Best of 2012

It is that time of year again.  That time when all we film critics (and all those who claim to be film critics) churn out our annual best of the year lists.  So, without further ado, here are my choices for the best films of 2012.

1. Django Unchained - I am kinda biased when it comes to Tarantino.  I think they guy is just the living end.  To die for, in a cinematic idol worship kinda way.  Can't get enough of the guy's often quite politically incorrect attitude, or his violence-drenched and self-referential playfulness. Of course, with this said, it should come as no surprise that this blood-splattered, inappropriately heee-larious Spaghetti Southern sits atop my list of the best of 2012.  My review can be read here.

2. The Master - Like QT above, Paul Thomas Anderson is another one of those auteur's that seems to be unable to do any wrong in my book.   Also like Tarantino, PTA has made a film that is easily one of the most divisive of the year.  But then again, I have always been a fan of those films that make everyone else a bit woozy in the head.  Oh yeah, and Joaquin Phoenix gives the performance of a lifetime.  My review can be read here.

3. The Turin Horse - Somber, distressed and morose.  Sorrowful, sick and mournful.  Dreadfully sad.  So sad, that one may not be able to even make it through this black and white, incredibly slow-moving, and even more incredibly sad, Hungarian film.  Yet, Bela Tarr, in what the director claims is his final film, makes even the most despairing of tales, a thing of rapt and terrifying beauty.  My review can be read here.

4. Zero Dark Thirty - There is controversy galore over this film, with a lot of conservatives bitching that too much confidential information was given to the filmmakers and liberals whining about a supposed condoning of torture, but whatever one thinks of such things (and I think such allegations, from either side of the political spectrum, to be bullshit), Kathryn Bigelow's military thriller is an enthralling, brilliant movie.  My review can be read here.

5. Cosmopolis - This makes four out of four in films I adore, yet are hated by just as many as love them.  David Cronenberg's Odyssean take on capitalism and greed, is an abrasively methodical film, that beats with a cadence that forebodes and foretells the very downfall of man, all the while making the viewer uncomfortable in their seats, as they wait around every corner for the ball to drop on the action.  My review can be read here.

6. The Cabin in the Woods - I am kind of a sucker for the writing stylings of Joss Whedon (film, TV, comicbooks - whatever), and this twisted, Escher-esque mindfuck of a horror film - one that takes all the tricks and tropes of the genre, and flips them on their arse - co-written with director Drew Goddard, is one of his most intriguing screenplays.  My review can be read here.

7. Killer Joe - When a film comes with the tagline, "A totally twisted deep-fried Texas redneck trailer park murder story," ya just know it's gonna be a hell of a lot of fun.  A rip-roaringly hilarious movie about a cool-as-ice hired killer, the idiots that hire him but cannot afford to pay him, the innocent teenage girl they give to him as collateral, and the most interesting thing ever done with fried chicken on the big screen.  Oh yeah, and Matthew McConaughey is, as the kids are saying, off the hook, yo.  My review can be read here.

8. Haywire/Magic Mike - These two intriguing films, from the always versatile Steven Soderbergh, are the best one two punch from any director since Soderbergh did the same thing three years ago with The Girlfriend Experience and The Informant.  These films, a spy thriller-cum-genre experiment, and a good ole boy, male stripper tale, are like the proverbial day and night of cinema, and that just goes to show that Soderbergh can do just about anything he puts his mind to.  My review can be read here and here, respectively.

9. The Kid With a Bike - Probably the most humanistic, and quite possibly the most humour-filled, of any of the Dardenne Brothers' films, this tale of - you guessed it - a kid and his bike, harkens back to a simpler time in cinema, and to films like the obviously influential The Bicycle Thieves, and, with its no-frills poetic realism, is a simply beautiful film to watch.  My review can be read here.

10. Compliance - A story so unbelievable, so impossible sounding, so implausibly ridiculous, that it just has to be true.  Telling the crazy tale of a fast food manager who is duped by a prank caller pretending to be a cop on the other end of the phone, and the poor young employee who is demoralized, humiliated, and much much worse, this subtly brilliant little film is one of the biggest revelations of the cinematic year.  My review can be read here.

11. Prometheus - Many of my fellow critical compatriots called this film a dismal failure.  I suppose it was a bit of a failure in certain, perhaps a too-high expectations category (in anticipation of its coming release, I had expected it to eventually make my top three), but the film, though not the desired second coming of Blade Runner, is still quite enjoyable to watch.  At least it was for this critic.  My review can be read here.

