Friday, June 10, 2022
Crimes of the Future (2022)
I sit in the tiny arthouse theater that thumbs its nose at “mainstream” film in a town that resents cultural outliers. The screening room is empty. I know what I’m getting into. This is David Cronenberg’s return to cinema.
Saturday, April 3, 2021
Cosmopolis (2011)
The core of the film is the star traveling to his haircut. He knows a barber that gives a certain honest kind of haircut that he can’t find on his end of town, and not even riots nor the president’s motorcade will stop him from getting that haircut. Because he’s Robert Pattinson.
It all sounds familiar, doesn’t it? You might think (as people often do) that Cronenberg saw the future, but in this case, the film was based on a 2003 novel. I can’t speak for the book, but the film is worth watching, and then watching again, and again.
Sunday, January 31, 2021
Videodrome (1983)
Everybody likes movies that predict the future, and sci-fi directors have a knack for it. The details may be a little fuzzy, but David Cronenberg’s broad strokes paint a bold picture of anarchic content creation and distribution, which some critics say is the Internet. That’s a stretch. I would say that Videodrome predicted some parts of Internet culture, but to its original audience it was just another romp through Cronenbergian delusion.
No, Videodrome is not the Internet. It’s the future, and the future is the past. Nostalgia lets us live in the moment because we can pin that moment down to a fixed point in time and space. This moment, this vision of the future, is as classic as they come.