Tommy: the Movie

Honestly, I don't get it. This is very Ken Russell, and I like Ken Russell usually, but this annoyed me. You know... I think I'd feel differently if I liked the voices in this, but the only song that really worked for me were the Elton John number and the Tina Turner number. I like all of these actors, but I didn't like any of their voices in Tommy.

The Music Lovers (1971)

Ken Russell's The Music Lovers is a really bananas film – with surreal sequences and much of the film set to Tchaikovsky's music without dialogue. Glenda Jackson is out of control, but then she's playing an insane nymphomaniac trying to make the homosexually inclined Pyotr Tchaikovsky love her. It doesn't work. 

Russell's film compares poorly with Igor Talankin's film Tchaikovsky (Чайковский) from 1970 (1972 in the U.S.), which is sumptuous but which I found cold and uninterested in Tchaikovsky's actual life. Russell's version of the Tchaikovsky story really tries to figure out who the man was, but The Music Lovers winds up being a kind of overwrought melodrama

Altered States (1980)

Altered States is honestly a pretty great sci-fi horror movie. It's not filmed like a horror movie – it's filmed like a basic family melodrama – but the script (by Paddy Chayefsky) is solid and the plot is fairly fascinating. It goes almost completely off the rails for a bit, and even stopped working for a while, but even that sort of charmed me. Altered States is an ambitious, interesting film. Also: William Hurt is naked for a lot of this movie, John Laroquette and Drew Barrymore both have small parts in it, and Blair Brown (very strangely) plays someone about eight years younger than she is.