The Cronenberg Thread

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i taped crash last night, when it was on channel 4. i'm going to watch it tomorrow. should i have high hopes?

― weasel diesel (K1l14n), Friday, 23 September 2005 22:40 (twenty years ago)

No.

― Alex in SF (Alex in SF), Friday, 23 September 2005 22:41 (twenty years ago)

should i go jogging instead?

― weasel diesel (K1l14n), Friday, 23 September 2005 22:42 (twenty years ago)

Yes.

― Alex in SF (Alex in SF), Friday, 23 September 2005 22:43 (twenty years ago)

why is it so bad, alex?

― weasel diesel (K1l14n), Friday, 23 September 2005 22:45 (twenty years ago)

you have less than 2 hrs to provide a satisfactory reply...

― weasel diesel (K1l14n), Friday, 23 September 2005 22:48 (twenty years ago)

It's just really boring. It's not a great book either, but at least the book has the benefit of Ballard's internal dialogues which hold at least a marginal amount of interest. The movie has nothing except some supposedly "titilating" sex scenes which come off as way too clinical and forced to actually be sexy.

― Alex in SF (Alex in SF), Friday, 23 September 2005 22:49 (twenty years ago)

LOL

― walter kranz (walterkranz), Friday, 23 September 2005 22:51 (twenty years ago)

Basically if you've read the book you'll be disappointed cause it's taken only most surface part of the text and doesn't do much with it and if you haven't read the book you'll just come away thinking it's just trying to hard to be sexy and shocking and is failing completely.

― Alex in SF (Alex in SF), Friday, 23 September 2005 22:51 (twenty years ago)

i think it's actually pretty funny... intentionally funny even.

― s1ocki (slutsky), Friday, 23 September 2005 22:56 (twenty years ago)

if you haven't read the book you'll just come away thinking it's just trying to hard to be sexy and shocking and is failing completely.

Or you'll actually watch the film and enjoy it.

― walter kranz (walterkranz), Friday, 23 September 2005 23:07 (twenty years ago)

two words: JAMES SPADER

please destroy

― hstencil (hstencil), Friday, 23 September 2005 23:26 (twenty years ago)

I liked the movie. I liked(and have always liked) James Spader. And I ESPECIALLY like one mr. elias koteas. Especially in that movie.

― Dan Selzer (Dan Selzer), Friday, 23 September 2005 23:41 (twenty years ago)

you're crazy.

― hstencil (hstencil), Friday, 23 September 2005 23:42 (twenty years ago)

James Spader!!? He's like an assail the unassailable.

― walter kranz (walterkranz), Friday, 23 September 2005 23:43 (twenty years ago)

are you kidding? he's terrible. more wooden than keanu.

― hstencil (hstencil), Friday, 23 September 2005 23:44 (twenty years ago)

but smugger!

― latebloomer (latebloomer), Friday, 23 September 2005 23:53 (twenty years ago)

spader is pretty wooden, but he does seem to have a bit more going on upstairs than keanu.

― latebloomer (latebloomer), Friday, 23 September 2005 23:54 (twenty years ago)

how can you tell?!?!? he's wooden!

― hstencil (hstencil), Friday, 23 September 2005 23:55 (twenty years ago)

his eyebrows are carved a tad differently than keanus on the wood!

― latebloomer (latebloomer), Saturday, 24 September 2005 00:09 (twenty years ago)

I don't think spader is wooden at all, I think he's genius. in most roles he's like "this movie is so below me that I'm not even going to bother raising my eyelids all the way".

― Dan Selzer (Dan Selzer), Saturday, 24 September 2005 00:38 (twenty years ago)

hstencil OTM.

― jed_ (jed), Saturday, 24 September 2005 00:45 (twenty years ago)

You guys just hate him cuz he's a stoner and his droopy eyelids make him look "wooden."

― walter kranz (walterkranz), Saturday, 24 September 2005 00:51 (twenty years ago)

A History of Violence is wow. Completely and totally wow. I think I need to see it again. I'm not even sure I can quite process it.

― Alex in SF (Alex in SF), Saturday, 24 September 2005 02:45 (twenty years ago)

really?!! must see must see must see. I couldn't make it this afternoon. Tomorrow then.

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

― dar1a g (daria g), Saturday, 24 September 2005 03:53 (twenty years ago)

I have no idea what Cronenberg was trying to do with Crash, but whatever it was it ended being horribly unsuccessful in everything it attempted (it's not funny enough to be "funny" IMO.) I think the biggest problem is that taken out of the time when the novel was written, the themes begin to make very little less sense (car crash culture just isn't what it was.) Maybe if Diana had died before the movie was made it might have worked somehow, really given the film something to focus on, but as it stood the whole car crash thing did seem kind of like joke and frankly there are funnier ones.

― Alex in SF (Alex in SF), Saturday, 24 September 2005 04:05 (twenty years ago)

I recall reading that Ballard liked the film very much.. Um, there never was a car crash culture, that was the reason he chose it (JGB I mean), a fetish that doesn't exist.

― dar1a g (daria g), Saturday, 24 September 2005 04:41 (twenty years ago)

Oh, look, a blog:
http://www.historyofviolence.com/cronenbergblog/

― dar1a g (daria g), Saturday, 24 September 2005 15:11 (twenty years ago)

actually my parents were big into car crash culture in the 70's and i was actually conceived in a car crash orgy. so Crash is a personal movie for me.

