7 result(s) tagged “David Cronenberg”

When you think of David Cronenberg, you’re likely to see fusion: Brundlefly, a living typewriter, a gun made of bones.

All of those are the work of Carol Spier, Cronenberg’s art director (from Fast Company through Videodrome) and production designer (from The Dead Zone forward, with the exception of Spider).

It’s easy to reduce Cronenberg to those signature images, which clearly reflect his longstanding concern with the relationship between technology and the flesh. Yet his two most recent movies — A History of Violence and Eastern Promises — have revealed a filmmaker of startling economy and density who doesn’t need to lean so heavily on those old tricks.

Cronenberg’s and Spier’s aggressive use of the tangibly repulsive — their creations have a physicality that’s unparalleled in cinema — obscure their more-mundane (but no less impressive) storytelling skills.

Like most of his movies, David Cronenberg’s Camera is a sly piece of work. On the surface, it’s an illustration of the effects of lighting, camera movement, recording format, performance, and even costumes.

Camera appears to be Cronenberg’s most warm and human work. But it packs a lot into its running time, and, on closer inspection, it’s a downer about submission to addiction.

In David Cronenberg’s The Brood, the monsters have the size and shape (and snowsuits) of little children, but everything else about them is off. You could point to their foreheads, or their noses, or their skin tone, or the color of their hair, or the way they move, but that misses the bigger picture. There’s no single element that makes these creatures grotesque. It’s the collection of features and details that approach being normally human without ever getting there.

The discomfiting effect is related to the uncanny valley, which suggests that people are repulsed by things (robots, computer animation) that too closely approximate reality.

“Repulsed” is the key word. These little children might scare you, but your reaction as a viewer isn’t based on fear for the safety of the movie’s characters. (These little buggers are nasty, but they’re also pretty ridiculous as assassins.) Rather, these near-children make you queasy, disgusted.

You’ve been horrified.

There aren’t many people writing about movies who make me feel inept and small-minded, but the one called k-punk does a pretty good job with these two pieces on A History of Violence: the initial take and a response to another critic. For comparison’s sake, my essay is here.

A History of Violence is a bizarre, challenging film dressed up as a mainstream entertainment, a subversive work bordering on parody yet also deadly earnest. The movie confirms that David Cronenberg has grown into one of cinema’s most sophisticated, rigorous, and probing filmmakers.

No good movie in recent memory has made me feel as perfectly awful and unsettled as David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ. The movie is beautifully made, engaging, and sometimes even funny, but it’s also repulsive and disturbing, and not just because of the director’s now-standard disfigurement fetish.

After watching David Cronenberg’s Spider the other night, I was acutely underwhelmed and disappointed. It could be that the movie’s impact on my first viewing — akin to dropping a light object onto a feather pillow — was a function of overblown expectations. Or it could be that the movie was designed to end with more of a whimper than a bang.