Crimes of the Future (David Cronenberg)

Started by wilder, April 14, 2022, 05:57:32 AM

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wilder


As the human species adapts to a synthetic environment, the body undergoes new transformations and mutations. With his partner Caprice (Léa Seydoux), Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen), celebrity performance artist, publicly showcases the metamorphosis of his organs in avant-garde performances. Timlin (Kristen Stewart), an investigator from the National Organ Registry, obsessively tracks their movements, which is when a mysterious group is revealed... Their mission – to use Saul's notoriety to shed light on the next phase of human evolution.

Written and Directed by David Cronenberg
Release Date - June 10, 2022

wilder


WorldForgot

Gonna try to go in blind so not gonna watch/discuss the longer teaser - but that short one is so exciting. Existenz type body interfacing? Body-mod community/privilege ala Brazil but in the hedonistic realm of Crash? Super cool, flesh and text.

WorldForgot

Film of the same name, but it is not a remake https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crimes_of_the_Future_(1970_film)

The teaser misses an opportunity to cite
FROM THE DIRECTOR OF
Crimes of the Future

RudyBlatnoyd

This ties with Killers of the Flower Moon as my most anticipated film.


RudyBlatnoyd

Beautiful trailer. This honestly looks brilliant. I'll tell you what's a crime of the present: the fact that one of the world's greatest living filmmakers has had to wait so long to get another project made.

WorldForgot

UK Publication THE UPCOMING interviewz Cronenberg

Beware -- plot spoilerz abound in the full interview. Some excerpts:

QuoteDo you think that could happen with our organs?

Oh I think we're doing it, I think we're definitely changing, I don't think there's any doubt about it, it might not be as obvious as I have depicted it. A famous Nobel prize winner, Gerald Edelmen, said that the human brain is not at all like a computer. It is much more like a rainforest where there's a constant striving for dominance amongst the neurons and the different elements in the brain and they're constantly responding to the environment, that is to say the intake from your eyes, from your nose, from your senses and also how much you exercise it. So even just talking about the brain as the super organ of human existence, it is constantly changing and mutating and so it's not much of a stretch of the imagination to imagine that for other parts of the body. The digestive system responds, we now understand the microbiome in the human gut and the intestines, that it's actually a lot of living organisms there that communicate with the human brain. There's a constant connection these things would be considered science fiction years ago, and now are just understood as part of what the complexity of the human body is. So, I don't think it's an exaggeration really, I think it's just a sort of extrapolation into the future that I'm undertaking with this movie.

QuoteDid shooting during Covid add to the experience considering the topic of the movie?

Well shooting a movie during the era of Covid in itself is an incredibly interesting experience. I did some acting in a couple of things, Star Trek: Discovery and also Slasher, a Canadian series, and I was interested to act in those because I was anticipating making Crimes of the Future. Those two TV shows were being shot under Covid protocol, so wearing masks, having constant tests, keeping social distancing and still making a movie, which is a very social experience, was revealing to me because I could see that it was possible to do and that you would sort of get used to the rhythm of that and it wouldn't hurt your filmmaking. There was that and then of course there was the environmental disaster that continues, climate change which was causing forest fires in British Columbia and Canada, but was also causing forest fires in many places in Europe including Athens. The forests that were in the north and the south of the city of Athens were on fire one morning, I woke up and I looked out my hotel window and I couldn't see anything, it was like total smoke... It was very scary. We managed to continue shooting and, in a way, it just confirmed the reality – let's say the philosophy – of the movie we were making. That things are changing, they're mutating, inside the human body as well as outside the human body. Just, the validity of the movie philosophically... of course it's entertainment, but part of the entertainment is that it has a resonance with people.

wilder


Yes

This is a Cronenberg movie but not just that, an oldschool Cronenberg movie. I think audiences expecting gross out body horror will be underwhelmed and are falsely engaging with that film. In fact, Cronenberg seems to be indicting audiences who perceive his works in such extreme, shallow terms. The film is a dense—simultaneously explicit and vague-sendup of performance art in a desensitized era where art and bodies are intertwined by politicization and appropriation of autonomy. Kristen Stewart's zealous character is obsessed with Viggo but only his provocations. The characters are all desperate for a reaction of any sort, which makes the relationship between Viggo and Lea so tender.

Subplot strands are lackadaisically introduced then seemingly become less narrative blocks and more worldbuilding which is quite jarring. Many side characters exist only in service of the thematics. On display is Cronenberg's chilly aesthetic, askew blocking, desolate interiors, stilted pacing, disparate exposition and jargon

WorldForgot

It's impressive what Cronenberg iz able to shoot these dayz. It shouldn't be, but it iz. This movie iz carefree yet pointed, in wayz most movies aren't allowed to be, because of financing and trust.

"There's something about a bureaucrat that doesn't like a poem"
- Gore Vidal

Ontology and vice.
Sensuality and politics.
Evolution and the present anthropocene.

How do we thrive on a planet that we've conditioned to attack us? How will society change as such?

Cronenberg iz one of the few filmmakers with the budgetary slack and confidence of studios to be able to fashion a narrative so commercially and aesthetically opposed to cinematically values that it's basically like peering at an HR Giger blueprint and waxing philosophically.

'This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium — that is, of any extension of ourselves — result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology. – Marshall McLuhan'

wilder


RudyBlatnoyd

Saw this tonight, now that it's finally had a theatrical release in the UK.

It's a beautiful, strange and quietly profound work, made for a diehard audience of about 300 people. There's little to no narrative drive whatsoever; instead, it's an old man ruminating on the concerns that have occupied his entire career: nature's resilience to ecological trauma, the ambiguous and compromised position of the artist and the infinite ingenuity of human sexuality, among other things.

Unlike most movies that purport to be ideas-driven, this actually does take its ideas seriously, at the expense of almost everything else. Despite what might be interpreted as a certain coldness, I found this intensely personal quality of the filmmaking very moving.