The Cronenberg Thread

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

Yeah I didn't realise this wasn't out yet over there although I wonder (I don't) how that works when it's the other way round

well DC's films haven't been American-financed in years (at least not substantially) and this one will prob barely be released due to content that can't be viewed by 12-year-olds.

no big deal, spoilers gen don't spoil me even when im victimized

with you there. What sort of release something will get is happily a mystery to me tbh, there is a cinema in my town that will show things and beyond that I don't really care

I guess bad cgi is really really cheap

― please delete outrageous tanuki crappyposter (wins), Wednesday, October 1, 2014 4:23 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

there is no limit to how cheap cheaply-made CGI can be!

this movie looks like it's really whiny and crabby about hollywood! I have limited patience with such movies but as i wrote earlier if it's genuinely weird that could be its redeeming feature

I was unsure if this film was targeting many people in particular. The boy is a bit like Beiber but I don't think it was really attacking him specifically. I don't remember any references to actors or directors being damning.

A large part of the humour is how horrible and cynical the people are but I don't think satire is the main point.

I think satire has to have an implicit belief in the virtue in the world that opposes the forces being satirized. This shows a hermetic world of the unredeemable or unsalvageable.

really nev thought of Bieber, the pubescent grossout comedy Benjie appears to be making suggests any of those kid actors who are usually washed up by 20 (looks like Wagner wrote the script somewhere around 2006).

actually i guess he wrote the first go around '93?

http://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/sep/17/maps-to-the-stars-my-film-about-the-dark-side-of-hollywood

that makes sense, because I can't really think of any present day analogues to Benji's franchise. It seemed like more of a Home Alone/Problem Child thing

yeah, surely some of those kids' moms were their agents

Cronenberg made a movie about Problem Child? Sold!

dangerous method is the real nadir of latter-day cronenberg, imho - so lifeless and cheap-looking

― sʌxihɔːl (Ward Fowler), Monday, 29 September 2014 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I liked the film: how it put what he is interested in highly conventional ways.

Freud's office didn't look bad at all to me. Thought there was care to how the film looked.

i loved freud's office in ADM

i think it is a lot more interesting movie than anyone gives it credit for, i think weirdly people dismiss it just because it's a period piece and thus not what they expect from croney

i like when directors not known for period pieces (altman, mike leigh, cronenberg) do them, they always bring something interesting and weird

Kubrick, arguably.

paul w.s. anderson

Just to expand on this a bit. Its not that I don't like what Cronenberg does that I'd suddenly want something fairly conventional/BBC drama-esque from him. Dramatizing Freud and the scene of people around him in that way somehow felt appropriate. Some of those characters were so out of left-field that you just give them the space for their weirdness to take over.

Kubrick, arguably.

― Eric H., Friday, October 3, 2014 1:08 AM (7 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

you might say 2001 is a sci-fi period piece Ô_o

You might say Kubrick brought apes to the period piece.

you might say 2001 was the original "planet" of the "apes" movie

"you" might "say"

Vadim Rizov not wild about DC's year

There’s a moment when Olivia Williams is exiting her bathroom; she turns and stares before gasping in shock at an unexpected intruder. The camera waits in the hallway the whole time like a stalker, cuing us to expect a jolt, but the amount of space and attenuated time it takes to get there is what generates a frisson beyond the expected. Still, I can’t get around the fact that this is a terrible script, and I’m not sure Cronenberg grasps that that’s an insurmountable problem. A salute, though, to Mia Wasikowska, in the year’s most thankless great performance.

I should also say a few words about Cronenberg’s debut novel, Consumed. Reviews of this have been good so far, which makes me wonder if I’m just functionally illiterate and haven’t learned anything in my life so far....

http://filmmakermagazine.com/87812-nyff-14-david-cronenbergs-maps-to-the-stars-and-consumed/#.VDQWr_ldVyw

One thing about this film is that it may teach ilxors the correct way to say imago

imago ahead and say it

i think it is a lot more interesting movie than anyone gives it credit for

I remember seeing ADM at Telluride and being literally its only defender among the dozens of people I knew there who'd seen it.

yeah i think that criticism has so oriented itself around auteur critique that it's hard for some people to just say, "here's a talented director who has a shitty script, and the resulting film isn't that good." that explains most of scorsese's career for the past 20 years, anyhow.

Spider is my second favourite after Dead Ringers. I think Spider is seriously neglected.

I interviewed Cronenberg once about Spider and he told me how he'd cut out all sorts of special effects from the film. The one that sticks out is some meal that had eyeballs and bled when the guy cut into it. I admit, it's a fuzzy memory.

one of only a few Cronenberg movies I've never bothered to watch since it sounds so deeply unpleasant and pointless