The Cronenberg Thread

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

i was like "oh no oh no i don't want to see this" and nearly put my hands in front of my eyes!!!! a movie hasn't made me do that in.... idk if a movie has ever made me do that tbh

I like to imagine the new one as Cronenberg's entry in the MCU. The ending is great, and I've been craving purple chocolate bars since I saw it.

Yeah, I rewatched The Fly recently (it's on HBO Max or Hulu) for the first time since seeing it in theaters. I was expecting it not to hold up but it really fucking does.

the final skin-shedding is the most chilling moment for me

Shotgun to the head.

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

have only seen Pattorhson in Lighthouse, Good Times and Wild Palms, no idea what the jokes would be (saw a few minutes of a Twilight when a flatmate was watching it but dunno if he was in that scene)

Stewart was p unbearable to me in Adventureland and running the same changes in the Twilight scene but the material was not exactly inspiring. she seems to be making good decisions about what to let her name get funded tho (could not tell if I thought she was any good in this but her performance fit the tone fine)

her own film suggested an interest and aspiration beyond her capability, which might also describe her acting idk? better that than the reverse for sure tho

Watch her Assayas flicks.

Interesting premise(s), gross, I got through it. I'm not sure why I continue to see most every Cronenberg film because I really liked three or four of them 35 years ago.

Love Adventureland, so of course I love Stewart in it. She's very affected and somewhat funny in Crimes of the Future.

Haven't seen Crimes of the Future, but I thought Kristen Stewart was pretty great in Spencer. I also really felt her when she came out in her monologue on SNL, that was very memorable moment for me

Rex Reed — still alive!

David Cronenberg’s ‘Crimes of the Future’ Is a Senseless Collection of Horrifying Garbage

Crimes of the Future is a load of crap. I would like to find a more civil way to describe even a sick and depraved barf bag of a movie like this one, but it defeats every reasonable attempt to try. Publicity poopery declares it “From the mind of David Cronenberg.” That’s your first warning signal. I’ve been able to endure a few of his epic horrors in the past, but 90% of the time I’ve found no evidence of any kind of mind at all. Still, in what has become of a film industry badly in need of triage, wonders never cease. Quick on the heels of its world premiere a few weeks ago in Cannes, where it was shown to audiences who walked out in droves, loudly booed and declared “unreleasable,” Crimes of the Future is now upon us, like a rabid raccoon.

...

The movie opens with a mother smothering her sleeping child to death and goes steadily downhill from there. One scene does not follow another. Images just sort of invade each other while you hope something will make some sort of sense. Unfortunately, logic is nowhere in sight and nothing in the movie makes any sense. As repellent and revolting as it is, I was astonished to find it doubly boring. At the screening I attended, a lot of people walked out, but even more people were snoring. Eventually it becomes so silly that it sinks into a pandemic of farce.

...

The film has no dynamic, which explains why it has so little impact. Crimes of the Future is Grand Guignol to a new level of incomprehensible gibberish—the kind of self-indulgent, IQ-wrecking trash on film for which landfills and garbage dumps were invented.

Publicity poopery declares it “From the mind of David Cronenberg.” That’s your first warning signal.

Rex and I on the same page.

Rex Reed shoulda been executed by firing squad after his post-Oldboy racism and Melissa McCarthy body-shaming

or his Get Out "I don't care if black people are turned into robots"

Don't know about any of that. He's been a terrible non-critic for a long time, but I applaud the line I quoted above.

my comments weren't related to what you just said btw, just happened to come right after your post.

Oh, I know. He's actually famous enough to have turned up in a good movie (Superman) and in a great one (Lost in America--voice only). I could never tell if Albert Brooks was making fun of him (Larry King: "So what is Rex Reed's modus operandi?") or if he liked his little bit about not needing anybody else around if a comedy makes him laugh.

i guess the deepest engagement the rex reed piece has with the film is with its pr campaign yeah