The Cronenberg Thread

In the interview he says many of his films aren't on DVD, but which? I know Shivers taken a long time to get an American DVD release but I thought that was the final feature length thing.

I had shivers on DVD years ago.

I am thinking of watching The Brood tonight... never seen it before, hope it's good!

It's great.

yeah that was really something

kind of wanted to go for the Brood/ADM psychotherapy double-feature but I got too tired & chickened out

i really want someone to shop one of those brood children onto a picture of me so i can use it as my global profile pic

you don't need to see ADM after you've seen the Brood

Duly noted ... maybe i'll just rewatch The Brood

Ward is rong.

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.