Word: cronenberg
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...will we travel to our alternative universes? The most exciting possibility is to use some form of biologically engineered computer wired directly into our heads--an exobrain programmed to provide a better, more mathematically intricate imagination. In David Cronenberg's recent movie eXistenZ, squidgy pink packages called bioports plug directly into special jacks at the base of players' spines. The upshot is rather like what happens to your TV when you connect it to a VCR and press PLAY. Visual and aural information from the real world is overridden; your bioport provides all the sensory stimuli you need. Technically...
...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...
...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...