Watched: Crash (the 1996 David Cronenberg one, not the 2004 Oscar-winner)
- First: what the hell was up with home releases of James Spader films in the 90s? First the Stargate subtitling fuckup, and now this: I had a cut of the film that censored certain aspects with a big blurry black dot. Fixed that fairly quickly, and I’m glad I did, because… well.
- Most of this film is fucking. Roger Ebert talked about how this was what you’d get if you put a bleak road safety PSA and a porno into a machine that produced glitched, freakish hybrid mutants out of its essential ingredients, and that’s pretty much on point - the sex is all front and centre here, but it’s rarely actually erotic.
- That mostly comes from Cronenberg, I think. What I love about him as a director is that he takes controversial or otherwise grotesque concepts, and places them in the foreground with little directorial comment. On the surface, something like that might be seen as lazy, but these are concepts that always come with a moral context, even in fictional representations; a Hollywoodised version of this film would at least have some onlooker expressing their horror or disgust. Instead, it’s intoxicating in the blackest sense.
- There are a lot of people who I would steer away from this film, but I don’t think that means it’s bad. Like Videodrome, I think it’s more to do with the fact that Cronenberg deals with extreme subject matter, and some people are a little too close to those extreme subjects in the first place to get any value out of his work.
- Ultimately, this belongs in the Marmite camp with Spring Breakers. You might love it. You might hate it. It’s highly unlikely you’ll just be bored by it.