Maps to the Stars

Started by wilder, April 11, 2014, 04:32:22 PM

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wilder





Follows the Weiss family, a Hollywood dynasty where each member has their own array of problems, with drugs, pyromania and ghostly visions all in the mix.

Directed by David Cronenberg
Starring Julianne Moore, John Cusack, Robert Pattinson, Mia Wasikowska, Olivia Williams, and Sarah Gadon
Release Date - February 27, 2015


Trailer (NSFW)




Three clips






ono

Looks really interesting, though my interest is more piqued about the linked article's pondering as to whether Cronenberg is able to say anything new about the subject matter.  Not a Cronenberg guy, per se.  But I follow Julianne Moore pretty much anywhere.  It'll be interesting to see what she does when she begins to inhabit the Meryl Streep roles, now that she's taking on years, too.  Heh, soon Meryl's gonna have to play the grandma (and she'll get bajillions of nominations and awards for those, too, but I digress).

wilder

Cannes: 'Maps to the Stars' Director David Cronenberg on Indie Films and Portraying Hollywood (Q&A)
via The Hollywood Reporter

"I've never lost sight of why I'm making films," says Canada's wizard of weird as he reflects on his career, and his long history with the festival.

Canadian director David Cronenberg is no stranger to Cannes, having received the Carrosse d'Or lifetime achievement award in 2006 and a special jury prize in 1996 in addition to having had five films in competition, including his latest, the Robert Pattinson starrer Maps to the Stars, screening May 19. It is his first feature set in Hollywood, though considering the breadth of Cronenberg's imagination, it is not apt to be a Hollywood like any seen previously onscreen.

The 71-year-old director, whom Martin Scorsese has described as a cross between cinematic surrealist Luis Bunuel and macabre painter Francis Bacon, spoke with The Hollywood Reporter about his Canadian roots, his preference for an R rating and why it takes so long to make "difficult" films.

Many think of you as an American director, but you are Canadian and have shot practically all of your movies in Toronto. How did that happen?

It's funny, but some people would think of me as a Hollywood director, for whatever reason. I'm definitely not that. Part of what I do, and sort of the rhythm of my filmmaking, involves co-productions between Canada and Europe. Once you do that, you're committed to shooting a lot of the film in Canada or Europe, so there's a pragmatic reason for shooting [in Toronto]. I also have a base of talented people that I work with consistently; I don't want to abandon them for the latest "hot" person in that field. Then you have the nature of Toronto: I often think of it as a character actor who can play many different roles. In the 1970s, a lot of people got upset because Toronto would often be shown as somewhere else — as if that was a bad thing. But in the world of moviemaking, that's a great thing.

Maps to the Stars was shot mostly in Toronto, with only five days on location in Los Angeles. Toronto often doubles for New York or Chicago but rarely L.A. How did you pull it off?

It is tricky. We knew we had to shoot in the summer, and honestly, it was palm trees. There are places in Toronto that look strangely like places in L.A. — there's some very modern houses and architecture. Most of the Toronto shooting took place in a modern hospital or in private residences — that was doable. [We had to] put a bunch of palm trees in the garden, and it worked very well. I've been told many times by friends in L.A. that you could not tell the film wasn't shot entirely in L.A. But those five days were crucial, and [it] was really fun. You know, not too many feature films are being shot in L.A., outside of TV. And it was the first time I shot a film in the U.S. in my entire career.

You made Maps for a little more than $13 million. What is your approach to film financing?

Money can be neutral, and as long as the source of the money doesn't involve giving up creative freedom, I don't care where it comes from. In fact, I rather like that independent films are put together like Frankenstein: You get pieces from all over the world, and you stitch them together and hope it ends up being a living organism. That's the financing. But creatively — obviously that's one of the reasons you make independent films, for creative freedom. You don't have studio interference. When I was making [2012's] Cosmopolis, [Robert] Pattinson said to me, "I've never seen this before." I said, "You've never seen what?" He said, "You just make all the decisions right here on the spot." I said, "Yeah." I mean, you don't actually have to wait to get memos from the studio. He said he'd never been in a situation where the director did what he wanted, without consultation. I said: "You know, it's just us making this movie. There's no one else — there's no Big Brother."

Maps uses novelist Bruce Wagner's screenplay, which satirizes celebrity culture. Does the film skewer Hollywood?

