Shucks, the edge is wearing off some of my best friends. Herzog' s urges are in retirement, and now we are faced with an acceptable Cronenberg. Having him be acceptable to the mainstream makes him less acceptable for those of us that seek cinematic adventure.
Cronenberg's talent WAS in his ability to give us what I'll call drift between cinematic worlds. He'd create a base reality, a nominal reality and then drift into another, more radical one. My favorite is "Crash," because the drift is into a reality that the on screen characters create, and it itself is based on synthetic notions: car crashes made celestial merely because the victims were celebrities. This drift followed a sexual urge. Magnificent.
Also notable is "Existenz" where the alternate realities were similarly synthetic and introspective. In all of his great projects there's a sexual urge and expression that is ordinary but expressed in ways that appear perverted. Its unsettling.
Part of the joy in this is how our characters are sucked in, with a slight variation of the noir convention of a world that conspires against humans.
Now consider this. Let's set aside the perfection of expression. For what it is, it surely is competent. What's disturbing is how his notion of drift has been compromised. This time, it is drift from one conventional movie world to another, from the fiction of a happy family to the similarly artificial fiction of an invulnerable killing machine. There's no basic reality: it starts with one artificiality and goes to another.
The one it goes to is wholly conventional and could have been lifted from several hundred movies intact. There is sex acknowledged, but the drift isn't sexually colored, only displayed by two contrasting sexual episodes. The target world and how we get there is completely devoid of everything we used to celebrate in Cronenberg.
And. And we've seen these two worlds collide before, in "Blue Velvet," where the two worlds aren't just stations that characters move between. In that Lynch project, the two genres become characters themselves, seducing each other. Its a vision of the order of magnitude the old Cronenberg lived in.
Not here. Age is the devil. Our friend has drifted.
Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.
Cronenberg's talent WAS in his ability to give us what I'll call drift between cinematic worlds. He'd create a base reality, a nominal reality and then drift into another, more radical one. My favorite is "Crash," because the drift is into a reality that the on screen characters create, and it itself is based on synthetic notions: car crashes made celestial merely because the victims were celebrities. This drift followed a sexual urge. Magnificent.
Also notable is "Existenz" where the alternate realities were similarly synthetic and introspective. In all of his great projects there's a sexual urge and expression that is ordinary but expressed in ways that appear perverted. Its unsettling.
Part of the joy in this is how our characters are sucked in, with a slight variation of the noir convention of a world that conspires against humans.
Now consider this. Let's set aside the perfection of expression. For what it is, it surely is competent. What's disturbing is how his notion of drift has been compromised. This time, it is drift from one conventional movie world to another, from the fiction of a happy family to the similarly artificial fiction of an invulnerable killing machine. There's no basic reality: it starts with one artificiality and goes to another.
The one it goes to is wholly conventional and could have been lifted from several hundred movies intact. There is sex acknowledged, but the drift isn't sexually colored, only displayed by two contrasting sexual episodes. The target world and how we get there is completely devoid of everything we used to celebrate in Cronenberg.
And. And we've seen these two worlds collide before, in "Blue Velvet," where the two worlds aren't just stations that characters move between. In that Lynch project, the two genres become characters themselves, seducing each other. Its a vision of the order of magnitude the old Cronenberg lived in.
Not here. Age is the devil. Our friend has drifted.
Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.