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| Directed by David Cronenberg; Starring Jennifer Jason Leigh, Jude Law, Willem Dafoe, Ian Holm, Don McKellar, Callum Keith Rennie, Sarah Polley, Christopher Eccleston, Kris Lemche, and Vik Sahay |
People often tell me that one of my biggest problems is that I don’t succumb to “funny” films like Patch Adams, October Sky, and A Night at the Roxbury, and instead sing praises about “nearly unwatchable” weird films like A Clockwork Orange, Blue Velvet, and Dead Ringers. The fact of the matter is that I’m always on the search for originality. Those so called weird films are the closest to original that we seem to have these days. When I see there is a new film from David Lynch I think two things: “Oh, boy this will be weird” and “Thank heavens, something different.” I get more joy from the three Davids’ films (Lynch, Cronenberg, and Fincher) than I get from the entire filmographies of George Lucas, Steven Speilberg, Penny Marshall, et al.
If you look at a listing of my favorite films, almost all go in three categories: pre-1970 films (when originality came easier), crime dramas (thanks to geniuses like Scorsese and pre-1980 Coppolla), and vanguard films. Since Lynch has been off since 1997s poor Lost Highway, Cronenberg since 1996s underrated Crash, and Fincher since 1997s mesmerizing The Game, the pickings for new and unusual films have been placed to more comedic directors like Neil LaBute and Todd Solondz, who use the deconstruction of characters more than the mind startling realism intertwined with science that the three neo masters (though Lynch and Cronenberg have been working for quite a long time, some of their weirdest stuff have been in the last ten years) had given us. With all three finally making films this year, I’m ready for some interesting cinema (another unusual director has a film this year as Stanley Kubrick could be called the father of vanguard films with his followings behind 2001: A Space Odyssey and A Clockwork Orange; though I think the true father is Metropolis’ Fritz Lang). The first of those three is from David Cronenberg called eXistenZ.
The film, bare with me now, is about a virtual video game creator named Allegra Gellar (Leigh) who must flee a testing of her new game called eXistenZ when a failed assassination of her is attempted. She tries to find a safe haven on the road with a marketing student (Law) from the company releasing the game. They meet a nice collection of characters, some on their trek, some while plugged into the virtual world of eXistenZ. I especially liked the heavily German accented Ian Holm character that is almost an opposite to the character of Mitchell Stevens, Esquire in The Sweet Hereafter.
In my opinion, this is Cronenberg’s best since 1988’s Dead Ringers (if you have a DVD player, the Criterion version of this with a commentary with the director should be on your to buy list). His visual sense has only been paralleled by names like Kubrick, Welles, and Hitchcock. Here he keeps things so real seeming in this futuristic world that what is real and what is virtual remains a questions in the film’s middle third. His screenplay (his first original one since the somewhat similar but lesser Videodrome in 1982) is unflinching. Jennifer Jason Leigh makes a great performance and looks better in this than she has looked in years (of course over the past few years she’s made films like Georgia and Kansas City). I really liked Jude Law in this as he reminds me of why I awarded him the Golden Brando Award for Biggest Acting Find in 1997’s Gattaca. You don’t know just how happy I am to finally give a **** rating to a film from 1999.