12. Damsels in Distress - It has been thirteen years since Whit Stillman's last film, the sardonic Last Days of Disco, and the director is finally back with another quite acerbic, yet also quite fun-loving, look at the emotionally messed-up lives of his lovable but distressed characters.  I have talked with many a cinemagoer who did not understand this film, and therefore disliked, or even hated it, but all I can say to those people is, hooey.  My review can be read here.

13. Les Misérables - My love of this film kinda caught me off guard.  I mean, I love the musical genre, but that love is usually reserved for the old Hollywood style of musical, not the splashy, over-the-top Sondheimian kind, but this newer, stagier version pretty much blew me away anyway - and all you haters can go on hatin'.  My review can be read here.

14. Hit & Run - Written and co-directed by Dax Sheppard, and starring the actor-turned-director, his girlfriend (and every nerd's wet dream) Kristen Bell, and several of their clsoest friends (Bradley Cooper, Tom Arnold), this crazy comic chase film may not be your typical high end artistic cinema piece, but damn, it is a hell of a lot of fun.  My review can be read here.

15. Holy Motors - Bizarre and beautiful, this French comedy(?), drama(?), action film(?), thriller(?), satire(?), whatever(!), is another one of those films that the masses will never understand, but that this critic, in all his own bizarre and beautiful tastes, just loves to see.  I am still not able to confidently explain what the damn thing is about, but I still like it.  My review can be read here.

16. John Carter - Yeah, that's right.  I liked this film dammit.  So much hatred, and pure and despicable hatred, formed not by the critically intentioned folk who come down on the films that top this list, but by a bunch of silly pedantic bullies, has been spewed toward this film, but I do not care a wit for them, nor for their priggish criticisms.  The film is fun dammit.  Pure, unadulterated fun.  My review can be read here.

17. Amour - Harrowing.  Terrifying.  Unflinching and quite disturbing indeed.  All the things that make, for better or for worse, a Michael Haneke film, a Michael Haneke film.  But what this film has that no other Haneke film has had, is a streak of humanity, and it is in this quite unexpected humanity, that we are sucked in, and spit out an emotional wreck.  My review can be read here.

18. Little White Lies - It may have taken nearly three years to finally make its way to these shores, but this French dramedy was, as they are prone to saying, well worth the wait.  Written off by many as a mere Gallic Big Chill (and there are blatant similarities, though I doubt if they were necessarily on purpose), this film is actually quite stirring, in the emotional arena of things.  All that, and you get Marion Cotillard too.  My review can be read here.

19. The Avengers - Written and directed by the always able Joss Whedon (haven't we already been here?), this mega billion dollar smash hit (top grossing film of all time, that is not directed by James Cameron), takes this critic back to his long lost youth, when the monthly arrival of Marvel Comics' titular superhero team, was a must read moment in the life of this then ten year old future film critic, and lifelong comicbook reader.  My review can be read here.

20. Beasts of the Southern Wild - Granted, it has its faults, but once one gets past its rather cliché storyline, the remarkable visual beauty of the film, in both its uplifting, awe-inspiring moments and tragic realistic ones, and the surprising powerhouse performance of six year old Quvenzhané Wallis, make for a pretty darn good movie.  My review can be read here.

Ten Runners-Up (in no particular order): Bernie, The Deep Blue Sea, Flight, 21 Jump Street, Attenberg, Moonrise Kingdom, Miss Bala, Turn Me On, Dammit!, Savages, Chico & Rita.

Film Review: David Cronenberg's Cosmopolis

Cold, hard and calculating, with a near unbreakable diamond surface, lost emotions bubbling just beneath the alabaster skin, waiting to burst through the flesh in an explosive maniacal fashion not completely unlike some sort of metaphorical grotesquery from Videodrome or The Brood or from another one of the director's earlier more body horror works.  This can describe both Cosmopolis, David Cronenberg's latest film and Robert Pattinson's burning out, billionaire asset manager within said film.    As divisive as any Cronenberg, perhaps even more so, the film is bound to split both critics and viewers into separate widespread and equally brazen camps - those who think the film utter didactic crap, ready fodder for brainless attacks by an uneducated mass market, and those who believe the film an icy stroke of cinematic genius to be thrown hard against the oncoming mass of mainstream mediocrity much like the film's recurring theme of 99%ers diatribically tossing dead rats at soulless white limousines.  Obviously, one can tell this particular critic and viewer finds himself firmly imbedded in the latter camp.  

