Change Your Image
whitestreet
Reviews
Het snö (1968)
Great Swedish Let-Down
Altough "Het Snö" (Hot Snow) is probably the first drug thriller from Sweden and has a cast to die for, it's one of the biggest let-downs I've ever seen.
The story's confusing and the actors are working so hard to bring any sense to it that it just gets worse. Ernst-Hugo Järegård character, drug-lord Stenhäll, is like a cliché of every madmen he later would come to play on screen. And Sven Bertil Taube as international playboy Bobby Flyckt is mere a parody of Roger Moore in "The Persuaders" and, strange enough, a precursor for Moore's blasé interpretation of James Bond. Taube's always good, but if you want to see him as jaded cop/crook cross, Geoffrey Reeve's underrated take spy film "Puppet On A Chain" from 1971.
There's some bright spots to "Het Snö", though. The pictorial language is splendid and resembles some of the great French thrillers of the '60s, but all in all it's miles and miles away from the brilliance of "The Big Risk", "The Finger Man", "The Godson" and "Pasha".
The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976)
Bowie At His Best
So, you thought Alan Yentob's "Cracked Actor" or perhaps D.A. Pennebaker's "Ziggy Stardust: Motion Picture" was the perfect pictorial rendering of David Bowie and his life in the '70s?
Oh no!
It's in this, Nicolas Roeg's 1976 master-piece, the real Bowie reveals himself. The rock star's perfect in his interpretation of Thomas Jerome Newton, alien castaway turned resigned and bored capitalist super-star. Mainly because this was were Bowie were at in the mid-'70s. It's not acting. It's Bowie's mere presence. He was an earthling just as alien as his character.
"The Man Who Sold The World" is a rather depressing, and strange, tale of a man who comes to our planet to raise money to help his own world dying from drought. All he really want is to get home to his wife and kids on that doomed planet. But instead he falls for the mortal sins (sex, drugs, music, television).
The film's beautiful, sad, scary and somewhat pretentious. It's sci-fi when it's human.