Some people thought maybe it's based on a novel, but it isn't — it's an original screenplay. It's also very much Bruce; it's very much the kind of writing he has done in his novels. And of course his main subject is Hollywood and L.A. You could describe Bruce as a satirist, to a certain extent, but I think that shortchanges what he does. He's very humanely realistic and emotional as well. I definitely could have played the script as high satire and exaggerated everything, but I really wanted to play against those elements because I thought they would take care of themselves. They are there, strongly, and then I wanted to play with the actors for the reality of it. I want to play it absolutely straight. It is a family drama, in the way many Hollywood stories are. It's very incestuous, the film business. There's not literal incest but that inbred kind of intense, inwardly looking Hollywood story.

The film has been rated R. Are you happy with that?

I worry about an NC-17. I'm very happy with an R — that's where it deserves to be. I need to have the freedom of Bruce's dialogue and his insights into the way people really speak. It's pretty meaty and not PG-13 material.

When viewers see celebrity culture portrayed in Maps, will they see a side of Hollywood they find disturbing — or, as with The Wolf of Wall Street, will they get caught up in the glitz and glamour?

I don't think people will want to live like the people they see in Maps to the Stars, yet they will understand the desires of the characters to live out those lives. It's really, I think, given the emphasis there has been on celebrity culture — I'm thinking of Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton and all of that — it would be misleading if one thinks about Maps that way. Although the Hollywood business is the backdrop of the story, it really is a lot more universal than that. Yes, it has to do with ambition and identity and striving. But it's not just applicable to celebrity — it's about real people wanting to work and have success and make money and be successful in their field. So you could have rewritten this for people in the automotive industry, or even in the world of finance. There are aspects of celebrity culture, but there's no scenes with paparazzi, for example, or movie premieres.

You have a long association with Cannes and are seen as a festival darling. What does debuting a film in Cannes mean to you?

Everybody who has had a film in Cannes and had a long career has also been rejected by Cannes. I submitted [2011's] A Dangerous Method to Cannes and they didn't like it, or at least they didn't like it for the slate they were preparing. So I went to Venice. In other words, you can't take it for granted just because, in my case, you've been president of the [Cannes] jury and had three or four films in competition, that your new film is automatically going to be in. I think that's a misunderstanding people have. They're obsessive about their cinema in France and in Cannes. The selection committee is really rigorous. With A Dangerous Method, they said, "This isn't what we expected from you." I'd say: "Why would you want me to be predictable? What kind of artist is that, that you can predict everything he will do? Isn't that boring?" But for them, for whatever reason, [Method] didn't feel like me to them. I believe later they had some regrets about that.

Older directors often lose their creative edge as their careers progress. At 71, you don't seem to have that problem. Why?

It's a matter of creative force and edge. Cosmopolis, which was not a successful film in terms of box office, for me was a really successful film in terms of pushing the envelope of filmmaking. So I'm really very proud and happy with that film. That's the thing: I've never lost sight of why I'm making films. You can lose sight of it. When you get older, for me, you can even get choosier. If a film isn't really exciting, if it's just ordinary, there's no way I'll do it. I don't need the money. Not that I'm rich, but I have enough to live on, and I don't need to do a movie for money — and I don't need to do a movie just to be doing a movie. It has to be something that really pushes my buttons, and Maps to the Stars did that. It took 10 years to get it made. The same was true of A Dangerous Method, and Crash as well. The more difficult, interesting films take 10 years to get made. Eventually I'm going to run out of time, but it takes a project like that to get me interested. So I'm not likely to make a boring film.

David Cronenberg making a boring film — that would generate some scandal.

That would be the bad kind of scandal, absolutely.

max from fearless

I like this poster, my design instincts say I shouldn't. They say Pattinson's photo sucks and that essentially it's still a big head movie poster, but there's something about their big heads vs the behind the hollywood sign, in the dark bushes, that I like and that resonates.



wilder

^ whoever cut that trailer should be fired


David Cronenberg: 'My imagination is not a place of horror'
via The Guardian



The great Canadian director made his name with the body-horror classics Dead Ringers and The Fly and most recently with the savagely funny Maps to the Stars. Here he answers questions from Observer readers and cultural figures including Margaret Atwood and Viggo Mortensen

When the great Canadian film-maker David Cronenberg turned 70 last year he felt, in a word, old. An admirer of Franz Kafka, he said he found himself comparing himself to Gregor Samsa, the protagonist of The Metamorphosis, who wakes up one morning to find – very Cronenbergian – that he's become a giant beetle.