Either way you look at it, this film, the neuveu-Kubrickian auteur's twentieth feature, an adaptation of Don DeLillo's supposedly unfilmable 2003 novel of the same name, is one for the so-called ages - whatever age that may be.  Ostensibly set around 2000, at the time of the dot com bubble burst, but realistically taking place in what could be today or what could be tomorrow, or even the tomorrow after that - linear thought is not necessarily an important factor in Cronenbergian cinema - we follow cocksure billionaire Eric Packer around an impossibly congested Manhattan, full of rioting anti-corporate types swinging their aforementioned dead rats around town, intermittent sexual encounters and invading financial advisers, an unseen and unknown presidential motorcade blocking streets on a whim, a water main burst, overly insistent yet ineffectual bodyguards, a rap funeral procession, a mysterious but eventually credible lone gunman and the most sexually intoxicating prostate exam ever put on film (one will ask him or herself just what is an asymmetrical prostate) - most of which takes place in the back of an offensively long stretch limo blinged out with its own bar, sonogram machine, computer monitors, multiple TV screens and even a pull out toilet - and all just to get a damn haircut.  

Samantha Morton, as Packer's chief adviser, and one would guess mentor of sorts considering the way her character is positioned and listened to by the seemingly aloof billionaire, says of the riots happening outside the claustrophobic limo, that they are a protest of the future.  This, in part, is what Cronenberg is showing us here - the instability of the future.  The future of 2000 and the future of 2012 and beyond.  Packer's Odyssean traversing of the city (DeLillo's novel, and in turn Cronenberg's film, is of course a modern retelling of the Homeric epic) depicts a day long downward spiral from the veritable top of the world (we keep hearing of a penthouse in the sky and flying planes and devouring the world) to a shithole tenement building near the docks.  The excesses of the rich piled upon themselves to devour not the world, but perhaps Packer himself.  A film for the ages indeed as the economic disaster that was handed down by the administration that was just sleazily taking power at the onset of the book/film's ostensible setting is weighing heavy on lives and heads of state.  A film that shows its viewers - its rapturous watchers - the chaos that ensues when a society is given no boundaries of decency and fair play.  A protest of the future - and of the present - indeed.

Aside from the aforementioned Ms. Morton, we also get one-shot scenes from Juliette Binoche as an art dealer-cum-limo lover, Mathieu Amalric as a goofy pie-in-the-face protester playing at leaping gnome, and Paul Giamatti as the "voice of the little people" - all sharing just one scene a piece with the film's star.  Leaping, sometimes figuratively, oft-times literally, in and out of Packer's limo life.  But the star of the film is indeed Robert "Sparkles" Pattinson.  And it is Pattinson, trying to break away from his Twilight time and prove himself a viable actor, who does more than a bang-up job as our intrepid city traveler - showing us a frozen outer shell that begins to crack under the pressure of what is expected of him and what is actually happening now that he no longer controls the strings.  The cold, systematic way in which Pattinson's lost billionaire, playing at Holden Caulfield's idea of everyone being a phony when in truth he may be the biggest goddamn phony of them all, delivers his lines and meters his cadence may cover up a somewhat weaker actor (we really do not have anything else of substance to compare notes with here) but nevertheless it works here.  Pretty much everything, amidst the chaos of the film's goings-on, works here.

25 (plus a few more) Most Anticipated Films of 2012

Most of the following films will hit US cinemas sometime in this calendar year.  Some of them will end up being held until 2013 (or even later) and therefore will pass onto my most anticipated list for next year (as in turn some of the films here have done after not arriving last year).  All of these films are (obviously) ones I am excited about for one reason or another.  Some of them will inevitably not live up to my expectations - hopefully not too many - but judging from last year's list, where two-thirds ending up being films I quite liked and twelve actually made my eventual top twenty list, it should be a pretty good year. So, without further ado, I give you my 25 most anticipated films of 2012.

1) Django Unchained - I don't think anyone who is a regular reader here will be surprised to find a Quentin Tarantino film at the top of this list.  With a cast that keeps growing every day (or so it would seem), this QT-styled Spaghetti Western beast of a motion picture should (I now boldly proclaim) take the top spot on my Best of 2012 list.   Granted, this film may end up going way past schedule (QT has been known to do that) and therefore not make its debut until 2013, but here's hoping the Christmas present that the Weinsteins plan on giving us (ie, the planned December release date) does not delay.

