CommentsXp Best movie ever!

Comwayon A Disappointing Continuation

MusicChat It's complicated... I really like the directing, acting and writing but, there are issues with the way it's shot that I just can't deny. As much as I love the storytelling and the fantastic performance but, there are also certain scenes that didn't need to exist.

Deanna There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

sharky_55 Bad Timing is about a man and a woman who were never meant to be for each other, and how the whole world can see it except for them. They meet cute at a party, they exchange numbers and are soon between the sheets. In time, their differences are made obvious. But watching a Nicholas Roeg movie is never quite that simple. He was a cinematographer first and then a director, but in another life he was surely an editor. Linearity is tossed out, and as we begin to make our acquaintance with the pair and their blossoming romance, we are also coming to terms with their breakup. Roeg smashes the narrative strands, and we are left to piece them back together with Harvey Keitel's Inspector Netusil. Roeg loves his inserts. When Alex and Milena first meet eyes there is lust in the latter and curiosity in the former, but he doesn't just direct our attention to their gazes, but to their body language; fingers fiddling with anticipation and nervousness, hands tapping and playing with suddenly irrelevant objects. This is full body flirting, not merely exchanging suggestive dialogue. With his closeups Roeg maps Milena's physical beauty as a tool to be wielded, and an artwork to be spied on. He then pushes in to designate a lingering gaze - more immediate than an insert, with its forward momentum implying violation. Roeg's curious, zooming camera has an eye for documentary, and viewing his early work you can chart its development. It was used to masterful effect in Walkabout, which was concerned with observing human behaviour in the wild, and how sooner or later they dissolve into basic animalistic urges. It was also relevant in The Man Who Fell to Earth, which observed Bowie observing other humans and their performances, playing along as best he can. Art Garfunkel is right for the role - his temperament as an occasional actor manifests early and later on as he attempts to make sense of a relationship not bound by the usual rules. Some may point to this as amateurish, stilted acting, but the character requires a certain degree of stoicism and reservation that has been ingrained into him throughout his life, as an expectation of his class and occupation. Observe his stiff outrage in the bar scene, where he watches Milena kiss another man and then straddle him a moment later. He channels his emotions into several conflicting types of anger: he is angry that she is kissing someone else, angry that this unbridled lust is part of his obsessive attraction to her, angry that she can placate him with a simple move, and of course angry that he himself lacks that carefree impulse to match. Theresa Russell is mostly empty sensuality, but...that's the point. To try and pry something deeper and more complex from her is to fall into the same trap that Alex does, and make the same assumptions that eventually lead to the splintering of their relationship. Roeg splinters the very structure of his film's plot, through his trademark match cuts that juxtapose image and sound. This is the most arresting of his techniques, interrupting the moans of fervid lovemaking to contrast them with the choking of Milena on the operation table. Forget foreshadowing, this is telegraphing their demise in the most direct way, peering into the future of their severed relationship undergoing resuscitation. What is most intriguing about this method is not how it chops up time and space, but rather how revealing (or not) it is towards Roeg's specific allocations of nudity and vulnerability. There are sex scenes all over the place, yet in their frenzied passion Milena remains more or less partially clothed. Contrasting that she is completely exposed on the operating table, robbed of her agency, and penetrated by metallic utensils and strangers in masks. The most explicit nudity comes when Alex's final sin is revealed: not an act of love but literally tearing her apart, violating her body. Critics at the time reviled Bad Timing for being a sick film about sick people, but did anyone notice this sly irony? Roeg deploys his most graphic images as a critique of his own character; he can tear away clothes and dignity, but get no closer to what he truly wants. Non-linearity can be a masterstroke if done well. One of the reasons I adore Annie Hall is because the cutting rips right into Alvy Singer, exposing his hypocrisy and sharply bookending the highs and lows of his relationships. That would be replicated in 500 Days of Summer, the Annie Hall of the modern generation. Both protagonists are lovestruck fools, and who better to tell them than the film form itself? In Bad Timing Roeg deploys it as a way of wilfully obscuring the end goal of the narrative, and making a guessing game of their breakup. But ironically this jigsaw structure merely lays it all out on the table, and prolongs their agony over two hours. We know from the start she will never change, and that he might not take that so well. I refer to the final shot of Roeg's debut, Performance, where we witness a character escape in a cab - but sitting there is an entirely different person than the young man from the beginning. In Bad Timing, all the cab takes away is someone who deserves his punishment, and the fact that we have know it all along.

MarieGabrielle so when I saw this on NetFlix I figured it may be a decent film, suspense set in Vienna.She looks lovely, just prior to minor fame from "Black Widow" (starring with Debra Winger and Terry O'Quinn) where she was excellent as a gold digger and murderess.The sites are intriguing, she is a party girl who leaves a former older lover to date Art Garfunkel, psychiatrist. Yes, its dated in that Garfunkel is not exactly leading man material, even in the early 80's I do not think he was, but anyway.Basically as Milenia, Russell is enjoying her travels, and merely wants to party and have fun, sensual escapades and no strings. Garfunkel however begins to have contempt for her as she will not commit to being only with him.Some cinematography in Tangier is beautiful and sensual. The overall story doesn't work, but you may find it watchable if you are a fan of Russell. There is a twist at the end as well. 6/10

Nazi_Fighter_David His movie rates high in production value and acting and has an innovative approach to an old story… The film is basically a character study… Alex (Art Garfunkel) is a depressingly dark and shadowy American psychoanalyst living in Vienna… Theresa Russell plays Milena, a resonant, carefree American girl… They meet by chance at a party and are thrown into a roller-coaster ride of an erotic relationship… He wants to smash her free spirit because he can't understand it, but she won't let him… The result is a near-fatal break-up… Roeg comes close to the story from the middle (obeying Jean-Luc Godard's authoritative saying, a film "must have a beginning, a middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order." We quickly move to the different parts of Alex and Milena's relationship, moving through time as if it were Jell-O. The editing is intricate, but not confusing… As we change location back and forth, we begin to see more clearly how these two unlikely lovers ever got together… The motion picture is filled with exceptional images, and Theresa Russell is outstanding

MARIO GAUCI 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!