The Cronenberg Thread

I think Cronenberg and his 70s horror contemporaries - Craven, Romero, Carpenter - were all desperate not to be pigeonholed as genre directors, and Cronenberg definitely had the most success with escaping the genre. But horror was what all these guys were best at, imho - or at least, it was the form that best accommodated their imaginations. (I mean, there's a good case to be made for DC being the best horror film maker of all time, whereas you wouldn't never say he was the best dramatic film maker of all time).

you WOULD never say...

Hmm, it's a good question, I think Cronenberg transcends horror so much that I'm not sure he even counts as horror. Is Videodrome horror? Is Crash? Dead Ringers? He's as much a sci-fi-fi director as horror director.

Ironically, he does have a habit of popping up in acting roles in shitty horror movies, like Nightbreed and Jason X.

I remember Crash as being sort of abstractly sad.

Yes. Even though I don't experience it myself (the performances are just too wooden), I can see feeling sad for the characters in Crash--sadness at a remove. With The Dead Zone and The Fly, for sure--Dead Ringers is trickier--I feel an empathetic sadness with Walken and Goldblum and Geena Davis.

imo his work is more science fiction/body horror and not the violent or menacing horror you get from a lot of films in the horror genre

it's seldom some external force menacing the characters in Cronenberg's films, it's usually a man-versus-self thing

I mean, in Videodrome there's technically a group that has been specifically targeting the protagonist, but he's only the perfect target because he's been seeking out the type of material already

Cronenberg has a lot (loosely) in common with Egoyan. Two Canadian directors working consistently within a certain theme, briefly flirting with the mainstream, then for some reason just sort of ... fizzling out. I could imagine Cronenberg making "Where the Truth Lies" or even "Chloe."

idk what Cronenberg's problem is these days re: features. The more recent shorts I've seen of his were great.

It's weird, Spider (arguably the first of his films met with indifference) was followed by A History of Violence and Eastern Promises, maybe not the most Cronenberg-y of his films but really great nonetheless. But then it's a return to meh or disappointing (reportedly).

Cronenberg has made som meh movies recently, but nothing as awful as late period Egoyan.

I finally figured out the problem with Crash: it's a movie made by someone who loves J.G. Ballard, but hates both sex and cars.

He loves cars and he probably likes sex.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_Company_(1979_film)

he likes sex so much he demonstrated how to do it properly on the set of History of Violence

Spider, History of Violence and A Dangerous Method are all v good. I could take or leave the last couple but they had their moments.

he likes sex so much he demonstrated how to do it properly on the set of History of Violence

he subsequently claimed he and Viggo were joking about this fwiw

:(

75 today

have interviewed DC several times, he's great, but my favourite memory was meeting him when I was 15 and telling him I snuck into CRASH... he said "that's the way to do it."

— Adam Nayman (@brofromanother) March 16, 2018

Cronenberg getting his birthday cake. pic.twitter.com/fjbWPXWrkc

— Philip Concannon (@Phil_on_Film) March 16, 2018

David Cronenberg Is Developing a TV Series

Oodalally!

Both excited about this, and sad that this wasn't done during the 20th century, when "Cronenbergian" had more meaning.

https://nerdist.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/07-cronenberg.gif

pic.twitter.com/DPfHCTsM8Q

— Einojuhani (@__HypnoAngel) February 19, 2019

David Cronenberg is one of my favorite directors, and he has directed a few of my favorite movies. And yet, I'd somehow managed to skip his last three movies. So in the interest of completion I decided to start in with the most recent, "Maps to the Stars," and man, what a dumb movie that one is, like a particularly unfunny David Lynch parody. I'm sure it was funny or smart (or something) to a handful of people, but ugh. I guess at least it's memorable, in a campy sort of way.

Was it filmed digitally? Because it didn't even look particularly good, and Cronenberg movies usually do.

OK, now Cosmopolis, I thought that one was great. I never read the book, but what a perfect pairing of material with director, and Pattison (the best thing about Maps to the Stars) was really good in it.

https://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/news-bfi/interviews/crash-david-cronenberg-jeremy-thomas?utm_content=buffer5ebfd&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitterbfi&utm_campaign=buffer

“You want to know the moral of making a film like Crash?” asks Thomas, just as we’re leaving. “Wear a seatbelt.”

haha um no

Ballard himself was more withering, describing the moral panic as “little England at its worst… [symptomatic of a] strange, nervous nation.”

JGB otm, as usual

YESSS:

Cronenberg said that he’s currently in pre-production on a brand-new TV series for Netflix that will be based on his recent novel “Consumed.”

https://theplaylist.net/david-cronenberg-netflix-consumed-20191016/

turns out he's a documentarian

I'm hoping for a sexier virus like in Shivers.

