Cosmopolis (2012) - Cronenberg does DeLillo starring Robert Pattinson

I love DeLillo but never read this book cause the plot sounded so contrived. Mostly takes place on a limo ride across Manhattan on some "Bret Easton Ellis meets The Mezzanine" ridiculousness if my impression is right. Anyway this looks pretttttty bad.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=fvwp&v=q3ZmIwteUAY&NR=1

Some discussion here: The Cronenberg Thread

whoops! thanks.

LOOOL Cronenberg's back at it with the car fetish... Look at the size of that limo!

I wasn't particularly fond of the book, but I'm cautiously optimistic about the film.

The heavy use of strobing in the trailer is really irritating

"free to do WHAT?" in the trailer makes me lol every every time. crazy excited for this actually.

A.O. Scott likes: http://movies.nytimes.com/2012/08/17/movies/movie-review-cosmopolis-directed-by-david-cronenberg.html?ref=arts

Mr. Cronenberg keeps you rapt, even when the story and actors don’t. Some of this disengagement is certainly intentional. Taken as a commentary on the state of the world in the era of late capitalism (for starters), “Cosmopolis” can seem obvious and almost banal. But these banalities, which here are accompanied by glazed eyes, are also to the point: the world is burning, and all that some of us do is look at the flames with exhausted familiarity.

all the positive reviews i've read seem to be using a lot of waffle to disguise the fact that they didn't actually like the movie

god that is so ao scott

That's a pretty accurate recap of what it feels like to watch Cosmopolis, tho.

did Cronenberg slag off comic book movies somewhere recently...?

yeah

http://www.nextmovie.com/blog/robert-pattinson-david-cronenberg-cosmopolis-interview

it's actually "superhero movies" though, so he has an out

Does anyone else do a quick scan of current reviews whenever Ebert bashes a "difficult" movie? Just to see what fluff has gotten 3.5 or 4 stars lately? (Currently, ftr, big love for Odd Life of Timothy Green, Hit & Run, Snow White & the Huntsman, et al.)

http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20120822/REVIEWS/120829995

Movie appears to be improving retroactively in my memory. Samantha Morton's sequence is up there with Tatum's "Pony" for my favorite individual sequence this year.

David Cronenberg is a master filmmaker, whose films sometimes fail to reverberate with me, but whose genius cannot be denied. There is a coldness and abstraction in much of his work, a heartlessness.

sorry if an apocalyptic film doesnt reach the awesome adrenaline highs of Tony Scott clockpunchers.

Yeah, he's just not up to the challenge anymore. I remember some discussion on another board around the time The Fountain came out about how it was the kinda film Ebert woulda gone nuts for back in the day (the film was released when he was off sick) and then when he finally did go back and review it he gave it like 2 stars.

don't understand complaints about "heartlessness" about anything

Avowed Cronenberg lover Walter Chaw's take:

http://www.filmfreakcentral.net/ffc/2012/08/cosmopolis.html#more

David Cronenberg's North by Northwest

OK, stop right there.

Alfred, crix are scratching their lazy distorted Kubrick itch w/ DC now.

There is definitely a critical level of detachment in this latest one, tho.

It is, finally, a summary of Cronenberg's work to this point, as well as a statement of absolute fear and loathing. A lovely post-modern work, it's killed God by discovering there never was one to begin with.

this is guff, and i'm getting p irritated w/ this critical position that if you don't dig cosmopolis then you don't really dig cronenberg at all, it's like revenge of the art film snob. for some tru cronenberg heads - well, me - it's all been downhill since the fly, and these faithful bloodless literary adaptations don't come close to the power and pleasure of the brood, videodrome, scanners etc etc. long live the new horror movie.

I'm mostly with you, but this is the first time I've really kinda dug a Cronenberg movie in more than a decade. We are also at the point in his career where every. single. one of his movies gets the lazy "career summation" treatment from stans.

ppl define "tru" differently, don't they

tru

No, there is only one tru Cronenberg head.

http://www.wheaton.me.uk/gallery/albums/userpics/10001/ScannersExplodingHead.gif

yeah, everything before Scanners is p meaningless to me

for some tru cronenberg heads - well, me - it's all been downhill since the fly, and these faithful bloodless literary adaptations don't come close to the power and pleasure of the brood, videodrome, scanners etc etc. long live the new horror movie.

