Film Freak Central

Crimes of the Future (2022)

****/****
starring Viggo Mortensen, Léa Seydoux, Kristen Stewart, Scott Speedman
written and directed by David Cronenberg

by Angelo Muredda "It's not a completely bad feeling, at least not uninteresting," muses performance artist Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen) about his scratchy throat during a quiet moment in David Cronenberg's career-capping Crimes of the Future, a tender affair about listening to and affirming one's aging, sick, and mutable body--contrary to all the pre-hype about walkouts and the director's supposed return to his grimy horror roots. Saul lives with a radical disease called Accelerated Evolution Syndrome, which causes him to rapidly spawn superfluous organs. Surgical and life partner Caprice (Léa Seydoux) removes them on stage in underground live shows that fall somewhere between medical procedures you might gawk at on YouTube and ecstatic religious ceremonies. Saul is a full partner in these sensual spectacles, writhing in an open sarcophagus while Caprice mythologizes his new developments like a curator at a Francis Bacon show. Here, though, Saul is simply taking the opportunity to mind the sensations produced by his latest corporeal work of art, noting his symptoms with the observational humour and delicacy of previous Cronenberg protagonists who double as archivists of their changing forms. It's a trait common not just to scientists spliced with houseflies but to most people living with chronic illnesses.

Stephen King: 5-Movie Collection - Blu-ray Disc

THE DEAD ZONE (1983)
****/**** Image C Sound A
starring Christopher Walken, Brooke Adams, Tom Skerritt, Herbert Lom
screenplay by Jeffrey Boam, based on the novel by Stephen King
directed by David Cronenberg

by Walter Chaw Michael Kamen's score for The Dead Zone sounds so much like Howard Shore's work that if I didn't know better... Maybe something about Cronenberg inspires doomed Romanticism in his collaborators. What's sometimes lost in the focus on body-horror in his pictures is how like opera they are--so like opera, in fact, that The Fly was eventually turned into one. Each is in some way about the loss of the self to love and all those elevated metaphors for love like body transformation, breakdown, decay, death. He is a poet of liebestraum. His films are suffused with it, as well as--here's another German term for you--overwhelming waves of Weltschmerz. The Dead Zone was the first Cronenberg feature since 1979's Fast Company not scored by Shore; the two would never be separated again. In a CINEFANTASTIQUE article published at the time of The Dead Zone's release (1983), Cronenberg tells of producer Dino De Laurentiis desiring a "name" composer and discarding Shore before landing on Kamen, then fresh off Alan Parker's Pink Floyd: The Wall. I don't think Cronenberg gave up that kind of control again. The Dead Zone is an adaptation of a Stephen King bestseller and home to one of only a handful of lead roles for Christopher Walken, who's idol-handsome but, you know, off-tempo. A curious affliction for a trained, gifted hoofer, you'll agree. I used to refer to Cronenberg as an insect anthropologist, an alien observer, and that's true, I think. But as I grow older and, minute-by-minute, devastation-upon-devastation, immensely, geometrically wearier, I'm seeing Cronenberg as afflicted by a certain Proustian lost time. The more I know of grief, the more I hear that edge in Cronenberg's voice echoed in my own.

Shivers (1975) [Vestron Video Collector's Series] - Blu-ray + Digital

They Came from Within
****/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B
starring Paul Hampton, Joe Silver, Lynn Lowry, Barbara Steele
written and directed by David Cronenberg

by Bryant Frazer SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. In some sense, Shivers, a venereal horror movie that invites you to track the vectors of sexual intercourse among a group of apartment-dwellers, is a parody of a soap opera where the point is who is sleeping with whom. It's also a spit-take on those sex-ed hygiene films that try to frighten teenagers into abstinence. Set almost entirely in a Montréal apartment complex and photographed in a jaundiced palette that leans towards yellow-green, it's about the proliferation of parasites that make their way from body to body by a variety of sickening means, transforming their hosts into insatiable sex maniacs. Shivers was Cronenberg's first commercial feature, and by the director's own admission he was hardly equipped at the time to head up a production with any significant budget. And yet it's some kind of masterpiece. If it's a naive film in some respects, it benefits from naivete. The hurried, sometimes awkward mise en scène may as well be deliberate, given that it jibes so well with the film's chilly, alienating tone. Any cut corners in lighting, design, and special-effects work only enhance the generally grody feel. And there's a lot that's grody about Shivers. That's why it works so well as a chilling overture to a filmmaking career that critics have described as The Cronenberg Project, one in which the director uses film after film to explore love, sex, physical transformation, and mortality.

