The Cronenberg Thread

ADM is a totally different, albeit minor and enjoyable, film

it has one really good joke in it

surveying, ranking the oeuvre

http://www.slantmagazine.com/house/article/the-films-of-david-cronenberg-ranked

survey is good, rankings are ridic

Top 5 is accurate (in a different order, but still).

Crash is so bad

Eric possibly otm

Crash is much funnier than Maps to the Stars.

I loathed Crash in '97 (my first experience with crowds exiting a theatre) but it's due for a "rescreen."

A Dangerous Method has to be the worst, I forgot that was Cronenberg.

careful w morbz trigger-word there Alfred

I knew it was from how the precision of those images and how Freud and Jung are set up as umbilically connected as the Mantle twins.

how

Dangerous Method has at least one good joke in it, which is more than you can say for Crash which is just tedious

xp

careful w morbz trigger-word there Alfred

― Οὖτις,

"I"?

funnier?

Naked Lunch left me cold once Judy Davis exited, bn meaning to try again

the pacing of Naked Lunch is v strange and it drags for a bit in the last third but is redeemed by the ending. score is great, typewriters are great, should've been more overtly homoerotic imo if it wanted to be at all true to the source material but eh it's its own thing

the thing that's stuck with me from last year's r*scr**n of Dead Ringers is the sob of "I want some ice cream."

I feel like those rankings were picked out of a hat

every fetishist has his reasons

the write-ups aren't bad at all

i really, really like history of violence, which in its own way is perfect

it's really interesting to watch older cronenberg movies, esp. those from the mid-80s and earlier. he doesn't quite have his style mastered, and there are awkward moments and scenes that don't come off even as you admire what they are trying to do. but in some of the recent films you have a sense that he knows /exactly/ where to put the camera, /exactly/ when to cut, etc. there's a classical precision that's almost breathtaking.

The way Viggo Mortensen seems to change the very structure of his face through a change in expression when he acknowledges his past identity in AHOV is still one of my favorite scenes

some of his recent films remind me of the moment when a lot of people felt hal hartley went off the rails.... (ca. no such thing and later). there's a sense that having achieved a summit of critical favor, the director wants to tackle projects of an appropriate sociological heft. and what results is satire that's somehow both extremely idiosyncratic and kind of obvious (in a way that seems unbecoming of such smart directors).

xxxp Almost boring.

Give me the shagginess of his early stuff and the emerging thematic clumsiness of his most recent few any day.

the big confrontation in front of the house in "history of violence" (where viggo first shows his "true colors" to his family) is incredible. it's really kuleshovian, too -- it's not until over halfway through the scene, i think, that you get a shot that actually shows ed harris and his goons in the same frame as viggo and his family.

also really striking (and i guess derived from the graphic novel?) that history of violence begins with the bad guys, kind of like a lot of westerns.

Am willing to give History of Violence another shot, but I found it more uninvolving than clinical.

the obviousness is in "spider," too. the big climactic reveal is beautifully engineered as visual storytelling, but it's also, disappointingly, exactly what you might have feared/expected. cronenberg is much smarter than i am, so i probably shouldn't second-guess why he's sometimes drawn to material like that.

Give me the shagginess of his early stuff and the emerging thematic clumsiness of his most recent few any day.

and, for the most part, give me the meat in the middle.

you guys are being really glib

I love "milking cows and shit" from Hurt in History Of Violence.

hurt in "history of violence" is definitely a take-or-leave thing. when i first saw the film i thought he was playing too broadly, too cartoonishly. but each time i've seen it since (probably a dozen times) i figure there's really no other way to play it, and he's pretty perfect.

well it's all been said, and gets resaid (starting w/ Shakey) with every goddamn bump

xp

i mean doing an al pacino brooding intensity thing just wouldn't have been appropriate... it would have been too close to viggo's performance.

of his six post-2000 features (haven't seen Eastern Promises) what i really plug into is a pessimistic old-man vibe -- the world of the film is either revealed as a fraud or illusion, or is littered with multiple deaths, or both. Sure this is true of earlier work too, but seems upfront and obsessive now.

Essential: Videodrome, Stereo, Crimes of The Future.

I haven't seen anything recent by him though.

well it's all been said, and gets resaid (starting w/ Shakey) with every goddamn bump

oh now *I'm* the broken record? physician heal thyself etc

i think we shd do a podcast/commentary where Eric and I watch Crash and Cosmopolis with you and point out the funny parts.

Whatever gains Cronenberg has made w. the 'classical precision' of his recent(ish) films - and I'm w/ Eric, give me the rough edges of his first and best movies over the Merchant Ivory mise-en-scene of Dangerous Method - its been accompanied by a fatal loss of that energy given off by the wild ideas zinging round Shivers, Brood etc

the Merchant Ivory mise-en-scene of Dangerous Method

gahhh, this is such a misunderstanding of ADM. 19th-c furniture does not equal stodgy. also Merchant-Ivory made *some* pretty good films.

I haven't watched Cosmopolis (or Maps to the Stars yet), I'm a bit wary with all the bad reviews

xxp

i think we shd do a podcast/commentary where Eric and I watch Crash and Cosmopolis with you and point out the funny parts.

One thing's for sure, we'd never be talking at the same time.

xp my take on latter-day Cronenberg seems to be very much inverse to the general levels of critical enthusiasm

So I don't really know if it's a "recommendation" to say I loved Cosmopolis and really liked Maps.

well it's not like those two received the critical enthusiasm of the previous three

Cosmopolis is pretty bad.

I agree with Morbs about A Dangerous Method--it's excellent and not at all "stodgy". Aside from the setting it's very much of a piece with the rest of his ourvre. Also Viggo Mortenson is a lot of fun as Freud.

Cronenberg features ranked:

Videodrome
Dead Ringers
The Brood
eXistenZ
The Fly
They Came From Within
A History of Violence
Naked Lunch
Scanners
Rabid
The Dead Zone
A Dangerous Method
Maps to the Stars
Spider
Eastern Promises
Crash
Cosmopolis

Have yet to see M. Butterfly.

the blurb in Morbz link about M. Butterfly is v otm - it's totally inert

The Brood
The Fly
Videodrome
Crash
The Dead Zone
Cosmopolis
Dead Ringers
Maps to the Stars
Scanners
They Came From Within
Spider
A History of Violence
Rabid

Haven't seen or haven't seen recently enough to accurately judge: Stereo, Crimes of the Future, Fast Company, Naked Lunch, eXistenZ, Eastern Promises, A Dangerous Method