The 100 Best Movies You've Never Seen

by Richard Crouse

  Racked with guilt, she tries to commit suicide by driving her car into a river. Emerging alive, metaphorically baptized in the water, she stares destiny in the face and tries to come to grips with her chaotic life.

  Maelström is a dark movie that explores the mysterious nature of fate and how seemingly unrelated events add up to form a whole. Bibiane is leading an accelerated life where one bad relationship leads to abortion, a drinking binge, and the death of an innocent person. While the film has a surrealistic feel, every tragic event in the movie is realistic and could actually happen. Bibiane is a victim of her own bad judgment, and not a particularly sympathetic character, but she isn't a monster. She is, like so many people, a person who refuses to acknowledge her shortcomings and mistakes. It's a nervy move to build a movie around a character like this, and an even harder job to cast it.

  “Marie-Josée is very talented,” says Villeneuve, “and this was a very, very difficult role for her to do because she doesn't have a lot of tools. Very often [the character] is alone, and the emotion has to come when she is alone and doing nothing. When she is with others she is trapped and doesn't communicate.”

  Croze is marvelous to watch onscreen. Since her feature film debut in 1993, she has worked extensively in both English and French, in Quebec-shot Hollywood fare like Battlefield Earth. Her Bibiane is totally believable, a multi-layered character that is both fragile and confused, but resilient. Her greatest feat is to make Bibiane likeable, and by the end of her rebirth to actually have the audience root for her. As she sorts out the mess she has made of her life, finding love and meaning along the way, Croze imbues Bibiane with a humanity that is hard to deny.

  Villeneuve pieces the story together with aplomb. The abortion scene that opens the film is meant to grab the audience, and let them know they are not on safe ground. This is a movie that takes chances, one that keeps you off balance as it untangles Bibiane's anguish. The abortion is controversial, but absolutely necessary to the film's fabric.

  “The abortion scene is the most important scene in the film,” says Villeneuve. “I think it is the most important scene I have ever shot. You always make a film in reaction to the film you made before, and August 23rd on Earth was not raw enough, not close enough to life. I wanted to add authenticity, according to my point of view. I didn't want the abortion to be disgusting, but I also didn't want it to be safe. I tried to find the right emotional impact that I think abortion is about. There is a relationship that I see between abortion and responsibility.”

  Villeneuve pumps up the impact of the scene with music. As the doctors perform the cold, antiseptic procedure, the song “Good Morning, Starshine” from the peace and love musical Hair chirps cheerfully on the soundtrack, at stark odds with the pictures on the screen. It's an ironic choice that displays how life in the outside world will always continue despite whatever angst is playing out in your personal life.

  “I like songs that are not in sync with the images,” says Villeneuve. “When there is a gap between the mood of the song and the mood of the scene it creates an emotional response, a tension, and a poetry that I think is more creative than just underlining the emotion.”

  The abortion sequence might be shocking, but the tragicomic talking fish that narrate the tale are a memorable image that won't soon be forgotten. Sitting atop a bloody butcher block, a series of fish are about to meet their doom under the fishmonger's cleaver. Before they are filleted they try to articulate the movie's existential undercurrent of destiny and fate. In gruff voices they give us insight into the action onscreen.

  “When I decided to write a movie in which several fish would tell the story I was expecting a lot of questions about that,” says Villeneuve. “It came from a nightmare, and I respect that a lot. In cinema I like a dream quality. Sometimes you might have a strong subconscious response, but sometimes you have difficulty explaining them. I'm not expecting people to get it. For me the fish is about my relationship with cinema. It's about the relationship with storytelling. I like the idea that those fish are close to death, but still trying to tell a story. For me it is like the storytellers from different backgrounds from the beginning of humanity who try and tell the same story, and then stop dead. Then someone else has to continue.

  “It was a big casting when you make a little fish,” he continues, “because it is going to come alive with the voice. I had to find a very specific voice. Pierre Lebeau is an actor at home [Quebec] that has this beautiful voice and can bring humanity to this plastic fish.”

