David Cronenberg

This morning I got my first glimpse of the trailer for David Cronenberg's latest film, A Dangerous Method, and I dare say, it looks to harken back to Cronenberg's earlier-career themes: making his audiences uncomfortable in their seat, though not (at least from the trailer) from his trademark "body horror" but more to the unnerving nature of the plot. And after this 2007 mainstream release Eastern Promises (which I think many Cronenberg fans saw as a sellout), I think many such fans will be relieved to see the filmmaker return to his roots . . . if, in fact, that is the case of A Dangerous Method. For all we know, it could be just as mainstream as Eastern Promises, but time will tell on that front.

I have to confess, David Cronenberg was something of an acquired taste for me. It wasn't until after I'd seen his more mainstream films, like Eastern Promises and A History of Violence, that I became familiar with Cronenberg's style of filmmaking—and to be frank, I wasn't expecting what I saw. My first real foray into Cronenberg's "body horror" genre was with Naked Lunch, and while I knew about the giant talking bugs beforehand, I didn't expect them to unnerve me the way they did. After that, I watched Videodrome . . . and all I can say about my first viewing is, "Holy hell!" It's one thing to see gill slits randomly appear on a human body in the midst of a hallucination; it's a whole other ballgame to see James Woods inserting and removing full-blown objects (like a gun) from said gill slits, almost like he was putting it into his pocket. After that came a viewing of Dead Ringers (which Nora refers to as "that terrible Jeremy Irons movie"), which at the time was enough to make me quit Cronenberg's old-school films cold turkey.

But then a strange thing happened.

For Christmas 2008, my future mother-in-law gave me a copy of Naked Lunch on DVD as a gift, and after re-watching it, I found I had a much greater appreciation of the film than I did on first viewing. Yes, the giant talking bugs were still bizarre, unsettling, and somewhat gross, but I nevertheless gained a certain respect for the creativity and genius behind the inception of this film (which was actually an adaptation from a controversial beat novel). Having gained a certain admiration for Naked Lunch, I then rewatched both Videodrome and Dead Ringers, and found an equitable admiration for both films, as well as a respect for Cronenberg's style of filmmaking. In fact, what draws me to Dead Ringers now is the great tragedy that befalls the two main characters—the identical twins who lose their way, grow apart, and only reconnect through their mutual drugged-out downfall. And I'll also go on record to say that Jeremy Irons was robbed big time of an Oscar nomination (and win!) for Dead Ringers.

Having acquired the taste of Cronenberg through several of his trademark films, that should not suggest, however, that I love all his films. I still find Crash unwatchable (not to be confused with the 2005 Best Picture winner, which I thought was a masterpiece), and I was very disappointed with eXistenZ, because I thought the so-called twist at the end cheapened the whole movie. His remake of The Fly I was somewhat indifferent to, though I will say that Jeff Goldblum really proved his acting chops in that film. I once saw The Dead Zone a long, long time ago, but I don't remember how I felt about it (though I read the Stephen King book beforehand, and loved it). I have yet to see some of his more well-known early works, too, like Scanners and The Brood, both of which I believe were in his body horror camp.

Anyway, how did I get off on this long tangent? Oh yes, I was talking about the trailer for A Dangerous Method. Well, hopefully I'll get to see Cronenberg's latest release this year (though I'll likely be watching it solo), and I'd be very interested to see if he returns to his roots of making an unnerving movie that only certain audiences will enjoy and appreciate—and stomach. Until then . . . long live the new flesh!

Steven Spielberg

I feel like I have a love/hate relationship with the movies of Steven Spielberg. For a man whose movies have left an indelible mark on cinema in the last 30 years, I still can't seem to decide whether or not I like him as a director, or whether or not I like his movies. I guess one of the major problems I have with Spielberg movies, and this may sound trite, but it's how he idealizes things, turns moments into the warm and fuzzy feel-good scenes, which I feel is totally unrealistic. Having said that, though, Spielberg has made some absolutely brutal movies already, so while I say his feel-good moments are sappy and unrealistic, I can't ever accuse him of being completely out of touch with how terrible and how cruel real life can be.

But if I had to list some of the Spielberg movies I like, seated firmly at the top of the list would be Raiders of the Lost Ark, which introduced to the world the unforgettable character of Indiana Jones. I can't tell you how many Sundays I spent as a teenager watching Raiders and Last Crusade. (Temple of Doom I only rediscovered after buying the Indiana Jones DVD set.) Minority Report I absolutely loved! I don't know why, but I still find it hard to believe that it was a Spielberg-directed film. Maybe because sci-fi of this degree isn't what I would associate with Spielberg (E.T. notwithstanding), but I love the thinking element to Minority Report, how it challenges the viewer to not only accept what happens but to think about what it means on a larger scale. And what I can say about Jaws that hasn't been said already? (Hell, I think about it every time I hear Dvorăk's New World Symphony, thank you very much John Williams!) A story that gets circulated a lot in my family is how a distant cousin saw a TV special about the special effects in Jaws—in particular, the severed head that pops out of the bottom of the boat—and when he saw that scene in the theaters, he actually laughed while the audience cringed in terror.

