It has always been annoying that filmmaker Paul Haggis so cavalierly “borrowed” the title of David Cronenberg’s freaky 1996 car-wrecks-as-sexual-fetish drama Crash, an adaptation of the even more bizarre novel by J.G. Ballard.
Haggis’s film of the same name, released in 2004, less than a decade after Cronenberg’s far more intriguing and far more visually accomplished film, is an Altman lite examination of crisscrossing lives in Los Angeles; Altman’s Short Cuts (1993), based on the Raymond Carver short story collection, and Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia (1999) were superior films, also set in SoCal and taking similar approaches.
Adding insult to injury, in 2006 Haggis’s movie won Oscars for best picture, best original screenplay (Haggis) and best editing.
Haggis followed Crash with the bomb In the Valley of Elah, a heavy-handed anti-Iraq War film, while Cronenberg has fared well in recent years with critical and commercial triumph A History of Violence, a sort-of newfangled Western built on mythic themes, and the generally well-received drama Eastern Promises.
Cronenberg gets lots of love this month with a series at the IFC Center in Manhattan, showing the next seven Friday and Saturday nights at — appropriately enough — midnight. Scroll down to see the schedule.
Cronenberg’s themes of body horror and man-machine mutations have fascinated film students and scholars, and for good reason — the filmmaker offers plenty to chew on.
But the academics may have overstated the case for Cronenberg’s significance as a film artist, New York Times writer Terrence Rafferty observes in a piece published today (I disagree).
“The mind-body-machine games Mr. Cronenberg plays in movies like ‘Videodrome’ and ‘eXistenz’ are elaborate, suggestive and inventively worked out, but they are games, not deep philosophical statements,” Rafferty writes. “He always wins them, too, in part because he’s a terrific bluffer: he has the knack of convincing academics and other lofty-minded viewers that he’s holding better cards than he is.
“A midnight audience isn’t as easy to fool, and will probably see these films for what they are: funky, macabre science fiction comedies that tease the brain without effecting any significant alternation in its structure, or causing permanent damage.”
Cronenberg at IFC Film Center, 323 Sixth Avenue, New York City:
Feb 20-21: CRASH (1996)
Feb. 27-28: SPIDER (2002)
Mar 6-7: THE FLY (1986)
Mar 13-14: EXISTENZ (1999)
Mar 20-21: THE DEAD ZONE (1983)
Mar 27-28: VIDEODROME (1983)
April 3-4: NAKED LUNCH (1991)