The Cronenberg Thread

I'd like to see a movie this hateful about awards bloggers.

My favorite line in Maps might be "Everything's stunt casting!"

For Your Consideration was a step in the right direction.

a better ending for maps to the stars would be if after the final scene the limo driver drives up, shakes his head, chuckles and says "only in 'Hollyweird'!"

"that's 'La-La Land' for ya!"

Something bout those little pills...

hopefully during next awards season, Mia Wasikowska grabs someone's trophy and proceeds to...

thank the Academy.

I liked it, it was much stranger than I expected. The boy being competitive with the younger kid was funny.

Is it just me or was the burning woman struggling with a ghost made of fire? Probably not but I kept thinking there was some extra figure in the scene.

no it was just the worst CGI ever put on film

That they bothered using cgi instead of a stunt person with real fire was part of what made me wonder.
That is part of the annoyance of so many bad cgi scenes, that they easily could have been avoided.

That had to have been deliberate

Not going to entirely dismiss the notion that it's a "commentary" on something but it's pretty jarring considering the rest of the film (including the ghosts/hallucinations) is presented in such a flat, realistic manner

I vaguely recall reading something about Croney getting pissed off when questioned about it at Cannes but I can't seem to find it

idk

"I really love CGI in the sense that it's another tool," he said. "When I made Naked Lunch, there was no such thing as computer generated graphics. Even in Maps to the Stars, which is relatively naturalistic, there's a lot of CG that's wonderful. It was set in Hollywood, but it was mostly shot in Toronto. We just shot five days in Hollywood. And yet I could put the Hollywood Hills in the background easily because of computer graphics. That's a fantastic tool for a director, and that's why I love digital. But because it's exciting, it does get overused, of course."

the freud-jung movie wasn't great but there were a few interesting stylistic choices. but yeah for a movie with that subject matter it was pretty uninvolving

there are one or two moments of flagrantly shoody CGI in moonrise kingdom, i sort of like it

I always wondered why in Naked Lunch when you see that big thing Julian Sands was stuck in, they created a fake Julian Sands instead of putting the real actor in it. Another case of what seems to me unnecessary effects.
That Giger looking humping thing looked pretty rough too but otherwise I thought the special effects were brilliant. I can only guess what he would have replaced with cgi if he could.

w/out cuts this also appears to be "unrated" or NC-17 to me

Surely this is because of the guy wanking and not any of the violence. Brightly lit full-on penis shots are begging for an MPAA panic attack.

This is really Bruce Wagner's movie - it's got bits and pieces from Force Majeure and I'm Losing You - and so much autobiographical stuff (he was a limo driver at the Beverly Hills Hotel; he is heavily involved in new age mysticism but is a raging cynic, etc. etc.)

Cronenberg had never filmed a single shot in Hollywood before this movie!

hoew in the world do you clowns suspend your disbelief over rear projection in old movies?

Brightly lit full-on penis shots are begging for an MPAA panic attack.

Wolf of Wall Street was rated R and featured a brightly lit full-on penis shot of Jonah Hill wanking it in a crowded party

hoew in the world do you clowns suspend your disbelief over rear projection in old movies?

heh Existenz features some of the worst - or most obvious - back projection ever (in the driving scenes) and I've always wondered if it was a deliberate stylistic choice

it is in Far from Heaven and prob a few Coen joints I am forgetting.

anyway i have a number complaints about this movie and the fire is nowhere close to the top 20.

figure all the fake-looking stuff in eXistenZ is v intentional

It could just be that Cronenberg makes sure effects look great when they're integral to the story but doesn't really care when they're not

Wolf of Wall Street was rated R and featured a brightly lit full-on penis shot of Jonah Hill wanking it in a crowded party

― Οὖτις, Wednesday, October 1, 2014 10:48 AM (26 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

did it? man, I must have blocked that out

it is in Far from Heaven and prob a few Coen joints I am forgetting.

election features an amusing rear projection as a kind of fellini pastiche; film is chock full of intentionally crickety analog effects

although that's not a coen joint

i was watching some 1960s richard fleischer movie (which one? I forget) and it had a rather amazingly seamless instance of rear projection in a car-ride scene

really; i wonder if Sophocles thought Jocasta's suicide was "non-integral." xxxxp

WotW cock scene was v different than this; also the MPAA cuts a break to bad big-budget comedies. (also this one is clearly not a fake johnson, but it is flaccid)

True, I haven't seen this one yet so I have no idea what's important

in general, or w/r/t this movie?