Finally saw History of Violence. I liked it a lot but maybe not as much as Eastern Promises. The thing that bothered me most was that I thought it indulged a little too much in the male fantasy of being the secret ultimate badass. One of the great things about the famous steam room fight scene -- one of the greatest fight scenes of all time -- is that it really feels like he could lose and be killed, and therefore it really feels like life itself is at stake. Somehow the violence in History of Violence never quite reaches that visceral intensity, he always comes off as too much of an action hero, as nasty as he gets. The climactic scene felt tired and familiar, fighting the end boss and taking out all his dudes in the big mansion. It was Road House, it was Ghost Dog, it was a million other movies. I don't know where else the movie could have gone really, but it was overly contrived to have him finally kill ALL the guys from his past, including his own brother, and get on with his life. Other things felt very real to me - showing one's worst in a relationship and then getting on with it, both people deeply wounded.

William Hurt was very funny as the brother, fwiw, yet it still felt like a character I had seen too many times.

not that I am any expert on fighting to the death, but I imagine there is always a certain amount of chance involved even if someone is a trained killer. Eastern Promises captures that, History of Violence doesn't. I don't know if there's a reason for that or not. Maybe it's supposed to be a bit more cartoonish. It worked for me over all.

I think they're after different vibes tbh. Mortensen's seeming invulnerability in AHOV works for me because it doesn't help him master the part of his life he actually wants to preserve - if anything, his superpowers are a freakish liability.

Saw a trailer for a new film by his son a couple of weeks ago.

simon otm

Re-linking to J.G. Ballard's review, which proposes a different kind of perspective:
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2005/sep/23/jgballard

AHOV was based on a comic book...

I just noticed that Cosmopolis is available on Amazon Prime. Might watch that this weekend.

I read the comic years and years ago, iirc it was a lot more generic hardboiled crime and WAY more graphically violent

Mortensen's seeming invulnerability in AHOV works for me because it doesn't help him master the part of his life he actually wants to preserve

Yup. The critique of masculinity was also going on.

File under filmmakers i keep trying to like but can't get into. Tried watching The Brood last night and found it just a brutal slog. I just have no clue what people get out of this movie other than the big gross out at the end. Its like he used up all his imagination on the body-horror stuff and didnt have any left over for the rest of the film. All that brown and beige, all those interminable bland shots of people getting in and out of cars, opening doors, walking down hallways, sitting down in nondescript barely-decorated rooms, slowly reading their lines to each other. Maybe he was going for 'stately pace', but it just gave me Corman vibes instead tbh. I couldnt hold in the giggles during the scene when the father in law is mourning his dead ex wife, which Cronenberg opts to depict by having him literally weeping and caressing the chalk outline of her dead body.

Should I keep going? I've watched just about everything up to The Fly. If thats the only one that I've liked, is there a chance of me finding anything beyond it that'll work for me, or should I just chalk it up as Not For Me?

At least give Naked Lunch a shot.

I'm not a big fan of "The Brood." Have you seen Videodrome? If you haven't, you should. If you did and didn't like it, maybe take your foot off the gas a bit, but fwiw "The Fly" and "The Dead Zone" are the first ones (after "Videodrome") where he gets budgets and performances on par with his ideas. HIs post "Fly" work is kind of erratic - sometimes his ideas get the better of him, or at least are let down by their corresponding budgets, like "Naked Lunch" - but "Dead Ringers" is pretty incredible, "eXistenZ" fun, "Crash" worth watching, "Eastern Promises" and "History of Violence" excellent vehicles for Viggo. After that ... eh.

Should I keep going? I've watched just about everything up to The Fly. If thats the only one that I've liked, is there a chance of me finding anything beyond it that'll work for me, or should I just chalk it up as Not For Me?

IMO none of the movies he made after The Fly (except M Butterfly which I have not seen) are bad, though some are more interesting than others. tough to go wrong w/ Naked Lunch, Crash, or AHOV. the recent ones are stan-only affairs, more or less. I also have a soft spot for A Dangerous Method.

All that brown and beige, all those interminable bland shots of people getting in and out of cars, opening doors, walking down hallways, sitting down in nondescript barely-decorated rooms, slowly reading their lines to each other.

Sounds good to me, Cronenberg in a nutshell.

Haha, yeah, sign me up for that. (The Brood is my favorite of the early stuff.)

But then again Cosmopolis might be my favorite of the post Crash stuff, so I'm probably not to be trusted.

I really liked Cosmopolis, but really hated Maps to the Stars, perhaps the first of his movies I thought was outright bad across the board

Has anyone read Steve Bissette's monograph about The Brood?

https://www.pspublishing.co.uk/the-brood-hardcover-by-stephen-r-bissette-4784-p.asp

For me, one of the pleasing bonuses of early Cronenberg is all that beige 70s Canadian decor - I especially love the shopping mall in the opening of Scanners.

oh my word, I want that!

690 pages is ... a lot for a monograph.