― Ward Fowler, Thursday, August 23, 2012 12:57 PM (2 hours ago)

boom

though i have enjoyed quite a few of his post-fly films

this couldve been a lot better than it was

whoever thought that delillos prose shd be treated like mamet or whomever gets the gasface & pls dont let them make 'underworld' into a 12 hr epic

an old dude a few rows in front of me left abt halfway thru muttering (fairly loudly) 'crap'

Audience reaction was pretty visceral at my press screening. Toward the end, there was even some talkback.

Ward - Crash was p good, no?

Toward the end, there was even some talkback.

with Pattinson in his limo listening

Crash is awful

I was asking Ward.

Looking at that comment I guess it doesn't apply to Crash. The book is 'bloodless', the adaptation matches that. However Ballard is hardly 'literary'.

how is Ballard not literary

good question, and cronenberg's crash is a "literary adaptation" no matter what you think of the source material

Used to describe well written work that doesn't do much more than being well written (?) -- although that wasn't the way the word was being used earlier.

The path has been downhill (whose hasn't?) but I'd excuse Crash from that. xp

that makes "literary" sound like an insult...

Sure, it is...

"Crash" is closer to "Naked Lunch" in terms of how the adaptations relate to their source material (and Cronenberg's take on the latter is much more successful than the former imho). But I think both of those cases are different from what Ward was referring to as "faithful bloodless literary adaptations".

Sure, it is...

lol, i've never heard it used that way

But I think both of those cases are different from what Ward was referring to as "faithful bloodless literary adaptations".

― The Radioheads are massive in the Man community (Shakey Mo Collier), Friday, August 24, 2012 3:04 PM (1 minute ago)

must be, because neither is terribly faithful to its source

Naked Lunch >>>>>>>>>>>>> Crash

http://www.filmcomment.com/entry/interview-david-cronenberg

Crash > Naked Lunch.

Naked Lunch has a cracking score. Best music on any of DC's music.

DC's films.

Hi xyzzzz, yes Crash was p good, I agree w/ you there (tho' I'm not really in the market for quibbling over use of the word 'literary' thanx all the same) - Ballard JUST feels like a much better 'fit' for Cronenberg than Burroughs. I haven't seen Naked Lunch since it came out, but while I thought turning NL into a surreal biopic abt WSB was quite a clever response to an 'unfilmable' text, it did rather make the whole thing into yet another hetsex doomed romance w/ mediocre sfx, which (certainly at the time) seemed like a bit of a betrayl of Burroughs.

I guess my problem is, when he films Ballard or Burroughs or DeLillo (or Christopher fucking Hampton) he's obv serving somebody else's 'vision' as well as his own (kindly, you could say he achieves a synthesis between the two... I'm not so sure that he does). Combined w/ a 'late' style that is far slower, more self-consciously aesthetic (I'm thinking of the red gowns in Dead Ringers, which was the tipping point into art movie mannerism), it just seems like we're not getting the full fat Cronenberg anymore. Of course, artists change, and I'm sure Cronenberg felt in some ways confined by genre, but nobody else could've made a film like The Brood, whereas almost anyone could've given us Dangerous Method.

Thx Ward for adding here (and apols for the quibbling). Totally makes sense.

I need to see The Brood. They don't show that on TV, unlike a lot of his other films.

lol is that really what his naked lunch is like? that sounds terrible

i'm not sure i've ever seen a whole cronenberg movie, saw the first shot of a history of violence once

it is, and it is. it's kind of cool as a dishonest burroughs biopic with trippy bits, but it's fundamentally a betrayal of both the author and the novel. crash is just as bad in its own way.

I did doze off for about 30 seconds during the Giamatti-Pattinson dialogue. Some of this is leaden as hell. But it generates a perverse charm.

Ha I accidentally posted my reaction on the other thread but I dozed off for a few minutes right before it ended and the credits appearing snapped me out of it.

Audience reaction was pretty visceral at my press screening. Toward the end, there was even some talkback.