― latebloomer (latebloomer), Saturday, 24 September 2005 15:26 (twenty years ago)

I am lamely excited about this movie. The end of the graphic novel goes way over the top and I'm very interested in seeing what DC does with it.

― adam (adam), Saturday, 24 September 2005 16:31 (twenty years ago)

I'm looking forward to it too. The last Cronenberg film I liked was Naked Lunch.

My faves:

Dead Ringers
The Fly
Naked Lunch
Videodrome

― Alfred Soto (Alfred Soto), Saturday, 24 September 2005 19:01 (twenty years ago)

actually my parents were big into car crash culture in the 70's and i was actually conceived in a car crash orgy. so Crash is a personal movie for me.

so are you sure that's your dad?

― Dan Selzer (Dan Selzer), Saturday, 24 September 2005 21:12 (twenty years ago)

History of Violence..

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.

― dar1a g (daria g), Sunday, 25 September 2005 03:46 (twenty years ago)

I'm seeing HOV tomorrow. But I just watched Naked Lunch again, and holy shit what a movie.

― Paunchy Stratego (kenan), Sunday, 25 September 2005 04:06 (twenty years ago)

It was fun to watch it with a bunch of virgins, to Cronenberg and to Beats. I got to point things out... "That's Kerouac. That's Ginsberg. That's Tangiers." And I got to glance over to their reactions to, say, him rubbing bug powder dust on the talking asshole of a giant imaginary bug. God I love that movie.

― Paunchy Stratego (kenan), Sunday, 25 September 2005 04:11 (twenty years ago)

That's one I haven't seen! I'll have to rent it soon.

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.

― dar1a g (daria g), Sunday, 25 September 2005 04:22 (twenty years ago)

you lucky big city folk! ;-)

― latebloomer (latebloomer), Sunday, 25 September 2005 04:50 (twenty years ago)

I've been dying to see History of Violence for so long it seems. This week! As soon as freakin' possible! I even had a conversation tonight about Cronenberg with a friend who turns out to be a big fan too! Right now, well, maybe not right now but earlier today or tomorrow, I would be reading the book "Cronenberg on Cronenberg" but the library's self-checkout wouldn't scan it yesterday (and the real-person checkout was closed.) Anyway, new Cronenberg + latest ep of Battlestar + discovery that I do in fact really like Joanna Newsom = pretty good day.

― rrrobyn (rrrobyn), Sunday, 25 September 2005 05:47 (twenty years ago)

Ok, HOV was great. Everything Cronenberg is good at stripped down to essentials, shot and acted very well. Very funny, too.

― adam (adam), Sunday, 25 September 2005 11:36 (twenty years ago)

*spoilspoilspoil*
I saw it last night. Seven out of ten. Good things: acting, little tiny details (children's heights on doorframe, clothes that are not his own being too big for him), flitting from one little girl to another at the beginning lost me, then by losing me got me right into it because I started thinking. Bad things: one of the sex scenes, unbelievably cute mother with hips that are unlikely to have borne two children in slinky jeans that show them off too well, big scary gangster played a bit too comedy. I also liked the way the two guys who hold up the diner are like islands in the plot.

― Mädchen (Madchen), Sunday, 25 September 2005 15:02 (twenty years ago)

That's one I haven't seen! I'll have to rent it soon.
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.

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

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

― Alfred Soto (Alfred Soto), Sunday, 25 September 2005 16:51 (twenty years ago)

Edelstein's review isn't great, but he at least deals with a number of the isseus the film raises. (I can think of little good popular criticism that doens't also deal with the critic's "own issues". What do you want, pure formalism?).
It's a mesmerizing movie but Cronenberg is really playing both sides of the violence coin. It's not just that the movie is explicitly violent but in a number of scenes (especially when the son beats up the bully) there's the typical action/thriller treatment of violence-as-catharsis. I think Sympathy for Mr. Vengenance deals with a number of the same ideas (and is equally pornographically violent) in a more compelling (not necessarily better) manner.

― C0L1N B... (C0L1N B...), Sunday, 25 September 2005 19:38 (twenty years ago)

I found it pretty aggravating, like he's fixated on this shame/guilt thing which didn't make any sense to me, and I didn't see it in the movie. But then, I didn't find anything satisfying or virtuosic about any of the violence in the movie, it was all hard to watch, I thought.

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..

― dar1a g (daria g), Monday, 26 September 2005 03:33 (twenty years ago)

i liked it alot!

― huell howser (chaki), Monday, 26 September 2005 07:37 (twenty years ago)

I liked it, too.

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.

― jaymc (jaymc), Friday, 30 September 2005 15:00 (twenty years ago)

I hated it!

― 100% Nice (nordicskilla), Saturday, 1 October 2005 03:22 (twenty years ago)

is this going to be released nationwide? curse my hick town!

― latebloomer (latebloomer), Saturday, 1 October 2005 03:24 (twenty years ago)

I was so rooting for Cronenberg, but this movie was a horrible reminder that he is just the fuck that made Existenz!

― 100% Nice (nordicskilla), Saturday, 1 October 2005 04:44 (twenty years ago)

Also the acting was some of the worst I've seen in quite some time and the score was so intrusive and portentous and awful. I'm starting to believe that Spider (which I loved) was just an anomaly and that David Cronenberg started out making great movies and is going to make progressively worse ones as time passes.

― 100% Nice (nordicskilla), Saturday, 1 October 2005 04:46 (twenty years ago)

AND ANOTHER THING

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

― 100% Nice (nordicskilla), Saturday, 1 October 2005 04:52 (twenty years ago)

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