News Archive: December 2002

More Cameo Photos

Added 3 more photos to Cronenberg Cameos:

1 photo from Jason X (2001)
2 photos from Last Night (1998)

Cronenberg Interview
Paris Premiere features a nice 3-minute clip from an interview with David Cronenberg about *Spider*. This interview was conducted at the 55th Cannes Film Festival, on 22 May 2002. Cronenberg Interview (2:56, Realplayer)

New Fly Photos
Added 6 new photos of The Fly, all are deleted or alternate scenes, not shown in the movie. They are taken from the trailer.

Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984) - German DVD
Remember DK's Recommendation (July 9th) for *Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984)? It had a link to a bad VHS rip and as far as I knew, there was no DVD release for this move (only Laserdisc). Well, I was very surprised to find out that there is actually a DVD release and even a rip on the net. The bad news is that the rip has only one audio track, which is German dubbing. It's highly probable that the DVD itself contains the original English track too (the DVD seems nowhere to be found). Quality is really good, OGG format at 544x336. During the entire movie there is a watermark on the top-right corner, with a logo of Studio Universal. Personally, I can't stand movie dubbing (and for this movie it's twice as horrible), not to mention that I don't speak German. Still, since this DVD rip was so "rare", I thought some of you German speakers would find it a must-have. The movie is called Neunzehnhundertvierundachtzig* in German and the availability of this rip got surprisingly high during the last day (over 100 sources). Let's hope an English version will pop up sometime soon. Nineteen Eighty-Four (DVD rip, German audio, 544x336, OGG)

Spider Premiere in Finland

Antti Näyhä reports that Spider will premiere in Finland on January 3rd, 2003. The Distributers are Finnkino/Scanbox.

See the FAQ for a complete list of known release dates.

New Thumbnails
Redone all the site's thumbnails (over 400). They are now smaller but more colorful. Since they occupy less space on the page, the photos archive is easier on the eyes. File size is significantly smaller too, so download is faster (try the packed Spider or Cameos pages) and it helps a little to save space, which is running very low on this webhost. Please report bad links or missing images/thumbnails.

New Photo Section

Added a new section to the photos: Cronenberg Cameos. It opens with no less than 59 photos, of which 52 (!) are new.

  2 photos from To Die for (1995)
50 photos from Nightbreed (1990) (some spoilers)
  4 photos from The Fly (1986)
  3 photos from Shivers (1975)

Spider Posters for Sale

If you have some extra money, MovieGoods sells 1 English and 2 French posters of Spider, for the outrageous prices of $20, $25 and $40.

Terminator 3 Trailer

Apple and the official site of *Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines* have put up the first trailer of the movie (this is not the teaser that was released a while ago). Yes, it does look like a Terminator 2 rip-off. With Norwegian model Kristanna Loken as the evil T-X. The movie premieres on July 2, 2003. Trailer IMDB details

Spider Premieres in Hollywood
vrancent refers us to the official site of Laemmle Theatres, according to which, *Spider* will screen for a week, starting this Friday at Sunset 5, West Hollywood.

The Matrix Reloaded Teaser
Warner Brothers and TheMarix.com have released a 1024x464 QuickTime version of the The Matrix Reloaded teaser. On NeuroFilm you can find some nice snapshots from it.

DK's Recommendation: Irreversible (2002)

I wasn't sure what to think of Irreversible (2002), but a movie that makes me think about it so long after seeing it, usually holds something special.

This French movie, which was written, directed, edited and co-photographed by Gaspar Noe, obviously tries to be shocking, daring and provoking. Reports claim that in its screening, people walked out of the theatre in disgust or got physically ill.

At the top stand 2 scenes that you're not going to forget easily (minor spoilers next): The first one, which involves a man getting beaten to death, is probably the most shocking, violent and disgusting scene I've seen (and believe me, I'm not getting shocked easily) and could easily be described as "snuff". The second scene, although not nearly as shocking as the first one, involves a painfully-long brutal rape.

The style of the movie is mesmerizing: It's built almost entirely of extremely long (up to 14 minute) and continuous shots and the scenes are partially improvised. For instance, one scene begins in an elevator, continues in a subway station and then in the moving subway itself, while people are coming in and out. This style gives a great deal of realism to the film and also contributes to the shock effect described above.

In addition to being long and continuous, the photography itself tries to be unique. During the first third of the movie the camera continuously moves, jiggles and flips up to the point that you may get a headache.

