eXistenZ (1999)
Directed by David Cronenberg
A game designer on the run from assassins must play her latest virtual reality creation with a marketing trainee to determine if the game has been damaged.
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It only becomes sharper and more resonant with his remake of The Fly, where he charts the transformation in gooey detail that looks like some diseased attack on the human body (it’s been called a metaphor for AIDS) and eXistenZ, a virtual reality game made flesh, where the line between fantasy and reality doesn’t so much blur as dissolve and overpowering artificial stimulus comes back to effect physical reality.
Movies like "Videodrome" and "Dead Ringers" sought to unravel safe moviegoing with an unrelenting degree of physical abuse and visual prankishness - he managed a moving sight gag of a transvestite John Lone in "M.
The The brilliant filmmaker David Cronenberg returns for the first time since his 1996 masterpiece Crash and with his first original screenplay since 1983's Videodrome.
Cronenbergs first original screenplay since Videodrome puts us back into his special brand of science fiction: the sexualization of all sensory experience, bio-technology that fuses flesh with mechanics in a creation as much evolutionary mutation as science, murky conspiracies, disease, mutation, and the shifting dimensions of realities.
It's an arresting image, but derivative and gratuitous -- the gun made flesh made a much bigger impact in Cronenberg's far more disturbing Videodrome, as did the whole notion of the metamorphosis of the body into machinery and vice versa (a theme also explored in Cronenberg's masterpiece, The Fly).
In what is almost a David Cronenberg 101, "eXistenZ" sees the Canadian director revisiting themes already plundered in " Videodrome " (1982), "Naked Lunch" (1991), and "Crash" (1996), although this time in a more accessible format.
Allegra and Pikul become a pair of B-movie outlaws transplanted straight from "Gun Crazy" and dropped into the generica of an apocalyptic, Playstation version of "Detour."
Since Dead Ringers hes changed his cinematic attack somewhat, pushing the taboo transgressions into less obvious and more insidious territory and leaving the most disturbing elements to the imagination.
Earthy textures emerge from the darkness again and again, sometimes overlayed with anatomical drawings that recall the opening titles of Cronenberg's last great film, Dead Ringers (1987).
Similarly, the subsequent tale of escape from and confrontation with nebulous conspiratorial forces, not to mention that old chestnut the nature of reality, has been brought to light by the filmmaker with more conviction in the likes of Scanners and Naked Lunch.
In what is almost a David Cronenberg 101, "eXistenZ" sees the Canadian director revisiting themes already plundered in " Videodrome " (1982), "Naked Lunch" (1991), and "Crash" (1996), although this time in a more accessible format.
It was directed by David Cronenberg ("Crash" and "Naked Lunch").
The latest offering from Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg is probably the wildest ride he's given audiences since 1992's "Naked Lunch."
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Maybe it's the fact that every minute of the early scenes has the makeshift quality of an underground secret, with Christopher Eccleston ( "Shallow Grave" ) playing the focus group Svengali.
It's an arresting image, but derivative and gratuitous -- the gun made flesh made a much bigger impact in Cronenberg's far more disturbing Videodrome, as did the whole notion of the metamorphosis of the body into machinery and vice versa (a theme also explored in Cronenberg's masterpiece, The Fly).
Similarly, the subsequent tale of escape from and confrontation with nebulous conspiratorial forces, not to mention that old chestnut the nature of reality, has been brought to light by the filmmaker with more conviction in the likes of Scanners and Naked Lunch.
The director of Scanners (1981) and Videodrome (1983), after all, is one of the few filmmakers for whom a hallucinatory virtual reality flick could be considred retro.
In fact, the same ideas were presented in a more compelling and controversial fashion several years ago in the James Cameron/Katherine Bigelow collaboration, Strange Days .
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They seek refuge at a ski chalet run by her crony Kiri Vinokur (Ian Holm with the worst Russian accent since John Malkovich in Rounders), where Allegra determines that to get to the root of the problem she and Ted must both log on to "eXistenZ."