David Cronenberg's Good Bad and Ugly (second period)!

[Gabriel Girard]

From Dead Ringers to Cosmopolis

[cdouglas]

Good: So many options. I'll go with Dead Ringers - Whoever decided to give Jeremy Irons an Oscar Reversal of Fortune instead of this was smoking something. A genuinely unsettling and rewarding experience.

Bad: Wouldn't call any of them bad, honestly. If forced to pick a "least favorite" of this era, I guess I'd choose M. Butterfly, but it's still a pretty good movie.

Ugly: I got nothing.

[mavrach]

Good: Dead Ringers - Agreed on the best performance I've ever seen from Jeremy Irons, in a dark and unique story of two twin brothers going down a self-destructive path. The twin element could have turned out to be gimmicky or corny, but it's handled perfectly.

Bad: A History of Violence - Along with The Fly, this is also one that I return to often. Accessible and rewatchable, but there are several silly elements. Ed Harris and Wiliam Hurt are both gloriously hammy villains, but they feel like they were ripped out of a more fun mainstream movie, rather than the serious tone that the storyline takes on. And when you're in the mafia, do they train you in martial arts? Because Viggo had some pretty impressive arm-locks that he displayed. Actually that was one of the giveaways for me because I've studied martial arts. If he were just a determined ordinary man protecting innocent people, he wouldn't know those moves no matter how heroic he was. I also would've liked to spend maybe a half hour more of character development, as the central conflict of him hiding his past from his family is what I wanted to see more.

Ugly: I can't call this a bad movie, but my pick is Naked Lunch. This is a movie with a lot to say and a lot of symbolism, but it's not for everybody. Add in the discomfort of a feature-length drug trip for myself who's never even smoked a cigarette, and it's the single Cronenberg movie that I probably won't ever return to.

[Mitchell Hattaway]

Good: Crash

Bad: Naked Lunch

Ugly: eXistenZ

[J.M. Vargas]

Good: A Dangerous Method (Keira Knightley steals a psychological drama from Viggo Mortensen and Michal Fassbender and becomes, to my knowledge, the first Cronenberg film where a woman both headlines the movie -she gets first credit- and is a fully-fledged Cronenberg character in which her gender doesn't sideline her into victim status -like Marilyn Chambers-. Underrated)

Bad: Eastern Promises (very un-Cronenberg but a pretty tight and neat little mob/crime thriller)

Ugly: Crash (nothing new to add that the canuck panel didn't spend 89 of the podcast's 90 min. talking about)