2) The Grandmasters - I sure do hope this Wong Kar-wai film about the man who taught Bruce Lee everything he knows, gets here soon.  It was number one on my anticipated films list last year and I do not want to have to put it on next year's as well.  Then again, WKW is rather notorious for production delays (2046 took four years to complete) so it is really anybody's guess.

3) The Master - Not to be confused with the number two film on this list, the next film from Paul Thomas Anderson is not about the man who taught Bruce Lee everything he knows.  Actually it is ever so loosely based on the rise and fall of L. Ron Hubbard, but don't tell the Scientologists that or they will try to sue again.  Seriously though, PTA has a new film coming - how freakin' cool is that?

4) Like Someone in Love - Like with last year's French/Italian hybrid, the brilliantly twisting Certified Copy, Iranian auteur extraordinaire Abbas Kiarostami (one of the five best director's working today!) has again ventured outside his native land (and its censors) and headed off to Japan for his latest film.  The film, listed under the name The End on IMDb, is in post production right now and is tentatively slated for a Cannes premiere, with a hopeful US release sometime in the fall.

5) Untitled Terrence Malick Project - Though still going nameless as of the compilation of this list, this Malick film, boasting a cast that includes Ben Affleck, Rachel McAdmas, Javier Bardem, Rachel Weisz, Michael Sheen and Jessica Chastain, is a strange creature to see on this list so soon after The Tree of Life.  Known for taking years to finish his films, Malick is still probably an iffy bet from whom to see a 2012 release, but here is hoping we do.

6) Cosmopolis - A David Cronenberg that takes place mainly in the back of a limo cruising around NYC, and is given the director's usual treatment of sexual obsession and murder, all based on Don DeLillo's novel.  From everything I have read this also seems to be a film that may delve back into the fringe dwelling the director used to partake in, while simultaneously playing as one of his more recent critical darling works.

7) Post Tenebras Lux - With each successive film, Mexican New Wave provocateur Carlos Reygadas gets better and better.  From Japon to Battle in Heaven to Silent Light.  A modern day Blend of Bresson and Dreyer (Silent Light was a remake of Ordet in many ways), Reygadas is an auteur to watch out for, and if my growing estimation of the director is any indication, then this new film, probably making its debut at Cannes, should be pretty damn good.

8) Inside Llewyn Davis - Based on the life of Dave van Ronk, and featuring Oscar Isaac, Carey Mulligan and Justin Timberlake, this new biopic from the brothers' Coen has aspirations of being something akin to Todd Haynes' Dylan deconstruction I'm Not There.  Now granted, I do not think this film will go as far out as that brilliant work, but I still expect a damn good time.

9) Moonrise Kingdom - I can assure you that my lovely wife, a noted Wes Anderson hater (Rushmore notwithstanding) will not be a fan of this film, if I can even get her to watch it, but as I am much more thrilled with the auteur's past work, I am looking forward to this one with great glee.  Oh yeah, and as is to be expected, we get Bill Motherfuckin' Murray too.

10) A Place Beyond the Plains - From Derek Cianfrance, the man who gave us the deafeningly emotional Blue Valentine, comes a movie starring Ryan Gosling as a motorcycle rider who turns to robbing banks to feed his family.  I know, I know, it does bring up shades of Drive, but I am sure that is mere coincidence, and this film will be able to stand on its own.

11) Only God Forgives - The new film from Danish director Nicolas Winding-Refn will be coming to town sometime in late 2012.  After having Drive take the fifth spot in my favourite films of this past year (though I must admit to not having seen any of this volatile director's other films - an oversight that will surely be corrected very soon), and seeing the Gosman cast again (directors must like working with the guy), this could easily become one of my favourites of this coming year.

12) The Great Gatsby - If any classic of 20th Century American literature deserves a brash 3D treatment from an over-the-top director like Baz Luhrmann, it is The Great Gatsby.  Yeah, that was sarcasm.  The thing that  gives this strange strange film such an anticipatory flavour is the fact that it actually is a brash 3D treatment from an over-the-top director like Baz Luhrmann.  Not sure I like the casting of Leo DiCaprio as Gatsby, but with Carey Mulligan as Daisy and Tobey Maguire seemingly perfectly cast as Nick, hopes are rather high.

13) Stoker - Starring Mia Wasikowska, Nicole Kidman and Matthew Goode, this is Park Chan-wook's English language debut.  The film may not actually make it to theaters until 2013, but if it is ready for Cannes, it could sneak in as a late 2012 release.  The film seems a departure for the Korean filmmaker so famed for his revenge trilogy of Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, Oldboy and Lady Vengeance, but that means nothing really, for this still looks quite intriguing.

