The Producers (1968) [Deluxe Edition] – DVD|[Collector’s Edition] – Blu-ray and DVD Combo Pack

Mel Brooks' The Producers
*½/****

DVD – Image A- Sound B- Extras B+
BD – Image B+ Sound A- Extras B+
starring Zero Mostel, Gene Wilder, Dick Shawn, Kenneth Mars
written and directed by Mel Brooks

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by Walter Chaw A seminal year for film, 1968: Once Upon a Time in the West, Rosemary's Baby, Planet of the Apes, Night of the Living Dead, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Barbarella, If…, Targets, Faces, Danger: Diabolik…and, some would say, Mel Brooks's The Producers, a film back in the limelight thanks to the record-breaking, award-winning Broadway play on which it's based now coming out as an extraordinarily ill-advised feature film of its own. Unlike Brooks's other classics (Young Frankenstein, Blazing Saddles, even High Anxiety), The Producers has aged pretty poorly. It's played broad, which is to say that everyone acts like they're being defibrillated every five minutes, leading to a lot of high-decibel screeching and running around in circles. And I don't really understand what the film is about: Is it an attack on the theatre, or is it an attack on Nazis? If it's neither, if it's instead some kind of vaudevillian farce about the last days of Jewish entertainment hegemony, then perhaps that's as good an explanation as any for why its prehistoric rimshots, timing, and attitudes strike me as puzzling. Maybe it's a satire of being a Jewish comic.

This Is the End (2013)

Thisistheend

**½/****
starring James Franco, Jonah Hill, Seth Rogen, Jay Baruchel
written and directed by Seth Rogen & Evan Goldberg

by Angelo Muredda Whatever its dramatic hiccups, This is the End can at least boast that it’s one of the better full-length adaptations of a trailer. In 2007, Seth Rogen and Jay Baruchel starred in a 90-second sizzle reel–co-scripted by Rogen and Superbad collaborator Evan Goldberg–about their efforts to stay alive amidst an unspecified global catastrophe. As scrappy comedy skits go, “Jay and Seth versus the Apocalypse” was pretty good, a charming riff on the actors’ schlubby personas as well as a pitch for more time and a bigger budget to drive home their unlikely survival story. The trouble with This Is the End, a funny but belaboured riff on that premise, is that it’s still trying to close the sale long after the project’s been greenlit, ingratiating itself to an audience already on board. In their joint directorial debut, Rogen and Goldberg show a knack for characterization but seem anxious about where to go from there, squandering a gifted ensemble in a procession of spotty “what if” scenarios that don’t resemble a movie so much as a glimpse into a celebrity edition of charades in Judd Apatow’s basement.

Before Midnight (2013)

Beforemidnight

****/****
starring Ethan Hawke, Julie Delpy
screenplay by Richard Linklater & Ethan Hawke & Julie Delpy
directed by Richard Linklater

by Angelo Muredda Before Midnight opens with a bit of misdirection, a tracking shot of two pairs of shoes ambling towards the camera that we instinctively ascribe to Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Celine (Julie Delpy) before the second pair is shown to belong instead to Jesse’s teenaged son Hank (Seamus Davey-Fitzpatrick), about to board a flight back to the States. Somewhere in the slow pan up to the actors’ faces, and in the deferral of series MVP Celine, is a playful acknowledgement that Richard Linklater’s Before movies have grown into a franchise with a coherent visual language that’s dependable enough to riff on. Much has changed since Jesse and Celine’s inaugural philosophical walking tour through Vienna 18 years ago, and the prologue is an economical demonstration of how arbitrary our encounters with the couple to date have been, shaped by our inability to listen in after Nina Simone drowns out the end of Before Sunset. But the presence of Jesse’s son (from the unseen wife alluded to throughout the previous film) in place of Celine, who’s finally revealed in another tracking shot in the next scene, also alerts us to something new: a conflict that runs deeper than the pair’s usual anxious negotiations with a ticking clock.