Dead Ringers (1988) [Collector's Edition] - Blu-ray Disc

****/**** Image B- Sound D Extras B
starring Jeremy Irons, Genevieve Bujold, Heidi Von Palleske, Stephen Lack
written by David Cronenberg and Norman Snider, based on the book Twins by Bari Wood and Jack Geasland
directed by David Cronenberg

by Bryant Frazer Dead Ringers begins and ends extraordinarily, with the soft swelling of Howard Shore's title music. It starts with the slow emergence of strings, which are eventually layered with harp and woodwinds, mining uncommon veins of sadness in a major key. Set against on-screen illustrations of an anatomical and explicitly gynecological nature, the music serves the obvious function of undercutting the film's pointedly unsettling subject matter with unalloyed lyricism. It's like a statement of purpose. But Shore's melody goes farther than that, somehow. It's remarkably haunting, for one thing--the theme is one of the most potent sensory triggers I know, instantly evoking both beauty and despair. Just the first four bars are enough to set me weeping. And it's penetrating. More than elegiac, it's specifically regretful, and bittersweet. According to Royal S. Brown's liner notes on the first CD release of the movie's score, the director knew it right away. "That's suicide music," Cronenberg told Shore when he first heard the theme. "You've got it."

TIFF '14: Maps to the Stars

*½/****
directed by David Cronenberg

by Bill Chambers There's something vaguely pathetic about Bruce Wagner continuing to write these Los Angeles tapestries that send up the movie business, since his Hollywood career peaked in the early-'90s (and the vision of these satires is ossified thereabouts). And getting David Cronenberg--someone so insularly Canadian, and probably the last filmmaker to pore over the trades--to direct one of them is lunacy, albeit potentially inspired in the way that getting a German to helm Paris, Texas was. Indeed, though, Maps to the Stars is the blind leading the blind, taking place in an obsolete world where Carrie Fisher, playing herself, is some kind of industry gatekeeper and a remake of an old black-and-white melodrama is the hottest project in town. Fresh off the bus from Florida, the mysterious, lightly-disfigured Agatha (Mia Wasikowska) arrives in L.A. with an ally in Fisher, who helps get her a job as the personal assistant to high-maintenance Havana Segrand (Julianne Moore), an actress haunted by both her own former glory and the superstardom of her late mother (Cronenberg's paper-doll muse Sarah Gadon). Havana has regular, sexually-charged sessions with self-help guru Dr. Stafford Weiss (John Cusack), father of teen sensation Benjie Weiss (Evan Bird), a nightmare of Bieberian entitlement who, like Havana, has lately been receiving unwelcome visitations from the dead.

Echoes

Opening shot of Seconds (1966, d. John Frankenheimer):

Opening shot of The Fly (1986, d. David Cronenberg):

Naked Lunch (1991) [The Criterion Collection] - Blu-ray Disc

***½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras A
starring Peter Weller, Judy Davis, Ian Holm, Roy Scheider
screenplay by David Cronenberg, based on the book by William S. Burroughs
directed by David Cronenberg

"A group of children have tied an idiot to a post with barbed wire and built a fire between his legs and stand watching with bestial curiosity as the flames lick his thighs. His flesh jerks in the fire with insect agony." --William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch

by Walter Chaw "Sexual ambulance, did you say?" asks Bill Lee (Peter Weller), erstwhile exterminator of rational thought (and cockroaches) and stand-in for William S. Burroughs (who used the nom de guerre himself in Junkie) in David Cronenberg's impenetrable, impossibly complex, surprisingly funny, curiously pleasurable Burroughs adaptation Naked Lunch. Bill is responding to a statement--an introduction, really--to a creature called a "Mugwump," named after a political group that split from the Republican party in 1884 to support Grover Cleveland in protest of their own candidate James Blaine's financial corruption. Those Mugwumps were members of a social elite; these Mugwumps, Cronenberg's, are reptiles or insects (or should I say "also reptiles or insects"?), each voiced by Peter Boretski in his insistent, Columbo-esque rasp, asking just one more clarifying question. This Mugwump declares itself to be a master of sexual ambivalence, leading to Bill Lee's miscomprehension of it as "sexual ambulance"--which, as mondegreens go, is a fairly loaded one. Naked Lunch is, after all, invested in language and corruption. Describing to Bill what it's like to get high by injecting the toxin Bill uses to kill roaches, Bill's wife Joan (the great Judy Davis) says, "It's a very literary high--it's a Kafka high, you feel like a bug"--the processing of which provides by itself a kind of literary high.

