dave depraved cronenberg

Started by Cecil, February 10, 2003, 07:23:04 PM

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Sleuth

I like to hug dogs

Cecil


Seraphim

I definitively like Cronenberg's world more and more after each viewing, each film.

Haven't seen to many of his works, though. Still haven't seen Videodrome or The Fly (albeit very long ago, can't remember it).

Dead Ringers was great, although I saw it very long ago. Different than his later works, which tends to be more about reality in a science fiction way (eXistenZ). I just like theo more psychological stuff...

Naked Lunch also is a great film. eXistenZ is still a good film, although it's not my favourite Cronenberg. I was a bit disappointed by Crash.

Read the book Spider (really a MAGNIFICENT book by Patrick McGrath, for lovers of Thomas Mann, Dostojewski, Kafka!), and soon I'll see the film.
Have read (on different sites) that this film is a bit different than his other works. I hope it has the same psychological intensity as the book; maybe it's a bit like Dead Ringers (?).
Seraphim's magic words:
Dutch
Dead Can Dance/ Cocteau Twins
Literature
European/ Art Cinema:
Tarkovsky, Bresson, Fellini, Angelopoulos

MacGuffin



No one makes movies like David Cronenberg -- movies like Dead Ringers and Crash that willingly probe those dark, private regions of our psyche with the almost unwelcome intimacy of a surprise gynecological exam. Likewise, Cronenberg follows no one else's example in his own filmmaking.

"Obviously, I didn't invent filmmaking and montage and all the techniques," Cronenberg explains, "but at the same time, I really did feel that when I started making movies, I was free to invent myself as a director. When I thought of myself as a writer, I was really very much influenced by [William S.] Burroughs, by [Vladimir] Nabokov -- I started to imitate them when I wrote -- whereas, since I never thought of myself as a filmmaker, when I started to make films, I didn't know what I was going to be, and I felt quite free to become whatever."

Even Cronenberg's latest film, Spider, though considerably more conventional than some of his earlier films (by extension, it's his most accessible film yet), "would have gotten made even if I had not seen these movies." Based on the novel by Patrick McGrath, Spider explores the cluttered memory of a half-unhinged Englishman who still blames his father for his mother's untimely death. In adapting the book for the screen, Cronenberg looked to other films, not so much as inspiration, but as "touchstones" along the way. Here are five the director found most helpful.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Songs from the Second Floor
(2000; dir: Roy Andersson, starring: Lars Nordh, Stefan Larsson)
The movie that my cameraman Peter Suschitzky and I looked at was Songs from the Second Floor. It was something that he had seen and thought had some relevance to the look of Spider, in particular the sort of low-contrast look where you sink into the shadows, which are not deep. As viewers, we normally like high-contrast film stock, unless you're watching a sitcom, which is very flat, but [that low-contrast look] had something to do with the nature of Spider as a character and the wallpaper that we were going to use in the movie, the idea that he was going to be part of the wallpaper. The movie is very funny, very disturbing and very surreal, and to that extent, I suppose people will perhaps not be surprised that I like it. It had an austerity and an uncompromising quality that you don't get in a Hollywood film, an oblique kind of approach to the characters and a kind of anti-dramatic structure. Those things were encouraging because there are those elements in Spider as well. When you're planning to make a movie which is not a popcorn movie, it steadies your nerves when you know that many have gone before you and done things without compromise.

The Long Day Closes
(1992, dir: Terence Davies, starring: Marjorie Yates, Leigh McCormack)
It's an incredibly intense, nostalgic, almost sentimental (but with some bitterness) poem about a working-class boy in England in the '50s who goes to the cinema to find the kind of idealized beauty which he doesn't have in his actual life. It's a kind of autobiographical remembrance by this writer/director, Terence Davies. If you see that movie, you'll see a street that's very reminiscent of Spider's street as a boy, and I believe I read that he built this entire street as a set because the street as he remembered it didn't exist. They call them "back-to-backs" because the backyards of the houses face each other with a lane going down. There's only a few left in London that still retain their original shape and haven't been completely gentrified and rebuilt, and that's where we shot. Later when we were shooting on sets in Toronto, we still had to recreate Spider's whole backyard brick by brick. They took what they call a "squeeze" from the walls and stuff, so it was a very accurate reproduction of that very backyard, even down to which bricks were chipped and which ones weren't. So I was looking at this movie for some of those very practical things as well as things like the way people were dressed and the feel of the inside of the house, the drabness and so on. I was interested just to see how it compared to what I was trying to create for Spider.

