Cultures, Shocked

I was going to write about my disgust with Doug Ford winning a second majority government this week, but honestly, there’s nothing new to say. We collectively chose to keep the guy who makes things worse for everyone he doesn’t personally know – hell, he even exploited his kid brother’s misery for a quick hit of popularity – and grins as he encourages his supporters to be their worst selves. He tried to bluff his way through a fucking pandemic, and thousands of people died terribly and needlessly. Fuck him, fuck the cronies and sycophants who praise his nonexistent political savvy so he’ll sign off on their corrupt, self-enriching projects, fuck the progressive parties who failed to campaign against his incompetence or even offer a decent alternative this time around, and fuck the voters who supported his candidates because it feels good when you make other people feel bad. I used to try to empathize with them; now I just hope they don’t get sick. I suppose that's still a form of empathy.

Aaaaanyway. You want to see sick people? David Cronenberg has you covered.

There’s no telling when Crimes of the Future – which opened at the Lightbox on Friday and will show its multifarious diseases to the rest of Canada on Friday – is taking place. The film opens on a shot of a mother and child playing on a placid beach, the wreckage of a colossal cruise liner obscuring the horizon like the garbage island it is. Maybe it’s the Costa Concordia, and we’re somewhere on the Tuscan coast? No one’s speaking Italian. Some of the signs are Greek, but no one speaks that language either. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter; Cronenberg’s future is a waves-vaguely-at-everything polyglot of cultures and ideas. Fashion trends are indistinct; technology has taken a turn for the tactile; all you need to know is that we’re somewhere else.

As always, Cronenberg wraps his horrors in exquisite formalism; as Adam Nayman observes in his expert New Yorker profile, “his cool style has a way of peeling back cinematic conventions and clichés, and extracting the intellectual marrow at the core of his sci-fi scenarios.” With their slow, deliberate camera moves and an almost hushed sonic quality, his films pull us inexorably into worlds that resemble our own but which, we soon realize, are seething with perversity and despair. Bodies betray their inhabitants; emotions and instincts overwhelm otherwise rational minds. Hallucination and reality play swapsies on the regular, to the point where the physical world becomes distressingly fungible. Cronenberg could have told you why NFTs would never fly; we can’t understand things that aren’t subject to change.

And the world is changing. People don’t suffer bodily infections any longer, or feel pain; those fragilities just sort of went away. (The working title for the script was Painkillers.) We can still die, and badly, but only a fraction of a fraction can register agony. It’s been happening long enough that most people are over it. Some have adjusted in other ways.

Cronenberg wrote the script for Crimes of the Future around the same time he produced eXistenZ, and part of me wonders whether this story plays out within that movie’s VR program; it shares the same aesthetic, a production design inspired of fish scales and seahorse skin, and the same sense of grotty exhaustion. Through this world staggers the artist Saul Tenser, played by frequent Cronenberg collaborator Viggo Mortensen, whose body keeps growing new organs of random size and function. When they’re ripe, he and his creative partner Caprice (Léa Seydoux) organize a gallery event around their public removal.

Saul’s art is technically illegal, though the government officials who are supposed to prevent such performances turn out to be closet fans: The elder, played by Don McKellar in what I think is meant to be an inversion of his role in Atom Egoyan’s Exotica, tacitly encourages him while the younger, played by a charmingly overeager Kristen Stewart, is downright excited to see what he has to show her. “Surgery is the new sex,” she blurts out at one point, and while I don’t find that line either as weighted or as funny as the delicious ambiguity Mortensen gives Saul’s apologetic admission that he has “a throat thing” going on, it’s the line everyone’s determined to make a slogan.

Surgery, however, is not sex in Crimes of the Future. Sex is still sex, although – as always happens in Cronenberg’s cinema – it has a habit of producing monsters. The new film is rife with notions lifted from his earlier work, from the beauty pageant for internal organs joked about in Dead Ringers to the appearance of zealots bent on overturning the existing order with their own bodies, a bit that technically goes all the way back to Shivers (and maybe even to his 1970 student feature Crimes of the Future, about a plague that killed off the world's women and which may have been deliberately engineered) but truly found its own voice in The Brood’s psychoplasmics and Scanners’ Ephemerol mutants.

Scott Speedman carries that forward here as Lang Dotrice, an enigmatic revolutionary who may be the leader of a global bio-terrorist operation, or the New Flesh incarnate, or possibly both; he’s constantly eating candy bars and hoping Tenser will take notice of him. There’s a different sort of machinery at work in the world, is his argument, and it’s time to move things along. He may well be right. Those candy bars look pretty good.

DISC OF THE WEEK

WILD THINGS (Arrow, 4K/Blu-ray)

Here’s a surprise: John McNaughton’s beloved cult thriller about dangerous liaisons at a Florida high school– which now feels like a perfect snapshot of that post-Tarantino moment where the majors tried to outdo their indie competitors for overheated grown-up pictures – has never had a special-edition release until now. (Columbia’s DVD had a filmmakers’ commentary and three deleted scenes, which constituted a minimalist release for that label in 1999; those meager supplements made it onto overseas Blu-rays, but fell off the North American platter.) The master cheesemongers at Arrow Films know when something deserves celebration, though, and they’ve gone all out on this one.

