Word: cronenberg
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Over the last 30 years, David Cronenberg, director of such films as Scanners (1981), Dead Ringers (1988) and A History of Violence (2005), has been called the "King of Venereal Horror" and the "Baron of Blood." But more and more, he's being recognized as something else: a thinking man's filmmaker. A diehard existentialist, Cronenberg has infused philosophy into his films over the years; some critics even called his 1986 blockbuster The Fly an inspired allegory for the AIDS epidemic. And if anyone still doubted his high-culture credibility, now Cronenberg is tackling the medium of Mozart...
From Sept. 7 to 27, the Los Angeles Opera will present the U.S. premiere of The Fly, a stage mutation of Cronenberg's sci-fi horror tale of a renegade scientist whose teleportation experiment goes horribly awry when a fly enters his telepod - composed by Oscar-winner Howard Shore, conducted by celebrated tenor Plácido Domingo, and directed by Cronenberg. The director sat down with TIME's Jeffrey T. Iverson on the eve of The Fly's world premiere in Paris this summer to talk about the hidden complexities of the horror genre, the challenges facing modern opera...
...David Cronenberg: When I was making the movie and talking about the music with Howard, I said, "You know, this could be a play" - it's basically three people in one room, a triangle love story. And underneath all the technology and the sci-fi stuff there's a very powerful, scary story of loss, disintegration and decay. Later it became a kind of iconic AIDS story to a lot of people, but when we were thinking of it, it was just about something that happens to everybody, which is aging and ultimately death. So it has this universal potency...
...rethinking and transcending of a schlock source, The Dark Knight is up there with David Cronenberg's 1986 version of The Fly. It turns pulp into dark poetry. Just as that movie found metaphors of cancer, AIDS and death in the story of a man devolving into an insect, so this one plumbs the nature of identity. Who are we? Has Bruce lost himself in the myth of the hero? Is his Batman persona a mission or an affliction? Can crusading Dent live down the nickname (Two-Face) some rancorous cops have pinned on him? Only the Joker seems unconflicted...
...carnage of car wrecks, even his own publisher's view was that "this author is beyond psychiatric help." As if to prove that a new moral compass was at work in inner space, Ballard's book attracted little controversy until 23 years later, when the shock-horror director David Cronenberg brought Crash to the big screen. The French, Ballard notes, "accepted without qualms the yoking together of sex, death and the motor car. Anyone who drives in France is steering into the pages of Crash." But in England, the movie's distribution was delayed for a year by a wave...