goranson really likes to notice, and which i'm starting to fall for is the empathy Roeg has with the actress, Theresa Russell, which would lead to marriage. You really can understand that. Her character is not the center of the story, it's all about Garfunkel, but we miss that unless we think about that. Garfunkel's character was at this point a representative of Roeg's urges for this beautiful woman.The film that best portrays this relation, and simultaneously is Roeg's best, to me, is Insignificance. This Bad Timing is one of his most celebrated, but it has minor power compared to the other one. It's a good experience, but i suggest you use it as an introduction to the other.My opinion: 3/5 http://www.7eyes.wordpress.com insignificance

Nicolas Roeg anatomises a love affair, and then re-arranges the pieces to create an affective display. The film is visceral, poetic, dizzying and provocative, moving, sexy and repulsive by turns. It features brilliant performances from all of the cast, most notably Russell - few actresses can achieve the kind of freewheeling and real sensuality that she achieves so seemingly effortlessly here.Set mostly in Vienna, the film takes the psychologists need to control and coral the instincts and life force of a living human woman to be ultimately murderous. One is never quite sure whether Harvey Keitel's detective is a manifestation of guilt and the super-ego or a real on-the-trail policeman; in the end it doesn't matter, as the man in question is forced to face his own reality as a life-denying entity.The ending, as with Performance, shows a fragile human consciousness being driven off to their doom in a car which appears to be the manifestation of a post-modern world in which they are desperately lost.

BAD TIMING is the one Nicolas Roeg film (from his initial period of peerlessly brilliant movies) which had so far eluded me; actually, for some reason, I had missed out on its one and only TV screening in my neck of the woods.Following in the footsteps of Mick Jagger in PERFORMANCE (1970) and David Bowie in THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH (1976), Art Garfunkel was the third pop star to be engaged as an actor by Roeg. Harvey Keitel, on the other hand, was not Roeg's first choice for Inspector Netusil: the role had previously been offered to Albert Finney and Bruno Ganz (both of whom turned it down) and Malcolm McDowell (who was unavailable). While their casting is indeed eccentric, contrary to the general opinion, I found them both very good in their difficult roles. Despite her young age and the complexity of the character she was playing, the stunning Theresa Russell - who turned down SUPERMAN (1978) to do this but, ironically, is now currently engaged on SPIDER-MAN 3! - is simply astonishing in the film and she should by rights have become a huge star because of it; as it is, she ended up being criminally underused and her career has subsequently been disappointingly uneven.While the film's working title was ILLUSIONS, its eventual title could be referring to the chance meeting between Garfunkel and Russell at a party (had either of them left earlier, they might never have met), to Garfunkel's inexplicably sluggish movements on the night of Russell's suicide attempt (which are under Keitel's dogged scrutiny) or even to estranged husband Denholm Elliott's reporting of Russell's recovery just as Garfunkel is about to break down under Keitel's relentless questioning and confess to his ravishment of her while she was practically comatose. Tragically, Garfunkel's plight in the film was eerily mirrored in real-life towards the end of shooting when his own girlfriend Laurie Bird - whose brief acting career included two films for Monte Hellman, TWO-LANE BLACKTOP (1971) and COCKFIGHTER (1974) - committed suicide in their apartment. Clearly one of Roeg's most personal films, BAD TIMING is not only a harrowing study of male-female relationships or more precisely "l'amour fou", but is also another depiction by Roeg (as had been the case with all his previous pictures) of characters stranded in a foreign land, in this case two Americans in Vienna. In hindsight, the tumultuous and almost deadly Garfunkel-Russell relationship is mirrored in the one between Garfunkel and Keitel, especially in the film's latter stages when the interrogation and subsequent revelation take center stage; the latter sequences, then, are capped by an enigmatic ending - due to Elliott's nick-of-time appearance and subsequent dematerialization - could this be a figment of Garfunkel's agitated state of mind? BAD TIMING is shot in Roeg's typically fragmented style which, this time around, can perhaps be explained by the fact that the narrator (Art or Theresa) is under a lot of emotional (Keitel's interrogation of Art) and physical (Theresa's life-saving surgery) strain. In another sense, BAD TIMING can even be seen as a sophisticated precursor to the erotic thrillers so prevalent in filmdom from the late-80s onwards.For the third consecutive time, Anthony Richmond serves as director of photography for Roeg and the film also boasts a splendidly eclectic soundtrack - Billy Holliday, Keith Jarrett, The Who, Tom Waits, not to mention some typical Viennese zither music a' la THE THIRD MAN (1949) - an inspired choice to be sure but, ironically, the prohibitive rights issue costs were also one of the reasons why BAD TIMING has been out of the public eye for so long.The Criterion DVD is therefore a very welcome introduction for me to this essential film. Intriguingly, it transpires that the film's backers, The Rank Organization, dubbed BAD TIMING "a sick film by sick people for sick people" and subsequently not only dropped their famous gong logo from the credit titles but refused to show it in their chain of theaters! Interestingly, the outline of the story emerged from an aborted collaboration between Roeg and famed Italian producer Carlo Ponti. Disappointingly, unlike Criterion's other Roeg DVDs, WALKABOUT (1971) and THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH, there is no Audio Commentary to be found here although Roeg is in a jovial mood in the accompanying interview. Also, a couple of the deleted scenes were quite good, particularly one in which Russell crashes a party and embarrasses Garfunkel with her drunken and lewd antics. For the record, during the four-year hiatus between THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH and BAD TIMING, Roeg had been connected with several high-profile projects which were eventually helmed by other people, namely FLASH GORDON (Mike Hodges, 1980), HAMMETT (Wim Wenders, 1982) and OUT OF Africa (Sydney Pollack, 1985). Unfortunately, Roeg's decline has proved to been one of the saddest in recent memory but his two current productions - PUFFBALL and ADINA - sound promising at least and hopefully they will come to fruition eventually! Actually, after this viewing of BAD TIMING, I regret not purchasing Roeg's previous film, THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH, when Deep Discount DVD had their recent Criterion sale. However, I should be giving Roeg's subsequent film, (also starring his then wife Theresa Russell) EUREKA (1984), a first look via my VHS copy; actually, had it not been for the recent interview with the still gorgeous Russell conducted for the BAD TIMING DVD, I wouldn't have known that Roeg and Russell had separated!

I can't wait to see this masterpiece again. I hate slushy romantic flicks but this is not one of them.The world of people with extremely unstable emotions is brilliantly evoked in this film.I love the way they are both *so* messed up. There is no happy ending, this is no fairy-tale romance. The constant breakups, the creepy, almost stalking behaviours, the outbursts, the attacks and counter-attacks and violence and general hell that is borderline personality - it's all there.Russell's character is a complete mess - drunk, angry, crazy - she has a string of boyfriends with whom she rows constantly, she smashes things up, she smashes herself up and generally goes completely ape.Garfunkel is brilliant - he has much the same trouble as his girlfriend but he *seems* more subdued, although he hides it better, he keeps coming back to her because *he's the same*.Keitel's detached, manipulating cop who tries to unravel the whole thing is probably his best ever work. He's either the consummate professional, calmly picking up the pieces after some crazy and damaged people have been desperately trying to destroy themselves and each other, or he's a crafty, manipulating, evil so-and-so - you're never quite sure.If you like seriously messed-up movies, this film is for you!