The Cronenberg Thread

well there's some real obvious ones - The Player, Sunset Boulevard, Mulholland Drive

The Bad and the Beautiful
Singin' in the Rain
Irma Vep

Singin in the Rain is one of the greatest movies ever made

The Day of the Locust
Fedora
S.O.B.

huh didn't know about S.O.B., that sounds p nutty

^Topless Julie Andrews shocker, iirc.

Swimming with Sharks

Star Is Born '37 (funnier than the other versions, tho '54 too)

Barton Fink?

Sullivan's Travels?

or the much better original version, The Big Knife

xp

Thanks for the suggestions so far...I've seen Mulholland, Sunset and Barton. Lots of new suggestions :-)

In a Lonely Place?

Sullivan's Travels

x2

If you're not hung up on good, there's Alex in Wonderland.

The Loved One

there are a couple films that are more about celebrity than hollywood that come to mind but everyone's contributions so far have been excellent

Went to an Inauguration-themed screening of The Dead Zone tonight. I've always loved this film so much. I think of that Robert Kolker book, A Cinema of Loneliness, which I know includes Taxi Driver, The Conversation, and Night Moves. Strictly as a film about loneliness, I'd say The Dead Zone is sadder than any of them. Some of things that people laugh at nowadays baffle me. There's a moment, after Walken is caught off guard by Brooke Adams and her husband out campaigning, where Walken starts to cry and waves the young boy away with a beautiful hand gesture. Ninety percent of a full house thought this was hilarious. Don't get that at all.

Saw limos smashed up today and just thought of Cosmopolis

My dozen favorites.

Was traumatized by Dead Ringers as a teenager. Haven't seen it since.

I'm a huge Cronenberg fan, and yet: 1) I've yet to see his last three (the Freud movie, Cosmopolis or Maps to the Stars) and, more egregiously 2) until last night I had never seen Scanners! Which is very ironic, given it is literally his most iconic movie. I mean, I've seen the explosion scene dozens of times! Anyway, it was good. Haven't seen Dead Ringers or Crash in ages, should watch them again one of these days.

Freud movie is good, maps of the stars is laughable and seems to have been made for the sole purpose of a single iconic shot

Which shot?

"the end"

Don't remember that.

It comes at the end.

Just goofing. I've never seen it, remember?

First thing that springs to mind is Julliane Moore shitting but I don't think it became iconic.

I wonder if he's still planning on making his Lethem adaptation.

*SPOILIDAD*

murder-of-viewer-by-Oscar

The Freud/Jung movie is one of his best.

No Existenz no credibility.

No Crash no credibility

"A very protestant remark"

Existenz is sort of an apotheosis of his body horror stuff, redone as sorta farce. One of my favorite twists in any movie came from watching that. All sorts of bad accents bouncing around, and then you realize it's been on purpose ...

Speaking of Scanners, I didn't think it was particularly good, to be honest. Bad acting, dumb plot, but not very deep (unlike the similarly shaky Rabid/Shivers) when it comes to theme/metaphoric worth, etc. In Alfred's list I would at least swap its place with Dead Zone.

Also, McGoohan - there should be a thread for pipe-smoking portentous/pretentious psychiatrists in horror movies.

I've always thought it was pretty weird that Shivers and Ballard's High-Rise came out in the same year. Must have been something in the air

Scanners is def lower-tier Cronenberg. Outside of the iconic scene and some of McGoohan's scenery chewing it's really pretty slow and stupid.

I love Existenz, a much better film in every way.

I found eXistenZ rather slow, almost leaden at time. I'm rewatching this weekend.

idk maybe I'm just overly fond of the game framework ("GAS" etc.)

it also plays like a loose sequel to videodrome.

I need to buy the Criterion Blu-Ray of The Brood. Love that movie. I suspect any child of divorce whose custodial parent relentlessly shit-talked the non-custodial parent for years would probably feel the same. Scanners is a lot of fun, Videodrome is a masterpiece, and eXistenZ is a bad Videodrome knockoff.

eXistenZ is a good Videodrome tribute!

The Brood is my favorite.

i haven't seen the freud movie or maps to the stars either! cosmopolis was really dull, mostly, except for binoche

prob saw existenz ten years ago but i liked it & thought it was hilarious at the time

Didn't think it possible, but I went to a rep screening of Crash tonight and hated it even more than I did when it came out. Its lumbering eagerness to shock is embarrassing. This is not a comment on the novel, which I haven't read.

the only thing i remember about crash is when deborah kara unger says "anus"

for me that is enough

Unger and Elias Koteas speak every line in this breathy, ominous whisper that's as wearing as it is self-parodying.

I should say that I was semi-diverted throughout by trying to name specific roads. I took one of them home after the film, although I was going in the opposite direction--just me i the car, both hands on the wheel, trying not to crash.

Haven't seen Crash since it came out, but my memory of it is as a deliberately 'cool' version of the Ballard book.

The desire to shock seems to me a noble aim for any filmmaker (as a cinemagoer, I would rather be shocked than comforted) - god forbid we have a cinema deprived of the vulgar and voyeuristic. The erosion of the strong shock impulse in Cronenberg's work has made him a lesser, duller filmmaker imho (eg the bland heritage nothingness of that wretched Freud movie). Besides, Ballard's linking of vehicles with the death impulse, and with orgasmic oblivion, seems very prescient right now - shockingly so.

I'm at the opposite end with Cronenberg, which I know is unusual--the more he erodes his strong shock impulse, the more I like him. His Dead Zone/The Fly/Dead Ringers run is far and away his peak for me. Not that the shock impulse is absent in those films--obviously it isn't, especially in The Fly--but I find his focus is almost entirely on the sadness of the stories there. Maybe the sadness is just a more conventional kind that I can relate to; you could say that Crash is very sad, too, I guess. I wouldn't.

I don't remember anything really being 'cool' about the film adaptation of Crash? If anything, it's a little too literal. Ballard's expository prose is really hard to convey on screen, so a lot of the subtext is lost. So the film gives you the narrative of one man's journey through these sex/car/death fetishists, but doesn't quite drive home the point that it's about society's near-erotic fixation with these machines that regularly kill people.

the bland heritage nothingness of that wretched Freud movie

The staging, lighting, and script ideas were as clammy as ever. I suggest another look.