The Cronenberg Thread

Second-tier for me -- the movie sorta just stops -- but like you I haven't stopped thinking about it, maybe his best recent techno-queer film.

lol sorry -- I forgot I responded on Monday.

wasn't the Ear Guy dance sequence hot as fuck?

So is Cronenberg the first director to use the same title twice for a film that is neither a sequel nor a remake?

I'd say Mati Diop's Atlantiques (documentary short) and Atlantics (fiction feature) have the same name but ymmv.

oh also this movie confirmed for me that kristen stewart as an actor is chaotic good jared leto and personally i'm a fan, glad she got to be a strange little weirdo in this film

She's hilarious.

Viggo 4ever. So happy he's part of Cronenberg's world.

oh also this movie confirmed for me that kristen stewart as an actor is chaotic good jared leto and personally i'm a fan, glad she got to be a strange little weirdo in this film

Have you seen Underwater? It rules (think Hellboy crossed with The Abyss) and she's great in it.

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

I need to see this. Underwater is good fun. Stewart is incredible in Personal Shopper.

She's been good to excellent for a decade.

Have you seen Underwater? It rules (think Hellboy crossed with The Abyss) and she's great in it.

― but also fuck you (unperson), Wednesday, June 8, 2022 12:30 PM (six minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

i have not watched this movie bc tj miller is in it and no movie no matter how great it is otherwise can survive the presence of tj miller

this movie is like what if the art crime cyberpunk thing happening in the background of bowie's outside were actually cool and worth thinking about

i can't tell if my takes on this movie are bad or not but it had a profound effect on me

ha -- I wrote down "Damien Hirst" but couldn't figure out how he fit.

even tho k stew gives the best performance my favorite minor characters were the lesbian drill assassins who had a sensual lust for/were operating on behalf of(?) the tech modulating viggo's body

I like the idea of the Bowie character in the album playing Detective Cope...and Stewart as Algeria Touchshriek.

I am Ramona A. Stone.

i finally got my butt to the theater tonight, and then read this afterward:

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

this pull quote from that interview is a good one: “At what point can you no longer claim to be a person or a human? This question is certainly in the film.” —David Cronenberg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mIIfKwL43Cg

^Gets a little graphic in places.

Opens here in a few days...Not hopeful after seeing the trailer last night. The body-horror stuff--precisely what most people love about Cronenberg--is my least favourite part of his films, why The Dead Zone remains my favourite. Maybe even more ominous, though, for me, is something I use as a running joke for directors whose every pronouncement is treated like the word of god: "From the mind of David Lynch," "From the mind of Stanley Kubrick," etc. Sure enough, "From the mind of David Cronenberg" in the trailer and on the poster.

i think it's about the funniest and most idea-rich movie you'd get from the mind of any of those dudes

but yes it's also got a makeout scene with an incision

also the direct-to-video industrial sci-fi look of it is like the wallpaper/screensaver of my mind lol

anyway i finally saw crash this week and it was instantly my favorite movie

I had to avert my eyes a few times during the trailer, not a good sign. (Unaware that the film I was there to see, Men, would have its own share of body-horror towards the end.)

but yes it's also got a makeout scene with an incision

I have a friend who fainted during the similar scene in Crash.

licking a fresh tattoo way worse than french kissing internal organs for me, for whatever reason

Rewatched Crash again and it really is up there with my favorites of his or anyone's.

is it weird that i found crash pretty hot? or did i just reveal something about my psychosexual profile

i mean like a lot of his work it's hot and repellant at the same time

i was also delighted to see elias koteas, my favorite canadian character actor, giving the best performance i've ever seen

It is definitely weird that you found Crash hot.

Kidding (kinda), of course. What do you think of Ebert's take on it as a pornographic film about behaviour that no one could possibly find erotic? I always liked that read--or at the very least, it was the only substantial take I had read when I saw the film way back when, and it did help me get into what the film was doing.

xpost he's never topping Casey Jones in TMNT for me

That was a crime, you purse-grabbing pukes! and here is the penalty!

Arquette with the crutches is the most obvious thing I can remember but I still haven't seen any groups into car crashes and things like that. I thought the finger in the back of the head in Existenz was a great weird fetishy image.

Really looking forward to this film, I didn't think he'd ever return to this kind of imagery/subject. I wonder if younger directors (including his son) and artists inspired by him made him want to do it again?

was also delighted to see elias koteas, my favorite canadian character actor, giving the best performance i've ever seen

My feelings about the film aside, I'm hoping you meant the best Elias Koteas performance you've ever seen here.

I think Ballard's droll line that he 'didn't get an erection once while writing Crash' and 'would have considered it a failure' if he had is pretty definitive about the erotic nature of both the novel and the film.

i think i disagree that that suggests anything definitive about the film

haven't read the book tho

What do you think of Ebert's take on it as a pornographic film about behaviour that no one could possibly find erotic?

i honestly love this take, it's very thoughtful

Yeah, definitive was a daft way of putting it - read like I was trying to shut down the conversation. I think Ballard is being playful as ever. He was mapping the erotic onto something that could and should never be framed as erotic - in that transfer an echo or residue (eck) is bound to carry across. Which is to say the whole project is weirdly charged with misplaced affect.

The key scene in Crash for me is not the one or two most notorious moments, but the one where Holly Hunter obsessively asks Koteas (I think) to keep rewinding a particular moment on one of the car crash videos. Even Hitchcock rarely did fetishism that well (and I'm still not even sure I particularly like this movie).

Ebert knew better and Siskel slid off the track imo

Siskel finding some scenes erotic and others leaving him cold isn't a failure of the movie to eroticize nor is it a failure of filmmaking that Siskel found a scene erotic. Ballard has a lot of sexual scenes in his works written in a very matter-of-fact way that leave them open for interpretation as to whether the reader should find them titillating, be disgusted by their own arousal, or view the proceedings clinically which might be a perversion in itself

Cronenberg leans into that ambiguity pretty well in several movies, sometimes fairly explicitly spelled out

I mention this twice in the thread earlier; remembered it was buried in the Internet Archive, so here it is, something I tacked onto a 1997 year-end, my SCTV remake of Crash. (Written 25 years ago, so cut me some slack.)

SCTV parody of Crash:

Doesn't exist, of course, except in my mind--it's the one thing that could have redeemed such a solemnly preposterous film. Johnny LaRue heads the roving band of crash fetishists, with the badly mangled Woody Tobias Jr. its readymade love object (Tobias, Koteas, they even sound alike). There's a wild sex scene between Edith Prickley and Ed Grimley in the back of an overturned shuttle bus. Big Jim McBob and Billy Sol Hurok stand by the side of the road and cheer on every bit of mayhem and carnage. The film's in 3-D, but Count Floyd seems baffled as to what's so scary about it. Fifteen years later, Bobby Bittman releases ill-advised Crash Again remake.

Doesn't should exist, of course

i just saw the fly for the first time (again i've seen all the wrong cronenberg) and it made me want to barf a lot and i loved it

i don't blink at most body horror. the fly is fucking gross

Imagine seeing it when you were 9.

no!!!!

the makeup and practical fx in that movie are so well done it has lost none of its power to disturb and upset

but the most upsetting scene for me didn't involve brundlefly at all: the abortion dream sequence