Spielberg really hit his high-water mark in 1993, though, scoring back-to-back mega-hits with Jurassic Park and Schindler's List, the latter going on to win multiple Oscars, including Best Picture. Jurassic Park, while definitely having a dark element to it, was still more reminiscent of the feel-good Spielberg that we got to know in E.T. Schindler's List, however, was altogether a different story! Here Spielberg held nothing back in his depiction of how brutal and horrific the Holocaust was to the Jews during World War II—and I mean he held nothing back! I remember watching this movie very closely when I first saw it (at the tender age of 16), and while I was greatly impressed by it, what struck me the hardest wasn't any of the mass genocide that was depicted. It was the final scene of all the Schindler Jews who were still alive in 1993, all walking past Schindler's grave accompanied by the actors who portrayed them, and laying rocks on his grave . . . and that was the first time I ever felt myself tear up during a movie, because in that moment, Schindler's List went from being a movie to an actual (albeit brief) realization of real life, that these things we saw on screen actually happened in real life, and that these are the real people it happened to.

His brutal realism with Schindler's List was again evidenced 5 years later with his next World War II movie, Saving Private Ryan. The brutality, however, was limited to just the opening of the film, with the Allies storming the beaches of Normandy on D-Day. Well before I'd even seen Saving Private Ryan, the opening D-Day scene had already made itself known to me; hell, by then it had practically become legendary! By the time I finally got around to seeing it, it had been built up so much that I kind of wondered if I'd be let down by what I saw. Thankfully, it lived up to the hype.

But therein lies the tragedy of Saving Private Ryan—for once D-Day passed, everything else felt like a two-and-a-half-hour anti-climax to me, and the story of finding the Private Ryan whose 4 or 5 brothers had all just died in the war became less interesting. More so, Saving Private Ryan felt like it gradually defaulted into your standard Hollywood war movie after D-Day. I will, however, say that Spielberg genuinely deserved his directing Oscar for Saving Private Ryan, but I would largely credit that to his D-Day recreation.

Saving Private Ryan and Catch Me If You Can fall under the neutral umbrella for me—meaning I didn't necessarily care for them, but I didn't dislike them either. Speaking of Catch Me If You Can, when it came out, I was somewhat puzzled by it, mostly because I actually didn't know what to make of it.

Close Encounters of the Third Kind was one of my father's favorite movies while I was growing up, and when I last watched it, I felt that it alternated between a psychological alien movie and a feel-good first-contact movie. I had a hard time relating the whole broken home portrayed by Richard Dreyfus and Teri Garr, and their family's breakdown felt rather disjointed, like it somehow didn't make sense and connect right with the larger whole (even though it helped flesh out Richard Dreyfus's ultimate obsessive quest to Devil's Tower). The abduction of Barry, the little boy to Melinda Dillon, was filmed perfectly, with every angle and every lighting scene right on the money. It genuinely imparted the terror of an abduction and of having someone taken away from you. But at the end of Close Encounters, when contact is made with the huge mothership, it felt like we were moving away from the psychological and into the ideal. And the idealized, peace-loving first contact felt kind of unrealistic to me. (One too many X-Files episodes for me, I guess.)

I was 4 years old when E.T. came out in the theaters (boy, did I feel old when it was given a 20th anniversary theatrical release!), and I remember my father being so excited to take me to see it—in fact, he was more excited than I was! Because when I saw the trailers for E.T., I just shrugged and indifferently said, "Eh." My feelings didn't change after seeing the movie, either (even though I managed to acquire several E.T. promotional posters from McDonald's as a child). The Color Purple felt like something of a departure for Spielberg, for here he tackled serious personal drama and the finding of oneself, and actually didn't resort to the fuzzy feel-goodness that was seen in E.T. or Close Encounters. The Color Purple is another movie that I didn't dislike but didn't care for—though I must say, the acting was first-rate! Whoopi Goldberg, in her first acting role, has never been better. And I was even surprised to find myself impressed with Oprah Winfrey's acting!

