One Night Only Thursday, Feb 18
David Bowie took on a rare leading role as the title character of Nicolas Roeg’s trippy, fascinatingly cryptic sci-fi tale; he evidently felt a close kinship with the film, as he used its poster art for the cover of his album Low. Plummeting to earth in the New Mexico desert, Bowie’s itinerant starman adopts the name “Thomas Jerome Newton” and embarks on his mission to rescue his wife and child, who are dying of thirst on his barren home planet. With the aid of his advanced technology Newton becomes a man who could buy the world, establishing a powerful corporation and launching an independent space program. But as he spends more time on Earth he begins to succumb to human vices and panaceas (including sex, booze and binge TV-watching), while the corporate world he has turned on its head plots its revenge. “Science-fiction drama, western, love story, metaphysical mystery, satire of modern America — The Man Who Fell to Earth is the most beguiling of the films that [established Roeg] as a mainstream heir to such 1960s experimentalists as Alain Resnais, Jean-Luc Godard, and Chris Marker” (Graham Fuller).
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