Word: cronenberg
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Bugsy could be the name of the film David Cronenberg has woven from remnants of Naked Lunch. Its main character, Bill Lee (Peter Weller), is an exterminator who sees roaches everywhere -- not least because his wife Joan (Judy Davis) has been stealing the bug powder he needs for his job; she cuts the stuff with baby laxative and injects it into her breast. "It's a Kafka high," she says. "You feel like a bug." In his daymares, Bill is visited by beetles -- big ugly things, chatting away through purulent orifices -- that send him on a spy mission into...
...sepulchral charisma. With his cracked voice and deadpan insolence, Burroughs was the Beat Generation's W.C. Fields -- a raconteur of depravity, a cracker-barrel coroner. Weller gets the haunted look right, but he can't get inside the junkie's pocked skin. Burroughs lived and nearly died there; Cronenberg and the actors are only visiting. The movie is way too colorful -- cute, in a repulsive way, with its crawly special effects -- and tame compared with its source. Instead of an insider's view of drug despair, Cronenberg takes us to the Hell Pavilion at Walt Disney World...
...Adults need bedtime stories too. This one, about a man who turns into a huge insect, was the decade's scariest. And the most affecting, because director David Cronenberg made it a parable about how little we know of the people we love, and how much we still love them as they slip out of their control and ours...
DEAD RINGERS. David (The Fly) Cronenberg directs a spooky parable of split identity: twin gynecologists drive themselves to dementia and a symbiotic suicide-murder...
...times Dead Ringers also tilts out of coherence, with scenes that are dramatically stillborn. But Irons is splendid in both roles, and Cronenberg can create tour-de-force tableaux with his effortless black magic. In one, Bev strides into surgery dressed in red, like a demon priest at a sacrificial rite. The victim is woman; her crime is woman's unique advantage over man, the power to produce perfect new bodies from the most vulnerable part of her own. Any mad scientist, any man, can try either to serve that power or to destroy it. And Bev must finally love...