The Fallen Idol
(1948, dir: Carol Reid, starring: Ralph Richardson, Michele Morgan)
Fallen Idol is based on a Graham Greene short story called "The Basement Room," which was told largely from a child's point of view. It's about a young boy who idolizes a household servant who is suspected of murdering his wife, so you can see that there are some connections there. The boy has fantasies and confusions about what's going on with adults, [which creates] a disconnect between child reality and adult reality, and misunderstanding on both sides by each other. There's an absolute essential Englishness about it. It's never sentimental, never bathetic, never begging for an emotional response, but getting one anyway. As usual with Carol Reed, there's an incredible sense of precision and control, which I find in most of his movies. In terms of films that impressed me as being perfect in a way, Carol Reed sort of made perfect films. It's interesting because people have told me Spider's a perfect film. Of course, perfection can be a kind of death, and you don't want to make a perfect dead thing. You want it to be alive, so the trick is to somehow have the feeling of every shot being inevitable without planning everything to the point where all spontaneity and all life is dead and gone.

The Rocking Horse Winner
(1950; dir: Anthony Pelissier, starring: Valerie Hobson, John Howard Davies)
The Rocking Horse Winner has a strange fantasy premise, but it's impact is nothing like that. It's based on a D.H. Lawrence story about a boy who has a knack for picking racetrack winners. He rocks on his rocking horse, and he can pick the winners of horse races, and his parents become quite involved in it because they get greedy. It's really all about adults and children and fantasy and betrayal and misunderstanding. It's very potent emotionally. None of these childhoods were mine, and none of them were Spider's either, but they relate because [these movies depict] young boys in postwar London. It just gives me historical and cinematic touchstones.

The Caretaker (The Guest)
(1963 ; dir: Clive Donner, starring: Alan Bates, Donald Pleasence)
This was a movie with Robert Shaw and Alan Bates and Donald Pleasence. There is no other cast because it's based on a Harold Pinter play. It's three sort of eccentric characters in English boarding-type rooms caught up in strange loop-like relationships with each other that they can't get out of. It's sort of the ultimate Pinter play probably, and I believe it's gotta be the ultimate Pinter movie because there's no compromise in the sense that they don't try to "open it out" and show you people walking in the street and stuff. In particular I think of the Donald Pleasence character. He talks about getting his papers from Sidcup (Sidcup is a town), and you never know what papers he's talking about, and he never leaves and never does it, but he's obsessed with it. If you see it, you'll immediately get the connection. If you think of Mrs. Wilkinson being played by Donald Pleasence, maybe you get a little bit of the idea. It very much connects with Spider's life in the halfway house and the kind of casual sadism that happens when people have power over other people and can inflict pain on them almost without being aware of it.
"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol


Skeleton FilmWorks

godardian

The only one of those that I've seen is The Long Day Closes, which is certainly remarkable and may be the extremely underrated Davies's best film.

You have to see Spider not to be slightly surprised by Cronenberg's love of it, though.
""Money doesn't come into it. It never has. I do what I do because it's all that I am." - Morrissey

"Lacan stressed more and more in his work the power and organizing principle of the symbolic, understood as the networks, social, cultural, and linguistic, into which a child is born. These precede the birth of a child, which is why Lacan can say that language is there from before the actual moment of birth. It is there in the social structures which are at play in the family and, of course, in the ideals, goals, and histories of the parents. This world of language can hardly be grasped by the newborn and yet it will act on the whole of the child's existence."