A.I. Artificial Intelligence, however, was a totally different story . . . because this film I found spectacularly awful! I don't know if it was the overly fanciful story that didn't ring true with me, or if it was the acting and characters that left me at a loss (I mean, seriously, how many of us know robotic gigolos?), but I just couldn't sit through this movie easily, and in the end, seriously wondered why it was made. Munich, for all the praise it received, didn't strike me as anything special either, and I was somewhat puzzled when I saw it earning a lot of Oscar nominations last year.

I guess what it all boils down to is, when Spielberg has a hit, he has a hit. When he misses, he really misses—at least for me (and bear in mind that I haven't seen 1941, The Terminal, or his War of the Worlds remake yet—his most well-known theatrical bombs). I guess, given the precedent I've set for his other movies, I have to progress one Spielberg movie at a time, evaluate on a case-by-case basis. On one final note, I sure hope Indiana Jones 4 doesn't get made! The series ended perfectly at the end of Last Crusade, so I hope that franchise can rest on that film's high note.

Martin Scorsese

I have a very strange dynamic at work when it comes to Martin Scorsese. Which is to say, I have a very great admiration and respect for him as a filmmaker! . . . Though I don’t really care for many of his movies. I respect him as a filmmaker because he pours his heart and soul into his movies, because they exemplify his passion, because they come from the heart. And I’ll go see a movie of his because . . . very simply, it’s a Martin Scorsese picture!

But his landmark films—Raging Bull, Taxi Driver, Casino, Goodfellas, Mean Streets, Gangs of New York—none of them really did anything for me. I did, however, like The Aviator (I thought that should have won Best Picture at the 2004 Academy Awards over Million Dollar Baby, which is another film that didn’t do anything for me) and really enjoyed Bringing Out the Dead, so I guess it’s kind of a hit-and-miss thing with Scorsese’s films. (For the record, I haven’t seen The Departed yet.)

To this day, I know many people are still outraged that Raging Bull, Taxi Driver, and Goodfellas didn’t take home the Best Picture Oscar (losing to Ordinary People, Rocky, and Dances with Wolves, respectively), and I personally am angered that Clint Eastwood beat out Scorsese for the directing Oscar in 2004, because The Aviator was a far more epic and ambitious picture than Million Dollar Baby, which I felt was a bit of a manipulative and overrated film. I’m guessing that Scorsese’s best hopes for an Oscar statuette will be an honorary Oscar, just like Robert Altman received. (Hell, Hitchcock only received the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award at the 1968 Oscars. He never took home a Best Director statuette, either.)

As to Scorsese’s movies, I’m firmly in the camp that The Godfather duet (you’ll note I didn’t say “trilogy”) was the quintessential Mafia story, and that Goodfellas will never hold a candle to it. That’s not to say that I felt Goodfellas was a bad movie; it just didn’t really do anything for me. Having said that, though, Joe Pesci seriously deserved his Oscar for this film. When I watched Casino, though, I couldn’t help but wonder if Scorsese was trying to somehow remake Goodfellas, because so many elements seemed to carry over (not the least of which was Joe Pesci essentially reprising his Oscar-winning role, only under a different character name).

Raging Bull, widely felt to the best movie of the 80s, was another movie I was kind of indifferent to. Again, not a bad movie by any means, and Robert De Niro richly deserved his Oscar (at the same time setting the gold standard for physical transformation for a film role; he looked like hell when 50 pounds overweight). Though I would say this was a well-made movie, rather than having a superior story (though I’m sure many many people would disagree with me on that). Filming in black and white was a clever touch, and De Niro and Joe Pesci made an excellent pairing as brothers (they do have good chemistry on screen). Though I also think it was a good choice to give Ordinary People the Best Picture Oscar that year over Raging Bull, because what made that film so powerful was that the story could literally happen to anyone, that the characters were indeed ordinary people going through ordinary life, and how such ordinary people deal with unimaginable tragedy. The only thing I would have changed was, I would have given Scorsese the Best Director Oscar instead of Robert Redford, because as I said, Raging Bull was a well-made movie (it even got an Oscar for film editing).

Taxi Driver kinda depressed me, and I had a hard time relating to De Niro’s Travis Bickle descending into madness. Though his trademark line, “You talkin’ to me? You talkin’ to me?” couldn’t have been done by anyone else—just like nobody but Peter Finch could have cried out, “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not gonna take this anymore!”

I personally would like to see Scorsese do another De Niro-Pesci pairing, but I must admit, I’m a little bothered by Leonardo DiCaprio becoming Scorsese’s golden boy now. I will admit, he was very very good in The Aviator, and it gave me newfound respect for DiCaprio as an actor, but I still can’t seem to shake his pretty-boy image from Titanic.

But all that said, I hope to go into The Departed and feel good about it afterwards, much like I felt good about The Aviator afterwards. I have such respect for this director, and I want to like more of his movies, but only time and further viewings can tell.