The Cronenberg Thread

Also I don't think Crash was trying to be that, Alex - shocking people just isn't interesting.

My faves:

Dead Ringers
The Fly
Naked Lunch
Videodrome

so are you sure that's your dad?

Well, that was something. The beginning was really really frosty and weird. Interesting sort of uh.. comic timing toward the end, the audience would laugh and then sort of recoil like OMGWTF.

Re: Violence, the Boston Globe critic seems to get it.

David Edelstein at Slate writes an incredibly stupid review that seems to have little to do with the film and a lot to do with his own issues.

David Edelstein at Slate writes an incredibly stupid review that seems to have little to do with the film and a lot to do with his own issues.

-- dar1a g (dar1a_...), September 25th, 2005.

I enjoyed his review. His enthusiasm makes me count down the days when it opens in South Florida.

The sudden bloody discharges are lightning-fast and deliciously satisfying—orgasmic, even. But they also leave you sickened, because Cronenberg cuts briefly—in an extra frame, like a comic book's (sorry, graphic novel's)—to men with heads shattered and faces beaten, literally, to bloody pulps. But here's the thing: Those extra frames don't sicken us morally. Even though A History of Violence is suffused with loss—[..]—the right people are always on the right end of the (righteous) violence.

No, no, no..

Edelstein, fwiw, has been grappling with violence and vigilantism in film for a while now. See, for example, his reviews of In the Bedroom and Kill Bill. He worries about the bloodiness in History of Violence, but I never thought it was overdone. I agree with Rosenbaum, who said (in a review that apparently isn't online yet) that the shots of bloody faces don't dwell on the gore in a fetishistic way but linger on them just long enough to convey the real-life consequences of shooting someone in the head.

http://www.moviepublicity.com/image_assets/history_of_violence_DF_00511.jpg

Now, the score was intrusive and overwrought at the start, this was deliberate. Same for acting seemed to be v awkward and wooden in the opening scenes as well. I guess what I am saying is, do you think this stuff wasn't deliberate & therefore that is why the film wasn't good, or that regardless, even if it was meant to come across that way, it was just a bad idea that didn't work?

Everything was so telegraphed and cliched, moments like when Maria Bello says "because we were never teenagers together" (or whatever) were so awkward and incongruous and screamed ARE YOU PAYING ATTENTION?

To me, this was like an Oliver Stone movie gone emo. It's like, if you're going to have a good pulp scenario, fucking work it! Don't give your movie a title like "The History of Violence" and act like it's some sort of treatise on identity and the universal human condition! Don't have stupid teenage bully revenge scenarios and boring gangsters in dark cars with SCARY eyes! John Dahl used to be really good at this kind of thing. Or yeah, make everything really stupid and overblown, make U-TURN, at least it would be fun. But instead with Cronenberg all we get is the weak, wibbly middle-ground that tries to sell itself as "complex". Ugh.

I still love and respect all of you and your opinions, though!

not very. The sex scenes actually had both of us laughing out loud!

I loved the film. The acting is certainly not wooden: in the case of Viggo Mortenson, he makes the transitions between cornfed Midwesterner and gangsta like a pro I never expected him to be. Maria Bello quivers and rages with an intensity she's never quite shown before (her greatest moment: the look of disgust she gives Mortenson after their tryst on the stairs). As for William Hurt - well. Talk about a pro. If this had been a play, I would have given him a standing ovation. His ham-on-rye performance summons the pity, terror, and comedy that the film's schematic, over-explicit script (its weakest element) wants us to understand.

Cronenberg's work with sex and gore are pretty consistent. This film doesn't try too hard to shock or make a bold statement, but places it right in the middle of the completely ordinary. I don't see it as some sort of artistic contrast or shocking "My god, there is weird shit among this normal town," it's just kind of... there. And people have to deal with it. Seriously, if the film was filled with "You must deal with these things you've been through! You're tearing this family apart!"-style arguments filled with a rising in the score, it'd be every other schlocky film.