"You are a new creature," Cronenberg explains. "Ask anybody who is not advanced in years what they think of 70-year-olds – if they think of them at all – and it's Alzheimer's, senile old people and Zimmer frames. Just, 'Wow, what a burden on the healthcare system.' Three score and ten, that's supposed to be it, that's the biblical age. So there are precedents for considering 70 to be a major moment in your life."

Once he had come to terms with the shock, though, Cronenberg returned to his work with renewed vigour. He directed a script called Maps to the Stars, a savagely funny takedown of contemporary Hollywood, that he had been tinkering with for a decade with the writer Bruce Wagner. He also finished his debut novel, Consumed, which has been perhaps 50 years in the making. Both are unveiled in the next few weeks.

"You have huge power and potency at this age," Cronenberg continues. "There's the mythology of age, the bearded elder, the wise old man. In some cultures advanced age is very much revered, the Chinese culture, Confucius and so on: you are supposed to gain in wisdom and experience and therefore be quite a valuable member of society who should be honoured and listened to. At the moment, in the west, we certainly don't have that."

Cronenberg is certainly not ready for his Zimmer frame just yet. He's 71 now, but maintains a slim, athletic build and often disappears into the hills around his home in Toronto on his bicycle. His soaring hair has a metallic sheen and the density of chinchilla fur. He is ferociously intelligent and quick-witted, but, over a long conversation on Skype, not in the least bit intimidating. His reputation in film circles is for being decent, even moral; qualities not easily retained in that industry.

It's clear, too, that Cronenberg's ambition is undimmed. "I can say," he goes on, "that the novel that I wrote now, I really expected to have written when I was 21 instead of 71, but it couldn't have been the same novel and I doubt that it would have been as good. I really don't think it could have been."

Maps to the Stars, too, will also surely go down as one of the finest films in a career that has been both consistently surprising but also relentlessly Cronenberg: from the chaotic early body-horror flicks (Shivers; Scanners; The Fly; Dead Ringers) to slicker, more psychologically intense recent movies (A History of Violence, his most mainstream film to date; Eastern Promises; A Dangerous Method). Maps stars Julianne Moore as Havana Segrand, an ageing actress desperate not to be tossed on the Hollywood scrapheap. She has a guileless personal assistant, or "chore whore", called Agatha (Mia Wasikowska) and a wild-eyed therapist, Stafford Weiss (John Cusack). A sprawling, nightmarish tale also swallows Weiss's Bieber-esque son, Benjie (Evan Bird), and a limo driver, Jerome Fontana (Robert Pattinson), who is, of course, really an actor and screenwriter.

"The movie is obviously a work of fiction, it's not a documentary on how Hollywood works; it uses compression, exaggeration, all those techniques," says Cronenberg. "But both Bruce and I would resist calling it a satire. Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal is a satire, but this movie is too realistic to be a satire. In fact, Bruce has said that every line of dialogue in the movie he has heard spoken by someone. He could probably tell you who."

As an outsider Cronenberg is in many respects excellently placed to take a swipe at the eccentricities of Hollywood. He has lived in Toronto – the backdrop for many of his movies – his entire life and Maps to the Stars is the first time he has actually filmed in Los Angeles; he spent five days there mostly, he says wryly, shooting palm trees. But Cronenberg is not a total outsider. Long ago, he was tapped up to see if he might direct Return of the Jedi, and over the years he has had many involved, ultimately doomed discussions with several of the major studios about making films, perhaps most intriguingly a spy caper with MGM starring Denzel Washington and Tom Cruise.

"I'm 2,500 miles away from Hollywood and consider myself literally and figuratively halfway between Hollywood and Europe in terms of my cinema sensibility," says Cronenberg. "And being a Canadian, being outside the mainstream of America – as Marshall McLuhan used to say – allows you to have perceptions that you could not have otherwise. Like they say: 'A fish doesn't know what water is.' You have to be outside water to know what water is."

Consumed, meanwhile, is as singular and idiosyncratic as any of Cronenberg's films. Any synopsis is woefully inadequate, but at the centre of the book is a pair of globetrotting journalists whose reporting embroils them in a horrific murder, organ trafficking and some kinky sex.

