Cronenberg's Upcoming Films (Cosmopolis Trailer)

[perfectprism]

thought of one:



characters are janky as hell and low production values abound, but it definitely hits the seemingly neglected spot for this sub-sub-genre

[Career Over Like Mike(NJJ)]

David Cronenberg is set to follow Cosmopolis with Maps To The Stars, which reportedly tells the story of two child actors caught up in Hollywood's darker side. The film is set to star Robert Pattinson, Rachel Weisz and Viggo Mortensen.

I'll take that over another Cronenberg movie starring Keira Knightley's chin.

[Comedy Quaddafi]

That sound pretty interesting. Hes in a slump with his three most recent movies being rather mediocre (last convincing effort was AHOV in 2005), but I think he will deliver something good before he calls it quits.

[Spartan]

Really? If anything, I found Cosmopolis very reminiscent to his earlier work and an extension to some of his old themes.

[Tommy Bunz]

Really? If anything, I found Cosmopolis very reminiscent to his earlier work and an extension to some of his old themes.

[perfectprism]

yeah Cosmo was super dope imo, one of the more refreshing/surprising movies I've seen in a while.

that cast sounds intriguing and I could see that plot leading to really fucked up territory, into the anticipation queue it goes. here's hopin pattison sticks with cronenberg for a while to help shake off the twilight stigma, dude plays the ice-water-in-the-veins type role incredibly well

[Spartan]

http://blogs.indiewire.com/theplaylist/ ... e-20121214

Exclusive: David Cronenberg Shares Details Of Canceled 'Eastern Promises 2' & 'The Fly' Remake

Earlier this week while talking to one of our favorite directors, David Cronenberg, about the upcoming DVD/Blu-ray release of his underrated 2012 gem "Cosmopolis," we asked the filmmaker about a pair of his most tantalizingly unrealized projects: a sequel to his tremendous gangster movie "Eastern Promises" and a spin-off/sequel/something to his 1986 sci-fi classic "The Fly" (itself a remake of the considerably sillier film of the same name from 1958).
Though it had been brewing for a while, and was aiming to shoot this past October, we learned over the summer that Focus Features ultimately pulled the plug on "Eastern Promises 2." But we couldn't help but wonder where the story would have gone next. "It was something I really wanted to explore because it was the first time I had ever been tempted to do a sequel because I felt I wasn’t finished with the character of Nikolia, played by Viggo Mortensen, and Kirill played by Vincent Cassel," Cronenberg explained, about why he was tempted to reenter the "Eastern Promises" fray.

In Cronenberg's eyes, taking on the characters again required a change of scenery. "I really wanted to see Nikolia go back to Russia, because one of the things I wanted in the first movie was that you see a bunch of Russians in London but you never see them in Russia. In other words you experience their exile and they are trying to recreate some of Russia within London," Cronenberg explained. "In the original screenplay there were some scenes in Russia and I thought it was better if we don't see that – they long for Russia but we never see that."

Cronenberg went on to detail how the second film would be set up. "In the sequel," he explained. "We would see Nikolai go to Russia and there would be Russian elements and so on and so on. And [original screenwriter] Steve Knight wrote a lovely script." But why did it end up falling apart? "Focus Features couldn't agree on a budget, basically," Cronenberg said. "I thought it was a very ambitious script and I wanted to do it properly and they really felt the financial restraints of the world in general. It was a really budget disagreement." With some heartbreaking finality, Cronenberg said: "As far as I'm concerned I'm not involved anymore."

Back in 2011, it was reported that Cronenberg was working on a revision of "The Fly," one of his most beloved and commercially successful movies (it starred a young Jeff Goldblum and Geena Davis), for Fox. But almost as soon as that news surfaced, it was revealed that the studio has passed on the project. Cronenberg was hesitant to share too many details, but he did say, "It wasn't really a remake, it was more of a sequel or a sidebar. It was a meditation on fly-ness. None of the same characters or anything and, of course, with an understanding of modern technology. It was something I was very pleased with and it was a disappointment not to get it made." Cronenberg said that the same thing that derailed "Eastern Promises 2" also swatted "The Fly": "Again it was a budget problem, basically."

[ian e]

just stumbled across this very in-depth interview with cronenberg. apparently it was produced for and broadcasted on german television. it's in english tho. link:

http://www.3sat.de/mediathek/index.php? ... &obj=35323

[Career Over Like Mike(NJJ)]

So, Maps To The Stars is pretty, prettty good. Julianne Moore's Havana character might be the most toxic fading star protagonist since Norma Desmond and she's an eerie snapshot of Lindsay Lohan's real life in , say, 15 years.

(It's all over the 'net as it's out internationally even though it's not getting released in the U.S until next year.)

[zombie]

They aren't doing an eastern promises 2?


Fuck...

[ackbar]

i'll give 'maps to the stars' a shot. it's still playing at the festival here, so i might check in theatre
it's getting some terrible reviews that i've seen.

[Career Over Like Mike(NJJ)]

An old couple sitting in our row walked out about 25 minutes in muttering that it was "stupid crap".

