“If there’s such a thing as an ideal time of day to expose yourself to the deranging, hallucinatory visions of the Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg, midnight might well be it,” writes critic and Criterion contributor Terrence Rafferty in a terrific New York Times tribute to those “mind-body-machine games” the director loves to play, a piece highlighting a Cronenberg midnight-movie series currently playing at Manhattan’s IFC Center. Of Naked Lunch he writes: “You have to be in a fairly savage mood to enjoy the movie’s grisly humor and reality-warping imagery, the kind of mood that can descend on you toward the end of a long, bad night, when everything around you starts to look creepy and alien, and your nerves are too frayed for sleep. That’s the Cronenberg state of mind.” Click here to read the whole piece, in which Rafferty also discusses the Criterion-released Videodrome and such other creepy-crawlies as The Fly, The Dead Zone, and eXistenZ.
1991
115 min
Color
1.85:1
1983
87 min
Color
1.85:1
Categories: Clippings
2 Comments
Tue 24 Feb at 12:07 PM
Kevin Longrie
Mostly-unrelated: With the closing of New Yorker films, is Criterion going to be buying up a lot of those films? They’re being auctioned off, snatch them up!
Sun 07 Jun at 09:01 PM
Anonymous
Extract from the article:
“The mind-body-machine games Mr. Cronenberg plays in movies like “Videodrome” and “eXistenZ” are elaborate, suggestive and inventively worked out, but they are games, not deep philosophical statements. He always wins them too, in part because he’s a terrific bluffer: he has the knack of convincing academics and other lofty-minded viewers that he’s holding better cards than he is. A midnight audience isn’t as easy to fool, and will probably see these films for what they are: funky, macabre science fiction comedies that tease the brain without effecting any significant alteration in its structure, or causing permanent damage.”
Is this for real?
Basically, what he is saying is that Cronenberg films are weird-looking exploitation movies, no need to analyze ‘em, they’re just for fun.
Can ANYONE write articles nowadays?
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