Bad Timing

Bad Timingⁱ topped some chart of "hottest sexploitation films" maintained evidently by idiots. The film is tame to the point of fraudulence. It's clear they really really want to make a sexy film with sexy things in it and like women etc, but the means they pick to attempt their evidently cherished goal are a liberal usage of nude bodicesⁱⁱ and general dumbfuckery rather than the high road of frank tits and pussy, making the whole thing feel dirty. Scummy. Clammy. Like a repressed middle class underwear drawer.

It was observed during the endless tedium of this screening that "art" filmmakers really had it a lot easier in the days when smoking was "intellectual" because they could take care of a good twenty minutes by just adding footage of dudes lighting their cigarettes. Roeg pumps this to about twenty-five.

The scenography is rather elegant, making use of the proposed setting of Vienna as well as of Garfunkel's apparent acquaintance with interiors in Greenwich Village. The soundtrack is very pleasant, the walls are covered in bookshelves looking just-so etcetera etcetera. Sadly, the script was written by idiotsⁱⁱⁱ, none of it works, not in any detail, not in the general lines, the dialogue is particularly impossible but the everything else is just about equally bad.

Theresa Russell looks about forty eight, and tired. This in spite of being literally 23 at the time she was playing the supposed 24 year old Milena Flaherty. It is beyond comprehension how the hell this could have happened, but please review the footage and get back to me. Unless Nicolas Roeg kept her up all night long week after week, plying her with cheap rot-gut by the bucket in his (eventually successful) quest to fuck her already. In any case this is the saddest failure of stage make-up in the history of cinema.

A young Harvey Keitel with a lot of hair (but still the same collar style) is mildly interesting. Art Garfunkel^iv is essentially an alternatively-dressed carrot, and has no business being involved with acting.

The film altogether is not worth watching, unless you're a pervert of course.

1. 1980, by Nicolas Roeg, with Harvey Keitel, Art Garfunkel, Theresa Russell [↩]
2. These aren't those things cut to let out the tits and the cunt. They're those things colored to look like skin, but cut just exactly like the boring shit American women wear. [↩]
3. Yes I'm aware Laurie Bird killed herself just about in that manner just about at that time. So ? [↩]
4. Who is a Romanian Jew, by the way, did you know this ? [↩]