THE BLACK SHEEP INTERVIEW: BRANDON CRONENBERG (ANTIVIRAL)

THIS IS SICK.
An interview with ANTIVIRAL writer/director, Brandon Cronenberg

Imagine a world, if you will, where celebrity obsession has reached truly disturbing heights. Your neighbour stops by the local butcher on his way home to pick up steaks that have been genetically engineered from cells derived from the latest teen sensation; or maybe your mother stops by the clinic to have the same strain of hepatitis that was once in an Oscar winner, injected into her own blood stream. All so that they can be closer to their idols in ways they never could before. It’s a new world, an unsettling world; it is a world one man concocted in his head in the midst of one heck of a furious fever dream.

“I was in a weird head space, obsessing over the physicality of the disease, the fact that I had something physically in my body that had come from someone else’s body,” explains writer/director, Brandon Cronenberg, of the inspiration behind what would become his senior short film project and eventually go on to become ANTIVIRAL, his first feature. “It struck me as a weirdly intimate thing, someone else’s cells penetrating your cells. It’s pretty sexual and pretty intimate if you think of it that way. I then tired to think of a character that would see disease that way and came up with a celebrity obsessed fan.”

If the whole thing still sounds a bit too much to take, keep in mind where Cronenberg comes from. Brandon is the son of David Cronenberg, one of Canada’s most famous directors, who made a name for himself in the 1980’s as a horror master, with films like THE FLY and DEAD RINGERS. Between his father’s warped inspiration and the celebrity interactions Brandon had growing up, ANTIVIRAL starts to make a little more sense.

Cronenberg checking the playback.

“Obviously through my father, I was exposed to a lot of celebrity,” Cronenberg describes to me when we meet at the 2012 Toronto International Film Festival, where ANTIVIRAL had its North American premiere, following its world premiere in Cannes. “One of the themes in the film is this disconnect celebrities have as these cultural constructs and media constructs and the human beings that these constructs actually are. It’s not a revelation that what is conveyed in magazines isn’t completely factual, but to really see it first hand, the extent to which that is fictionalized, you can really see how far removed that is from the people themselves.”

Despite growing up around film, Brandon was adamantly against the idea of ever getting involved in it himself for a long time. “Until I was 24, I really hated the idea of getting into film,” he explains of his naturally youthful defiance. “Just because I grew up around it, I would get approached with these preconceptions that I must love film. At a certain point, I realized that this was a bad reason not to get into something I found interesting.”

ANTIVIRAL star, Caleb Landry Jones, in front of a massive Sarah Gadon billboard.

Brandon is also acutely aware of the level of scrutiny he is facing with his first feature, a horror one at that, having come from horror royalty. “In terms of individualism, everybody, well I shouldn’t say everybody, but certainly a lot of people, are affected by our relationship and interpret the film in the context of my father’s career, which was to be expected,” he confides, without a trace of disdain. “I think some of the comparisons are legitimate and some of them are vastly overstated. I was going to get that anyway; I was getting it before I even got into film.”

Regardless of where it’s coming from or why it’s coming his way, Brandon is just excited that people are seeing ANTIVIRAL as a result. “One of the great things about film as a medium is that it is still quite prominent in our cultural landscape. People still get angry about film. People still react to them very strongly. This degree of scrutiny is very strange to experience but it’s also great because I just want people to see the film. I’m happy to have it.”

See it, they will, but if they’re anything like me, they might have to look away from the screen now and then because ANTIVIRAL is just that horrifying. But have you really done your job as a horror director if that doesn’t happen?

ANTIVIRAL is playing now across Canada.

ANTIVIRAL

ANTIVIRAL

Written and Directed by Brandon Cronenberg

Starring Caleb Landry Jones, Sarah Gadon and Malcolm MacDowell

Syd March: Celebrities are not people; they are a group hallucination.

ANTIVIRAL, the debut feature from Canadian writer/director, Brandon Cronenberg, is being billed as a horror film. While it does offer up some significantly scary moments and I did have to look away in disgust on more than one occasion, the most frightening thing about ANTIVIRAL has absolutely nothing to do with the horror you may be accustomed to. The thing that’s coming to kill us here is our own ever worsening obsession with celebrity and fame.