  Maelström is an intelligent, disturbing movie that is bound to spark thought about the vagaries of everyday life, and how one selfish or ill-conceived action can directly affect the lives of many people — simple cause and effect. It is a playfully cautionary story that advises the viewer to be careful and responsible.

  THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH (1976)

  “You have to believe it to see it.”

  — Advertising tag line for The Man Who Fell to Earth

  Someone much smarter than me once said that there are only two types of stories. In the first a person goes on a journey. In the second, a stranger comes to town. The Man Who Fell to Earth, a spacey 1976 Nicolas Roeg thriller combines both premises with a science-fiction twist. David Bowie, in his feature film debut, plays a visitor from the planet Anthea who comes to earth in search of water.

  As a cinematographer, Nicolas Roeg lent his expert visual style to the films of Clive Donner, David Lean, Richard Lester, and Francois Truffaut. His resumé as a director begins with a surreal 1970 movie that examined the nature of identity. Performance starred James Fox as Chas Devlin, a gangster on the run who moves in with Turner, a reclusive, androgynous rock star played by Mick Jagger. At first Devlin is disgusted by Turner's excessive existence, but soon their strange lifestyles become intertwined. Devlin spirals downward into Turner's world of drug-induced decadence, and his refuge becomes a hell as his own sense of reality starts to disappear.

  Performance baffled critics, who objected to the graphic violence, sex, and drug taking, with one critic asserting that it was “the outcome of an over-developed visual sense and an under-developed moral one.” Battles with censor boards in Europe and North America delayed the film's release for two years, and killed its chances of finding an audience. This commercial flop was followed by two critically acclaimed, but financially unrewarding films, Walkabout and Don't Look Now.

  In the early development stages of his fourth film, an adaptation of the Walter Tevis novel The Man Who Fell to Earth, Roeg had considered Mick Jagger for the role of Mr. Newton, the alien, but decided that he was “too strong, too positive.” “I want somebody who looks as if he has no bones in his body,” he said. One night he happened to catch a bbc documentary featuring David Bowie called Cracked Actor. “Watching that film,” Roeg told writer Jerry Hopkins, “he was my film's character, Mr. Newton. My reaction was, ‘That's him alright, all wrapped up and done.'” Roeg was attracted to Bowie's otherworldly appearance, saying that he “exudes such a wonderfully perverse non-human quality.” Like Jagger before him, Bowie had been cast to play a part that was molded to create echoes of his existing public persona.

  From his end, Bowie admired Don't Look Now and was excited to work with Roeg, although he forgot about their initial February 1975 meeting, and kept the director waiting for eight hours. The movie's story was familiar ground to Bowie, who had created the musical outer-space character Ziggy Stardust in 1972. “Ziggy really set the pattern for my future work,” Bowie said. “Ziggy was my Martian messiah who twanged a guitar. He was a simplistic character. I saw him as very simple . . . fairly like the character Newton I do in [The Man Who Fell to Earth] later on. Someone who's dropped down here, got brought down to our way of thinking, and ended up destroying his own self.”

  The Man Who Fell to Earth begins at the end of the visitor's long journey, as his space vehicle enters the Earth's atmosphere. We follow the vehicle's strange visitor as he assumes the identity of Thomas Jerom
e Newton, a British expatriate, and pawns gold rings brought from his planet to finance a trip to New York. In the Big Apple he hires patent attorney Oliver Farnsworth (Buck Henry) to form a company to sell his inventions, which are actually products from his home planet. They create a wildly successful communications company and generate millions of dollars, which Newton plans to use to launch his own space program for the dual purposes of returning to his family and saving Anthea by bringing back water. On his Bill Gates-like journey he meets Nathan Bryce, a lecherous college professor, and begins an affair with Mary-Lou (Candy Clark), a drunken motel maid. Suspicion grows in tandem with his sudden rise to prominence. Betrayed by friends, his extraterrestrial origins are uncovered. An enigmatic government agency kidnaps him and carries out a battery of tests to ascertain who, or what, he is. Newton's space program is dismantled, and he is cut loose. Alone and frustrated, with no means to return home, he turns to drink.

