Cosmopolis (2012) - Cronenberg does DeLillo starring Robert Pattinson

Avowed Cronenberg lover Walter Chaw's take:

http://www.filmfreakcentral.net/ffc/2012/08/cosmopolis.html#more

David Cronenberg's North by Northwest

OK, stop right there.

Alfred, crix are scratching their lazy distorted Kubrick itch w/ DC now.

There is definitely a critical level of detachment in this latest one, tho.

It is, finally, a summary of Cronenberg's work to this point, as well as a statement of absolute fear and loathing. A lovely post-modern work, it's killed God by discovering there never was one to begin with.

this is guff, and i'm getting p irritated w/ this critical position that if you don't dig cosmopolis then you don't really dig cronenberg at all, it's like revenge of the art film snob. for some tru cronenberg heads - well, me - it's all been downhill since the fly, and these faithful bloodless literary adaptations don't come close to the power and pleasure of the brood, videodrome, scanners etc etc. long live the new horror movie.

I'm mostly with you, but this is the first time I've really kinda dug a Cronenberg movie in more than a decade. We are also at the point in his career where every. single. one of his movies gets the lazy "career summation" treatment from stans.

ppl define "tru" differently, don't they

tru

No, there is only one tru Cronenberg head.

http://www.wheaton.me.uk/gallery/albums/userpics/10001/ScannersExplodingHead.gif

yeah, everything before Scanners is p meaningless to me

for some tru cronenberg heads - well, me - it's all been downhill since the fly, and these faithful bloodless literary adaptations don't come close to the power and pleasure of the brood, videodrome, scanners etc etc. long live the new horror movie.

― Ward Fowler, Thursday, August 23, 2012 12:57 PM (2 hours ago)

boom

though i have enjoyed quite a few of his post-fly films

this couldve been a lot better than it was

whoever thought that delillos prose shd be treated like mamet or whomever gets the gasface & pls dont let them make 'underworld' into a 12 hr epic

an old dude a few rows in front of me left abt halfway thru muttering (fairly loudly) 'crap'

Audience reaction was pretty visceral at my press screening. Toward the end, there was even some talkback.

Ward - Crash was p good, no?

Toward the end, there was even some talkback.

with Pattinson in his limo listening

Crash is awful

I was asking Ward.

Looking at that comment I guess it doesn't apply to Crash. The book is 'bloodless', the adaptation matches that. However Ballard is hardly 'literary'.

how is Ballard not literary

good question, and cronenberg's crash is a "literary adaptation" no matter what you think of the source material

Used to describe well written work that doesn't do much more than being well written (?) -- although that wasn't the way the word was being used earlier.

The path has been downhill (whose hasn't?) but I'd excuse Crash from that. xp

that makes "literary" sound like an insult...

Sure, it is...

"Crash" is closer to "Naked Lunch" in terms of how the adaptations relate to their source material (and Cronenberg's take on the latter is much more successful than the former imho). But I think both of those cases are different from what Ward was referring to as "faithful bloodless literary adaptations".

Sure, it is...

lol, i've never heard it used that way

But I think both of those cases are different from what Ward was referring to as "faithful bloodless literary adaptations".

― The Radioheads are massive in the Man community (Shakey Mo Collier), Friday, August 24, 2012 3:04 PM (1 minute ago)

must be, because neither is terribly faithful to its source

Naked Lunch >>>>>>>>>>>>> Crash

http://www.filmcomment.com/entry/interview-david-cronenberg

Crash > Naked Lunch.

Naked Lunch has a cracking score. Best music on any of DC's music.

DC's films.

Hi xyzzzz, yes Crash was p good, I agree w/ you there (tho' I'm not really in the market for quibbling over use of the word 'literary' thanx all the same) - Ballard JUST feels like a much better 'fit' for Cronenberg than Burroughs. I haven't seen Naked Lunch since it came out, but while I thought turning NL into a surreal biopic abt WSB was quite a clever response to an 'unfilmable' text, it did rather make the whole thing into yet another hetsex doomed romance w/ mediocre sfx, which (certainly at the time) seemed like a bit of a betrayl of Burroughs.

