The Cronenberg Thread

when william hurt's standing there in the door frame, a woman sitting up behind me starts going "kill him! KILL HIM!" -- and every time we wanted that, we got it .. with the kid in the high school .. with everyone who crosses viggo.. and every time, it's like YEAH!!! URK!!!!!!

i really like the things madchen noticed. they're things that i either didn't notice, or didn't noticed that i noticed.

All references to Joey mention how he was crazy or angry. Tom's unsettlingly sane and calm! Even in sex, he shows some motivation but never agression. There are as many people like this as there are superhuman hyper-violent people like Joey. You've got this unbelievable character, with the approximation of a real person stuck somewhere in-between. There's this visual tic that showed up on Mortensen's face in the transitions. There's an outright denial that there's a multiple personality situation in play, which is kind of true: everything that constituted Joey dropped off the face of the planet when Tom came into being, and it's a conscious effort to bring Joey back. It's Joey that slaps her on the staircase, etc.

Videodrome/eXistenZ are about people who are "normal" but are pursuing something they think is deviant or subversive for sexual pleasure. Lately, Cronenberg is kind of on a roll lately with characters that deny part of their pasts. With Spider you ended up with a man who was insane, but with AHOV you end up with a walking caricature of all that's good and right that contrasts with the "evil" past...

Weird audience reaction when I saw it as well. Some people walking out trying to puzzle out something about the plot, others going "OMG that was awful," others kind of stunned. Nervous laughter as well as laughter with the movie (more of that toward the end).

That was my favorite scene in the movie by as many miles as the drive to Philadelphia.

I guess what amazes me about the critical reaction is that so many reviews are working angles of this - 'oh, he's undermining our societal attitude toward violence'/'violence comes back to haunt you'/etc. - like this message isn't just as much of a cliche as anything Hollywood produces.

And if I'm not enthralled by the concept (which I'm not), then all I've got are some relatively ungruesome fights/shootings, bad performances and weak humor.

That's what the Lord of the Rings movie was about?

The son scenes work on basically the same level, but without anything quite as psychologically rewarding. Basically he seems to harbor latent Michael Corleone-ism. And whoever mentioned Adam Brody upthread OTM!

I like how he always has some decompressed (omg am I some film auteur bullshit artist for using this word?) scenes in his films and they seem to go on a while, but Cronenberg usually barely breaks the 90 minute standard.

The quality of the performances, the skillful editing, grounding the tale in a believable if overstated reality...I can go on. All these things redeem his "ideas"; I mean, who cares about IDEAS anyway? It's the execution. You think the film sucks, I think it's marvelous. If we can't disagree about movies, the world's in dire shape. Let's have a drink.

I don't want to sound like a dick, but I'd honestly like to know how it was effective as a thriller, jaymc. The end was never in doubt to me - there was no question that Viggo would settle his Philly business and wind up back on the farm.

I'm just referring to much of the commentary and praise surrounding the film, esp. from daily and mag critics, who seem to think that the 'violence comes back to bite you on the ass'/'never outrun your past'/etc. is something new and innovative. I wouldn't care if the film had been otherwise successful.

If only, John.

'violence comes back to bite you on the ass'/'never outrun your past'/etc.

I haven't seen the new one yet but now I don't have to thanks to this brilliantly succinct encapsulations!

http://nypress.com/18/38/film/seitz.cfm

Hate to think how arid it would've been without Ed Harris and William Hurt having a ball. As mysteriously overrated as "Spider was underappreciated.

I wonder what non-auteurist heartland multiplex audiences make of scenes like the staircase fuck. "Edna, this remind you o' Crash?"

>Cronenberg can hardly be accused of being a non-diverse filmmaker. This isn't John Ford or anything.<

Alex, you know he made non-westerns, yes? War films, comedies, "The Informer"? Try "The Sun Shines Bright," which on certain days I think is his best work. (And it's a remake of an early '30s Ford film with Will Rogers, "Judge Priest," which was quite good to begin with.)

They go "Man I hate Dr Morbius, constantly making asinine comments on all the threads about films and sports and politics on that there I Love Everything web-enabled BBS. How come these movies never show any wang?"

He wrote some of it without WGA credit in collaboration with this Josh Olson guy; from a Salon interview:

I didn't know this script was based on a graphic novel for a long time, because nobody told me. When I found out, Josh and I had already done a couple of rewrites. I said, "What do you mean, graphic novel?" and he said, "Oh, didn't anybody tell you?" They found me a copy and I looked at it, and I thought, well, we've gone so far in a different direction that this is actually irrelevant. In fact, if someone had brought me the graphic novel and said, "Are you interested in adapting this?" I'm not sure I would have said yes...

Q. Did his screenplay include the two intensely physical erotic scenes we see in the film?

It did not. I added those scenes.

Jams Murphy OTM on the hideous early Viggo-Bello dialogue; when I read in that same interview DC says "no irony" was a rule -- shit, there goes his only out.

Not one of Howard Shore's better scores; my friend recognized one of the closing-credit themes as a short walk from Return to the Shire.

There's a lot going on, nearly all of it sledgehammer-obvious, even compared to "Unforgiven" as MZS mentions.

I though the peak was the shots wrapping up the stairs hatefuck -- Bello kicking VM away, her showering, the blue night-shot of the scrape on her back.

It struck me, and I just remembered, that some sense that all kinds of security are built on some kind of.. well, force and the willingness to use it. That's not so clear, but what I mean is, all the scenes with the local sheriff had this feel of playing up the effects of just straight up intimidation and potential for violence as the real forces keeping some sort of order in the community, the letter of the law being pretty much irrelevant.

I don't get this "violence underlying everyday life" theme. If your everyday life involves you desperately, schizophrenically hiding your bounty-killer past, then yes, it's about the violence the underlies everyday life. Otherwise it's about the violence underlying the life of a man desperately, schizophrenically hiding his bounty-killer past.

I agree with Dr. Morbius about the dialogue of the first 30 minutes or so. It really seemed over the top, and it's really hard to believe Cronenberg sees it playing straight down the middle.

I'm not saying it's done geniously (Blue Velvet does some of the same stuff, way more geniously), but I think it's all there.