The Cronenberg Thread

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...

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.