Curiosity Inc.

“Hollywood is a place where they’ll pay you a thousand dollars for a kiss and fifty cents for your soul.” –Marilyn Monroe

There’s an increasingly sharp divide between 20th-century David Cronenberg and 21st-century David Cronenberg. In his 20th-century heyday, Cronenberg was mostly known for horror films with grotesque makeup effects, such as The Fly (1986), Scanners, and Videodrome. And to a large degree, those films still make up the bulk of his reputation among filmgoers. But they bear very little resemblance to his 21st-century work.

It’s hard to believe that the same guy was responsible for films like A History of Violence, A Dangerous Method, and Cosmopolis. Cronenberg has always had a flair for making intelligent cinema, but his more recent works have been decidedly void of special effects, bodily horror, or sci-fi allegory. Yet these films (Cosmopolis in particular) seem to take place in a world that’s only slightly heightened from our own reality, off-putting in just such a way that we’re implicitly led to keep our guard up by keeping our brains turned on.

Maps to the Stars is more of the same, in that it’s a movie playing by its own bizarre set of rules. Oh, don’t get me wrong, the rules and logic resemble that of our own real world at first. But as the characters continue to weave their way through the plot and the symbolism goes ever deeper, there comes a point when you have to stop and wonder just how the fuck we got to this point. And then someone bursts into flames for no reason. I’ll try to elaborate.

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First we have writer/directors Glenn Ficarra and John Requa, previously responsible for Crazy, Stupid, Love. Though the trailers for that film so famously introduced the world to Ryan Gosling’s abs and the rest of the cast was very impressive, the picture itself turned out to be a cliched and instantly forgettable mediocrity.

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Time to call it, folks: Neill Blomkamp is fool’s gold.

He seemed like the next big genre filmmaker when District 9 hit the scene, backed by Peter Jackson after their hyped-up adaptation of Halo so infamously fell apart. Granted, D9 had a flimsy story and a few painfully two-dimensional central characters, but the premise was intriguing and the South African setting was something new to Hollywood cinema. Blomkamp did a superb job of delivering aliens and robots with immersive grit and superlative VFX skill, to say nothing of his bold attempt at bringing some intelligence back to mainstream science fiction. He also introduced the world to Sharlto Copley, which is no bad thing. Read the rest of this entry →

Ah, death. Such a universal, timeless, perpetually fascinating subject. It doesn’t always make for uplifting or entertaining cinema (unlike the far more tired and overused subject of love), but I suspect that’s in large part because death is so final. It truly is the undiscovered country, from whose bourn no traveler returns. As long as that holds true, I suspect that humanity will always be fascinated with the nature of death, what awaits us when we’ve shuffled off this mortal coil, and whether it can or even should be controlled.

This curiosity is naturally reflected in our entertainment, from The Re-Animator to Frankenstein to the umpteen trillion stories about ghosts and zombies (though modern zombie fiction tends to dabble more often in social observations regarding consumerism, conformism, etc.). Stories about death and resurrection are as old as the art of storytelling itself, going clear back to Heracles, Orpheus, and all the other ancient mythical figures who ventured to the afterlife and back. Read the rest of this entry →

Awards contenders are typically released near the end of the year, the better to stay fresh in the minds of Academy voters and relevant to the moviegoing public. This is the way it’s been for years. But this awards season, the trend was taken way too far. Not only did we have way too many awards hopefuls in a dogpile on top of each other between Christmas and New Year’s, but we also got movies released so late in the year that they didn’t have time to earn any votes. This was the fate of Selma, which got snubbed six ways from Sunday in large part because it wasn’t finished soon enough to send out screeners in a timely manner.

Another example is A Most Violent Year, a critical darling with a 90 percent Tomatometer, an Oscar-friendly cast and a theatrical release of… wait for it… December 31st, 2014. So of course it got shut out of the Oscars entirely. The best it could manage was a Best Supporting Actress Golden Globe nomination for Jessica Chastain. It really makes you wonder what the hell the distributors could possibly have been thinking.

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