The Cronenberg Thread

the final skin-shedding is the most chilling moment for me

Shotgun to the head.

I really get irrationally angry anytime people make Twilight jokes about her or Patterson as both have emerged as solid actors.

have only seen Pattorhson in Lighthouse, Good Times and Wild Palms, no idea what the jokes would be (saw a few minutes of a Twilight when a flatmate was watching it but dunno if he was in that scene)

Stewart was p unbearable to me in Adventureland and running the same changes in the Twilight scene but the material was not exactly inspiring. she seems to be making good decisions about what to let her name get funded tho (could not tell if I thought she was any good in this but her performance fit the tone fine)

her own film suggested an interest and aspiration beyond her capability, which might also describe her acting idk? better that than the reverse for sure tho

Watch her Assayas flicks.

Interesting premise(s), gross, I got through it. I'm not sure why I continue to see most every Cronenberg film because I really liked three or four of them 35 years ago.

Love Adventureland, so of course I love Stewart in it. She's very affected and somewhat funny in Crimes of the Future.

Haven't seen Crimes of the Future, but I thought Kristen Stewart was pretty great in Spencer. I also really felt her when she came out in her monologue on SNL, that was very memorable moment for me

Rex Reed — still alive!

David Cronenberg’s ‘Crimes of the Future’ Is a Senseless Collection of Horrifying Garbage

Crimes of the Future is a load of crap. I would like to find a more civil way to describe even a sick and depraved barf bag of a movie like this one, but it defeats every reasonable attempt to try. Publicity poopery declares it “From the mind of David Cronenberg.” That’s your first warning signal. I’ve been able to endure a few of his epic horrors in the past, but 90% of the time I’ve found no evidence of any kind of mind at all. Still, in what has become of a film industry badly in need of triage, wonders never cease. Quick on the heels of its world premiere a few weeks ago in Cannes, where it was shown to audiences who walked out in droves, loudly booed and declared “unreleasable,” Crimes of the Future is now upon us, like a rabid raccoon.

...

The movie opens with a mother smothering her sleeping child to death and goes steadily downhill from there. One scene does not follow another. Images just sort of invade each other while you hope something will make some sort of sense. Unfortunately, logic is nowhere in sight and nothing in the movie makes any sense. As repellent and revolting as it is, I was astonished to find it doubly boring. At the screening I attended, a lot of people walked out, but even more people were snoring. Eventually it becomes so silly that it sinks into a pandemic of farce.

...

The film has no dynamic, which explains why it has so little impact. Crimes of the Future is Grand Guignol to a new level of incomprehensible gibberish—the kind of self-indulgent, IQ-wrecking trash on film for which landfills and garbage dumps were invented.

Publicity poopery declares it “From the mind of David Cronenberg.” That’s your first warning signal.

Rex and I on the same page.

Rex Reed shoulda been executed by firing squad after his post-Oldboy racism and Melissa McCarthy body-shaming

or his Get Out "I don't care if black people are turned into robots"

Don't know about any of that. He's been a terrible non-critic for a long time, but I applaud the line I quoted above.

my comments weren't related to what you just said btw, just happened to come right after your post.

Oh, I know. He's actually famous enough to have turned up in a good movie (Superman) and in a great one (Lost in America--voice only). I could never tell if Albert Brooks was making fun of him (Larry King: "So what is Rex Reed's modus operandi?") or if he liked his little bit about not needing anybody else around if a comedy makes him laugh.

i guess the deepest engagement the rex reed piece has with the film is with its pr campaign yeah

I love Cronenberg but still haven't seen this because after a winning streak longer than most careers, "Maps to the Stars" was some hot garbage, imo. I don't want to be disappointed again. (I mean, I *will* see this, I'm just wary.)

this is v much not like that movie

maybe more like Maps to Your Intestines

oh man, i loved this movie. i don't know who rex reed is. i really dislike when critics can't even understand why something _could_ be good, especially when the thing they're criticizing really _is_ good. it's like a guy dry-choking who doesn't believe there is water

i saw some of this movie and it was too late in the evening and my restless-leg syndrome kicked in so I couldn't finish or concentrate, but I want to go back cos I love Cronenberg. the bits I saw were prime-era Cronie

I loved this as well. Mortenson puts in a fantastic shift. Who the fuck is Rex Reed, never heard of him!

"Maps to the Stars" was some hot garbage, imo

Maps was him bringing his cool austerity to Wild-Palms-but-everyone's-older-now; Crimes is him bringing his cool austerity to classic-Cronenberg-but-everyone's-older-now.

only wack scene was the scene of Julianne Moore taking a dump really

did anyone pick up that it was supposed to be in greece? in retrospect i can see how certain sets suggested it, but did they ever mention so in the dialogue or otherwise?

Getting older sometimes leaves you in the strange position of doing things like defending Rex Reed (I suspect ILX's patron saint would have done the same thing). Not as a critic--again, he's never been more that a breathless pull-quote guy, although I'm sure he sees himself very differently--but more against the charge of "Who is this guy I've never even heard of?" He's not some obscure blogger; in the late '60s and early '70s (which, yes, was a long time ago), he was as famous as Kael.