I guess my problem is, when he films Ballard or Burroughs or DeLillo (or Christopher fucking Hampton) he's obv serving somebody else's 'vision' as well as his own (kindly, you could say he achieves a synthesis between the two... I'm not so sure that he does). Combined w/ a 'late' style that is far slower, more self-consciously aesthetic (I'm thinking of the red gowns in Dead Ringers, which was the tipping point into art movie mannerism), it just seems like we're not getting the full fat Cronenberg anymore. Of course, artists change, and I'm sure Cronenberg felt in some ways confined by genre, but nobody else could've made a film like The Brood, whereas almost anyone could've given us Dangerous Method.

Thx Ward for adding here (and apols for the quibbling). Totally makes sense.

I need to see The Brood. They don't show that on TV, unlike a lot of his other films.

lol is that really what his naked lunch is like? that sounds terrible

i'm not sure i've ever seen a whole cronenberg movie, saw the first shot of a history of violence once

it is, and it is. it's kind of cool as a dishonest burroughs biopic with trippy bits, but it's fundamentally a betrayal of both the author and the novel. crash is just as bad in its own way.

I did doze off for about 30 seconds during the Giamatti-Pattinson dialogue. Some of this is leaden as hell. But it generates a perverse charm.

Ha I accidentally posted my reaction on the other thread but I dozed off for a few minutes right before it ended and the credits appearing snapped me out of it.

Audience reaction was pretty visceral at my press screening. Toward the end, there was even some talkback.

― Eric H., Friday, August 24, 2012 4:05 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

i read a review written after the premier and they described the apparently surreal scene of don delillo getting a standing ovation from an audience of 15 year old girls

I read the book when it came out and wasn't blown away, but now I'm thinking I'll re-read based on the various movie reviews. Maybe it'll come at me from a different perspective .

i think this is actually better than the book*, because there's only 2 hours of it and cronenberg doesn't really dawdle, and imo the dry humor comes off better on the screen than on the page.

that said its still not good. the first ten minutes or so made me think that it could end up being one of the worst films ever made, but then it kinda levels off. many of the scenes between pattinson and gadon feel like you're watching high school actors doing something serious

*the book sucks

I enjoyed this. Cronenberg doesn't seem like he's trying to knock himself out with this one, seems like a pretty quick project for him, but -- sustained surreal atmosphere, absurdly stilted & effective dialog, and this is a great year for a film with this subject matter. A little frustrated by the pacing at the end, his films now seem to slow down instead of explode, but... Also, in the past, I've always loved how when Cronenberg adapts other people's material, it always comes out in his own voice, even the dialog. That's not as true in this one -- it's much more straight-up transcribed DeLillo, Cronenberg hasn't done as much as he usually does to formally translate this into being a film.

I skipped watching his last two, but I'm a pretty hardcore fan, I found lots to like about M Butterfly and the only one I didn't get that much out of was Spider. This one was a good time.

This is one of my favs of the year so far. Granted I haven't seen a lot.

this was just terrible. I really like cronenberg and delillo too. but wooden and dull doesn't even begin to describe this.

i swear the book's about two hours long. i quite like it actually, the book. is this the first delillo adaptation? are there others i forget?

just a couple shorts. he did an orig script for a Michael Keaton film.

i swear the book's about two hours long. i quite like it actually, the book. is this the first delillo adaptation? are there others i forget?

― thomp, Sunday, September 9, 2012 10:54 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark

its only 200 pages and the font is large, but, im not a 200 pages in 2 hours kinda guy

I look forward to seeing this again. For some reason it seems like it would play well on tv, something you can dip in and out of.

god this was weird. started of so spectacularly horrible that i had to kill it 15 minutes in. the first three mettings w pattinson alongside baruchel, shifrin and nozuka were all just awful. like watching high-school kids try to deliver shakespearean language they don't even understand. bizarre. the basic approach seemed all wrong. like, some of that bizarre dialogue might have worked if the performances had been more archly ironic and playful, but for some reason, almost everyone in the movie seems to have been directed to deliver it in a flat, uninflected manner. pattinson the worst offender, obv.

