Cosmopolis (2012) - Cronenberg does DeLillo starring Robert Pattinson

Lines uttered by Jeff Goldblum (as Dr. Ian Malcolm) in "Jurassic Park"

I thought I was the only Goldblum hater here

i refuse to believe that there are goldblum haters

Especially when Woods was next in the sequence.

(You did mean Elijah Woods, right?)

of course

at this point, i break cronenberg's above-ground career into three major arcs of descending quality:

rabid, the brood, scanners, videodrome, dead zone, the fly >>> dead ringers, naked lunch, m butterfly, crash, extenze >>> spider, AHOV, eastern promises, ADM, cosmopolis

in the the beginning, he's pretty much a straight-up horror/sci-fi filmmaker with a small set of pet obsessions.

during phase two, beginning with dead ringers, he trades cinematographer/DP mark irwin, who shot the run from the brood through the fly), for the much sleeker and moodier work of peter suschitzky, who's shot every major cronenberg film since. he turns his attention to adaptations of avant-garde novels and begins to distance himself from genre. as a result, his ambitions and tastes begin to seem rather self-consciously "cultivated". still got a thing for gory weirdness and ostentatious prosthetic effects, though.

in his films of the last 12 years, he's completed this transformation, settling into a tepid sort of well-read middlebrow intellectualism. at the same time, he's continued to do interesting and sometimes brilliant work: i count dead ringers, existenz and a history of violence among his best films, and am willing to concede that i may have underestimated crash, spider and eastern promises. but the last two have been pretty damn dire, and i find myself missing the unapologetically geeky spock-horror enthusiasms of his early films.

extenze was the one about that guy who has a boner all the time, right

im with you, tendy

His peak for me overlaps your first two periods: Videodrome -- Dead Ringers.

The Fly, Dead Ringers, A History of Violence -- three all-time killers. Naked Lunch and A Dangerous Mind in the next tier.

I'm done ranking Cronenberg forever. Doesn't seem to really matter which ones are great and which ones are pretentious swill.

Especially when so many of you are ranking RONG!

(some of) y'all are crazy, this movie was great after the first 10 minutes

I grant that each of those three "periods" contain at least one great fillum.

i woulda been totally okay with cronenberg doing stylish and inappropriately ultraviolent crime thrillers for the rest of his life but apparently at some point he stopped getting my psychic messages.

also this blew.

the delillio he shoulda made was running dog.

I would've said Libra but Oliver Stone already did.

Many of you kinda missed that this is essentially funny.

(admittedly a good minor work, a step down from A Dangerous Method)

Pattinson seemed to me a combo of Walken -- maybe it was the Queens accent -- and Shatner. On Novocaine.

I thought it was very funny.

For some reason it seems like it would play well on tv, something you can dip in and out of.

that is how savages watch films on TV

Oliver Stone's Savages, maybe

I didn't miss that it was funny.

there's a difference between missing it was funny and not finding it funny. This thing was about as funny as a prostate exam

cronenberg is at his best when he's completely humourless

You're nuts; all his films are funny, cept some of the early horror garbage.

I've had some pretty funny prostate exams.

All of the dialogue in this film feels like it's delivered by human computers, computational machines of human nature and geography. I'm not sure if the humor is in the disconnect, the stoic dialogue, or the strict continuance of plot.

There's something here, and maybe a different "here" than the novelette by its very difference.

Eh, I got that it was supposed to be funny. Problem was that it wasn't funny enough. And that many of the performances were horribly dull - odd and disconnected in a bad way.

"How come we never spent this kind of time together?"

*lascivious -- or is it threatened? -- eye contact *

* doctor fiddles around with gloves *

"Your prostate is asymmetrical."

It's really a movie where everyone speaks in their logical imperatives and not actual dialogue

refreshing

(it's breakdown language, somewhat akin to Beckett p'raps)

concede that the prostate exam was hilarious, easily my favorite scene

i really loved the language, even (especially?) when i could barely make out what it was supposed to mean. i liked the ominous foreboding entailed in everyone's manner but minus the emergence of, you know, an actual object of that dread.

hadn't thought of a beckett comparison, probably because I'm underversed in beckett. good avenue to explore, thanks.

along those same lines i think Delillo's own "The Names" explicitly engages a lot of these themes re: language and in really stupendous fashion. my fav novel of his that i've read.

(admittedly a good minor work, a step down from A Dangerous Method)

― saltwater incursion (Dr Morbius), Wednesday, January 2, 2013 11:20 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

allow me to just bristle at the implication that ADM was a major work

bristle, the universe will endure

Bristle4Ass

ADM underrated I think, but don't think this was minor in comparison.

Prostate scene was great, but it was Samantha Morton's scene that really worked on all sorts of levels.

She brought some welcome Laurie Anderson into the proceedings.

Cosmopolis is at least a step up from the awful ADM, which seems to me much more of a Christopher Hampton film than a David Cronenberg film

Look more carefully, Ward.

when I read the Morton scene in the novel, I actually visualized Pauline Kael.

Doesn't Packer get tased by the female bodyguard in the book?

i feel like i liked ADM to such a greater extent than everyone else here i missed something essentially embarrassing about it. possibly i just geeked out at a movie about 20th century intellectuals.

I need to rewatch it, but I just thought it was boring

Thought it was his best in years (tho I never saw Eastern Promises)

see i did find ADM funny. The Freud/Jung scenes anyway

maybe it was because of almost zero expectations, but i thought this pretty much ruled. maybe my favorite Cronenberg since the 80s. i don't know who played the main bodyguard, but i could watch him all day long. reminded me of Bill Callahan.