{"id":14430,"date":"2022-06-02T21:45:12","date_gmt":"2022-06-02T21:45:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/moviesandshakers.com\/staging\/4428\/?p=14430"},"modified":"2022-06-02T21:45:12","modified_gmt":"2022-06-02T21:45:12","slug":"crimes-of-the-future","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/moviesandshakers.com\/staging\/4428\/crimes-of-the-future\/","title":{"rendered":"Crimes of the Future"},"content":{"rendered":"
[vc_section][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]David Cronenberg is known for being a body horror aficionado. It\u2019s been 8 years since directing his last film and all of his pent up artistic juices are poured into this one. He\u2019s revisiting this title which was used for his first feature in 1970. \u00a0 <\/span>The film received a 6-minute standing ovation at its premiere in Cannes this year, but there were also people who walked out.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Here, he creates a provocative vision of a disturbing dystopian world of the future where humans are evolving with some very frightening mutations and side effects. The opening scene is of a young boy on a rocky beach with a capsized cruise ship in the bay. We then see him munching on his afternoon snack while his disgusted mother looks on. He\u2019s bitting off pieces of a plastic waste bucket. That\u2019s our first food for thought.\u00a0<\/span>[\/vc_column_text][vc_row_inner][vc_column_inner width=”1\/3″][vc_single_image image=”14436″ img_size=”full” alignment=”center” css_animation=”fadeInUp”][\/vc_column_inner][vc_column_inner width=”1\/3″][vc_single_image image=”14434″ img_size=”full” alignment=”center” css_animation=”fadeInUp”][\/vc_column_inner][vc_column_inner width=”1\/3″][vc_single_image image=”14433″ img_size=”full” alignment=”center” css_animation=”fadeInUp”][\/vc_column_inner][\/vc_row_inner][vc_row_inner][vc_column_inner][vc_column_text]Writer\/Director Cronenberg is known for the films Slasher, The Fly, Shivers, the Friday the 13th <\/i>TV series and Crash. <\/i>We know to expect grotesque images, and there is no dearth of them here. He structures the film like a noir detective caper. The pace is almost painfully slow for the first third of the movie, but pay attention. Clues dropped in the beginning will come into play when the pace picks up later. Cronenberg injects satire to take on where our world could be headed incorporating pointed references to climate change, genetic mutations, how people eat, live and love.<\/p>\n

Here, humans have found a way to eliminate pain and entertain themselves in bizarre ways to feel emotions. Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen) is a performance artist like you\u2019ve never seen before. His skill is entirely internal. Saul\u2019s body can consistently and magically generate new internal body parts. Are they organs? Do they serve a purpose? He has other afflictions. He is constantly clearing his throat and has trouble breathing.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Performing partner, Caprice, (L\u00e9a Seydoux) is a tattoo artist who cuts him open on a moving table. She makes her mark on each organ, then takes it out of him to put on display to the oohs and aahhs of the audience. Cutting someone open while they are living and breathing its shown to be an erotic experience. \u201cSurgery is the new sex.\u201d But there\u2019s even a graphic autopsy performed on a young boy. Cutting people, dead or alive, seems to be in vogue here.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Kirsten Stewart plays a very strange character in this futuristic noir detective story. Timlin is an employee of the National Organ Registry dedicated to tracking the emerging new species of human being let loose in the world. But she\u2019s also thrilled and titillated by Saul Tenser and his unique talents. She\u2019s in awe of him. Stewart\u2019s performance is an amalgam of awkward timidity and longing for Saul. He\u2019s almost like a Biblical character, almost always wearing a hooded cloak and covering his face.<\/p>\n

There are a few more characters who will get your attention. There is the dancing man with his faced stitched up and little human ears all over his head and body. Then there are two young, attractive robo-bed technicians who keep keep turning up, finally ending up, unexplainably, for a naked romp together in a bed.[\/vc_column_text][\/vc_column_inner][\/vc_row_inner][vc_row_inner][vc_column_inner width=”1\/3″][vc_single_image image=”14438″ img_size=”full” alignment=”center” css_animation=”fadeInUp”][\/vc_column_inner][vc_column_inner width=”1\/3″][vc_single_image image=”14435″ img_size=”full” alignment=”center” css_animation=”fadeInUp”][\/vc_column_inner][vc_column_inner width=”1\/3″][vc_single_image image=”14440″ img_size=”full” alignment=”center” css_animation=”fadeInUp”][\/vc_column_inner][\/vc_row_inner][vc_column_text]The color palate that cinematographer Douglas Koch uses is always dark, hued blue, foreboding and unrelenting when he shows the surrealistic abnormal episodes of Tenser\u2019s body being opened as performance art. Production Designer (Carol Spier) didn\u2019t have much to do as the set is mostly a bunch of grungy rock formations and buildings. There is not much in the way of furniture or anything else, except the skeletal chairs jerking Saul to and fro as he and others eat, we surmise, to help swallow their pur\u00e9es of mush. No one seems to be bothered about transmissible diseases or even personal hygiene because no one gets sick in this filthy future. It was shot in Greece, but it\u2019s no enticement to go there.<\/p>\n

The plot is clearly confounding. The visuals are stark, dull, and disgusting. Everything is low key, quiet, dark and ominous with little explanation and no story lines are ever complete. We were enticed by the path he put us on, but the crime is that Cronenberg\u2019s future led us to nowhere\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Neon.\u00a0 \u00a0 <\/span>1 hour and 47 minutes\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 <\/span>R<\/em><\/strong>[\/vc_column_text][vc_video link=”https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=v_bbLcJAHEo” el_width=”80″ align=”center” css_animation=”fadeInUp”][\/vc_column][\/vc_row][\/vc_section]\n<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[vc_section][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]David Cronenberg is known for being a body horror aficionado. It\u2019s been 8 years since directing his last film and all of his pent up artistic juices are poured into this one. He\u2019s revisiting this title which was used for his first feature in 1970. \u00a0 The film received a 6-minute standing ovation at its […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":14439,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14430","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-review"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/moviesandshakers.com\/staging\/4428\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14430","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/moviesandshakers.com\/staging\/4428\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/moviesandshakers.com\/staging\/4428\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moviesandshakers.com\/staging\/4428\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moviesandshakers.com\/staging\/4428\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14430"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/moviesandshakers.com\/staging\/4428\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14430\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14441,"href":"https:\/\/moviesandshakers.com\/staging\/4428\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14430\/revisions\/14441"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moviesandshakers.com\/staging\/4428\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14439"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/moviesandshakers.com\/staging\/4428\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14430"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moviesandshakers.com\/staging\/4428\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14430"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moviesandshakers.com\/staging\/4428\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14430"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}