Basquiat (Julian Schnabel, 1996)

Cast: Jeffrey Wright, David Bowie, Michael Wincott, Benicio Del Toro, Claire Forlani, Dennis Hopper, Gary Oldman, Christopher Walken, Willem Dafoe, Parker Posey, Elina Löwensohn, Paul Bartel, Courtney Love, Tatum O'Neal. Screenplay: Julian Schnabel, Lech Majewski, John F. Bowe. Cinematography: Ron Fortunato. Production design: Dan Leigh. Film editing: Michael Berenbaum. Music: John Cale, Julian Schnabel. 

The Linguini Incident (Richard Shepard, 1991)

Rosanna Arquette and David Bowie in The Linguini Incident

Cast: Rosanna Arquette, David Bowie, Eszter Balint, Andre Gregory, Buck Henry, Viveca Lindfors, Marlee Matlin. Screenplay: Richard Shepard. Cinematography: Robert D. Yeoman. Production design: Marcia Hinds. Film editing: Sonya Polonsky, David Dean. Music: Thomas Newman.

Richard Shepard's The Linguini Incident is frequently called "off-beat," but to me it just seems off. Its gags never quite land, its narrative is scattered, its design is drab, and its lead characters, played by Rosanna Arquette and David Bowie, have very little chemistry. Still, it has a cult following that rescued it from obscurity after initial box office and critical failure and inspired a "director's cut" that added ten minutes to its run time. I admit that I laughed a few times, as when Arquette, playing a would-be escape artist who idolizes Houdini, tries to make her way out of a bag in which she's been locked, but even that bit goes on just a few seconds beyond the point at which it's funniest. 

The Prestige (Christopher Nolan, 2006)

Michael Caine, Scarlett Johansson, and Hugh Jackman in The Prestige

Cast: Hugh Jackman, Christian Bale, Michael Caine, Scarlett Johansson, Rebecca Hall, Piper Perabo, David Bowie, Andy Serkis, Samantha Mahurin, Roger Rees, Ricky Jay, Daniel Davis, Jim Piddock, Christopher Neame. Screenplay: Jonathan Nolan, Christopher Nolan, based on a novel by Christopher Priest. Cinematography: Wally Pfister. Production design: Nathan Crowley. Film editing: Lee Smith. Music: David Julyan.

With his low-budget feature Following (1998), Christopher Nolan showed a genius for making the preposterous plausible, and he followed it up well with Memento (2000). But although he managed to get his footing again with Inception (2010), after his excursion into the comic book world of Batman, in The Prestige he lost control. It's a dark thriller about dueling illusionists with a sci-fi twist that seems to take to heart Arthur C. Clarke's assertion, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." As Nolan is careful to show from the outset, stage magic is technology-based, a careful use of low-tech apparatus like trap doors and collapsible cages that can prove accidentally deadly -- or intentionally so, as the sacrifice of several pigeons demonstrates, and the film's plot will exploit. But as the rivalry between illusionists Robert Angier (Hugh Jackman) and Alfred Borden (Christian Bale) heats up, The Prestige wanders into the fancifully futuristic, a sort of molecular cloning technology devised by no less than Nikola Tesla (David Bowie). The problem for me -- if not for the fans who give The Prestige an astonishingly high 8.5 ranking on IMDb -- is that this insertion into the story of a real historical figure, who never crafted anything of the sort, is about as cheesy as turning Abraham Lincoln into a vampire hunter. It undermines the suspension of disbelief we need to appreciate the film's intricate plotting (complicated by Nolan's non-linear narrative technique) and enjoyable performances. I didn't get the exhilaration I expect from a thriller's twists and turns, but instead a kind of numb depression set in.

The Man Who Fell to Earth (Nicolas Roeg, 1976)

This is a film that could only have been made in the mid-1970s, when people with a lot of money were looking for the Next Big Hit aimed at the youth market. And what could be better than a sci-fi film featuring a major rock star, lots of sex, and an irreverent attitude toward American corporations? Four years later, this anything-goes approach to filmmaking would expire with the colossal failure of Heaven's Gate (Michael Cimino, 1980), now known as the movie that killed United Artists. But we can see in The Man Who Fell to Earth a bit of the carelessness (some of it fueled by too-easy access to drugs) that afflicted the film industry. It is frequently brilliant but also often frequently incoherent, a movie held together by David Bowie's charisma as the alien Thomas Jerome Newton, even though Bowie later admitted that he was so high on cocaine during the filming that he didn't know what he was doing. In the film, as the titular alien, he gets hooked on gin and television, so his drug indulgence may have helped in his performance. Somehow Roeg pulled through a difficult shoot in New Mexico, and while the movie never quite succeeds as either science fiction or satire, it became a cult hit. None of the other cast members stands out as prominently as Bowie. Rip Torn doesn't put together a coherent character as Nathan Bryce, the lecherous college professor who gets hired on by the mega-corporation created by Newton so he can bring water to his dying home planet. Candy Clark plays Mary-Lou, the hotel maid who becomes Newton's lover, has some affecting moments, but it's never clear whether she is extraordinarily naive or under a kind of mind control induced by Newton. But there's an intelligence (or at least an attitude) here that makes more coherent and better polished films about alien visitors look tame and conventional.