Cronenberg, son to infamously macabre director, David Cronenberg, paints a fairly desolate picture of our contemporary existence. Visually, everything seems so drab, as if we’ve stopped living with any actual passion. If it weren’t for his bright, ginger hair, we would likely not even notice the story’s “hero”, Syd March (Caleb Landry Jones), for his pale skin blends right in with the sterile background. Syd works for The Lucas Clinic, one of a handful of medical treatment facilities that allows people to get closer to their favorite celebrities in ways you would never even imagine. This clinic gives its patients the chance to infect themselves with diseases exclusively obtained from the elite celebrity community. Now, not only can you know everything about them, but you can have something that was once inside of them, inside of you.

Syd drives the rest of ANTIVIRAL with an attempt to sell the latest celebrity disease on the black market, which goes horribly awry. His struggle is a truly disturbing one but the brilliance of Cronenberg’s debut is that no matter how repulsive Syd’s exaggerated journey is, we can never forget that it is our very real celebrity fixation that inspired it to begin with.

THE BLACK SHEEP INTERVIEW: DAVID CRONENBERG & ROBERT PATTINSON (COSMOPOLIS)

THE COMEDY OF COSMOPOLIS
An interview with COSMOPOLIS writer/director, David Cronenberg and star, Robert Pattinson

When a director is as prolific as David Cronenberg is as of late, it is not uncommon to end up interviewing them more than once in the same year for different projects. I had spoken with Cronenberg earlier this year when A DANGEROUS METHOD had its Canadian release and with this week’s release of COSMOPOLIS, I found myself face to face with the icon for the second time in six months. Somehow I had completely forgotten that the man is way more amusing than I would ever expect him to be.

“I used a little Apple program called iDirector,” Cronenberg announces of his COSMOPOLIS process. “A little green light goes on if its ok and a red light if you need another take.” See what I mean? The man is hilarious.

There is nothing funny about the premise of COSMOPOLIS though. Based on the 2003 Don DeLillo novel of the same name, Cronenberg’s 20th feature film recounts protagonist, Eric Packer’s day long quest to get across Manhattan for a haircut from his regular barber. It sounds silly on the surface but it is set against the backdrop of the collapse of capitalism, making the film both timely and incredibly tense.

As complex as the story is though, Cronenberg had very little trouble adapting the book into a screenplay. “I literally transcribed all the dialogue [from the novel] and put it into screenplay form. Then I looked at it and asked, ‘Is this a movie or not?’ And it was.” The entire process took him all of six days to accomplish. His extensive experience allows for this kind of efficiency. “Now that I’ve adapted a few things, I’ve accepted the rule of thumb that there are some things that you just can’t do in movies that you can easily do in novels, and vice versa. The things that didn’t work or that I couldn’t make work, I just left out.”

Pattinson on the streets of Toronto, made to look like NYC

One of the things that does work in the film is its star, the infamous Robert Pattinson, whom was also on hand for the COSMOPOLIS Canadian press tour. This is the first collaboration between the two super powers and already rumoured not to be the last, with Pattinson lined up for another unconfirmed Cronenberg project to be shot in France. The secret to their success? “I was in the very obvious throes of a panic attack. I guess its part of my process where I feel like I have to go through the motions of feeling like I’m having a heart attack,” Pattinson admits, wearing his anxiety like a second skin. “David got me to stop worrying. Although, he may have just been placating me until I came around.”

Pattinson was not originally supposed to play Packer, a tycoon loathed the world over for simply being rich and good at it. The role was first given to Colin Farrell but when he dropped out due to scheduling conflicts, Cronenberg rewrote the script for a younger actor (which is more authentic to the book anyway) and immediately thought of Pattinson. The last minute casting change did not leave much time for Pattinson to prepare though.

Cronenberg directs Pattinson

“I was not going to come up with a completely original interpretation of DeLillo in two weeks. That’s completely ridiculous,” states Pattinson, when pressed about how he came up with the character so quickly. “There’s something about the construction in DeLillo’s writing that is so easy, you don’t need to add anything to it. That’s the direction David encouraged me in.”

Cronenberg didn’t just encourage this loyalty to the word on the page, he insisted on it. “In general, I don’t want the actors to be screenwriters. They’re not designed for that,” Cronenberg quips, without the least bit of insult to actors at all. “If everybody is improvising and you have actors who are used to doing that with each other, that’s a whole other thing. Basically, I want them to stick to the script but within that, there are tons of things an actor can bring to it.”

Pattinson kicking back and letting Cronenberg steal the show at the Toronto press conference.