Warm Bodies (2013) – Blu-ray + Digital Copy + Ultraviolet

Warmbodies3

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Nicholas Hoult, Teresa Palmer, Rob Corddry, John Malkovich
screenplay by Jonathan Levine, based on the novel by Isaac Marion
directed by Jonathan Levine

by Bryant Frazer The American zombie movie was born in October 1968 with the release of George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, and it’s a measure of how subversive that film and its sequels truly were that zombies only became palatable to the major studios in 2004, when a kid named Zack Snyder stripped Dawn of the Dead of its original class-conscious, anti-consumerist premise–inverted it, even, by making a zombie movie that pandered to the shopping-mall multiplex crowd rather than ripping into it. Given its success, it’s hard to believe it has taken almost another ten years for the sub-genre to be completely transformed by a Hollywood establishment that’s turned so timid and equivocal in its thrill-seeking ways that it begrudges even the zombies their killing sport. Yes, somebody somewhere decided that what zombies really need, more than forty years on, is a redemption story. Director Jonathan Levine doesn’t put a stake through the heart of the sub-genre, quite, but he does something that might be worse. With Warm Bodies, he’s made the first middle-aged zombie film.

Woochi: The Demon Slayer (2009) – Blu-ray Disc

Woochi
**/****
Image B+
Sound B+
Extras B-

starring
Kang Dong-won, Kim Yoon-seok, Im Soo-jung, Yoo Hae-jin

written
and directed by Choi Dong-hoon


Woochi3click any image to
enlarge

by
Bryant Frazer
 With directors like
Park
Chan-wook, Kim Ki-duk, and Bong Joon-ho doing their level best to
reinvent
genres like the revenge thriller, the lurid melodrama, and even the
monster
movie, recent Korean cinema has been a wellspring of intrigue for movie buffs. You won't get that kind of ambition from Woochi,
a
middle-of-the-road adventure yarn constructed out of bits of Korean
mythology,
formulaic action beats, and Hollywood-style VFX work. It's
featherweight
through and through, adventurous only inasmuch as it switches gears
partway in,
moving from the generic conventions of a period martial-arts film to
those of
an urban fantasy opus set in modern South Korea, where centuries-old
wizards
are vying to retrieve an ancient relic. If you listen carefully enough
during
the quiet bits, you can almost hear the popcorn being chewed.

The Hangover Part III (2013)

*½/****
starring Bradley Cooper, Zach Galifianakis, Ken Jeong, John Goodman
screenplay by Todd Phillips & Craig Mazin
directed by Todd Phillips


Hangoverpartiii

by Angelo Muredda When Project X spilled forth from its amniotic
septic tank last spring, I read it as a prime example of a
producer-driven form of auteurism pioneered by Judd Apatow. That found-footage
chronicle of a house party-turned-apocalypse, I suggested, was a monument to
producer Todd Phillips's equally noxious Hangover series, where the same Dionysian impulses and
deep-seated hatred of the different–whether female, trans, queer, or
disabled–were championed by a trio of middle-aged men. What a difference a
year makes. If Project
X
was a brand
consolidator and The
Hangover Part II

was a morbidly curious recalibration of its predecessor, displacing Phillips's
demonic impulses and scarcely controlled misogynist rage from Bradley Cooper's
Phil to Ed Helms's Stu, Part
III
is an actors'
contract negotiation sputtered to life. Since the previous instalment, Cooper has
become a respectable leading man and Oscar nominee and Helms has been savaged
for the degeneration of his irritating Andy Bernard character on "The
Office", while co-star Ken Jeong's fortunes have inexplicably risen.
Consequently, gone now are the days of Phil's "Paging Doctor Faggot,"
along with Stu's loveable dude-rage and the Wolfpack's infinite jokes about Mr.
Chow's shrunken Asian manhood. In their place is a surprisingly neutered, if
inarguably more ethical, product with very few laughs and no reason for being.