I always wondered why in Naked Lunch when you see that big thing Julian Sands was stuck in, they created a fake Julian Sands instead of putting the real actor in it. Another case of what seems to me unnecessary effects.

― Robert Adam Gilmour,

because it emphasizes the illusory nature of what Bill sees? It's the actor playing Kiki who's obv fake. Sands and Kiki are having sex; instead, he imagines a mugwump eviscerating Kiki.

I should probably watch it again, I barely understood the film but I enjoyed quite a lot of it. Not that I think I'll understand it the second or third time.

nice one, amateurist B)

Wolf of Wall Street was rated R and featured a brightly lit full-on penis shot of Jonah Hill wanking it in a crowded party

Should have clarified - full-on bright penii played for a laugh (see also: Walk Hard) generally treated differently than dramatic and sexualized full-on bright penii (in Maps (genital spoilers) the guy is tugging on it watching Julianne Moore make out with another woman).

genital spoilers

Jonah Hill's genitals are spoiled.

Cronenberg is a man with eyes who has seen what fire looks like and seems to put a fair amount of thought into how he films things so I don't find it difficult to credit him with making these decisions for a reason

The alienation effect or whatever of the fake-looking fire worked for me cause I found the (self?) immolation of the woman to be one of the odder things to happen in the film, it seemed to come out of nowhere (I may have missed something tbh)

Having now seen Maps to the Stars, I can confirm that a) the penis tugging scene is far more explicit than the one in Wolf of Wall Street and that b)it is possible to read the shoddiness of the fire SFX as either the unfortunate consequence of a limited technical budget OR a deliberately artificial moment of extinction in a film that blurs the boundaries between what's real and what's unreal.

xpost to wins
Yes, I was going to say that SPOILERS the fire/suicide scene is probably the most difficult one to read at a simple narrative level in the whole film

Does stuntpeople + actual fire cost that much? (Genuine q I know nothing)

I guess bad cgi is really really cheap

Perhaps it is simply health and safety gone mad, and we can no longer freely douse stuntppl in petrol now that shoddy sfx are available

Best stuntman-set-on-fire scene is in Carpenter's Thing, imho

I'm a scientist and tbh it will never not be amazing to me that they can safely set people on fire

I'm amazed at the sizable pockets of contempt that exist here and among under-40s in general for Method/'naturalistic' acting, but damn let 20 seconds of CG that doesn't look like a NASA doc in IMAX outtake come along and the film is ruined.

Whereas your ability to make fictive leaps stretches to imagining up some posts nobody made

the olivia williams on fire bit really freaked me out, to extent that I didn't even notice the crappy cgi that was apparently obvious to everyone else, I used to have a recurring nightmare in which someone I knew was consumed by fire and I was trying to pull them out/put the fire out, but terrified that they were already dead/would not recognisably be 'themselves' any more if I did and trying to fight the urge to run away and leave them because of this, I don't know if this is what was supposed to be communicated.
I kind of have the idea that this nightmare was first inspired by something I saw/read in a piece of fiction but I don't remember what

Think he was more scared of getting burned than anything else

character-specific spoiler for a film that may not get a US release til next year; i knew we could get there.

that's probably right, but something about the way it was done, that she did not look like an identifiable human being while he was trying to save here was so close to this nightmare, like this abject thing, of this transition between a living body and a corpse was really effective for me, even if it was just a side-effect of crap cgi

xp sorry, I didn't realise we were not spoiling, apologies Dr Morbius