The remaining cast of COSMOPOLIS is made up of many familiar Canadian faces, including Jay Baruchel, Emily Hampshire, Kevin Durand and Sarah Gadon. The film was shot in and around Toronto, from Yonge and Bloor to Union Station to Geary Avenue in the wee hours of the morning. Once again, Toronto is made to look like New York City, something that COSMOPOLIS has been criticized for not doing as well as it could have. “Somebody had said to me that there aren’t even any New York landmarks in the film but there aren’t any in the book either. In fact, a lot of the places, actually almost all of them that are mentioned in the book, are gone,” Cronenberg says, in response to this criticism. “So even if we were shooting in New York, it would have looked like it did, I have to say.”

As the capitalism capitol of the civilized world, the story had to be set in Manhattan. And with as much global unrest as there is these days, COSMOPOLIS couldn’t hit at a more opportune time. Be warned though occupiers, while the film depicts the demise of the financial world as we know it, it doesn’t do it how you would think. “There are no anti-capitalist characters in the movie, even though you might think it is an anti-capitalist creed on some level,” Cronenberg declares. “It’s really more pro-capitalist with people just wishing they were in on the action.”

Pattinson with co-star, Paul Giamatti

While typical fare for Cronenberg, COSMOPOLIS is not what your average Twihard (that is what they call themselves, right?) would ordinarily see. Pattinson still thinks they will like it though. “I like this script the same way I liked the TWILIGHT scripts. I’m not a post-modernist scholar,” Pattinson begins to explain but at this point, Cronenberg cuts him off.

“Your agent said you were,” he says, dryly and without missing a beat. Suddenly everyone is laughing again and the interview is over. With chemistry like that, who knows? Maybe Pattinson will be the new Mortensen.

Black Sheep interviews David Cronenberg & Robert Pattinson

THE COMEDY OF COSMOPOLIS
An interview with COSMOPOLIS writer/director, David Cronenberg and star, Robert Pattinson

When a director is as prolific as David Cronenberg is as of late, it is not uncommon to end up interviewing them more than once in the same year for different projects. I had spoken with Cronenberg earlier this year when A DANGEROUS METHOD had its Canadian release and with this week’s release of COSMOPOLIS, I found myself face to face with the icon for the second time in six months. Somehow I had completely forgotten that the man is way more amusing than I would ever expect him to be.

“I used a little Apple program called iDirector,” Cronenberg announces of his COSMOPOLIS process. “A little green light goes on if its ok and a red light if you need another take.” See what I mean? The man is hilarious.

There is nothing funny about the premise of COSMOPOLIS though. Based on the 2003 Don DeLillo novel of the same name, Cronenberg’s 20th feature film recounts protagonist, Eric Packer’s day long quest to get across Manhattan for a haircut from his regular barber. It sounds silly on the surface but it is set against the backdrop of the collapse of capitalism, making the film both timely and incredibly tense.

As complex as the story is though, Cronenberg had very little trouble adapting the book into a screenplay. “I literally transcribed all the dialogue [from the novel] and put it into screenplay form. Then I looked at it and asked, ‘Is this a movie or not?’ And it was.” The entire process took him all of six days to accomplish. His extensive experience allows for this kind of efficiency. “Now that I’ve adapted a few things, I’ve accepted the rule of thumb that there are some things that you just can’t do in movies that you can easily do in novels, and vice versa. The things that didn’t work or that I couldn’t make work, I just left out.”

Pattinson on the streets of Toronto, made to look like NYC

One of the things that does work in the film is its star, the infamous Robert Pattinson, whom was also on hand for the COSMOPOLIS Canadian press tour. This is the first collaboration between the two super powers and already rumoured not to be the last, with Pattinson lined up for another unconfirmed Cronenberg project to be shot in France. The secret to their success? “I was in the very obvious throes of a panic attack. I guess its part of my process where I feel like I have to go through the motions of feeling like I’m having a heart attack,” Pattinson admits, wearing his anxiety like a second skin. “David got me to stop worrying. Although, he may have just been placating me until I came around.”

Pattinson was not originally supposed to play Packer, a tycoon loathed the world over for simply being rich and good at it. The role was first given to Colin Farrell but when he dropped out due to scheduling conflicts, Cronenberg rewrote the script for a younger actor (which is more authentic to the book anyway) and immediately thought of Pattinson. The last minute casting change did not leave much time for Pattinson to prepare though.

Cronenberg directs Pattinson

“I was not going to come up with a completely original interpretation of DeLillo in two weeks. That’s completely ridiculous,” states Pattinson, when pressed about how he came up with the character so quickly. “There’s something about the construction in DeLillo’s writing that is so easy, you don’t need to add anything to it. That’s the direction David encouraged me in.”