It's also gotten some great reviews

Maps to the Stars review – David Cronenberg enters the dark heart of Hollywood

A towering performance by Julianne Moore drives the Canadian director’s study of the terrors of Tinseltown

4 out of 5

Mark Kermode

Films that purport to satirise, examine, or eviscerate the vacuous horrors of Hollywood often end up as fatuously empty and self-involved as their subject. Look at Paul Schrader and Bret Easton Ellis’s pitiful The Canyons, a classic case of people in glass houses merrily throwing bricks at themselves. Good job, then, that perennial outsider David Cronenberg clearly isn’t the least bit dazzled or seduced by the cultural cesspool of his latest movie, a tale of terminal Tinseltown wastrels with the twisted structure of a Greek tragedy and the rictus grin of a freshly poisoned sitcom.

On the contrary, Cronenberg observes the assortment of pestilential players in Bruce Wagner’s self-reflexive script with characteristic detachment, like a scientist watching bacteria multiplying in a Petri dish. The symptoms may be cultural rather than physical, but as with early films such as Rabid and Shivers, Cronenberg’s primary response to the display of disease is one of wry detachment – fascination rather than infatuation.

Mia Wasikowska stars as burn-scarred Agatha, returning to the alienating womb of California after a lengthy period of enforced separation. Via the vagaries of social networking (a very Cronenbergian viral malaise), Agatha lands a job as “chore whore” for fading actress Havana Segrand (Julianne Moore, looking like Lindsay Lohan’s wicked stepsister) whose broiling neuroses are being treated by self-help media quack Dr Stafford Weiss (John Cusack). Havana longs to land the lead role in a remake of a film that originally starred her mother (Sarah Gadon), a Hollywood legend who died in a fire and who now haunts her embittered, twisted daughter. Meanwhile, Bieberesque brat Benjie Weiss (Evan Bird) finds his star-crossed path inevitably intertwined with that of Agatha despite the best efforts of his mother, Cristina (Olivia Williams), to preserve and exploit the precocious monster whom she and her charlatan husband have spawned.

If The Brood (an early body-horror gem starring Samantha Eggar) was Cronenberg’s Kramer vs Kramer, then Maps is his Sunset Boulevard, with sprinklings of Chinatown, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls and Mommie Dearest thrown in for good measure. At the centre of it all is Moore, magnificently horrendous as the needy-greedy Havana, wallowing in the amniotic fluid of her own narcissistic self-loathing – a sick, siren-like performance of parasitic perfection. There’s something of Eggar’s Nola Carveth in Moore’s Gorgon-like creation; watching Havana sitting in the lotus position, screaming in fury at the world, you half expect her to sprout boils from which the ravenous children of her rage will spill to wreak bloody havoc in the Hollywood hills.There’s more than a hint of The Brood’s “Psychoplasmics”, too, in Dr Weiss’s hands-on therapy, which physicalises Havana’s fury with no discernible benefit beyond the financial; the genre and shape of rage may have changed, but Cronenberg’s core psychodramatic concerns remain a constant.

After the suffocating sterility of Cosmopolis and the stagey psychoanalysis of A Dangerous Method, Maps to the Stars finds Cronenberg returning to the kind of movie-making that prompts physical response, in this case laughter, the nervous sibling of horror. To say that this is Cronenberg’s funniest film sounds like damning it with faint praise, but anyone who tittered in terror at the spectacle of the exploding head in Scanners will recognise the queasy laugh/scream dilemma provoked by the sight of Havana dancing on the graves of children in a fit of ecstatic, psychotic celebration. Moore deserves an Oscar for her performance, although considering the nefarious use to which Cronenberg’s own Genie statuette (for Spider) is put to use in this film, judges may run shy of handing the makers of Maps to the Stars any sharp, heavy objects.

Against the radioactive toxicity of Moore’s performance it’s hard for anyone to hold their own, but Wasikowska provides ice-cool counterpoint to Moore’s sweltering self-regard, Agatha’s quirky composure covering deep wellsprings of barely contained chaos. Williams, too, is terrific as the steely stage mom who talks percentage points and urine tests over breakfast with her cash-cow progeny, while Robert Pattinson keeps things nicely underplayed as the dorky chauffeur (Wagner drove and wrote when he first came to Hollywood) whose supporting role puts a sly spin on his limo-riding star turn in Cosmopolis – this time, he’s in the driver’s seat.

Beneath the jet-black humour there is real horror – a rampant existential panic that eats away at the lives of the rich and famous, conjuring visions of ghosts from the empty spaces where their souls should be, infecting those who feed upon them and who are desperate to share their disease. Along with Videodrome, which playfully wondered whether movies really could make you sick, I was reminded at times of David’s son Brandon Cronenberg’s underrated Antiviral, in which fans pay huge sums to contract their idols’ cold sores – and worse. Anyone satirising Hollywood runs the risk of such infection, but surrounded with his usual team of collaborators (cinematographer Peter Suschitzky, composer Howard Shore etc), the Canadian Cronenberg maintains a protective barrier between himself and his subject – slicing into its body like a surgeon with a scalpel, laying bare the great malignancy that lurks beneath its pallid, ghastly skin.

[Spartan]

Yeah, his Youtube vid was very positive about it. Gonna have to watch it even though I can't stand Julianne Moore.

Edit: Oh crap, all these years and I thought that Twilight geezer was called Robert Patterson. Need to edit my film round-up pronto.

[Tommy Bunz]

Has anyone here copped Cronenberg's new novel Consumed? Thinking about buying it for myself for xmas.