The trailer made this look so cool, but the reviews were shit. What's the deal with this movie?

The trailer made this look so cool, but the reviews were shit. What's the deal with this movie?

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Affluenza the movie

Cronenberg is just not a very good director and the only reason he’s a name is a bodyhorror gimmick he abandoned.

He is good. History of Violence, Eastern Promises and Dead Ringers are all good. They don't have bodyhorror stuff.

This movie is a horrible piece of shit. David Cronenberg is one of my favorite Directors, while Crash and Naked Lunch are my two favorite movies of his, so it’s not like I have ADD but this movie had me grinding my fucking teeth. The concept had soo much potential; billionaire taking a limo ride to get haircut while his empire collapses and an anti-capitalist movement raging in the background. There was many opportunities for allegory and symbolism. The limo being Eric Packer’s own coffin in that he’s already dead on the inside and being taken to his final destination. Taking a “haircut” meaning losing your ass financially. Marrying not for love but because you find a woman who’s lifestyle and wealth is comparable to yours. The clips that I saw got me excited because I thought this was going to be a movie filled with alienation, existentialism, philosophy and maybe a bit of metaphysics all through stimulating intellectual dialect. I also happen to LOVE movies that focus on talk (Talk Radio, Fail Safe,The Ninth Configuration, Clerks 1 & 2, The Silence of the Lambs, Network, The Hospital, Pulp Fiction etc…) but talk without focus is meaningless and that’s how I feel about Cosmopolis.

The problem is that Cronenberg is too cerebral and seals this movie soo hermetically that I couldn’t connect on it on any level. Now you might ask “how does that differ from, say, Crash, which has people crashing cars, fucking and talking about the taste of semen?”. Well, Crash was, as I understand it, a Science Fiction movie dealing with the abnormal psychology of people who are sexually aroused by car crashes. People who are so cut off from feeling that they see the car crash as a liberating of sexual energy as said in the movie. So the cool, measured tones of the actors and their performances fits perfectly within the context of that movie.

But that style just didn’t work for Cosmopolis. What was missing was context for everything. We see Eric Packer, 28 year old billionaire venture capitalist riding through New York to get a haircut. First question, why does he soo need to get a haircut at this specific location when he could have it done at the office? At the end of the movie we see that it’s a small barber shop run by someone who knew Eric when he was a child and was acquainted with his parents which tells us that he came from a lower economic background. This could have explained many things but Cronenberg fails to use it to tell a human story as the destination should have meant something. Not to mention that the barber is a fucking idiot who cuts giant chunks out of his hair and babbles to himself. Packer is obviously some kind of child genius and a self made billionaire. The way he speaks, his money, the limo all symbolize someone who is soo wealthy that they’ve been cut off from the real world. He’s married to an ice queen who rejects him sexually because she was born into a wealthy billionaire family. A self absorbed “artiste” who writes poetry and prefers to isolate herself with books as opposed to having sex with her husband. In the book he loses not only his own fortune but that of his wife and her family. This is not done in the movie and I felt that this was a crucial mistake as it could have shown Packer’s attack on aristocratic capitalists from the inside which brings me to my next point….

Packer has bet against the Yuan and loses his fortune over the course of a day but it doesn’t seem to make an impact one way or the other as Cronenberg doesn’t show us anything that happens from outside of the limo, always from the inside which creates a deadening vacuum with no emotional contrast. We never find out whether Packer deliberately blew his fortune although we are made to ASSume that it was because had such belief in the market, that every single equation and outcome could be predicted, that he had somehow miscalculated. The problem with this thesis is that Packer, who is supposed to be a genius, completely fails to take into account that markets are created by people and people are fallible and will fuck things up either by accident or by greed. Perhaps this was Cronenberg’s way of saying that Packer had become soo isolated from humanity that he had forgotten about human nature which is why he failed to see this coming? But that’s not as interesting as a boy king deliberately taking everything down to assert his individuality and break free of the gilded prison he’s built for himself. Eric Packer reminds me of the protagonists of George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead in that once they have everything they could ever want inside the mall their lives become stagnant as the need for survival is what drives us as a species and once that want was filled, the characters became no better off than the zombies surrounding the mall who represent mindless consumerism just as the protesters in Cosmopolis aren’t actually anti-capitalist but are in fact fighting for their piece of the pie in the face of cyber-wealth and the changes in the global economy which will leave them behind as one character puts it. My point is that a tale of self destruction is more interesting than the ennui odyssey that Cronenberg gave us.

Finally, the so called “threat” against Packer’s life is nothing more than noise in the background and comes to nothing as Eric confronts his would-be assassin during the final excruciating tedium of this boring fucking movie. What should have been a visceral, emotional climax is fucked right in the ass with nothing but two characters droning on endlessly and pointlessly as we learn that Paul Giamatti’s Benno Levin wants to kill Packer to give his life meaning (ala John Hinkley Jr.) but also that he’s a fucking nutzoid (David Mark Chapman) while the correct ending of Benno deciding not to kill Packer once he’s learned that all of his wealth and influence is gone, thus making his killing of Paker a meaningless act in his own mind, was not taken by Cronenberg who fucking cuts to black with Benno talking about the fungus between his toes and pointing a gun at the back of Packer’s head. No gunshot, no resolution, NOTHING!!!

This was the last straw as I stormed out of the theater, fucking pissed that I had wasted two hours of my life on this piece of shit which is easily the lowest point of Cronenberg’s career and that’s saying something after that fucking wretched fucking trash Spider. There were about 20 people in the theater that I saw this in and within 30 minutes half of them were gone and I regret that I didn’t join them as Cosmopolis is a fucking terrible movie and not worth wasting your time on.

AVOID LIKE THE FUCKING PLAGUE!!!

Having said that, the soundtrack is GOAT!!!FACT!!! youtu.be/Zp6hw68O6cg

Nigger what?

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