― Eric H., Friday, August 24, 2012 4:05 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

i read a review written after the premier and they described the apparently surreal scene of don delillo getting a standing ovation from an audience of 15 year old girls

I read the book when it came out and wasn't blown away, but now I'm thinking I'll re-read based on the various movie reviews. Maybe it'll come at me from a different perspective .

i think this is actually better than the book*, because there's only 2 hours of it and cronenberg doesn't really dawdle, and imo the dry humor comes off better on the screen than on the page.

that said its still not good. the first ten minutes or so made me think that it could end up being one of the worst films ever made, but then it kinda levels off. many of the scenes between pattinson and gadon feel like you're watching high school actors doing something serious

*the book sucks

I enjoyed this. Cronenberg doesn't seem like he's trying to knock himself out with this one, seems like a pretty quick project for him, but -- sustained surreal atmosphere, absurdly stilted & effective dialog, and this is a great year for a film with this subject matter. A little frustrated by the pacing at the end, his films now seem to slow down instead of explode, but... Also, in the past, I've always loved how when Cronenberg adapts other people's material, it always comes out in his own voice, even the dialog. That's not as true in this one -- it's much more straight-up transcribed DeLillo, Cronenberg hasn't done as much as he usually does to formally translate this into being a film.

I skipped watching his last two, but I'm a pretty hardcore fan, I found lots to like about M Butterfly and the only one I didn't get that much out of was Spider. This one was a good time.

This is one of my favs of the year so far. Granted I haven't seen a lot.

this was just terrible. I really like cronenberg and delillo too. but wooden and dull doesn't even begin to describe this.

i swear the book's about two hours long. i quite like it actually, the book. is this the first delillo adaptation? are there others i forget?

just a couple shorts. he did an orig script for a Michael Keaton film.

i swear the book's about two hours long. i quite like it actually, the book. is this the first delillo adaptation? are there others i forget?

― thomp, Sunday, September 9, 2012 10:54 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark

its only 200 pages and the font is large, but, im not a 200 pages in 2 hours kinda guy

I look forward to seeing this again. For some reason it seems like it would play well on tv, something you can dip in and out of.

god this was weird. started of so spectacularly horrible that i had to kill it 15 minutes in. the first three mettings w pattinson alongside baruchel, shifrin and nozuka were all just awful. like watching high-school kids try to deliver shakespearean language they don't even understand. bizarre. the basic approach seemed all wrong. like, some of that bizarre dialogue might have worked if the performances had been more archly ironic and playful, but for some reason, almost everyone in the movie seems to have been directed to deliver it in a flat, uninflected manner. pattinson the worst offender, obv.

came back later and watched the rest. was surprisingly okay for a while, half an hour or so. dug the sex-addled stretch from juliette binoche to patricia mckenzie. rectal exam was the film's high point, the only segment i really loved. samantha morton was good as the theoretician, though i thought she should have been styled in tribute to laurie anderson. after the hotel room tryst w the security guard, it got awful again. never recovered. even giamatti seemed lost. and that hideous scene with the old barber, and was that supposed to be like biggie or what?

cronenberg's had a career long tendency to build movies around handsome but mechanically-minded cyphers. nerds, idea men, scientists, outsiders. he usually casts sharp, compelling actors in these roles (goldblum, woods, irons, spader), but pattinson utterly fails to deliver. such a wasted opportunity, as with better actors in several roles, and a more interesting approach to the dialogue overall, this could have been great.

i dont know if there's anyway to make this dialogue sound good tbh

samantha morton was good as the theoretician, though i thought she should have been styled in tribute to laurie anderson

OTM, which is probably why her segment felt like one of the best scenes of the year.

(oic you're saying she should've been more Laurie Anderson-ish ... I thought she was basically there.)

It was the book's dialog transcripted to the screen, which was a bit rough my first watch through

i dont know if there's anyway to make this dialogue sound good tbh

yeah, that's the big takeaway question. i want to think it could have worked.

(oic you're saying she should've been more Laurie Anderson-ish ... I thought she was basically there.)

i wasn't sure. i thought that was maybe what they were as going for. made me want the suit and hair.

you're right though: all that lullaby talk about clocks, numbers, "money has lost its narrative quality", the (great) time division detour, the incantatory delivery. guess it didn't need to be any clearer.

he usually casts sharp, compelling actors in these roles (goldblum

*splutter

Lines uttered by Jeff Goldblum (as Dr. Ian Malcolm) in "Jurassic Park"

I thought I was the only Goldblum hater here

i refuse to believe that there are goldblum haters

Especially when Woods was next in the sequence.