The Bonfire of the Vanities (1990) – Blu-ray Disc

*/**** Image B Sound B-
starring Tom Hanks, Bruce Willis, Melanie Griffith, Morgan Freeman
screenplay by Michael Cristofer, based on the novel by Tom Wolfe
directed by Brian De Palma

Bonfire1

by Walter Chaw Based on Tom Wolfe’s instantly-legendary (and instantly-dated, truth be known) novel about the upper crust of Manhattan society in the ’80s, Brian De Palma’s The Bonfire of the Vanities is a disaster mitigated now and again by the odd extraordinary shot–exhibit A in what happens when too much money is spent in the creation of too sure a thing. The production was besieged by distraction and calamity, all of it captured in Julie Salamon’s The Devil’s Candy in what, after watching the movie again for the first time since its release, seems too measured a hatchet job. After all, Salamon’s book is really just proof of what’s evidenced on screen and observed by contemporary audiences: Decisions were made to pander to the lowest common denominator, and say what you will about the lowest common denominator, but it often knows when it’s being condescended to. More, it confirms that Bruce Willis was outmatched by the demands of the material; that Tom Hanks was disengaged; that Melanie Griffith was badly miscast; and that Morgan Freeman was inserted as a sop to an African-American community that not only would have to endure multiple comic-effect uses of the word “nigger” during the course of the film, but would likely never go see it in the first place. The great irony of pandering to the lowest common denominator in an adaptation of an arch Tom Wolfe novel, is…well, you finish it. Frankly, when you can’t get Peter Travers to like it, you’re in seriously deep shit.

The Last Stand (2013) – Blu-ray Disc

**½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B-
starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Forest Whitaker, Johnny Knoxville, Rodrigo Santoro
screenplay by Andrew Knauer
directed by Kim Jee-woon

by Walter Chaw I think, and I don’t say this lightly, that South Korean filmmaker Kim Jee-woon is a genius. His landmark A Tale of Two Sisters is lush and at times unbearably frightening; his A Bittersweet Life is an elegiac crime saga with the best, most innovative knife-fight in a movie until the naked scuffle in Eastern Promises; his The Good, the Bad, the Weird (which his latest most resembles) is a dizzy, hilarious take on the Spaghetti Western; and his I Saw the Devil is the slickest, and stickiest, exploitation serial-killer/torture flick I’ve ever seen. He’s his country’s Takashi Miike, its Quentin Tarantino. And his American-made, English-language debut, unceremoniously dumped in the middle of the deadly first quarter of 2013, is, I guess you could say, at least better than John Woo’s Hollywood baptism, Hard Target. The tragedy of it all is that the picture will be more ballyhooed not for the arrival of Kim on our shores, but for the return to the action genre of one Arnold Schwarzenegger (Expendables cameos notwithstanding), here cast as a soft-around-the-middle aging lawman in the Stallone-in-Copland mold who stands up against a cabal of snarling baddies in defense of the AARP and the NRA in one fell, sometimes ironic, swoop. I’ve never not liked a Kim film, but he’s testing me. Ultimately, it’s impossible to completely hate a movie that references, in addition to all the pictures Schwarzenegger’s made, one–Paul Verhoeven’s forever-gestating Crusades epic–he never got to.

Crimewave (1986) – Blu-ray Disc

Crimewave1

*½/**** Image B- Sound C+ Extras A
starring Louise Lasser, Paul L. Smith, Brion James, Reed Birney
screenplay by Ethan Coen & Joel Coen & Sam Raimi
directed by Sam Raimi

by Walter Chaw Sam Raimi’s sophomore picture Crimewave is a nightmare, a mess, a calamity of rare scope but also one possessed of a singular, maybe misguided but definitely committed, vision. It wants very badly to be a feature-length Three Stooges sketch or Warner Bros. cartoon (one of the early Tex Averys), and so the thing it most resembles is Joe Dante’s segment of The Twilight Zone: The Movie, stretched to a truly sadistic length (a deceptively scant-sounding 83 minutes) and thrown together by misadventure, studio interference, and a lot of talented people who didn’t know what they didn’t know. It’s so consistently and dedicatedly cross-eyed badger spit, in fact, that it eventually takes on the surreality of a Max Ernst gallery, or an acid trip in a travelling funhouse. It’s deeply unpleasant, even as fans of Raimi and the Coen Brothers (who co-wrote the screenplay with Raimi) busily trainspot all the auteur signatures in double time. What Crimewave represents is that peculiar artifact of a film that should have ended careers instead getting “lost” by a bumfuddled, betrayed studio for long enough to allow Evil Dead II and Blood Simple the opportunity to cement reputations before this one could bury them.