(Possible response: "Kael who?")

"more than"

I remember reading something about Maps of the Stars at the time that indicated that Moore's performance was inspired by/revenge against Madonna, with whom she had appeared in Body of Evidence.

did anyone pick up that it was supposed to be in greece?

I do not think it was supposed to be in Greece.

I want to suggest that anyone who shrugs at the name Rex Reed watch Myra Breckenridge, but I suspect that would only lead to more confusion.

the reason i mention it was this interview:

https://www.artforum.com/print/202206/amy-taubin-talks-with-david-cronenberg-about-crimes-of-the-future-88615

in the intro to the interview, taubin writes "The antecedent planetary catastrophe is never specified, but it is suggested that survivors of a defunct globalism have arrived on the Aegean coast by boat."

and then, in the interview:

AT: The lighting is very different from the lighting I’ve seen before in your films.

DC: It’s shooting in Athens, and in Mediterranean light, which I’ve never done before. I really embraced Athens and Greece for everything, including the streets, the graffiti, the color of the Mediterranean, and that had a lot to do with the way the film looked. When I wrote the script more than twenty years ago, I was thinking of Toronto, of course. But once we decided on Athens, I embraced it completely. And part of it is the color.

AT: I can’t imagine this film in Toronto, because what you see is the crumbling relics of the cradle of Western civilization, which is different from the relics of postmodern Toronto.

DC: Absolutely. You have three thousand years of human habitation at a grand scale, even though we didn’t shoot at the Acropolis. But you can feel it in the streets. You just feel it everywhere.

(xpost) Forgot all about that--more than cameos, he actually starred in a big-budget movie.

Amy Taubin, by the way, is Cronenberg's #1 critical supporter--he's always been an automatic Top 10 inclusion for her any year he has a film out. (Taubin and Taubin's Screen Test for Warhol were in the VU documentary.)

He’s had Canada play the US plenty of times before — that excerpt reads to me like he’s saying he used the light and streets they were shooting on to play the deliberately unspecified future setting, but maybe not.

Rex and I on the same page.

That is not something someone should ever boast about in print.

Rex Reed means as much to global film culture as Barry Norman

xp sic

yeah, i agree it's very ambiguous - i definitely didn't notice it while i was watching, and i'm still curious what taubin thought were suggestions that it was the Aegean coast specifically.

We're going around in circles on three different things at once.

1) He's a poor excuse for a film critic. (True.)

2) Who in the world is Rex Reed? (He's very famous.)

3) Because he's a poor film critic, anything he says about David Cronenberg must be wrong. (No--he's absolutely right in making fun of that "From the mind of..." nonsense.)

xp there's Greek language signage in at least one scene.

I think Cronenberg has earned the right to use "From the mind of..." as he did write the screenplay!

I like "From the mind of" only because, cheesy as it is, it evokes an earlier method of advertising films that I thought had fallen out of fashion in the wake of the current bludgeoning-pop-song-overtop-bludgeoning-images style.

The Suicide Squad was advertised as From The Horribly Beautiful Mind Of James Gunn, the Crimes marketing are really sleeping on a chance there

(xpost) Very old-fashioned, I'll give you that (guessing Kubrick was the first director who would have been been given that treatment in a trailer). Besides Cronenberg and Lynch, I think I've seen it used with De Palma. You can almost predict whether a director sees himself as a "From the mind of..."-type. (I can't imagine a female director okaying that, which is 100% a compliment.) "From the mind of James Cameron"--sure. "From the mind of Terrence Malick"--probably. "From the mind of Martin Scorsese"--don't think so.

Sorry--it's just a construction that pushes a button with me, like the director's announcing that he's a true visionary, and you just might not be visionary enough yourself to keep up.

"From the mind of Martin Scorsese"--don't think so.

Again, he hasn't solo written a script for any of his films since Who's That Knocking at My Door

I get that. It is pompous as hell--just maybe in a way that I miss?

Also, didn't know James Gunn (or rather, the studio) was trying to pull that auteurist shit. A counter to Scorsese's critiques of superhero blockbusters, I imagine.

from the ass of Tim Burton

(xposts) Is that the determining factor then--only people who write their own scripts? When I mentioned Kubrick, I wouldn't doubt that it started with 2001 and A Clockwork Orange, and those are adaptations. (Or Barry Lydon, or The Shining, or Eyes Wide Shut.) I always thought it more to do with the idea of the director creating his own recognizable world--with art direction and ways of moving the camera and such. And ego. I'm not saying that Scorsese wouldn't be a director where they'd use that in a trailer, just that I can't see him going along with that. For all I know, he has on occasion. Hitchcock was a total "From the mind of" guy.

I guess you can't say "From the mind of Stanley Kubrick, by way of Stephen King (who doesn't really like this, by the way)."

I could 100% see David Fincher trying that bullshit.

Directors should go back to starring in trailers for their own films. My fave example:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LwX8NiXv9Hw

"who is that silver fox lesbian? - oh"