Cosmopolis (2012) - Blu-ray Disc

****/****Image B+ Sound A Extras A
starring Robert Pattinson, Juliette Binoche, Sarah Gadon, Paul Giamatti
screenplay by David Cronenberg, based on the novel by Don DeLillo
directed by David Cronenberg

click any image to enlarge

by Walter Chaw David Cronenberg's North by Northwest, his adaptation of Don DeLillo's Cosmopolis functions as a difficult, arctic précis of the Canadian filmmaker's career-long obsession with the insectile nature of, and indulgence in, hunger. Cronenberg's proclivity for parasites, after all, is essentially the admiration of creatures defined by their hunger. His latest is Eric Packer (Robert Pattinson), a voracious sexual predator who lives in the dark cocoon of his stretch limo as it inches its way across Midtown to a barbershop that would be more at home in the bucolic small town of A History of Violence than in the metal canyons of Manhattan. Its existence, like a little diner along the way, like a bookshop with paper- and leather-lined walls, is further evidence of infestation--pockets of disease on the glistening skin and sterile surfaces of industry. No wonder the filthy rabble protesting in Gotham's streets have as their unifying symbol the rats that are the true inheritors of man's work. Cronenberg recalls his own Crash in these ideas--and not just in his desire to adapt literary properties considered unadaptable. He recalls his Naked Lunch in the idea that language is a neurological contagion, and he recalls most of all both his Videodrome (in his identification of screens with every intercourse) and his eXistenZ (in the erasure of any meaningful line between our interiors and exteriors). Cosmopolis is dense and multifarious--the absolute pinnacle of pretentious, too, in its desire to explain not only its creator, but all of the world at this moment in time in our age of missing information.

A Dangerous Method (d. David Cronenberg)

I wish David Cronenberg would direct a script of his own again. A Dangerous Method is recognizably Cronenbergian in its careful anthropology (DePalma-esque, too, in its frequent use of the split dioptre), but it's also a hit-or-miss period talkfest, identifying it as a Christopher Hampton adaptation of a Christopher Hampton play through and through. Distilling all the expected body-horror in grotesque and painful-looking contortions of her jaw, first-billed Keira Knightley does fine if exhaustingly histrionic work as Sabina Spielrein, a patient of Carl Jung's (the ubiquitous Michael Fassbender) who becomes his apprentice while in therapy. Jung corresponds with the more popular Sigmund Freud (Cronenberg muse Viggo Mortensen, ingeniously cast against type) over Sabina's case as well as his own neuroses, and Freud eventually tosses another patient Jung's way, protégé Otto Gross (Vincent Cassel), whose maverick disregard for the ethics of transference and countertransference ultimately influences Jung's decision to embark on an affair with the sexually-repressed Sabina. On some level, A Dangerous Method is Cronenberg's first out-and-out comedy, and though a few of the laughs are of the historically-superior variety, more still are born of the characters using psychobabble to rationalize their every surrender to their urges. (Also funny: that Freud is never not smoking a cigar.) Which is not to say the movie is especially satirical or irreverent. Indeed, the dense debates that blossom between Jung and Freud as the former attempts to broaden the latter's horizons beyond the psychoanalytic movement reveal a passionate respect for the work of these men, if an ambivalence--to borrow a Freudian term--towards their differing points-of-view. (The split dioptre is generally employed here to keep both Jung and Freud in focus.) Unfortunately, things get a little bit repetitive and tedious, culminating in an ending that feels somewhat arbitrarily placed; as much as I love Cronenberg, I was going to suggest that this stagy material might've benefited from a showier director--but then I remembered Julien Temple's Pandaemonium. ***/****
PROGRAMME: Gala Presentations

Vroom! Vroom!: Grand Prix (1966); Le Mans (1971); Fast Company (1979) - Blu-ray Discs

GRAND PRIX 
***/**** Image A- Sound B Extras B-
starring James Garner, Eva Marie Saint, Yves Montand, Toshiro Mifune
screenplay by Robert Alan Arthur
directed by John Frankenheimer 

LE MANS
****/**** Image A Sound A- Extras D
starring Steve McQueen, Siegfried Rauch, Elga Andersen, Ronald Leigh-Hunt
screenplay by Harry Kleiner
directed by Lee H. Katzin