And why wouldn’t they? Even more than Basic Instinct, Wild Things is the ’90s erotic thriller of its era that welcomes audience participation. McNaughton’s ability to slide the film’s tone from legitimate dramatic thriller into smart, self-possessed sleaze is the key; Campbell and Richards attenuate their performances to accommodate our growing understanding of the plot. It makes us feel like accomplices in the increasingly lurid, overheated silliness of it all, and it’s ever so much fun. You’ve got Neve Campbell sneering like there’s no tomorrow, Matt Dillon modulating his “dumbest guy in the room” performance from There’s Something About Mary withan undercurrent of convincing menace, Bill Murray gleefully fucking with his co-stars as a morally flexible defense attorney and – almost incidentally – Bacon and Richards delivering some career-best work. And yeah, I know, it’s a low bar for Richards, but she’s perfectly on point here.

My packed preview screening in the cavernous Varsity 8 had no idea what they were in for, and between the audible gasps at Kevin Bacon’s pickle shot and some guy apparently vaulting through puberty during the threesome sequence, it was livelier than most of that decade’s Midnight Madness shows. I can only imagine how disappointed that poor guy was when he brought home the unrated DVD a few years later to discover its juiciest element was a scene in which Murray annoys Robert Vaughn at a diner. (It’s really fun, though.)

Arrow’s special edition – available in separate Blu-ray and UHD editions – is built around a new 4K master of both the theatrical and unrated cuts. Both versions of the film look great, the Florida locations appearing bright and lurid with minimal digital tinkering; that filmic texture I love so much about HDR is once again in evidence here. Colors are vivid, foliage is lush and deep, crappy hotel rooms are appropriately seamy, and everyone’s heavy breathing is well-represented on the remastered DTS-HD soundtrack.

The nuts-and-bolts DVD commentary with McNaughton, DP Jeffrey Kimball, editor Elena Maganini, composer George S. Clinton and producers Steven A. Jones and Rodney Libert, is resurrected for this edition; McNaughton and Jones also contribute a new track, sharing a few additional production stories and quietly marveling at the longevity of this goofy picture they so clearly enjoyed making. Other extras include new interviews with McNaughton and Richards, an EPK featurette of on-set interviews and some brief outtakes of Murray being Murray. The trailer and a still gallery round out the disc, and the package also includes a booklet with essays by Anne Billson and Sean Hogan, a replica poster and six lobby cards. (I was only sent a check disc. Harrumph.)

BACK IN CIRCULATION

THE BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI and LAWRENCE OF ARABIA (Sony, 4K)

I was going to catch up to Criterion’s excellent Blu-ray releases of The Funeral and ’Round Midnight this week, but then Sony went and reissued its glorious 4K discs of The Bridge on the River Kwai and Lawrence of Arabia in new steelbook packaging on Tuesday to mark their respective 65^th and 60^thanniversaries. David Lean being David Lean, and Lawrence being one of my all-time favorite films, I couldn’t help but shove everything else off the table to celebrate them.

If you’re a fan of Lean’s epics you’ve probably grabbed Kwai already, but this is the first time the UHD Lawrence has been made available on its own. (It was released in 2020 as part of the first Columbia Classics boxed set.) The steelbook graphics are pretty; the movies are glorious – one a film about a man who loses himself to a larger cause, another about a man who finds his true self in one. Both will be horrified by the person they become; only one gains that knowledge in time to save himself.

Together they comprise six and a half of the most rapturous hours you’ll ever spend in front of a screen, with David Niven and Peter O’Toole carrying the themes of their respective stories along with their narrative weight as Lean gives us the space to simply watch them exist, wrestling with questions of duty and honor in worlds that ultimately care little for either, no matter how much time they spend talking about them.

Kwai and Lawrence have been lovingly restored over the decades, and their 4K editions are as close to pristine as we’re likely to get; Lawrence once again uses the 1989 70mm restoration by Robert Harris and James C. Katz as its master text, with HDR grading allowing for an even richer color palette and Dolby Atmos enabling a more sweeping soundtrack. Kwai, a slightly less polished production, is gritty and beautiful, its sweaty, humid landscape feeling just a little more punishing – and its location work that much more impressive.

All the extras from the earlier editions are included here, meaning Lawrence is still a four-disc set, with two UHD platters for the feature and two Blu-rays for the feature and its voluminous supplements. Kwai’s 4K platter is different from the 2017 edition; this edition adds Dolby Vision to the previous HDR grade, and includes the original mono soundtrack in DTS-HD Master Audio along with the 2017 Dolby Atmos mix. (The accompanying Blu-ray is the same, though, supplementing the film with a trove of pre-existing extras.) If you don’t already own the movie in 4K – or you’ve invested in a Dolby Vision display – you’re going to want to pick this one up. Lawrence,too. It doesn’t get any better than that.

Next week: I’ll definitely catch up to those Criterion discs. And that new dinosaur movie will be out. But please god don’t make me write about Morbius.