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Old 06-15-2022, 07:41 PM
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TrueFaith77 TrueFaith77 is offline
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37.Crimes of the Future (David Cronenberg); grade: C

Crimes of the Future combines elements of my two personal "favorite" Cronenberg films. Here the perverse techno sexuality of 1996’s Crash meets the bizarre labyrinthine conspiracy of the 1991 Naked Lunch. Yet, it jettisons the most interesting parts of those films. Instead of the common connection between people and cars in Crash, Crimes of the Future focuses on niche performance art and body-horror sadism. Instead of the literary-biography elements of Naked Lunch, the original screenplay of Crimes of the Future reflects the faux-existential pretensions of Cronenberg. Double agents engage in a pseudo-political war between those who support body adaptation (incorrectly labeled "evolution") and those serving the powerful which seeks to maintain the biological status quo. Yet, the status quo means making a spectacle out of mutilation, and the radical means accepting the reduction of humanity to biological impulses. It affirms the question: are we just eating and ****ing machines? That's why Viggo Mortensen and Kristen Stewart give labored performances and why Cronenberg over-relies on cgi instead of practical effects. Even Lea Saydoux, the most believable and emotionally dynamic performer in the movie, plays a character who cynically fakes her own expressiveness when the film reaches its transgressive climax. The movie's consensual mutilations reaches their logical conclusion in the desecration of a child's corpse. Some complain that the movie's final shot acts as too much of a cliffhanger. Note: it fulfills the movie's art direction--bio-furniture designed to achieve maximum comfort. It features the rebellious act of the story's main mole who risks death for the chance to embrace dietary evolution. Still: It's more interesting and more intelligently crafted than Everything Everywhere All at Once, The Northman, and The Batman! They’re the crimes of Cronenberg’s ‘90s future.
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Last edited by TrueFaith77; 06-16-2022 at 07:28 AM..
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