Word: cronenberg
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...string of lower-than-lowbrow horror movies by such directors as Roger Corman (Not of This Earth) and William Castle (The Tingler), films that were enjoyable in direct proportion to our sense that they were made without adult supervision. The tradition was carried on by filmmakers like David Cronenberg; though later celebrated for the high-toned horror of The Fly and Dead Ringers, he never matched the shocks of his early, amateurish offerings such as Rabid and They Came from Within. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, directed by Tobe Hooper in 1974, was almost comical in its killer...
...dealt creepily and eloquently with the disintegration of mind and body. eXistenZ, where Leigh and Jude Law get into a virtual reality game and can't get out, is more modest than its current twin, The Matrix, but it pulses with a furtive fury that's pure Cronenberg. Like the virtual game he plays on us, the film is weird, it's addictive, and Lord, it's alive...
Cars and sex do have things in common: acceleration, aggression, contact, combustion. Cinema, eternal celebrant of the stupid-funny car crash, is the ideal medium to anatomize America's fetishizing of the automobile. And Cronenberg is the very guy for the job. His first commercial film, Fast Company, was about stock-car racing; his brilliant remake of The Fly was a parable of love, decay and death, of man misguidedly using machinery to transform himself...
...last May's Cannes Film Festival it won a hotly disputed prize for "originality, daring and audacity." In November it nabbed five Genies (Canada's Oscar equivalent), including one for director David Cronenberg. It also earned a chilling blast of invective from Ted Turner, boss of bosses of the film's U.S. distributor, Fine Line Features (and vice chairman of Time Warner, parent of TIME). Now Crash--from J.G. Ballard's notorious 1973 novel, and with an NC-17 warning sticker affixed--finally opens in the country that invented car culture...
...intellectual and a sensualist, Cronenberg graces Crash with philosophical musings, acres of pretty flesh and even more penis talk than on some 8 o'clock sitcoms. For all that, Crash doesn't work. Sexual without being sexy, the film moves smoothly but slowly, like a Caddy on a revolving showroom platform. Dialogue scenes are conducted in a reverent whisper; only the brakes screech, just after a climax or before a death. Even the carnographic love play--in which each character has predictably weird sex with most of the others--is too studied. The fine actors disport themselves solemnly, like giant...