came back later and watched the rest. was surprisingly okay for a while, half an hour or so. dug the sex-addled stretch from juliette binoche to patricia mckenzie. rectal exam was the film's high point, the only segment i really loved. samantha morton was good as the theoretician, though i thought she should have been styled in tribute to laurie anderson. after the hotel room tryst w the security guard, it got awful again. never recovered. even giamatti seemed lost. and that hideous scene with the old barber, and was that supposed to be like biggie or what?

cronenberg's had a career long tendency to build movies around handsome but mechanically-minded cyphers. nerds, idea men, scientists, outsiders. he usually casts sharp, compelling actors in these roles (goldblum, woods, irons, spader), but pattinson utterly fails to deliver. such a wasted opportunity, as with better actors in several roles, and a more interesting approach to the dialogue overall, this could have been great.

i dont know if there's anyway to make this dialogue sound good tbh

samantha morton was good as the theoretician, though i thought she should have been styled in tribute to laurie anderson

OTM, which is probably why her segment felt like one of the best scenes of the year.

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.

It's whatshisface from Lost.

i gave up on that shit early on. was he towards the beginning?

Somewhere in the middle iirc.

Kevin Durand is his name.

He was in the last third of Lost. As a corporate-seeming mercenary type!

Pattinson turning into what Depp used to be, only moreso?

Over the last year, he has been diligently making movie after independent movie, in what has been his first stretch of work post-Twilight. And so far, his direction seems clear – he’s working exclusively with auteurs, on films that are not obviously commercial, and in roles that are uniquely challenging and wildly different, one to the next.

Last summer, he finished The Rover in Australia, a dystopian western from David Michôd, who made 2010’s brilliant Animal Kingdom. Pattinson’s performance is already receiving rave reviews. He then spent 10 days on Maps to the Stars, David Cronenberg’s merciless satire about Hollywood, followed by Werner Herzog’s Queen of the Desert in which he plays Lawrence of Arabia. This spring, he made Anton Corbijn’s Life, in which he plays the photographer Dennis Stock, who took iconic photos of celebrities in the Fifties. And later, there’s a crime drama by the French director Olivier Assayas, co-starring Robert De Niro.

These are just the confirmed productions. There’s a long list of other compelling indie projects in the pipeline. A film with James Gray based on David Grann’s book The Lost City of Z, and a couple of films that are actually being written for him – Harmony Korine is writing him a gangster movie, set in Miami, and Brady Corbet, one of the killers in Michael Haneke’s blood-chilling Funny Games, is developing a script called Childhood of a Leader. “It’s about the youth of a future dictator in the Thirties,” he says....

http://www.esquire.co.uk/culture/film-tv/6735/robert-pattinson-interview-esquire-cover-star/

lol @ Korine bit

And later, there’s a crime drama by the French director Olivier Assayas, co-starring Robert De Niro.

oh lord no

hey morbius just outta curiosity which arc of depp's career would you match that to? asking out of ignorance & skepticism of jay-dee, i don't remember a hugely fruitful affiliation w/auteurs beyond jarmusch & i guess like ... schnabel

Well, Depp did Waters, Jarmusch, Lasse Hallstrom, Kusturica, John Badham, Gilliam, Polanski, Sally Potter, etc., all while juggling Burton and the occasional romcom.

that's about what i was thinkin... tho Hallstrom went to the dark side early

dude's certainly been putting in the indie cred-work (and will get to as long as his name helps with foreign pre-sales) but dude's actually yet to have one of his art-house efforts really be acclaimed

i'm sure one of them will ding bells on Metacritic eventually

unanimous acclaim frequently betrays some pandering

have you liked him in anything? can't say i've spotted a ton of potential

haha whoops, forgot what thread we're on

quickly checking Letterboxd, guess what single film i've seen him in

ty josh/morbs, xxxxp

i really liked the Depp-Kusturica film, but it essentially went unreleased in the US

wonder if Assayas can trick De Niro into making an effort

I can imagine him saying in press for the film, "Yes, the trick was to persuade Bobby to make an effort."

I've never seen Pattinson in anything but he's really good in this. He's EXTREMELY beautiful and weird looking though, no?

Yep.

I really like how his accent shifts when he visits the barber.

the scenes with sarah gadon are nice because it's two people who you can't help but stare at.

When he meets her outside the theatre the show she's just been to see is called Stage Play - I can't remember if that's in the book but I liked it.