David Cronenberg, the director who gave us Rabid, Scanners, the remake of The Fly, Naked Lunch and A History of Violence, is back with his big screen adaptation of the Don DeLillo novel Cosmopolis.
In fact, Croneberg’s work can only be uniquely his in that there’s no other filmmaker like him anywhere.
He moved beyond the horror genre in fine style, but can still deliver extreme elements, along with great intelligence that doesn’t condescend to the audience. He’s not for everyone, but the guy is still making movies as good, if not better, than he ever has.
While the film has gotten mixed reviews, it has proven to some critics that indeed Twilight star Robert Pattinson is more than a pretty face. As The Daily Beast writes, “Critics have charged that the young star, famous for his mannered performances in the Twilight saga and tabloid-fodder breakup with Kristen Stewart, cannot act. Cosmopolis may change their minds.”
As veteran film critic J. Hoberman wrote in the L.A. Times, even a period piece like A Dangerous Method, or a film that takes place in a limo like Cosmopolis, has “an alienated, science-fiction flavor,” and the limo in the film “has intimations of the moon shuttle in 2001… Indeed, Cronenberg is not only Kubrick’s heir as the most experimental narrative filmmaker at work today but the most provocative and consistently original North American director of his generation.”
And of course, considering it’s a new day, that means another remake announcement, and this one is for Cronenberg’s Videodrome, which was very ahead of its time. Audiences didn’t quite know what to make of it when it came out in 1983, but people started catching on to it several years after it first came out when Cronenberg had a big commercial hit with The Fly. (BTW, Cronenberg couldn’t have picked a better movie to update himself than The Fly, and it was indeed one of those remakes that was better than the original).
As Deadline tells us, the new Videodrome was written by Ehren Kruger, who also co-wrote Transformers 2, and first broke through with Arlington Road, and up to direct is Adam Berg, a commercial director. The technological world of the original Videodrome was when the VCR and cable boom was getting started, with the latest iteration of the franchise updated with nanotechnology.
Funny enough, at one point, Cronenberg was even toying with the idea of rebooting The Fly, which was a reboot of the ‘50s sci-fi classic itself. Thankfully, he’s still committed to making films that are uniquely his, and again, as Cronenberg approaches his 70th birthday, he’s proving that making great movies isn’t necessarily a young man’s game.