Cronenberg didn’t just encourage this loyalty to the word on the page, he insisted on it. “In general, I don’t want the actors to be screenwriters. They’re not designed for that,” Cronenberg quips, without the least bit of insult to actors at all. “If everybody is improvising and you have actors who are used to doing that with each other, that’s a whole other thing. Basically, I want them to stick to the script but within that, there are tons of things an actor can bring to it.”

Pattinson kicking back and letting Cronenberg steal the show at the Toronto press conference.

The remaining cast of COSMOPOLIS is made up of many familiar Canadian faces, including Jay Baruchel, Emily Hampshire, Kevin Durand and Sarah Gadon. The film was shot in and around Toronto, from Yonge and Bloor to Union Station to Geary Avenue in the wee hours of the morning. Once again, Toronto is made to look like New York City, something that COSMOPOLIS has been criticized for not doing as well as it could have. “Somebody had said to me that there aren’t even any New York landmarks in the film but there aren’t any in the book either. In fact, a lot of the places, actually almost all of them that are mentioned in the book, are gone,” Cronenberg says, in response to this criticism. “So even if we were shooting in New York, it would have looked like it did, I have to say.”

As the capitalism capitol of the civilized world, the story had to be set in Manhattan. And with as much global unrest as there is these days, COSMOPOLIS couldn’t hit at a more opportune time. Be warned though occupiers, while the film depicts the demise of the financial world as we know it, it doesn’t do it how you would think. “There are no anti-capitalist characters in the movie, even though you might think it is an anti-capitalist creed on some level,” Cronenberg declares. “It’s really more pro-capitalist with people just wishing they were in on the action.”

Pattinson with co-star, Paul Giamatti

While typical fare for Cronenberg, COSMOPOLIS is not what your average Twihard (that is what they call themselves, right?) would ordinarily see. Pattinson still thinks they will like it though. “I like this script the same way I liked the TWILIGHT scripts. I’m not a post-modernist scholar,” Pattinson begins to explain but at this point, Cronenberg cuts him off.

“Your agent said you were,” he says, dryly and without missing a beat. Suddenly everyone is laughing again and the interview is over. With chemistry like that, who knows? Maybe Pattinson will be the new Mortensen.

102. Naked Lunch

102. (08 Apr) Naked Lunch (1991, David Cronenberg) 62

Black Sheep interviews David Cronenberg

On paper, it would make perfect sense to any outsider that famed Canadian director, David Cronenberg, would be the only appropriate choice to direct A DANGEROUS METHOD, an exploration of the complex relationship between the great grandfathers of psychoanalysis, Carl Jung and Sigmond Freud. Melding the cerebral and the hyper-sexual in this heightened a fashion might seem like old hat for the director of DEAD RINGERS and A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE, but suggest this to the man himself, and you might be surprised to hear what he has to say.

“I have to tell you I don’t think in terms of theme at all,” Cronenberg tells me over the phone, right before my chest gets tight at the prospect of insulting one of this country’s most acclaimed talents. “Anyone telling this story would be dealing with those same things. When I’m making a movie, for me, creatively, it’s as if I’ve never made another movie.” Cronenberg is also quick to explain to me he isn’t trying to be evasive in his response. With that, my tension is relieved and we move on happily.

“In retrospect, I could say I always wanted to do something about Freud,” Cronenberg, 68, says, upon further reflection. “To say that isn’t really to say anything at all though because Freud is such a big topic.” And so, he just needed the right project to come along and he found that project in Christopher Hampton’s (DANGEROUS LIAISONS) stage play, "The Talking Cure". Cronenberg had heard his Spider star, Ralph Fiennes, was playing Jung on the London stage and, while he couldn’t attend, he did read the play and found the angle he had been looking for all this time.

“I thought it was very doable as a movie and it would be fascinating to approach it just the way Christopher had, which is to say very neutrally,” Cronenberg explains. Hampton’s play does not pick sides between Jung and Freud, played on film by Michael Fassbender and Viggo Mortensen, respectively, but rather allows the audience to take in their differing points of view and assess on their own where their allegiances lie. The play pits the two against each other by framing their relationship in context with another, that of a shared patient and one of the first female psychoanalysts, Sabina Spielrein, played with great fervor and bravery by Keira Knightley.

Fleshing out the stage version for the screen was easier than one would expect. “As they were both psychoanalysts, no detail went unnoticed. They were their own first subjects after all,” Cronenberg quips. So there was a plethora of information to draw to fill out the story but there was still some things that required a certain creative flair, namely most of the intense sexuality that happens behind closed doors. “There are some very intimate moments which are speculative, of course. There was still some modesty involved in these relationships because of the era.”