Cronenberg is not joking when he says that Consumed was half a century in the making. His father owned a bookstore in Toronto and wrote journalism and true-crime stories. "I used to fall asleep to the sound of his IBM Selectric and before that I would fall asleep to the sound of his Underwood typewriter," Cronenberg recalls, sitting in his office at home in front of a wall of books, many inherited from his father. At the University of Toronto, he studied science, dreaming of one day being like Isaac Asimov, the scientist and sci-fi author. After a year, Cronenberg switched to English literature and there he made friends who were shooting their own films.

"I remember feeling that my writing was a pastiche of Nabokov and William Burroughs, or a combination of the two," he says. "Of course, they are very different writers, so that still created a new thing. But one of the things about film-making was that I felt I had no influences. Not being arrogant, I felt I could invent myself as a film-maker from scratch. I had seen Bergman, but I wasn't feeling I was making a Bergman film. I loved Fellini, but not being an Italian Catholic, I couldn't possibly make a Fellini film. Nobody in Canada was making genre pictures, so making a Canadian horror film, that was a pretty new thing."

And what about directing a film of his novel, Consumed? "Once I finished it, I thought that is what I'd really want to do," says Cronenberg. "I had five producers who read it and said they would love to make it into a movie. But I don't actually want to make it myself. I've already done it. It would be weirdly like doing a remake of my own thing."

With that, Cronenberg hunkers down and prepares for an inquisition on his seven decades of life from old friends and Observer readers.

If it were possible to enter any film's time/location/stylisation etc, which one of yours would you choose to dwell in and why?
Nick Newman, London

I'm really happy not to be in any of my movies. There's a sense in which you create a film in order to experience something that you are not really living in. So that would be anathema to me, I would not want to live in any of those movies. In fact, for me, part of the reason you make a movie is to experience something that intrigues you, perhaps disturbs you, you need to deal with it, experience it somehow but you need it to be at a distance from you. You need it to be safely encapsulated the way a grain of sand is encapsulated in a pearl by an oyster. It's an irritation. You hope you have created these movies that are like pearls but you wouldn't want to be inside them because inside them is that grain of sand or worse.



Why did you cut the lactating moment in Crash?
Rosanna Arquette, actress

Haha! Rosanna was breastfeeding her baby when we shot Crash, and in one of the scenes where she's having sex in a car with James Spader suddenly this huge spurt of milk shot across the screen. It was pretty sensational, we were all excited that it happened, but the thing is in the movie that character is not pregnant and is not breastfeeding, so dramatically it made no sense. And though Crash is kind of a fevered dream-nightmare, it still it has its own logic.

So I cut it not because of censorship or anything else – really I thought it was a great moment, I loved it, and her breasts were very full in those scenes as a result, which was also rather nice. She certainly didn't need implants!

How do you survive the horrors of your own imagination? What is/are your favourite a) alcoholic drink b) other drugs?
Matthew Hill, Lyon

My imagination is not full of horrors at all. This is the misunderstanding of what my movies are. First of all, I think all my movies are funny. Not everything in them is funny, but they are full of humour. And second, it's not really my imagination. Anybody looking at the news on the internet or in a newspaper, there's horror there every day – compared with that, my imagination is a wonderful playground! So I don't feel that my imagination is a place of horror at all.

As for the second part, I actually don't drink. The most I'd do is have a little bit of red wine while I have a meal. Left to my own devices, not going out with people who are ordering wine, I would never even think about ordering an alcoholic drink. It's not a religious thing, or a question of morality or ethics, simply my body, I discovered early on, does not respond well to alcohol. My mucus membranes don't like it. I've only been drunk like three times in my life literally. At the age of 71, I can count the actual times and I wasn't crazy about the experience.

That goes for the other drugs too. Yes, in the 1960s I had experience of various drugs as everybody did, but I didn't really find anything that was congenial. I did one LSD trip, it was very potent but there were disturbing aspects that I didn't enjoy. As an artist, one of the things I value most is clarity. You are constantly striving for incredible clarity, which maybe you never achieve, but I have found that drugs and alcohol derange that. So I'm boring, what can I say?