14) On the Road - This Walter Sallas directed adaptation of Kerouac's classic was on this very same list last year, but I think it may actually finally arrive this time around.  Being a Beat aficionado from way back, I have been looking forward to this inevitable but always thwarted literary adaptation, through all of its tempting incarnations for years and years and years.  It is about time dammit!

15) Magic Mike - With Steven Soderbergh's claims of early retirement, one supposes that with each of the director's new films, it could very well be his last.  Now of course this talk of retirement has been scoffed at by many, including Soderbergh himself, decrying an upcoming sabbatical as the more likely outcome of cinematic frustrations, so we probably have nothing to worry about with this one being his last.  As for the film itself, it is the story of a young male stripper who is taken under the wing of a mentor.  Oddly enough, the film is based on the early days of Channing Tatum, with Tatum himself playing the mentor.  Sounds fun.

16) Gravity - Now it may be somewhat surprising that I would place a film starring Sandra Bullock on this list, but here it is anyway.  Actually, Bullock aside (though I did like her in the oft-overlooked Murder by Numbers), my main reason for anticipating this 3D sci-fi thriller (yeah, I know, everything is in 3D these days) is that it was written and directed by Alfonso Cauron.  Starring Bullock and George Clooney as the only two surviving astronauts on a semi-demolished space station, the film should have a very high creep factor indeed with Cauron at the helm.

17) Amour - Austrian auteur Michael Haneke can be a bit hit or miss (though never having made an outright bad picture) but the hits certainly outweigh the few misses.  Here is hoping this film about octogenarians in love and the daughter (played of course by the great Isabelle Huppert) who must care for them after one has a stroke, is one of those hits.

18) Nero Fiddled - After turning out the biggest box office hit of his career, Woody Allen is back with a film featuring Jesse Eisenberg as the movie's Woody surrogate (and a perfectly cast one at that), and boasting a cast that includes Penelope Cruz, Alec Baldwin, Roberto Benigni, Greta Gerwig and Ellen Page.  Sure, the prolific auteur is hit or miss in recent decades, but here is hopin'.

19) Cogan's Trade - Directed by Andrew Dominik of The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford fame (and we have had to wait five years for a follow-up), and featuring the cinematic outlaw himself, Brad Pitt, as a mob enforcer, this crime thriller promises to be a hell of a lot of fun.  Well, at least we all hope so.

20) Prometheus - Ridley Scott is back, and he is at his probable sci-fi wheelhouse best.  First rumoured to be an Alien prequel but now apparently taking on a life of its own (though still shrouded in mystery), this outer space horror movie starring Charlize Theron, Noomi Rapace and Michael Fassbender (fuck yeah!) could bring Scott back from his more recent spate of mediocrity.

21) Anna Karenina - This a hefty movie that Joe Wright has taken upon himself and it is a hefty role that his usual star Keira Knightley has taken upon herself.  There are some questions about Knightley's ability to tackle such a role, but I have faith in the actress - she is a much weightier actor than many give credit for her being.  The film also stars Aaron Johnson (John Lennon in Nowhere Boy) as Count Vronsky, and that may be a damn good casting choice indeed.

22) Argo - A new film starring Ben Affleck?  Not really a reason to get all hot and bothered.  A film directed by Ben Affleck?  Now we are talking baby.  After the spectacular Gone Baby Gone (one of the best films of the last decade) and the smart and intense The Town (albeit with a rather lackluster ending) this new film, set amidst the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis, could and should prove quite intriguing.

23) The Cabin in the Woods - A self-proclaimed "twist" on the usual formula, this Joss Whedon written horror movie is co-written and directed by Drew Goddard, one of the writers of Lost, so we should possibly expect something that perhaps makes no sense at all.  The Joss Whedon connection makes it an interesting-looking movie though.  The film was originally set for an early 2010 release before being shelved indefinitely due to MGM financial woes.  It appeared on this list last year but now there is an actual set release date, so here we go.

24) The Wettest County - Written by Nick Cave and directed by John Hillcoat, the team that last gave us the new wave revisionist western The Proposition back in 2005, this looks to be a quite rousing film about rural gangsters.  Granted, the casting of Shia LaBeouf gives one pause, but perhaps we can get past that and just have a good old time.