The We and the I (2013)

Weandthei

**½/****
starring Michael Brodie, Teresa Lynn, Raymond Delgado, Jonathan Ortiz
screenplay by Michel Gondry, Paul Proch, Jeff Grimshaw
directed by Michel Gondry

by Angelo Muredda The We and the I opens with a throwback, an image that wouldn’t be out of place in Michel Gondry’s distinctive music videos from the late-1990s, which were themselves full of backward glances to the more rough-hewn early days of MTV and old-school hip hop. Over the credits, a boombox modified into a miniature bus rolls along the streets of the Bronx pulsing out Young MC’s “Bust A Move,” until it’s crushed by what’s ostensibly the real thing, a city bus packed with urban teens who make up Gondry’s boisterous, gossiping, and privately wounded nonprofessional cast. That’s an interesting start, insofar as it suggests that Gondry’s obsession with whimsical props tinged with nostalgia are about to be traded in for something more authentic, even as it implies a bit cheekily that the “real” bus, taking a bunch of high-schoolers home on the last day of school, is itself a roaming set on which to stage semi-scripted exchanges between proper teens doubling as actors and artistic partners.

Monsieur Verdoux (1947) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

Verdoux1

***½/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B-
starring Charles Chaplin, Martha Raye, Marilyn Nash, Isobel Elsom
screenplay by Charles Chaplin, based on an idea by Orson Welles
directed by Charles Chaplin

by Bryant Frazer Charles Chaplin augmented his trademark mix of physical comedy, sweetness, and lefty politics with a dose of suspense (borrowed, probably, from Hitchcock) and a sardonic worldview (informed, maybe, by film noir) in the playful, funny, but ultimately downbeat Monsieur Verdoux. In a scenario that originated with Orson Welles, who receives an “idea” credit, Henri Verdoux is a serial killer based on Henri Landru, a French Bluebeard who seduced, married, and then murdered a string of Parisian women in order to liberate their assets. Chaplin plays Verdoux as a charming fiend whose demeanour incorporates the barest echo of the Little Tramp, but whose murderous M.O. recalled the director’s own reputation as a womanizer.

Pain & Gain (2013)

**/****
starring Mark Wahlberg, Dwayne Johnson, Anthony Mackie, Ed Harris
screenplay by Christopher Markus & Stephen McFeely, based on the articles by Pete Collins
directed by Michael Bay

Painandgain

by Angelo Muredda A man does a stomach crunch in mid-air, suspended off the armpit of a muscleman logo that's spray-painted onto the side of a gym. Is there a more quintessential Michael Bay image than the opening shot of Pain & Gain? The only serious contender comes later on, in a slow-motion tableau of the same bro, Mark Wahlberg's personal trainer-cum-murderer Danny Lugo, sailing over the windshield of an SUV, propelled by the debris from a flying fruit stand. When your story doesn't have any Autobots, I guess you just have to improvise with your surroundings to get all your primary colours in. To say that the radioactive pop palette and abs-fetishism is familiar is an understatement, but it's the thematic material and belaboured telling of it that makes Pain & Gain a perfect storm of Bay. Temporarily freed from the restraints of a battling-robot franchise, he's allowed to make his most purely ideological statement yet in the form of a (fact-based) story about three idiots pursuing their warped vision of the Horatio Alger myth–which happily coincidences with Bay's.

True Blood: The Complete Second Season (2009) + True Blood: The Complete Third Season (2010) – Blu-ray Discs

Image A Sound A+ Extras B-
S2: "Nothing But the Blood," "Keep This Party Going," "Scratches," "Shake and Fingerpop," "Never Let Me Go," "Hard-Hearted Hannah," "Release Me," "Timebomb," "I Will Rise Up," "New World in My View," "Frenzy," "Beyond Here Lies Nothin'"

S3: "Bad Blood," "Beautifully Broken," "It Hurts Me Too," "9 Crimes," "Trouble," "I Got a Right to Sing the Blues," "Hitting the Ground," "Night on the Sun," "Everything Is Broken," "I Smell a Rat," "Fresh Blood," "Evil Is Going On"