Although you are several years younger than I am, we both attended the University of Toronto in the early 1960s and we both have a background in the biological sciences. Was there anything in particular about the University of Toronto that might have suited you for an initial interest in horror films? Was it the pickled eyeballs, preserved foetuses, and venomous snakes in the old, and very gothic, zoology building? They certainly made an impression on me!
Margaret Atwood, author

Yes, I did my dissection of foetal pigs and a few other things, because I started off in organic chemistry. I think I would've ended up being a cell biologist. And it was pretty gothic, that's true, and in fact it was the way the science was being taught that drove me out of the field of science. I felt that the students around me were so different from me and I ended up spending all my time hanging round with all the English language and philosophy students.

So I can't say the University of Toronto led me to horror, but what it did do was lead me to cinema, though I never studied cinema. There was a student called David Secter who was making a movie called Winter Kept Us Warm, which starred some friends of mine. And it never occurred to me that you could make a movie. It was unlike someone growing up in LA where everybody's parents were in the business. In Toronto, no one's parents were in the movie business because there wasn't a movie business.



So that was more influential in leading me to biological horror. I never thought of the biology part of it as horrific anyway. I thought that was all incredibly exciting, even dissecting the foetal pig, which if you shot that scene in a movie, it might be rather gross for people. To feel that you were really beginning to understand the form of life, how life came to be and exists, that was exciting. That's not horror to me, that's pure ecstasy actually.

You've a habit of using the same actors for a few films in a row. Who would be in your dream cast?
John Sowerby, Miami, Florida

I honestly have worked with a lot of actors who I really like a lot, but you don't do an actor a favour by miscasting him. So there is no dream cast without a script and characters you are trying to cast. There's no abstract in other words. For example, it did occur to me that it would be very interesting to make a movie in which you had Viggo Mortensen and Rob Pattinson. I think they'd be very interesting together, but I don't have that movie or the characters for them to play.

You go way back, I loved working with Christopher Walken [on The Dead Zone], I thought I'd work with him again, but there was never quite the role. Same with Jimmy Woods [Videodrome], [James] Spader [Crash]. I had a pretty good time with all of my leading men and women really, so I could imagine a movie which they were all in. The way Fellini in 8½ had everybody in his life, all his actors in a dance with him.

What do you think of the theory of "inflation", and do you believe in the idea of the "multiverse"? If you do believe in it, where the hell did the "big bang" come from?
Viggo Mortensen, actor

Well, that's a big question. To scale it all down, I have no idea where the big bang came from because I really can't imagine the reality of that. But I do think the Earth is unique in terms of its life forms and how it evolved. We are the only planet that has the life forms that are advanced as we are, that's my instinct. Even if there were life forms on other planets, I think we'll never reach them, they will be so far away. So existentially and functionally we are alone even if theoretically we are not. But I think we really are and that's all the more reason to take better care of the planet.

I'm not sure I answered his question but I did my best. We have some deep discussions, Viggo and I, but we also tell a lot of jokes to even it up.

I very much enjoyed your performance in Don McKellar's Last Night. Do you like acting, and would you like to do it more (if more good roles were offered to you)?
David Jackson, Washington, DC

I do like acting and I love being praised for my acting, so thank you for that. It doesn't happen often. Acting is interesting but I don't know now if I'd be prepared to fly to the Isle of Wight and spend three or four months there or Australia or whatever. But if the role was really interesting enough, substantial enough, maybe I would.

I do enjoy it, and it's an entirely different universe from directing; you really discover a lot more about what an actor goes through when you try it yourself. You are incredibly vulnerable and you understand why an actor is so obsessed with his body and his voice and his clothes, because that's your instrument. As a director nobody cares what you look like or what you are wearing or whether you are sick as long as you can say "Action!" and "Cut!". It's kind of shocking and the only way you can realise that is if you try yourself.

Your films often contain loops: life and death, body and mind, the conscious and unconscious. What are the challenges in evoking endless returns within a medium that is experientially finite?
Candice Breitz, artist

I'm not sure that I quite understand! But for me, my movie-making is like a diamond, in the sense that it has many facets but when you look in each facet, you are looking into the inner core of the same diamond. That diamond is really my experience of life, that's all it is, and so it's inevitable I return to the same themes and tropes and considerations but from slightly different angles.



Could you beat David Lynch in an arm wrestle?
Jack Cody, Kilkenny, Ireland

That's interesting. I've had Bob's Big Boy burgers with David Lynch when I was doing The Dead Zone and he was doing Dune and we were both working for [the Italian film producer] Dino De Laurentiis. That's when we got to know each other a little bit. I think I could take him. Especially if he was meditating at the time.