25) The Dark Knight Rises, The Amazing Spider-Man & The Avengers - Being a old comic book head, these three films needed to be on this list.  Christopher Nolan's final piece in his Dark Knight trilogy, Mark Webb's retooling of everyone's favourite friendly neighbourhood Spider-Man (and what a perfectly named director for the job) and Joss Whedon's supergroup extravaganza (based on my personal favourite comicbook) all have great possibilities.  Hopefully they all come through.

Some other films to look forward to (in no particular order): Something in the Air (Olivier Assayas); Gangster Squad (Ruben Fleischer); Cloud Atlas (Tom Tykwer and the Walchowskis); Take This Waltz (Sarah Polly); Looper (Rian Johnson); Rust and Bone (Daniel Audiard);  Savages (Oliver Stone); The Hunger Games (Gary Ross); Snow White and the Huntsman (Rupert Sanders); Piranha 3DD (John Gulager); The Hobbit (Peter Jackson); Lincoln (Steven Spielberg); A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence (Roy Andersson); Skyfall (Sam Mendes); Dark Shadows (Tim Burton); Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (Timur Bekmambetov); A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III (Roman Coppola).

And one final film before we go:

Ted - A live action Seth MacFarlane movie?  This is either going to be the greatest idea ever or it is going to end up being the very worst thing to ever happen.  It really could go either way, but my love of Family Guy and MacFarlane make me willing to give it a chance.

The Cinematheque Reviews: A Dangerous Method

Chewy Cronenbergian goodness.  I actually use that term in my review of David Cronenberg's latest film, A Dangerous Method.  I am quite proud of the term actually - even if I am not quite sure what it means.  Whatever it means, it is how the film made me feel.  The film is the story of the relationship between Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud, and the woman who came between them.  This description seems a bit more salacious than it probably needs to be, but then what appears to be a proper period piece at first, is given a serious Cronenbergian overhaul - a chewy Cronenbergian overhaul of goodness.  But enough of that.  My review of the film (originally seen at this year's Philadelphia Film Festival) is currently up and running over at The Cinematheque.  

Read my review of A Dangerous Method at The Cinematheque.

PFF 2011: David Cronenberg's A Dangerous Method

Part of the Masters of Cinema section of the Twentieth Annual Philadelphia Film Festival, one could make a claim that a film such as this gets a bit of a free ride from an auteurist like myself, but dammit, I don't care - the film is quite spectacular, no matter who directed it.  Even so, it is not your typical kind of spectacular - it's the kind of spectacular that sneaks up on a person.  At first unassuming, leading crescendo-like into full-bore Cronenberg, A Dangerous Method (missed at the New York Fest but finally caught here in Philly) is something one may not expect from the director, but at the same time, something completely in the madman's semi-psychotic wheelhouse.

  

Perhaps not as cleverly deceptive as A History of Violence (in my not-so-humble opinion, the director's greatest and gutsiest work) nor as balls-out as Crash (the other film in the Canadian's oeuvre that comes closest to a masterpiece), but only the man who gave us, along with the aforementioned two films, Dead Ringers, The Fly, and the filmic version of Burroughs' Naked Lunch, could have put so much disturbing dread, so much perverse glee into the now-infamous psychoanalytical battle song of the mystical Jung and the Svengali-like Freud.  Cronenberg is one of those directors with the ability to arouse and disgust you simultaneously, and once again, like in Videodrome and Crash (to name just two), he does it here in this tale of psychological horror disguised as an analytical period piece.  The film is subtly dirty, and that's just how we want it.

Cronenberg has always had a rather perversely funny way about showing sexual encounters in his film (and again, we must look back at Crash as the prime example of such perversity), so a film about Freudian psychoanalysis and the particular case of Sabina Spielrein, a patient and eventually lover of Jung, and the catalyst (at least in this version of the story, based on Christopher Hampton's 2002 stage play, The Talking Cure, which in turn was based upon the 1993 novel A Most Dangerous Method by John Kerr) of the break between Jung and his one-time mentor Freud, was ripe for the Cronenbergian touch.  When we watch as Keira Knightley's Sabina is belt-whipped by Michael Fassbender's Jung, and see the look of orgasmic power shooting from the actress's surprisingly nuanced face, Cronenberg has enraptured us inside his own web of sexual obsession - and that is just what a film such as this needs to have.

