The Cronenberg Thread

or the much better original version, The Big Knife

xp

Thanks for the suggestions so far...I've seen Mulholland, Sunset and Barton. Lots of new suggestions :-)

In a Lonely Place?

Sullivan's Travels

x2

If you're not hung up on good, there's Alex in Wonderland.

The Loved One

there are a couple films that are more about celebrity than hollywood that come to mind but everyone's contributions so far have been excellent

Went to an Inauguration-themed screening of The Dead Zone tonight. I've always loved this film so much. I think of that Robert Kolker book, A Cinema of Loneliness, which I know includes Taxi Driver, The Conversation, and Night Moves. Strictly as a film about loneliness, I'd say The Dead Zone is sadder than any of them. Some of things that people laugh at nowadays baffle me. There's a moment, after Walken is caught off guard by Brooke Adams and her husband out campaigning, where Walken starts to cry and waves the young boy away with a beautiful hand gesture. Ninety percent of a full house thought this was hilarious. Don't get that at all.

Saw limos smashed up today and just thought of Cosmopolis

My dozen favorites.

Was traumatized by Dead Ringers as a teenager. Haven't seen it since.

I'm a huge Cronenberg fan, and yet: 1) I've yet to see his last three (the Freud movie, Cosmopolis or Maps to the Stars) and, more egregiously 2) until last night I had never seen Scanners! Which is very ironic, given it is literally his most iconic movie. I mean, I've seen the explosion scene dozens of times! Anyway, it was good. Haven't seen Dead Ringers or Crash in ages, should watch them again one of these days.

Freud movie is good, maps of the stars is laughable and seems to have been made for the sole purpose of a single iconic shot

Which shot?

"the end"

Don't remember that.

It comes at the end.

Just goofing. I've never seen it, remember?

First thing that springs to mind is Julliane Moore shitting but I don't think it became iconic.

I wonder if he's still planning on making his Lethem adaptation.

*SPOILIDAD*

murder-of-viewer-by-Oscar

The Freud/Jung movie is one of his best.

No Existenz no credibility.

No Crash no credibility

"A very protestant remark"

Existenz is sort of an apotheosis of his body horror stuff, redone as sorta farce. One of my favorite twists in any movie came from watching that. All sorts of bad accents bouncing around, and then you realize it's been on purpose ...

Speaking of Scanners, I didn't think it was particularly good, to be honest. Bad acting, dumb plot, but not very deep (unlike the similarly shaky Rabid/Shivers) when it comes to theme/metaphoric worth, etc. In Alfred's list I would at least swap its place with Dead Zone.

Also, McGoohan - there should be a thread for pipe-smoking portentous/pretentious psychiatrists in horror movies.

I've always thought it was pretty weird that Shivers and Ballard's High-Rise came out in the same year. Must have been something in the air

Scanners is def lower-tier Cronenberg. Outside of the iconic scene and some of McGoohan's scenery chewing it's really pretty slow and stupid.

I love Existenz, a much better film in every way.

I found eXistenZ rather slow, almost leaden at time. I'm rewatching this weekend.

idk maybe I'm just overly fond of the game framework ("GAS" etc.)

it also plays like a loose sequel to videodrome.

I need to buy the Criterion Blu-Ray of The Brood. Love that movie. I suspect any child of divorce whose custodial parent relentlessly shit-talked the non-custodial parent for years would probably feel the same. Scanners is a lot of fun, Videodrome is a masterpiece, and eXistenZ is a bad Videodrome knockoff.

eXistenZ is a good Videodrome tribute!

The Brood is my favorite.

i haven't seen the freud movie or maps to the stars either! cosmopolis was really dull, mostly, except for binoche

prob saw existenz ten years ago but i liked it & thought it was hilarious at the time

Didn't think it possible, but I went to a rep screening of Crash tonight and hated it even more than I did when it came out. Its lumbering eagerness to shock is embarrassing. This is not a comment on the novel, which I haven't read.

the only thing i remember about crash is when deborah kara unger says "anus"

for me that is enough

Unger and Elias Koteas speak every line in this breathy, ominous whisper that's as wearing as it is self-parodying.

I should say that I was semi-diverted throughout by trying to name specific roads. I took one of them home after the film, although I was going in the opposite direction--just me i the car, both hands on the wheel, trying not to crash.

Haven't seen Crash since it came out, but my memory of it is as a deliberately 'cool' version of the Ballard book.

The desire to shock seems to me a noble aim for any filmmaker (as a cinemagoer, I would rather be shocked than comforted) - god forbid we have a cinema deprived of the vulgar and voyeuristic. The erosion of the strong shock impulse in Cronenberg's work has made him a lesser, duller filmmaker imho (eg the bland heritage nothingness of that wretched Freud movie). Besides, Ballard's linking of vehicles with the death impulse, and with orgasmic oblivion, seems very prescient right now - shockingly so.

I'm at the opposite end with Cronenberg, which I know is unusual--the more he erodes his strong shock impulse, the more I like him. His Dead Zone/The Fly/Dead Ringers run is far and away his peak for me. Not that the shock impulse is absent in those films--obviously it isn't, especially in The Fly--but I find his focus is almost entirely on the sadness of the stories there. Maybe the sadness is just a more conventional kind that I can relate to; you could say that Crash is very sad, too, I guess. I wouldn't.

I don't remember anything really being 'cool' about the film adaptation of Crash? If anything, it's a little too literal. Ballard's expository prose is really hard to convey on screen, so a lot of the subtext is lost. So the film gives you the narrative of one man's journey through these sex/car/death fetishists, but doesn't quite drive home the point that it's about society's near-erotic fixation with these machines that regularly kill people.

the bland heritage nothingness of that wretched Freud movie

The staging, lighting, and script ideas were as clammy as ever. I suggest another look.

I need to rewatch it, but I had to admit it's the most disinterested I've been in a Cronenberg film! Sounds great on paper, though

and I've even seen that racing movie he directed when he was starting out

FWIW, Kim Newman also claimed that the Freud flick was DC's worst (and I'm guessing he's seen M. Butterfly, whereas I haven't) - so perhaps it's especially disliked by long-term genre dudes who miss the vulgar brilliance of Shivers?

I wouldn't expect genre dude to make allowances for experiments outside genre though.

*dudes

I haven't seen it since it came out, but I remember Crash as being sort of abstractly sad. Like, these people only want this one dangerous thing, like addicts, and it ends more or less as it begins, iirc, in a state of semi-desperation.

I think Crash might have been better (again, from faded memory) if it was *more* shocking. It was sort of lopped in with mainstream NC-17/pseudo-X movies like Showgirls, but that kind of stuff, with explicit sex/nudity, has come a long way in relatively mainstream cinema. Naked Lunch, too, was sort of limited by the times, both n terms of what could be depicted but especially with FX. Crash was hampered less by practical stuff, iirc, but still felt a bit like a challenge (as in dare) to pull off, as when anyone films a transgressive "unfilmable" book, which Cronenberg clearly had on the mind with the streak of Dead Ringers/Naked Lunch/Crash.

I'll have to watch it again, but I recall Crash as sort of perversely, intentionally boring/cold. Like he tried to make a movie that is literally about sex and crash crashes as unsexy and unexciting as possible.

Like, I hate Lars Von Trier, but he might have made a good Crash.

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...