What are five films that you particularly admire and why?
John Landis, director

Not to be difficult, but I don't have a list. The number of films I've seen that have impressed me is endless. But actually, Winter Kept Us Warm is the most influential film of my life in a weird way. It wasn't a horror film – it was a drama about students coping with life at the University of Toronto – and it wasn't because of its artistry. It was just the fact it was made. It's hard to reproduce the shock I felt when I saw my classmates on screen in a real movie, acting. It was like magic: you are watching TV and suddenly you are in the TV, acting in some TV series. It was that kind of shock.

Word has it that Peter Jackson may direct an episode of Doctor Who. Is there a TV show you would consider directing an episode of?
yesfuture, posted online

I've been offered episodes to direct, butI have to say it doesn't attract me at all. All the things that make directing interesting – casting the lead actors, finding the locations, working on the scripts, developing the scripts, finding your crew, working with the crew – you'd have none of those if you were doing a series because they are already established. You're more like a traffic cop.

Has something been lost with the move away from physical SFX to CGI?
Archaen, posted online

CG, of course, can be overused and it has been overused. You see that in a lot of the superhero movies, it's just ridiculous stuff that's going on. It's amazing technically but it has lost its physical presence. But that doesn't mean that the answer is more physical effects. To me it's not really a technological question, it's a question of art: how good is the director at understanding his audience? I use a lot of CG in my movies, it's just not obvious. You use it for small things, just heightening little moments, it's pretty invisible the way I use CG. It becomes another very effective tool, no different from lighting or costume or editing. That's where it's most effective.

What is your favourite biscuit?
Misterlks, posted online

Shortbread. If there was a plate of shortbread I'd probably eat it all.

Fast cars bore me to tears. Could you explain why you find them so interesting?
Steven Hughes, Bristol

Which philosophers, would you say, have the most impact on your work
Howard Shore, composer

I consider myself a junior existentialist. When I started to read Sartre and by association Heidegger I thought, "Oh wow, this is what I've been thinking." There's a great lecture Sartre gave called "Existentialism is a Humanism". He basically said, "Look, we humans are really all we've got, forget about the afterlife, it doesn't exist. Forget about God, there is no God. We should accept that and if we did and realised that compassion and humanistic empathy were valuable – more than valuable but crucial – then the world would be a better place." So that's really my approach to life.

Cars have always represented almost flight, it's like being able to fly. And freedom, sexual freedom in the old days. So it depends how young this person is because it's not so much the fast-ness, it's the car-ness that's the issue, the essence. At the moment, I'm driving a Tesla, it's an electric car and I find it terrifically exciting and that has nothing to do with how fast it goes – although it is really fast. Nonetheless if you see a Lamborghini or a Ferrari driven at speed, it's pretty impressive, it's like an animal, there's a beauty to it. I could go on and on about the beauty of the now-outmoded internal combustion car, but there was a prehistoric magnificence to them. If this person cannot respond to that I have no problem with that, but I need to know the experience this person had of so-called fast cars. If you are just watching them from your balcony on a highway then of course it's boring.

How has your Jewishness influenced your films?
Professor Nathan Abrams, Y Felinheli, Wales

Undoubtedly it has because it's influenced the formation of my sensibility and my life. My parents weren't fanatical about it, I never was in a synagogue, I was never bar mitzvahed. My mother did speak some Yiddish to me, but that's not a religious thing, that's a cultural thing and I still have an affection for Yiddishness as a result. It would be easy to say that Jews always feel like outsiders in any society because of the diaspora and there are a lot of philosophical and interesting cultural things you could say, but I don't know that in my case that was particularly true. I always felt very much a Canadian and embedded in Canada, so I would mix the Jewishness with the Canadian-ness. I don't think you can separate these components of a life.

What's the most frightening film ever made?
Toby Sculthorp, London

That's totally subjective because what frightens some people is like a laugher to somebody else. For each person there might be a different answer to that question. Bambi is a terrifying film for a kid because Bambi's mother is killed. When you're a child that's a terrifying thing. So does that qualify? There's a movie called Blue Lagoon, which was really scary for me as a kid. It's kids on a boat, the boat sinks, the parents drown, the kids are alone on the island with a drunken sailor. There's a scene in a cave with a snake and a skeleton and all that stuff, and that was a scary movie for me. Probably for an adult not so scary.

