The Cronenberg Thread

That's ... kinda perfect.

is this movie as bad as everyone said? I always get excited about cronenberg movies, then get depressed by bad reviews, then eventually watch them on demand or whatever and end up loving them.

I kinda liked this one, or at least admired its arrogance.

Ending will make a lot of people want to hurt someone, tho.

trailer for new (brandon) cronenberg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TcJTd69dMyQ

Glenn Kenny gave it five stars. I haven't looked at a lot of reviews, but my general impression from festival-time was people were at best muted and at worst severely disappointed. GK isn't at all credible though because he's a pretty hardcore Cronenberg stan, but I sort-of am as well so I'm still pumped.

This is a pretentious Cronenberg stylez I can get behind.

A Dangerous Method was the only Cronenberg film where I've felt unenthused, but I think that was a glitch.

Agree with crix that call Giamatti's segment (or, rather, his performance) a miscalculation, but it was still kind of riveting after all that android pseudo-conversation.

Haven't bought the issue yet, but Amy Taubin has Cosmopolis on her S&S list. She always has a Cronenberg film on there. I think she may second-guess that one.

?!

I guess that's no stranger than putting Spider on her '02 list, tho I still haven't managed to sit through that one.

wonder if this means Cronenberg will get *another* Film Comment cover

Haven't bought the issue yet, but Amy Taubin has Cosmopolis on her S&S list. She always has a Cronenberg film on there. I think she may second-guess that one.

― clemenza, Tuesday, 14 August 2012 21:25 (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i read her repping for it somewhere - film comment's cannes review i think - & it made me really want to see it. i like taubz & i think it's probably in some ways as honourable to include something super current as to just co-sign potemkin or w/e.

spider sucks iirc

^^^

Spider's pretty good, cert'ly tons better than A History of Graphic Novel Violence.

you're replacing one graphic-novel-level approach with another?

still love HoV, but I guess it did come from that inferior art form

M. Butterfly, Crash, existenZ, and Spider are the duds of the last twenty years, although I'd watch the last one again. Funny how no one has ever made a case for the first on this list. I saw in the theatre after loving Naked Lunch -- one of my first disappointments as an Adult Film Watcher.

still love HoV, but I guess it did come from that inferior art form

lol, art form. i liked it cuz it was fun to think about, appealingly heightened and quite strange. spider was just a drag.

alfred otm, except that i genuinely love about 90% of existenz. falls apart towards the end cuz the dreamlike oddity is much more interesting than the espionage plotting behind it, but up to that point, i've got no complaints.

"cuz"

alfred OTM about all those EXCEPT eXistenZ imho, which is awesome

on the other hand I don't like them all but he went from strength to strength in the Videodrome-The Fly-Dead Ringers-Naked Lunch sequence.

Alfred all wet cept for M Butterfly

Naked Lunch is an interesting failure, and I bet we've all said these fucking things upthread.

we're improving as we age, appearances to the contrary

no, I still look good but have otherwise gone to shit.

Another existenz lover here.

"new ports are tight"

so is Jude Law in that fillum

I thought M Butterfly a bit of a damp squib but Existenz and Spider were both good.

Crash is his last great movie, among the ones I've seen.

it's good but not the last great, sheesh

When I first saw it Spider was one of the most depressing things I'd ever seen, being forced into such intimacy with a guy who writes an illegible diary and barely utters anything coherent. It was a genuinely uncomfortable, despairing psychological space to occupy. Admittedly the film didn't impress me quite as much when I saw it again a few years later, but I'd still probably it's still my favorite Cronenberg since, oh, Videodrome. I'm not quite sure on what level it's deemed a failure, what it should offer that it doesn't.

i wasn't terribly interested in the film's surface, well detailed though it was. it seemed to depend for tension on the unraveling of a mystery whose solution seemed fairly obvious from early on, and on the similarly predictable parallel disintegration of the protagonist's mental health.

i've never read the mcgrath novel on which the film is based, but others have suggested that it was a risky choice to begin with, given how much the original story depends on the protagonist's subjectivity. despite cronenberg's attempts to depict interior states visually, i felt as though i were observing only the shell of a narrative inside which something potentially interesting was happening.

The book is better than the film, but Spider is as good a film as one could make from it and have it still be watchable.

existenz is one of his best, but you may need to be steeped in canadian content to really get it i think

I don't know--I know lots about The Trouble with Tracy and the Poppy Family and Joey McLaughlin, and it didn't really help.

Well, here's one rave anyway:

http://www.slantmagazine.com/film/review/cosmopolis/6446

that doesn't really say much

'rizer, that novel's style has a certain amount in common with the one he adapted here, so bevare perhaps.

"darkly comic" is a phrase i'm always wary of seeing in reviews. It basically means "not funny"

To me it usually means I'll be one of the only ones laughing.

There was actually a lot of laughing at the press screening I went to, but probably of a few different varieties. There was also some yelling at the screen.

i may have emitted an anguished moan at some point

I may have launched an ironic belch.

Prostate exam was a crowd pleaser.

^when aint it

I did laugh a fair bit at the funny bits in Crash when I saw again a few months ago, as I did at much of Viggo's Freud in ADM.

However, the only great film I've seen from DC is The Fly.

I can settle on that as his best. (That or The Brood.)

I tried reading the novel several years ago.