FAST COMPANY
**/**** Image A- Sound C+ Extras A+
starring William Smith, Claudia Jennings, John Saxon, Don Francks
screenplay by Phil Savath, Courtney Smith and David Cronenberg
directed by David Cronenberg

LE MANS

by Walter Chaw Of the major films produced during John Frankenheimer's fulsome period (that stretch between The Young Savages and Seconds that saw him as a giant among giants, tearing off masterpieces major (The Train, The Manchurian Candidate) and minor (The Birdman of Alcatraz, Seven Days in May)), Grand Prix has always stuck out for me as a swing-and-a-miss. There's no disputing either its technical innovation, which saw cameras mounted to Formula One cars for the first time, or Frankenheimer's fire, which seemed to single-handedly will the production to the finish line despite prickly subjects, competition from a Steve McQueen Formula One project in simultaneous development, and insurance companies pulling out when Frankenheimer insisted on his stars doing much of their own driving. But only upon my most recent revisit, occasioned by the picture's Blu-ray release, did it become clear to me the relationship that Grand Prix has with the same year's Seconds, far and away Frankenheimer's best film: an element of the biomechanical--of Frankenstein, sure, but Icarus¹, too, where man metastasizes himself with machines of his own creation to achieve the forbidden, whether it be beauty, or endurance, or speed...or immortality. It's therefore a film that may get at the heart of auto racing's allure for not only its participants but also its true believers. Elements of Harlan Ellison's "Ernest and the Machine God"--this idea that while anything's possible through technology, the debt of that ambition is paid out in blood.

Eastern Promises (2007)

****/****
starring Viggo Moretensen, Naomi Watts, Vincent Cassel, Armin Mueller-Stahl
screenplay by Steve Knight
directed by David Cronenberg

by Walter Chaw As executed by our pre-eminent insect anthropologist, David Cronenberg's Eastern Promises is more fairytale than thriller, one that finds new muse Viggo Mortensen as Nikolai, the rising star of an émigré Russian mob family taken root in the heart of London within the red velvet-lined walls of a restaurant innocuously-/romantically-named "Trans-Siberian." Self-described as "wolfish," this pack is led by grandfatherly Semyon (Armin Mueller-Stahl), who's disappointed with his ineffectual son Kirill (Vincent Cassel) and looking to replace him with a surrogate heir. The rot of that familial discord throws its roots back to ferocious opening minutes that see first a vicious throat-slashing, then a fourteen-year-old, pregnant prostitute haemorrhaging on the floor of a drugstore after she's told that, for Methadone, the pharmacist will need a prescription. Cronenberg's London is a cess seething beneath a veneer of "normalcy"; regarded as a toxic tabernacle in Spider, the city is transformed here into a garish, meticulously theatrical wonderland. The central problem of the picture has a lot to do with the idea that Cronenberg has again taken a pre-existing script and reordered it along distinctly Cronenbergian lines--that what must have read initially as a sociological text on another facet of the immigrant experience (much like screenwriter Steve Knight's Dirty Pretty Things) now plays like one of Cronenberg's investigations into the difficulty of parsing concepts like "normal" and "family" in the crushing crucible of bugs pretending to be human among humans.

Everything is Illuminated (2005) + A History of Violence (2005)|A History of Violence [New Line Platinum Series] - DVD

EVERYTHING IS ILLUMINATED
**/****
starring Elijah Wood, Eugene Hutz, Boris Leskin, Laryssa Lauret
screenplay by Liev Schreiber, based on the novel by Jonathan Safran Foer
directed by Liev Schreiber

A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE
****/**** Image A Sound A Extras A
starring Viggo Mortensen, Maria Bello, Ed Harris, William Hurt
screenplay by Josh Olson, based on the graphic novel by John Wagner and Vince Locke
directed by David Cronenberg

by Walter Chaw A year after a glut of films about the past being wilfully stifled by the present, find Liev Schreiber's Everything is Illuminated and David Cronenberg's A History of Violence, literal calls to awake following the nightmare of the night before--or, better, avenues through which we might recognize that suppressing a collective shadow mainly serves to nourish it until it explodes, monstrous, back into our consciousness. The one is based on an Anthony Burgess-like book of great linguistic imagination by Jonathan Safran Foer, the other a spare graphic novel by John Wagner and Vince Locke--and just the obliqueness of the respective source materials speaks to the primacy of their message: "Everything is illuminated by the past." The keystone line in Schreiber's picture, this serves as a mission statement of sorts for both films, locating in the middle of this first decade of the new millennium something that feels like a weary acceptance that not only are we products of our trauma and misdeeds, but also that our trauma and misdeeds are beyond redress and completely inescapable. To parse the best line in Kenneth Branagh's Dead Again, it's the karmic payment plan: buy now, pay forever.