(Minor spoilers next) The plot itself is told backwards. The movie starts at the end credits, which go backwards, and ends

at the beginning (if you've seen Memento (2000) or Following (1998) by Christopher Nolan, you won't find this to be very original). The purpose of it is two-fold: To give suspense to the plot, and to serve the main theme of the movie: Time destroys everything. You get the full impact of this pessimistic (and very simple) theme by the end of the movie, when you run the scenes in your head in chronological order.

(Minor spoilers next) The movie starts as hell-on-earth, both in terms of plot and technically (photography, music, lighting) and it ends very delicately, in a beautifully long love scene (between Vincent Cassel and Monica Bellucci, a couple in real life) and an innocent, almost surreal, scene of children playing and an obvious reference to Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), all to the sounds of Beethoven's 7th symphony.

A Kubrick-Beethoven connection intuitively connects to A Clockwork Orange (1971), another movie that definitely had a great affect on the maker of this film, mainly in terms of ultra-violence in-your-face. I also felt an influence by Darrn Aronofsky's Requiem for a Dream (2000), a fantastic movie that itself was obviously influenced by Kubrick's Clockwork Orange.

Whether this movie is special or just non-original, pretentious and meant to be shocking, provoking and controversial - you'll have to see to judge by yourself. The pessimistic theme/moral of the movie, Time destroys everything (and future events are already set), although extremely simple in concept and plot, turns out to be quite effective and horrifying by the end of this movie. Great directors learn, in time, that hardcore sex and violence are sometimes more effective if left for the viewer's imagination, out of the camera. This movie takes the "in-your-face" method and doesn't hide anything from the viewer.

Hate it or like it, from a "technical" point of view, Gaspar Noe seems to be a promising movie-maker. I'm certain it won't be long before we'll see him follow Luc Besson's footsteps, making films in Hollywood. It will be interesting.

DK's Rating: 8/10
Irreversible (2002)
English subtitles
Official site
Trailer: Media Player (1.87MB) / Real Player
More info and photos on Vincent Cassel's Site
Interview with Gaspar Noe
Premiere reactions at Cannes Festival 2002
Press-kits from cannes

Cronenberg in NY
David Cronenberg will attend the upcoming Fangoria's Weekend of Horrors, which takes place on 11-12 January 2003 in Brooklyn, New York, at the Brooklyn Marriott Hotel (333 Adams Street). Cronenberg will preview *Spider* and receive a Lifetime Achievement Award. Go to Creation Entertainment to order tickets and get more info. (Thanks to Rachel)

Cronenberg Interview at Cannes
Metropolitan Filmexport, mentioned above, also features 2 interviews with Cronenberg, made on May 22, in Cannes. The first clip was mentioned here before; The second one seems to have been added recently. Both clips are dubbed into French. On the bottom of that page, you'll also find 8 (!) different radio spots for the movie, in French, each of them is 30 seconds long.

Spider Released in Canada
*Spider* is released this Friday (the 13th...) in Canada. See the FAQ for full list of known release dates.

The Fly Cameo
Added 4 photos of David Cronenberg's cameo in *The Fly*, as the gynecologist who delivers the maggot in Veronica's nightmare.

William Burroughs Clips
If you're a big fan of William Burroughs (and *Naked Lunch), you'll be happy to see these 2 clips from Screen Edge: The first one is a 3.5-minute clip from Bill and Tony (1972), a 16mm short (and very experimental) film based on a Burroughs text, with Anthony Balch* and Burroughs himself. You might remember this one from *Naked making Lunch (1992)*. 56k / 256k / Download (6.3MB) The second one is a 2-minute clip from 1982, of Burroughs reading from his book in front of an audience. 56k / 256k / Download (4MB)

Regular Section Updated
Updated Howard Shore and added 18 new crew members to the Regular section.

New Interview Snapshots

Added 9 new snapshots from Ashbrg's clip of David Cronenberg in the Sitges Film Festival.

Site Statistics
Some statistics about the site and its visitors: • The site contains 1031 files, weighing 15.6MB. • It had 113 polls so far. • It currently has about 36 unique visitors daily. • Most of the known (that also means excluding US) visitors are from (in order, from left to right): As always, you can take a look at the News Archive (link is at the bottom of this page) to see the site's history.

News Archive - December 2002