  Capturing The Man Who Fell to Earth on film presented some unusual challenges for the rock star. The three-month shoot, mostly on-location in New Mexico, was an exhausting affair, with Bowie having to rise at 4 a.m. to attend a five-hour makeup call each day. The long shoot did have one upside, however — the remoteness of the location cut Bowie off from his usual drug dealers, and by the end of the shoot he was almost free of the debilitating drug habit that had plagued him in recent years.

  One peculiar story from the production log begs for an explanation, although it seems not to be drug related. While shooting on an old Aztec burial ground, something inexplicable happened. Bowie was drinking a glass of milk on set when he noticed “some gold liquid swimming around in shiny swirls inside the glass.” Production had to be shut down for the next two days when the actor fell ill. After running tests, doctors could not determine any cause for the ailment, even though six witnesses testified that they had seen a foreign substance in the bottom of the glass. Powerless to explain the story, Bowie chalked up the entire experience to “very bad Karma.”

  The Man Who Fell to Earth isn't a typical science-fiction film. Roeg doesn't rely on special effects to dazzle; he doesn't have to, he already has David Bowie. As Newton, Bowie is an organic special effect — otherworldly, androgynous, and mysterious. But it is the unspoken emotion, the heart and soul of his character that shines through in his performance. In the book Newton has no fingernails, has a waist that measures only five inches and is over six feet tall. No amount of makeup could perfectly reproduce that effect, but Bowie's physicality is ideal; he's pallid, gaunt, with a bone structure that is reminiscent of the popular, large-eyed image of aliens. Trying to imagine anyone else in the role is like trying to nail Jell-O to a wall. It just can't be done.

  If you want action, rent Independence Day or The Terminator, but if you like idea-based sci-fi check out Newton's story. The Man Who Fell to Earth is a parable showing the clash between decadent Western culture and Newton's simple, innocent alien life, and how he ends up losing his purity of heart. This was a particularly potent message in the mid-'70s, hot on the heels of Vietnam and at the beginning of globalization. Newton's Icarus story is a warning — fly too close to the sun, and you'll fall to Earth in flames.

  RICHARD' S FAVORITE TITLES WITH TEN WORDS OR MORE

  1. Dr. Strangelove, Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb Stanley Kubrick's 1964 masterpiece featured Peter Sellers in three roles.

  2. The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed Up Zombies This 1963 horror musical was originally called The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living or How I Became a Mixed Up Zombie, but was changed after a threatened lawsuit over the similarity of Kubrick's title.

  3. Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mom's Hung You in the Closet and I'm Feeling So Sad This 1967 Rosalind Russell film was a precursor to Weekend at Bernie's.

  4. The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade Based on a successful stage play, this 1966 film is better known by its shortened title Marat/Sade.

  5. Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines: Or, How I Flew from London to Paris in 25 Hours and 11 Minutes Rivalries abound when a British newspaper sponsors a cross-channel airplane race in this 1965 adventure.

  6. Cafeteria, or How Are You Going to Keep Her Down on the Farm After She's Seen Paris Twice A 1973 one-minute movie about a girl and her 26 cows.

  7. The Saga of the Viking Women and Their Voyage to the Waters of the Great Sea Serpent A 1957 Roger Corman action/adventure about lonely Viking women who embark on a search for their missing men.

  8. I Killed My Lesbian Wife, Hung Her on a Meat Hook, and Now I Have a Three-Picture Deal at Disney This 1993 short film was Ben Affleck's directorial debut.

  9. Went To Coney Island On A Mission From God . . . Be Back By Five A 1998 feature which starred former child star Jon Cryer.

  10. Can Hieronymus Merkin Ever Forget Mercy Humppe and Find True Happiness? Sixties heartthrob Anthony Newley searches for the meaning of life in this 1969 musical.

  MEET THE FEEBLES (1989)

  Don't worry if you feel ashamed

  It's been around for years

  And thousands more that can't be named

  Are interested in rears

  Don't worry about hell

  No harm will come to your soul

  We're not a Pentecostal

  And everybody's got an asshole

  Sodomy!