Truebloods2cap

by Walter Chaw "True Blood" is pulp crap. Yet as Bryant and Bill have already so eloquently pointed out, it's highly-addictive pulp crap–the sort of shallow, handsomely-mounted titillation that fosters the craze that sprung up around prime-time soaps like "Dynasty" and "Falcon Crest". White-collar smut that traffics in the currency of the age: once upon a time it was the super-rich, now it's the supernatural. Plus ça change, plus c'est la meme. It's certainly soapier than showrunner/creator Alan Ball's previous pay-cable drama, "Six Feet Under", but to its credit what "True Blood" does in returning sexuality–and gore, and (southern) Gothic trappings–to the vampire mythos, it does well. The shame of it is that it seems to be ashamed of itself and so continually strives for relevance in aligning the plight of its vampire underclass to gay rights. Bill said it first, but is the appropriate supernatural analogue to gays really vampires? Is it wise to suggest that gays present that same kind of sexual allure? The same kind of blood contagion? Doesn't that play into the Conservative storyline a bit too neatly? At least it's not "The Walking Dead".

Extracurricular Activities: “The Monster Show”

by Bill Chambers Recently, my brother Derek
and I–a failed screenwriting team if ever there was one–took advantage of the new technological democracy and decided to make our own web cartoon, spun off from
a short story Derek wrote ("The Monster Strikes") about a closet
monster who goes on strike and becomes roommates with his intended victim. For
years we had scribbled ideas for a potential TV show based on the concept,
though our initial desire to satirize sitcom tropes changed (evolved?) over
time as we realized we wanted to get away from meta humour and do something
more organically stupid.

Design for Living (1933) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

Design1

****/**** Image A Sound B Extras A+
starring Fredric March, Gary Cooper, Miriam Hopkins, Edward Everett Horton
screenplay by Ben Hecht, based on the play by Noel Coward
directed by Ernst Lubitsch

by Walter Chaw The impulse to call the work of Ernst Lubitsch “frothy” and “bubbly” and otherwise insubstantial (a practice excoriated, rightfully so, by film scholar William Paul on Criterion’s Blu-ray release of Design for Living) obscures the fact that none of Lubitsch’s romantic masterpieces would carry any kind of resonance without an essential heart of darkness and decay. The oft-invoked “Lubitsch Touch”–that well-circulated anecdote that Billy Wilder hung the words “What Would Lubitsch Do” above his office door–suggests to me the wellspring of the asshole element in Wilder’s works: the idea that Wilder was just Hitchcock undercover, with Lubitsch influencing both directors in ways obvious and not so and not in terms of a “light” touch so much as a decidedly bitter one. Take my favourite Lubitsch film, Trouble in Paradise, which begins with a trash barge in the middle of the night in a Venice we don’t see again until Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now. The picture proceeds to document the love affair between two professional thieves and the innocent woman who falls victim to them. In that, there’s a direct reference to hated President Hoover’s deep-in-the-Depression platitude that “prosperity is right around the corner,” offered in piercing irony for a cash-strapped audience for whom the theatre had most likely just lowered their admission to a dime. The “Lubitsch Touch,” indeed: edged and between the ribs before you know it’s being brandished.

Driving Miss Daisy (1989) – Blu-ray Disc (DigiBook)

Drivingmissdaisy1

*/**** Image B Sound B Extras B
starring Morgan Freeman, Jessica Tandy, Dan Aykroyd, Patti Lupone
screenplay by Alfred Uhry, based on his play
directed by Bruce Beresford