Most attuned to the director's Dead Ringers (sexual obsession, psychosis) and, of course Crash (socially perverse actions that are merely the workings of a person's natural sexuality), but more subtly maneuvered (an attribute that comes with age perhaps?), A Dangerous Method , which incidentally also stars an especially devilish Viggo Mortensen as Herr Freud (in his third collaboration with the director), is a film that may seem a bit awkward at first as the viewer is not sure which direction one is about to take, but ends as a bubbling cauldron of, for lack of a better or more encompassing term, chewy Cronenbergian goodness.  In sum, both unexpected territory for the director and typically lurid Cronenberg material - a fiery juxtaposition that creates such an atmosphere as to make this one of the master's best and most mature works.

A Dangerous Method will open in limited release on November 23, with a national roll-out later (in time for the Oscar campaigns I assume, of which Viggo Mortensen could be a strong contender for a Best Supporting Actor nomination).  I will have a full review of the film coming right around that planned release date.

David Cronenberg and His Rather Disgusting Cinematic Art and Psychosis of Bodily Mutilation and Transmogrification

The following is my contribution to The LAMBs in the Director's Chair #19: David Cronenberg.  And as a warning, there are probably some spoilers ahead, so if that is a concern of yours, ye have been warned.

He made people's heads explode in Scanners.  He turned James Woods into a living breathing VCR in Videodrome by putting the most vaginal of openings in his belly.  He shoved bio-mechanical USB cords into slimy, fleshy spinal holes of his gamers in eXistenZ.  He put parasitic venereal diseases into promiscuous young women in Shivers.  He gave erotic pleasure to mutilated auto accident victims in Crash.  He gave a woman an oozing phallic underarm stinger in Rabid.  He made emotional states dictate how your body would deform in The Brood.  He had a demented, drug-fueled Jeremy Irons go to town on women with the most medieval of gynecological contraptions in Dead Ringers.   He gave grotesque physical life to the warped creatures in William Burroughs' head in his adaptation of Naked Lunch.  He transformed Jeff Goldblum into a freakin' fly for crying out loud - a filthy, disgusting, pus-covered freakin' fly. 

Now I have a rather strong stomach and can take pretty much anything in stride, but let's face it, David Cronenberg isn't the kind of director you go see with lots of snacks in hand.   The images that are brought to mind from the above-mentioned cinematic moments are merely the tip of the proverbial (and quite repugnant) iceberg of what can be called Cronenbergian cinema.  What I am trying to say is that the career of Cronenberg, one-time master of the genre known as body horror (yes, every genre has a name), has been strewn with the most repulsive, oft-times horrific images of body mutilation ever put on film.  Other directors have tried their respective hands at the genre (Lynch with Eraserhead, Carpenter with his remake of The Thing, del Toro with Cronos) but it is Cronenberg who has made a lifetime commitment out of the whole grotesque affair.   It is Cronenberg that has come to nearly perfect a certain type of Grand Guignol filmmaking style that at once titillates and repulses.   Like his characters in Crash, an erotic turn-on in the midst of death and destruction and mangled human flesh.  Guns and flesh becoming one in revolting nightmarish style.  Pulsating, talking typewriters that resembles melting assholes.  Goldblum's transmogrifying insectoid vomiting up his own food.  Nauseating, offensive, turns-one's-stomach kind of stuff.

Now I am not saying any of this as a negative critical reaction to the filmmaker and his work - his films feature repugnant imagery and that is just what they are meant to do.  Cronenberg's oeuvre has ranged from the awful to the spectacular (leaning perhaps more toward the latter than the former) but it has always been the outrageous ick factor (for better and for worse) that has given the director his auteurial signature.   As of late though, this ick factor has gone by the wayside, to be replaced with a more strictly psychological bent.  Still a horror-based psychological bent when all is said and done (or at least a horror-based undercurrent) but still a more thinking than seeing kind of horror.  Granted, even Cronenberg's earlier, more pure horror (or more precisely, 'body horror') films were of course laced with a certain type of demented psychology, but as the man has grown as a director, his films too have grown - grown into multi-headed beasts - and Cronenberg has grown into a more mature, and more multi-faceted filmmaker.

