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Jack is Back?
Very short intro today. We have Hollyfeld's thoughts on Spider by David Cronenberg. I follow it up with some thoughts of mine on a TV spinoff of my second favorite movie of all time...
Spider Review
"David Cronenberg’s Spider, caught last Saturday at the AFI Film Festival, is a wonderful spiral of a film. Sometimes I find myself leaving a theater and thinking that the movie was made by people who picked up a camera and had some fun. Every once in a while, however, I find myself walking out of a theater wherein the film was perfectly composed - there were no accidents, nothing out of place. Spider is that rare cinematic jigsaw puzzle where every piece somehow locks together, perfectly planned. The picture they make may not be what you want to see, and it may not be pretty, but it has been drawn so assuredly and with such detail that there is no denying that it is the work of a master.
The master in question is David Cronenberg, best known for his high-minded, ultra-violent musings on flesh and technology, and who here makes what is probably his subtlest film to date, and easily his best since Dead Ringers. Absent here are the moments of perversity and gore which punctuate most of his oeuvre, although he toys with our expectations of both his films and the characters’ actions. Everything in Spider seems to teeter on the edge of being shocking, occasionally tipping this way and that without ever falling over. The scenes of violence and sexuality almost never make take that final plunge into the gore we know and love from Cronenberg’s previous works, and when they do it is with surprising subtlety... at least, compared to turning James Woods into a human VCR, or copulating with open wounds. There is a moment of murder that, while shocking, is nowhere near as explicit as what I myself would have shot, and the film contains the best 3D shot since they stopped making 3D movies. Actually, it’s probably better than all of those, and had all the audience around me ducking in their chairs.
But a few moments aside, it is the subtlety of Spider that stands out most predominantly, beginning with an opening sequence that may as well be devoid of dialogue. We meet Spider coming off of a train - the last one off the train. The camera sifts through the exiting passengers looking for the man who, as played by Ralph Fiennes, is as psychologically elusive as he is physically in the beginning of the film. Spider either doesn’t talk much or talks all the time. Fiennes plays his speech with an almost brave lack of commitment. Nothing he says makes an impression on anyone around him because it is either inaudible or barely comprehensible, and everything he writes, which makes up the bulk of the film’s plot, is written in incomprehensible scrawling. Spider is a puzzle that he himself cannot connect, and one that no one else seems interested in solving either.
He arrives in a halfway house for former asylum inmates and is put to work, and although he goes through the motions of putting together a new, normal life, his thoughts all revolve around his past. Finally back in his old neighborhood, where terrible events occurred that now make him a shell of a man, Spider reflects on his boyhood with a caring mother and a dissatisfied father. He drifts back to his old homestead where he looks at his family through a window, and lives through his past once again. But Spider is just an observer, or perhaps a puppetmaster, in these memories - he watches himself make observations and decisions as a third party. Ralph Fiennes sits in a corner, watching the young version of himself without ever truly admitting to being that boy; Adult Spider watching Young Spider becoming Adult Spider. The only moment of Spider participating in his own memories is fiercely Oedipal, but that would be oversimplifying his scarred perception.
Spider watches his father have an affair with a town whore, he watches a terrible murder - but often he remembers things that he himself was never present to experience. The film asks if he, or we, can be truly reliant on his perception of the events that made him what he has become. Have they been pieced together from clues discovered as a child, or are they strictly fantasy... the musings of a warped mind? As Spider explores these possibilities for himself, he finds that his dementia is evolving yet again. His mother starts appearing in the strangest places, or is it the town whore? Is he the victim of terrible childhood trauma, or is something more complex at hand? How will he act upon the terrible lumplings filling his mind?
Spider is a straight-forward film. It presents a puzzle, in this case a man, and solves it. The beauty is that the film doesn’t solve it for you... rather, it works with you to come to an inevitable, perhaps surprising (perhaps not) conclusion that warrants scrutiny. David Cronenberg spoke after the film, and after hearing his design for the film it becomes perfectly clear that Spider isn’t ambiguous - unlike many films of this variety that remain open for interpretation, here we have a piece of cinema with a distinct goal that comes across. All the pieces of the puzzle fit together, because it seems that for once an elliptical film has a distinct purpose. Spider serves its purpose with style and subtlety, and I regret that I have to wait until February to see it again. I expect it to be on my Top Ten films for next year."
(Incidentally, I spoke to Cronenberg briefly after the film and he seems like a really nice guy. Why is it that the people who make the creepiest movies always come across as the most normal guys in show business? I got to compliment him on his performance in Nightbreed, one of my favorite movies. Check it out.)
(Review submitted by Hollyfeld.)
SPEED: The TV Show?
This morning was business as usual for myself. Woke up and checked the morning entertainment news. I always start with Daily Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, Dark Horizons, AICN and Coming Attractions. Nothing really struck me at Variety. Then at The Hollywood Reporter website, a news story hit me in the face. Producer Mark Gordon is developping a TV show based on Speed. Actually, a prequel to it. Set 5 years before the first feature film, it will deal with Jack Traven and Harry Temple's (Keanu Reeves and Jeff Daniels) partnership inside the LAPD Bomb Squad. Gordon and original screenwriter Graham Yost will executive produce the series for ABC. Writers John Cowan and Robert Rovner are penning the pilot.
For those who don't know me, I have seen Speed over 60 times. I'm very excited about this concept. I have been dreaming for years of bringing back the 'Jack Traven' character. Speed 2 killed off any chances of a sequel. A spin-off film with Keanu could have worked. The prequel idea is even sweeter. They can go a million directions with this. Will the film be set five years before the original in real-time (1989) ? or set in 2003? Who are they going to cast? (How about Jared Leto as Jack Traven?) Any chance Jeff Daniels, Joe Morton and Richard Lineback could reprise their original roles? How about letting Jan De Bont direct the pilot episode?
Graham Yost wrote two great episodes of Band of Brothers and created the surprise hit Boomtown. His first creation Speed, is in really good hands. I doubt Yost will let another Cruise Control destroy his baby. Oddly enough, ABC is also developing another one of my favorite movies of all-time, Out of Sight. I'm also looking forward to that one. (They're also doing About A Boy which has good chances of making my 2002 top ten film list) Even though ABC has been seriously struggling in the ratings, I hope they can rebound with these two projects in hopefully a year and a half.
Stay tuned...
That's all folks...
Jean-François Allaire (aka DeadPool)
Questions, comments, praise etc. Email me at deadpool@tnmc.org
Jean-François Allaire is TNMC's first columnist. At only 24 years old he has become a respected entertainment journalist, with his columns appearing in Corona's Coming Attractions and Scr(i)pt magazine. He also writes a monthly column in Screenwriters Monthly entitled 'The Last Word.' Hailing from Montreal this young writer is determined to dig up all the details on the movies before they hit your local theater. If you're part of a movie production then you really need to be talking to him.