by Walter Chaw The heart-warming story of how a bitter old Jewess learns to not be such a bitch to a patient Negro driver in an idyllic pre-integration South, Bruce Beresford’s Driving Miss Daisy, released the same year as other such landmark films about race as Ferris Bueller’s Black Civil War Regiment and Do the Right Thing, discusses how forty-one years of forced companionship can overcome even the deepest-seated prejudices and resentments. Or, at least, dementia can. We meet Ms. Daisy (Jessica Tandy) as she crashes her car, and we meet Hoke (Morgan Freeman) when he begs Miss Daisy’s son Boolie (Dan Aykroyd) for a job as her chauffeur–meaning they’re both prisoners of circumstance, see? Meaning this is an unlikely but no less racially naïve remake of Stanley Kramer’s embarrassing melodrama The Defiant Ones, scored by Hans Zimmer with outtakes from his synth-heavy, bullshit-rich Rain Man score, all teddy bears humping and building music boxes and shit. Meaning, essentially, that we are to believe there is no substantive difference between a wealthy white woman needing to hire a driver and a destitute black man looking for work in 1948 Atlanta. My favourite scene is either the one where Hoke asks Miss Daisy’s permission to make water, or the one where Hoke says something and Miss Daisy tells him to “be still.”

Holy Motors (2012) – Blu-ray Disc

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****/**** Image B Sound B- Extras B
starring Denis Lavant, Edith Scob, Eva Mendes, Kylie Minogue
written and directed by Leos Carax

by Angelo Muredda It’s no great shock that Holy Motors is innovative, coming from the same headspace as The Lovers on the Bridge and Mauvais Sang–movies that seemed fashioned out of whole cloth despite their indebtedness to names like David Bowie and Herman Melville. What’s most surprising is that beneath the formal variety and cheekiness, mainstays of Leos Carax’s freewheeling cinema, is a moving and altogether serious exploration of what it means to be an actor, in both a professional and a metaphysical sense. Carax’s films have been ranked among the boldest aesthetic manifestos since the 1980s for good reason, yet the ineffable quality that distinguishes them from the superficially similar grandstanding of nascent stylists like Xavier Dolan is their deep sincerity and unabashed adoration of the eccentric city-dwellers who cross paths on the loneliest roads in urban France. If Holy Motors is even wilder in presentation than its predecessors, then, it’s also perfectly legible within a body of work that’s always found a human streak in the avant-garde.

A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III (2013)

**/****
starring Charlie Sheen, Jason Schwartzman, Katheryn Winnick, Bill Murray
written and directed by Roman Coppola


Charlesswan

by Angelo Muredda Bill Murray's sad-clown deadpan is so ubiquitous now
that it's hard to remember a time before he was the face of hipster melancholy.
Wes Anderson and Sofia Coppola had a lot to work with in Murray's cracked mug,
so you have to feel for Coppola's brother Roman, whose own project of redeeming
an iconic face hits a snag right from the casting sheet. If A
Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III
really is a tour through the psyche of star and
one-man band Charlie Sheen, then the major takeaway is that there isn't much to see unless you're into incorrigible man-children on their best
behaviour. It isn't that post-meltdown Sheen lacks the charisma to anchor a
picture, but that Coppola, on rockier ground with his second feature after the
much more aesthetically bold and thematically rich CQ, is serving two
masters: his own whimsy; and his obvious desire to stage a career intervention
for his friend, recasting the actor's overexposed mania as hangdog sadness–probably
the last thing anyone wants to see Sheen embody.

Frankenweenie (2012) – Blu-ray 3D + Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

**/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras C+
screenplay by John August, based on a screenplay by Lenny Ripps
directed by Tim Burton

Frankenweenie1click any image to enlarge

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Back in the early-Eighties, Tim Burton was part of the conveyor belt at the Walt Disney Company, cranking out artwork for films like The Fox and the Hound and The Black Cauldron. But drawing cuddly animals proved as bad a fit for Burton as it did for R. Crumb, and the studio eventually allowed him to separate from the pack, giving him a chance to hone his voice that was kind of unprecedented. Under the Disney umbrella, Burton produced two black-and-white shorts: the animated Vincent, a sweet and Seussian ode to his idol, Vincent Price (who narrated); and the live-action Frankenweenie, about a boy who uses mad science to bring his departed canine back to life. The latter scandalized Disney (too “scary,” plus dead dogs and black-and-white have got to be roughly equivalent anathema to kiddie fare), and plans were shelved to attach the film to prints of Pinocchio in 1984. Three decades later, Disney confidently bankrolled a feature-length remake of Frankenweenie, stop-motion animated this time but still in black-and-white, and still with an undead dog at the crux of the narrative. What changed in the interim?

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


Cosmopolis1click
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.