Word: eldritch
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...DAVID BOWIE'S SPACESHIP CRASH-lands in New Mexico at the beginning of THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH, so does director Nicolas Roeg's splendidly enigmatic sci-fi parable invade our subconscious, making a great, strange racket. It is a tribute to Bowie's eldritch skill and Roeg's eerie artistry that we feel immediately all the main character's displacement, fear and wonder in his new world. This laser disc (Voyager/The Criterion Collection) marks the first uncut presentation of the original wide-screen format for U.S. home video. Also on the disc: interviews with Roeg, Bowie...
...ROBERTSON: STORYVILLE (Geffen). "Catch a thrill," Robertson sings in Go Back to Your Woods, and there isn't a bigger or better thrill to be heard anywhere right now than this ravishing new collection of songs that capture the fragile magic of American mythology and transform it into an eldritch excursion through the collective rock unconscious. Whew! Oh, mustn't forget: it really jumps...
These characters were not new with Lucas, of course; they spanned epic literature from Ulysses and King Arthur to the Lord of the Rings and Gormenghast trilogies. But Star Wars gave a high-tech polish to the rustic hardware, a kick to the old eldritch machinery. Alas, a decade later, everything new in Lucas' films seems old again. There is a shroud of inevitability, of why-bother, about Willow's chase through the forest (done better in Return of the Jedi), the impromptu ride down a mountain on a warrior's shield (done better in The Living Daylights...
...wizard like Art Tatum was astounded and flummoxed by Fess's style. This record, first released in 1975, has now been reissued on CD. The disc, with the good professor's piano remixed to stand way out in front of the band, is a perfect introduction to Longhair's eldritch dexterity. It is also as good a working definition of funk as you will ever find. The professor died in 1980, but there is a whole generation of peerless piano players, like Huey ("Piano") Smith, Allen Toussaint and Mac ("Dr. John") Rebennack, forever in his debt...
...many a horror movie touted by the hip critical fringe, it falls just short of delivering on its artistic promises. Director Stuart Gordon has fun trying to slice it both ways, though. Fleshing out a story by Horror Aesthete H.P. Lovecraft, Gordon finds florid visual correlatives for Lovecraft's eldritch prose, then adds a heavy dose of '80s psychosexuality. One messy kiss from the late Dr. Pretorious (Ted Sorel), and a cool blond psychiatrist (Barbara Crampton) gets tarted up in dominatrix leather to revive Nerdy Genius Crawford Tillinghast (Jeffrey Combs) by any means at hand. Heady stuff...