Eureka (1983) - Roeg's tiring gold-and-greed epic

♥♥

One of the few posters for Nicolas Roeg's Eureka is this hideous concoction

QUICK REVIEW:

Jack McCann's (Gene Hackman (The Royal Tenenbaums (2001))) passion is the hunt for gold. But when he in 1925, after a 15 years long search, finally hit a big ore, he metaphorically dies.

SPOILER He later dies literally: After getting beaten vehemently, his head is burned with a blow torch, he is covered in feathers and then decapitated in what may be one of cinema's ugliest death scenes.
Eureka, written by Paul Mayersberg (The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976)), based on Marshall Houts' non-fiction book Who Killed Sir Harry Oakes?, and directed by Nicolas Roeg (Walkabout (1971)), is a film which is carried out in a demonstratively expressive, loud, Freudian palette with excessive use of zoom and a trite orgy scene. What Roeg tried to do here seems very old-fashioned today in the shadows of such much superior, related films as Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood (2007).

Related review:

Nicolas Roeg: Don't Look Now (1973) or, Grief in Venice

In lieu of a trailer for the movie, which isn't on Youtube, here's an interview with Roeg about his David Bowie-starring The Man Who Fell to Earth

Cost: Unknown
Box office: 123k $ (North America only)
= Mega-flop
[Eureka was released May 20 (UK) and runs 130 minutes. It is loosely based on the life and death of Sir Harry Oakes, who was murdered in the Bahamas in 1943. The film was shot in England, Florida, Jamaica and Canada. As of 1986, it  was only released theatrically in 4 countries. It was produced during troubled times for its American distributor MGM/UA, who "dumped it" in a few theaters in the fall of 1984. Millions of dollars were lost on Eureka, which, nevertheless, didn't end Roeg's career. 1,948 IMDb-users have given Eureka a 6/10 average rating.]

What do you think of Eureka?

The Believer (2001) - Shocking, powerful account of antisemitic fanatism and personal tragedy

♥♥♥♥♥

Praise and a troubled Ryan Gosling on a poster for Henry Bean's The Believer

QUICK REVIEW:

The Believer is about a Jewish neo-Nazi, who agitates with great eloquence and persuasion about different things and contributes to violence, but who at the same time hasn't totally abandoned his religion.
This is an intellectually hard-pumped film about racism, antisemitism, the Holocaust and Judaism seen through a profoundly torn, confused, volatile and self-loathing protagonist. Ryan Gosling (Lost River (2014), writer-producer-director) is frighteningly convincing in that paradoxical role, which is based on a real man, who was a member of the American Nazi Party and the United Klans of America, until a journalist from the New York Times outed his secret, Jewish personality, and he committed suicide. This happened in 1965.
The Believer is a strong film, thought-provoking and provoking altogether. It is a strange coincidence that it came out in 2001, about 6 months before a band of fanatically crazed believers (of a different religion and creeds, yes, but still very comparable to Gosling's character in The Believer) attacked the US, and flung the world into the decade-long War on Terror.
The Believer's director Henry Bean, who is Jewish himself, has only directed one other film, Noise (2007), and has written quite a few screenplays for other directors for films like Basic Instinct 2 (2006).

Watch the trailer here

Budget: 1.5 mil. $
Box office: 0.4 mil. $
= Big flop

What do you think of The Believer?