Stay informed on protecting your freedom of speech and civil rights.

phil marlowe

i've just ordered scanners, dead ringers and videodrome on dvd for something like 20 bucks. the only one i've seen is videodrome and that movie was fucked up.

ono

Has anyone else here even seen Crash?  I just did last night out of morbid curiosity.  It was ... interesting to say the least.  Definitely worth a look if you too are morbidly curious.  Ebert gets the appeal of this film just right, though he overrates it.  It really requires a suspension of disbelief to get in to the film, and it's at the same time sexy and totally not sexy.  It's a good study of grief, but at the same time, it's incredibly thin.  I find it hard to believe this was based on a novel that actually sold.  If I didn't know better, I wouldn't put it past Cronenberg to come up with this himself, which is I guess what he saw in the film.  *** (7/10)  Just barely.

MacGuffin

"Crash" reminds me of budgie.  :yabbse-cry:



I really liked "Crash". It's a fascinating exploration of these characters and their pleasure from pain fetishes (even making the scars resemble vaginas), and their 'self-destruction'.
"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol


Skeleton FilmWorks

Pubrick

crash made me hot. one of the best films i've seen about crazy sex.
under the paving stones.

MacGuffin

History of Violence: New Line is rumoured to be quite happy with Josh Olson's adaptation and David Cronenberg is being mentioned as a potential director.
"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol


Skeleton FilmWorks

ono

Sometimes, I wish titles could be copyrighted so things like this couldn't happen.  But then I think of all the fun I'd miss out on when/if some people go to rent this movie and get the Cronenberg version instead.  Hehe.

MacGuffin

David Cronenberg Has A History of Violence
Source: Variety

David Cronenberg (Spider) will direct A History of Violence at New Line Cinema, the first book in the Paradox Graphic Mystery line of books published by Paradox Press/DC Comics. The second book in the series was Road to Perdition, on which the Tom Hanks film was based on.

The plot of the graphic novel follows an ordinary family's life after the father receives unwanted national attention for a seemingly vigilante self-defense killing at his diner and his previously unknown past is dredged up.

The novel was written by Judge Dredd creator John Wagner. "Violence" was adapted by screenwriter Josh Olson, who also wrote Three Gun Blues, set up at Paramount.
"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol


Skeleton FilmWorks

MacGuffin

David Cronenberg Helming London Fields
Source: Variety

David Cronenberg (Spider) is directing London Fields, based on Martin Amis' 1991 novel of the same name.

The script, written by Roberta Hanley and Amis, follows a promiscuous psychic troubled by disturbing premonitions that are all the more unnerving for never being wrong. The story is set in and around a seedy London pub, where the psychic has come to meet the end her dreams have foretold: to be murdered by one of two men she meets there -- but which one?

No distributors have come aboard as yet, but discussions are taking place with several, and the film is going out to cast.
"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol


Skeleton FilmWorks

SoNowThen

I need to see more of his work.

I've seen:

The Fly  :yabbse-thumbup:
Crash  :yabbse-thumbdown:
Naked Lunch  (half a thumb up)


Where do I go from here?
Those who say that the totalitarian state of the Soviet Union was not "real" Marxism also cannot admit that one simple feature of Marxism makes totalitarianism necessary:  the rejection of civil society. Since civil society is the sphere of private activity, its abolition and replacement by political society means that nothing private remains. That is already the essence of totalitarianism; and the moralistic practice of the trendy Left, which regards everything as political and sometimes reveals its hostility to free speech, does nothing to contradict this implication.

When those who hated capital and consumption (and Jews) in the 20th century murdered some hundred million people, and the poster children for the struggle against international capitalism and America are now fanatical Islamic terrorists, this puts recent enthusiasts in an awkward position. Most of them are too dense and shameless to appreciate it, and far too many are taken in by the moralistic and paternalistic rhetoric of the Left.

ElPandaRoyal

Quote from: SoNowThen
Crash  :yabbse-thumbdown:

Where do I go from here?

To the doctor  :wink:

You should check out Spider. I didn't really like it as much as I hoped...  :(
Si