(You did mean Elijah Woods, right?)

of course

at this point, i break cronenberg's above-ground career into three major arcs of descending quality:

rabid, the brood, scanners, videodrome, dead zone, the fly >>> dead ringers, naked lunch, m butterfly, crash, extenze >>> spider, AHOV, eastern promises, ADM, cosmopolis

in the the beginning, he's pretty much a straight-up horror/sci-fi filmmaker with a small set of pet obsessions.

during phase two, beginning with dead ringers, he trades cinematographer/DP mark irwin, who shot the run from the brood through the fly), for the much sleeker and moodier work of peter suschitzky, who's shot every major cronenberg film since. he turns his attention to adaptations of avant-garde novels and begins to distance himself from genre. as a result, his ambitions and tastes begin to seem rather self-consciously "cultivated". still got a thing for gory weirdness and ostentatious prosthetic effects, though.

in his films of the last 12 years, he's completed this transformation, settling into a tepid sort of well-read middlebrow intellectualism. at the same time, he's continued to do interesting and sometimes brilliant work: i count dead ringers, existenz and a history of violence among his best films, and am willing to concede that i may have underestimated crash, spider and eastern promises. but the last two have been pretty damn dire, and i find myself missing the unapologetically geeky spock-horror enthusiasms of his early films.

extenze was the one about that guy who has a boner all the time, right

im with you, tendy

His peak for me overlaps your first two periods: Videodrome -- Dead Ringers.

The Fly, Dead Ringers, A History of Violence -- three all-time killers. Naked Lunch and A Dangerous Mind in the next tier.

I'm done ranking Cronenberg forever. Doesn't seem to really matter which ones are great and which ones are pretentious swill.

Especially when so many of you are ranking RONG!

(some of) y'all are crazy, this movie was great after the first 10 minutes

I grant that each of those three "periods" contain at least one great fillum.

i woulda been totally okay with cronenberg doing stylish and inappropriately ultraviolent crime thrillers for the rest of his life but apparently at some point he stopped getting my psychic messages.

also this blew.

the delillio he shoulda made was running dog.

I would've said Libra but Oliver Stone already did.

Many of you kinda missed that this is essentially funny.

(admittedly a good minor work, a step down from A Dangerous Method)

Pattinson seemed to me a combo of Walken -- maybe it was the Queens accent -- and Shatner. On Novocaine.

I thought it was very funny.

For some reason it seems like it would play well on tv, something you can dip in and out of.

that is how savages watch films on TV

Oliver Stone's Savages, maybe

I didn't miss that it was funny.

there's a difference between missing it was funny and not finding it funny. This thing was about as funny as a prostate exam

cronenberg is at his best when he's completely humourless

You're nuts; all his films are funny, cept some of the early horror garbage.

I've had some pretty funny prostate exams.

All of the dialogue in this film feels like it's delivered by human computers, computational machines of human nature and geography. I'm not sure if the humor is in the disconnect, the stoic dialogue, or the strict continuance of plot.

There's something here, and maybe a different "here" than the novelette by its very difference.

Eh, I got that it was supposed to be funny. Problem was that it wasn't funny enough. And that many of the performances were horribly dull - odd and disconnected in a bad way.

"How come we never spent this kind of time together?"

*lascivious -- or is it threatened? -- eye contact *

* doctor fiddles around with gloves *

"Your prostate is asymmetrical."

It's really a movie where everyone speaks in their logical imperatives and not actual dialogue

refreshing

(it's breakdown language, somewhat akin to Beckett p'raps)

concede that the prostate exam was hilarious, easily my favorite scene

i really loved the language, even (especially?) when i could barely make out what it was supposed to mean. i liked the ominous foreboding entailed in everyone's manner but minus the emergence of, you know, an actual object of that dread.

hadn't thought of a beckett comparison, probably because I'm underversed in beckett. good avenue to explore, thanks.

along those same lines i think Delillo's own "The Names" explicitly engages a lot of these themes re: language and in really stupendous fashion. my fav novel of his that i've read.

(admittedly a good minor work, a step down from A Dangerous Method)

― saltwater incursion (Dr Morbius), Wednesday, January 2, 2013 11:20 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

allow me to just bristle at the implication that ADM was a major work

bristle, the universe will endure

Bristle4Ass

ADM underrated I think, but don't think this was minor in comparison.