This transformation came not abruptly, but over a matter of time and a matter of films.  Beginning with Dead Ringers in 1988 and working through Naked Lunch in 1991, Crash in 1996, and eXistenZ in 1999, his work would eventually lead to films like Spider in 2002, A History of Violence in 2005, Eastern Promises in 2007 and to his latest work, A Dangerous Method coming to US theaters later this year.  The director's more recent works look more at the mind than the body (although the body is still a large part of his oeuvre, and shows in these films) and delve into subjects of hallucinations, dreams and the ideas of sex and violence on humanity.  Still though, even as Cronenberg transforms his cinema from the outside to the inside, he still manages to creep his audience out - he has now just invented new ways to do so.  But then Cronenberg has always been inside our heads, just as his imagery has come out of his own - and sometimes his own life as well.  In his 1992 book Cronenberg on Cronenberg, the director revealed that The Brood was inspired by events that occurred during the unraveling of his first marriage, which caused both Cronenberg and his daughter Cassandra a great deal of turmoil. The character of Nola Carveth, mother of the brood, is based on Cassandra's mother. Cronenberg said that he found the shooting of the climactic scene, in which Nola was strangled by her husband, to be "very satisfying".  Now how's that for some inner turmoil bubbling to the surface?

A History of Violence (David Cronenberg, 2005)

This review was originally published on 10/05/05 at The Cinematheque and is being reprinted here (with a few alterations) as my contribution to the David Cronenberg Blogathon over at Tony Dayoub's wonderful film blog, Cinema Viewfinder.

Canada's very own Auteur of vexatiousness, David Cronenberg, the man who spewed forth some of the most deliriously disturbing cinema of the past two decades, takes now, as his most recent study of penetration (this word can be used both figuratively and literally in describing certain scenes in this film), the philosophical conundrum of violence in America. More accurately, Cronenberg wants us to think about how we see violence, how violence makes us feel and the ways in which we, as both individuals and as a society, have become so desensitized toward said violence that it is as if we no longer even notice it, let alone are appalled by it as we should be. 

What Cronenberg has actually managed to do, as he did in the sublime Crash, is create both a reflexive and antagonistic film, that can be watched simultaneously as a neo-western, transposed to small-town middle America, and as an indelicately funny social attack on mores in America. What Cronenberg has really accomplished, after all is said and done though, has been to create the best damned English-language film of the year so far.   Replete with a seething undercurrent of potential violence (the name does say it all, after all) that seems to boil just under the surface of every single scene, no matter how benign they may otherwise seem, Cronenberg may very well have created the best damned film in his deep, and quite diversely perverse oeuvre.  

After a viciously malaisical prologue, Cronenberg's meditation on violence begins in the sleepy little hamlet of Millbrook Indiana, where the stunning and seemingly homespun husband and wife team of Viggo Mortensen and Maria Bello appear to live the "American Values" idyllic life with their equally beautiful children, Jack and Sara. Firmly establishing, from almost the beginning, both the love and lust between these two people - including a sexual encounter that plays more honestly than any other I have seen in a long long time - it becomes all that more harrowing as we watch them fall apart from each other, and are swallowed up by the titular omen foreshadowing every moment of this film.

Full of Hitchcockian layers, whence the characters may not even know what is going on - even, sometimes, inside their own heads. Mortensen goes miles past his saturated LOTR days and opts for a much more adult-oriented role (as opposed to the rather mentally stunted fanboy-esque following that his King of the Rings garnered him). He is surprisingly nuanced as the everyman turned wrong man (just one of many Hitchcock allusions), possibly turned cold-blooded killer, or maybe even something all together different - a plot point question that can only be answered by seeing this film (there be no spoilers here!). Maria Bello, as Mortensen's wife, is at both her sexiest and emotionally-charged best, playing the damaged wife with such ferocity and teeth - not to mention about as much primal sex appeal as one woman can physically contain. 

Speaking of sex - that too, along with our perspective of gratuitous violence on the screen, is at the heart of Cronenberg's film. We see the juxtaposing of a bookended pair of sexual encounters by this (to say the least) strained couple. The first, a loving, honest rendezvous.  This attempt to capture their lost youth, complete with cheerleader outfit (I did mention how sexy Bello is here, right?) is followed - post violent explosion - by a brutal, near-rape attack on the stairs of their once quiet little home. It is these black and white, cracked-mirror image scenes that sum up the emotional percussion of these two characters.  The urgency of sex as possible violent release (or is that violence as possible sexual release?) penetrates Cronenberg's film as viciously as anything else in there.

Perhaps not quite as dream-induced as some of his more esoteric works (eXistenZ, Dead Ringers, Naked Lunch or, to a lesser extent, The Fly), it is the blurring of what is real, what is not real and what may or may not be real, that has shown up in both Spider and in this film. It is the maturation of Cronenberg as a Filmmaker that pulls it all together, and it is this notion of unreality - or perhaps even surreality - that holds sway over these characters heads like some sort of Damoclean sword - here strung up by the likes of David Cronenberg, in his finest hour.