David Cronenberg Re-examines David Cronenberg: A Retrospective Interview

FILM FREAK CENTRAL takes a look at David Cronenberg's body of work--with a little help from the master himself

March 9, 2003 | Offered the opportunity to visit with David Cronenberg a second time recently, I sat down with the legendary director the morning after moderating a post-screening Q&A with him at Denver's Landmark Mayan Theater (where a sell-out crowd of over 450 was enthusiastically in attendance for a sneak of Spider) to discuss his work from student films Stereo and Crimes of the Future all the way through to what is arguably his best--certainly his most mature--film, the oft-delayed Spider. Dressed in casual cool as is the director's habit, Mr. Cronenberg exudes supreme confidence; gracious in the extreme and unfailingly polite, not given to displays of false modesty or overly interested in compliments, his speech is pleasant and carefully modulated--a sort of intellectual detachment that has marked even his earliest, "tax shelter" work. It seemed clear to me that Mr. Cronenberg was not generally accustomed to talking of his earlier work on the junket circuit. Speaking only for myself, it was a wonderful break from the usual stump.-Walter Chaw

From Flies to Spiders: FFC Interviews David Cronenberg

November 15, 2002|Of the many opportunities afforded to me by my association with FILM FREAK CENTRAL, the ones I treasure most are interviews with favourite filmmakers. Guillermo Del Toro, Cory McAbee, John Sayles, and now David Cronenberg--easily the most important Canadian auteur of the last thirty years, and one of the most vivid and innovative voices in a horror genre otherwise moribund since the early 1980s. Cronenberg's films are obsessed with the twisting of the flesh by machineries and ambition, sexual perversion and insectile disassociation, and the blurring of lines between reality and the phantasms constructed by the Icarean aspirations of its doomed protagonists.

Spider (2002)

***½/****
starring Ralph Fiennes, Miranda Richardson, Gabriel Byrne, Bradley Hall
screenplay by Patrick McGrath and David Cronenberg, based on the novel by Patrick McGrath
directed by David Cronenberg

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover After a period of indifferent projects, declining audiences, and three years of disconcerting silence, the unthinkable has become reality: David Cronenberg is back on top. His new film Spider intensifies all of his past thematic concerns with a pictorial eloquence practically unheard of in his oeuvre--it's like watching one of the sex-slugs from Shivers turn into a beautiful, fragile butterfly. For once, the trials of his sexually confused lead resonate beyond the merely theoretical, and for once, you feel his pain instead of contemplating it from a distance. The antiseptic restraint of Crash and Naked Lunch has been replaced with a dread and sadness that overwhelm you with their emotionalism; Spider is easily the best film he's made since Dead Ringers, possibly even since Videodrome. I hope that it marks a turning point in the career of Canada's most conspicuous auteur.

The Fly/The Fly 2 [Fox Double Feature] - DVD

THE FLY (1986)
***½/**** Image A Sound B
starring Jeff Goldblum, Geena Davis, John Getz
screenplay by Charles Edward Pogue and David Cronenberg
directed by David Cronenberg

The Fly II (1989)
*/**** Image B- Sound B
starring Eric Stoltz, Daphne Zuniga, Lee Richardson, Harley Cross
screenplay by Mick Garris and Jim & Ken Wheat and Frank Darabont
directed by Chris Walas

by Vincent Suarez

"Long live the new flesh." -- Max Renn, David Cronenberg's Videodrome (1983)

"I must not know enough about the flesh. I've got to learn more." -- Seth Brundle, David Cronenberg's The Fly (1986)

"I want it out of my body ... now!" -- Veronica Quaife, David Cronenberg's The Fly (1986)

SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. David Cronenberg's most memorable and profound films are a unique blend of fascination, celebration, inquisitiveness, and horror with regard to the possibilities of the flesh. Hollywood's most memorable and profound monster movies (Bride of Frankenstein, King Kong (1933), Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992)) are a similarly mystical mingling of romance, repulsion, and overwhelming sympathy with regard to the creature. It's no wonder, then, that Cronenberg's The Fly is essentially the genetic splicing of his trademark obsessions with these hallowed genre conventions. In making the material his own, the pathos generated by Cronenberg's fusion of elements raises the film's status from mere remake of the campy 1958 original to masterpiece.