Then, as an adult, for me, Don't Look Now, Nic Roeg's film with Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland. That really got to me, that was very effective film-making, its anticipation of death was so palpable. On the other hand if the person who asked this question saw it maybe it wouldn't have any effect. There's no absolute universal.

Would you consider yourself an optimist?
Tomas René, London

I'm a Canadian, what can I say? Of course! Yes, I'm actually in general a very happy-go-lucky guy and that's the thing that surprises people because of the movies. You worry about the environment, you worry about the future of the planet, you think as an existentialist, when you die that's the end, it's oblivion. People might think, "My God, that's a horrible way to live." But no, I'm actually quite optimistic and happy.

max from fearless

On second viewing, the hilariously funny hollywood movie talk (yes PTA is mentioned) the status games, putdowns and power-plays recede into the background, leaving us with a mythic tale of abusive parents and their damaged children. Mothers and daughters. Fathers and sons. Memories and ghosts haunt the characters, they offer them peace, which the living, so caught up in their own narcissistic plights seem to avoid at all costs.

Julianne Moore reminds us again and again throughout why she's one of the very best actors in the world. She is continually reduced to nothing in this. She also reduces people to nothing, and yet she finds spaces to reveal humanity, for us to understand. Some of her coldest exchanges reveal so much. A seductive (for her, in my eyes: brutal) exchange with a starfucker before their sexual encounter was thoroughly telling.

Pattinson is real good here. His interactions with ‪Mia Wasikowska‬ are nice. The way they humour each other. Sniff each other out. But for me, Mia as Agatha, well, she's the standout here. Or maybe it's her character I'm not sure. Is her character Agatha, stuck in a performance? A script which she so badly wants to abandon (or at least tells herself she does) whilst acting it out scene for scene, taking it to it's inevitable conclusion? I liked her haircut, her gloves, it reminded me how I'm not really digging costumes in movies so much anymore. I dunno, but there was something iconic about her look, probably like she was starring in her own movie.

There are parallels here with 'Spider' which I think is one of Cronenburg's best. Also with 'The Player'. Evan Bird as Benjie the child star is also another stand out performance. Watching this film the first time, following the plot, seeing the thing reveal itself, I loved it.

On second viewing, once you know how the toy works, visually the thing isn't so interesting, rediscovering/delving further into the characters/motivations etc is, there is a sweet layering going on in the performances. There are repetitions of lines, of moments (stuff I saw on first viewing but didn't quite grasp) that pay-off. But something is missing here. I think maybe it has to do with the parents in the film. We don't get enough dimensions of John Cusack and Olivia Williams (who both do good work here) and perhaps what should be a family's fall from grace story, maybe comes up a bit short, I don't know. I have to think on it some more.

Last comment and perhaps my most immature, but it was really good to see Cronenburg return to body horror = scars, burns, holes and inflicting violence on the body. This is definitely his best since 'A History of Violence' but maybe something is missing.....Have him do Charles Burn's 'Black Hole'. It'd be incredible...
 


max from fearless

Thanks for this wilder, my only beef is that after such a performance, Julianne was only asked one question....otherwise good stuff!!!

wilder


wilder


Something Spanish

I think it's even getting a limited run in February, trailer looked good. Just read that reader-submitted Q&A with Cronenberg, one of the best to every do it.

wilder

New trailer, VOD simultaneous with the limited theatrical release on February 27, 2015



wilder


jenkins



new hero

things i learned about bruce wagner:

1
wrote story w/ and script for paul bartel's scenes from the class struggle in beverly hills

2
wrote/directed two movies based on two of his own books

3
wrote a book titled force majeure (force majeure: the bud wiggins stories, seems actually at one point), and here's a blurb from that


4
dropped out of high school

5
born in madison, bred in los angeles

4
"Wagner and Oliver Stone co-executive produced Wild Palms, the mini-series Wagner created, based on a comic strip that he wrote for Details magazine"

7
wrote w/craven the story for a nightmare on elm street 3: dream warriors, which script was written by craven and wagner and frank darabont (shawshank fame) and chuck russell (director of jim carrey's the mask)

8
he's such a fucking impressive wikipedia entry, for example "his novel The Chrysanthemum Palace was a PEN/Faulkner finalist" and "married the mystic Carol Tiggs"

seeing maps tomorrow and i'm as pumped as i can be right now. john waters (reminder) called this his favorite movie from 2014, and david cryingberg did like a commercial before so that's cool