Prostate scene was great, but it was Samantha Morton's scene that really worked on all sorts of levels.

She brought some welcome Laurie Anderson into the proceedings.

Cosmopolis is at least a step up from the awful ADM, which seems to me much more of a Christopher Hampton film than a David Cronenberg film

Look more carefully, Ward.

when I read the Morton scene in the novel, I actually visualized Pauline Kael.

Doesn't Packer get tased by the female bodyguard in the book?

i feel like i liked ADM to such a greater extent than everyone else here i missed something essentially embarrassing about it. possibly i just geeked out at a movie about 20th century intellectuals.

I need to rewatch it, but I just thought it was boring

Thought it was his best in years (tho I never saw Eastern Promises)

see i did find ADM funny. The Freud/Jung scenes anyway

maybe it was because of almost zero expectations, but i thought this pretty much ruled. maybe my favorite Cronenberg since the 80s. i don't know who played the main bodyguard, but i could watch him all day long. reminded me of Bill Callahan.

It's whatshisface from Lost.

i gave up on that shit early on. was he towards the beginning?

Somewhere in the middle iirc.

Kevin Durand is his name.

He was in the last third of Lost. As a corporate-seeming mercenary type!

Pattinson turning into what Depp used to be, only moreso?

Over the last year, he has been diligently making movie after independent movie, in what has been his first stretch of work post-Twilight. And so far, his direction seems clear – he’s working exclusively with auteurs, on films that are not obviously commercial, and in roles that are uniquely challenging and wildly different, one to the next.

Last summer, he finished The Rover in Australia, a dystopian western from David Michôd, who made 2010’s brilliant Animal Kingdom. Pattinson’s performance is already receiving rave reviews. He then spent 10 days on Maps to the Stars, David Cronenberg’s merciless satire about Hollywood, followed by Werner Herzog’s Queen of the Desert in which he plays Lawrence of Arabia. This spring, he made Anton Corbijn’s Life, in which he plays the photographer Dennis Stock, who took iconic photos of celebrities in the Fifties. And later, there’s a crime drama by the French director Olivier Assayas, co-starring Robert De Niro.

These are just the confirmed productions. There’s a long list of other compelling indie projects in the pipeline. A film with James Gray based on David Grann’s book The Lost City of Z, and a couple of films that are actually being written for him – Harmony Korine is writing him a gangster movie, set in Miami, and Brady Corbet, one of the killers in Michael Haneke’s blood-chilling Funny Games, is developing a script called Childhood of a Leader. “It’s about the youth of a future dictator in the Thirties,” he says....

http://www.esquire.co.uk/culture/film-tv/6735/robert-pattinson-interview-esquire-cover-star/

lol @ Korine bit

And later, there’s a crime drama by the French director Olivier Assayas, co-starring Robert De Niro.

oh lord no

hey morbius just outta curiosity which arc of depp's career would you match that to? asking out of ignorance & skepticism of jay-dee, i don't remember a hugely fruitful affiliation w/auteurs beyond jarmusch & i guess like ... schnabel

Well, Depp did Waters, Jarmusch, Lasse Hallstrom, Kusturica, John Badham, Gilliam, Polanski, Sally Potter, etc., all while juggling Burton and the occasional romcom.

that's about what i was thinkin... tho Hallstrom went to the dark side early

dude's certainly been putting in the indie cred-work (and will get to as long as his name helps with foreign pre-sales) but dude's actually yet to have one of his art-house efforts really be acclaimed

i'm sure one of them will ding bells on Metacritic eventually

unanimous acclaim frequently betrays some pandering

have you liked him in anything? can't say i've spotted a ton of potential

haha whoops, forgot what thread we're on

quickly checking Letterboxd, guess what single film i've seen him in

ty josh/morbs, xxxxp

i really liked the Depp-Kusturica film, but it essentially went unreleased in the US

wonder if Assayas can trick De Niro into making an effort

I can imagine him saying in press for the film, "Yes, the trick was to persuade Bobby to make an effort."

I've never seen Pattinson in anything but he's really good in this. He's EXTREMELY beautiful and weird looking though, no?

Yep.

I really like how his accent shifts when he visits the barber.

the scenes with sarah gadon are nice because it's two people who you can't help but stare at.

When he meets her outside the theatre the show she's just been to see is called Stage Play - I can't remember if that's in the book but I liked it.