  — The “Sodomy” song from Meet the Feebles

  “It's a nasty little piece of work, and people should know that,” says Kiwi director Peter Jackson about one of his early “lost” films. Originally conceived as a 24-minute television show, Meet the Feebles is the most disgusting, ribald, and funniest film to feature puppets as lead actors. It's the Muppet Show on acid. The movie revolves around the puppet cast of the soon-to-air The Fabulous Feebles Variety Hour. Cheerful characters on television, off-screen the Feebles are drug addled, sex-starved psychopaths. Backstage drama flourishes as Sid the elephant tries to avoid a paternity suit from his ex-lover, a chicken named Sandy; Harry, a sex-crazed rabbit, feels woozy and is concerned that he has contracted aids after years of unprotected sex; the uncouth producer of the show Walrus Bletch is involved in drug deals, while his partner Sebastian the fox becomes completely obsessed with buggery, going so far as to include a song called “Sodomy” in the show; Wynyard the frog knife thrower is a full-blown heroin addict who has frequent flashbacks to his days as a pow in Saigon; Trevor the rat dresses in a Nazi uniform and films underground porn; while Heidi the hippo, the show's star attraction, is told, “I've heard better singing from a mongoose with throat cancer.” The tension backstage spills onto the air, and the show's audience finally sees the Feebles for who they are.

  It's pretty dark stuff, and Jackson leaps at the chance to offend, including as much carnage, sex, and bawdy humor as 94 minutes will allow. The finished film is so unhinged that the major investor, the New Zealand Film Commission, refused to put its name in the credits. The movie is a disgustingly graphic piece of work, but there is more to it than just cows engaging in s&m, if you can dig past the layers of bodily fluids, unnatural sex, and curse words.

  “I'd like to view it as a satire of human behavior,” said Jackson. “Imagine a scenario where the Muppets have just finished a TV show. What would happen if they went backstage and behaved like normal people, smoking, drinking, and having sex? That's what we were aiming at.” It is also a cautionary tale of the pitfalls of celebrity, or as Russ Meyer once put it, “the oft-times nightmarish world of show business.”

  Ten years before Jackson would begin shooting his masterpiece, the Lord of the Rings trilogy, his visual flair was very much in evidence. He uses handheld cameras to shoot musical numbers and very hectic scenes, perfectly choreographing the 90 rubber-faced “actors.”

  The “story” is basically a series of fart, urine, and porn jokes strung together, but like any great musical, the
songs are the glue that bind the whole thing. Composer Peter Dasent, who would also score Jackson's next two films, Braindead and Heavenly Creatures, penned a full score for the movie, including the “Feebles Theme,” which includes the obvious line, “we're not your average ordinary people,” Heidi's signature song “Garden of Love” and “One Leg Missing,” a blues tune sung by a Rastafarian bandleader with a chorus of poodles. The real showstopper is “Sodomy,” an elaborate set piece involving a giant erect penis that literally serves as the climax of the film.

  The movie has become a cult classic, but don't expect a sequel. A disclaimer that no puppets were killed or maimed during the production of Meet the Feebles turns out to be a fib, as Jackson cheekily noted in a press interview at the time. “The way we abused them I doubt whether they would want to work with us again.”

  MILE ZERO (2002)

  “Your love was a beautiful thing, but you took it too far.”

  — Allison (Sabrina Grdevich)

  Mile Zero is a film about male vulnerability. Michael Riley (the London, Ontario-born actor best known for small roles in Amistad and French Kiss) plays Derek Ridley, a psychologically brittle man who lets jealousy devour him, eventually pushing him to break the law. He is still deeply in love with his ex-wife (Sabrina Grdevich) despite the fact that she has moved on and is involved with another man. Unable to let go, he desperately tries to reunite his family with a series of inappropriate actions that soon escalate into the realm of stalking. He unexpectedly shows up at his wife's home to prepare her breakfast in bed, roots through her garage, and secretly installs video surveillance in his eight-year-old son Will's (Connor Widdows) bedroom.