As impassioned as it gets onscreen, Cronenberg insists that the set itself, located in Vienna and in various German locations, could not have been more ideal. “It was as though, after one or two days, as if you’d worked with everybody many times before,” he recalls fondly. Of course, Cronenberg has actually worked with Mortensen before, most recently in 2007’s EASTERN PROMISES. While Christoph Waltz was originally due to play Freud, he had to drop out because of scheduling conflicts, and Mortensen stepped in. “With Viggo, I would say I have a long hand rather than a short hand,” Cronenberg describes of their working relationship. “We would exchange something like 25 e-mails about what kind of cigars Freud smoked and when.”

Cronenberg is currently in post-production on his 20th feature, COSMOPOLIS, based on the Don DeLillo novel and starring Robert Pattinson. First up though, he must contend with awards season, as A DANGEROUS METHOD is naturally garnering attention. Though happy with the acclaim, Cronenberg takes the arduous process in stride. “Awards season isn’t a real season; it’s not like fall or winter,” says the man whose first brush with Oscar came when his 1986 film, THE FLY, took home the statue for Best Visual Effects. “It can be very exhausting if you’re nominated so at a certain moment, part of you is almost praying you don’t get any nominations.”

Well, consider my fingers crossed for you, Mr. Cronenberg. Wait.

495. A Dangerous Method

495. (17 Dec) /A Dangerous Method/ (2011, David Cronenberg)* 75



On this rewatch, I'm more impressed than ever by the beautiful structuring of Christopher Hampton's script. There's also such astonishing nuance in the men's performances that balance Knightley's histrionics.

Top Ranked Films of David Cronenberg

David Cronenberg
6 titles, 75th in points with 11,293

Cronenberg is a mixed bag. On the one hand he’s noted for over the top horror fantasy films like The Fly and Videodrome. On the other, he can make some serious dramas, albeit a bit disturbing, such as Dead Ringers, A History of Violence, and Eastern Promises, which lean toward the realistic. Dead Ringers is, in fact, based on a true story

A DANGEROUS METHOD

A DANGEROUS METHOD
Written by Christopher Hampton
Directed by David Cronenberg
Starring Michael Fassbender, Keira Knightley and Viggo Mortensen

Otto Gross: If there is one thing I’ve learned in my short life, it’s this: Never repress anything.

Canadian director, David Cronenberg, is synonymous with exploring sexuality and psychology on screen. In his latest epic, A DANGEROUS METHOD, he lets our minds get lost amidst these two forces as they intersect in Austria during the birth of modern psychology. What should have been an explosion of intense thought and tantalizing eroticism unfortunately amounts to little more than awkward conversation.

Like so much of psychoanalysis, some things make perfect sense on the page but do not necessarily apply past the theory. On paper, A DANGEROUS METHOD should work. Michael Fassbender plays Carl Jung, the founder of analytical psychology, who engages in a father-son like relationship with Sigmund Freud, played by three-time Cronenberg collaborator, Viggo Mortensen. Freud’s beliefs surrounding psychological trauma tended to be sexual in nature and this would inevitably cause an irreparable rift between them as Jung thought there had to be more to it than that. The situation was only further exacerbated by Jung’s own affair with one of his own patients, Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightley). The two enter a kinky relationship that really only proves Freud’s point but men being men, neither will admit any fault.

A DANGEROUS METHOD is aptly performed by its talented cast and beautifully shot and composed but it never truly comes alive. Considering the film itself is about repression, it certainly feels as though it could have used some loosening up. Instead, its tightly wound setting and nature eventually lead to its own unravelling.

472. A Dangerous Method

472. (20 Nov) A Dangerous Method (2011, David Cronenberg)* 73



I'm regularly drawn to costume dramas with elements that make them feel completely contemporary, so by the time Michael Fassbender's spanking Keira Knightley in her bedroom I was bowled over. Cronenberg fearlessly confronts Carl Jung, Sigmund Freud, and Sabina Spielrein as individuals. Though all helped popularize psychology, it's fascinating to see how they ignore their own professional ethics or hide behind self-diagnosis for the sake of convenience. Only Freud comes off at all well, and his rigidness certainly doesn't make him sympathetic.

It's a compelling narrative and it would be a mistake if Christopher Hampton's script didn't make it into this year's Oscar discussion. Kiera Knightley's explosive, selfless performance is a standout, but I appreciate seeing Viggo Mortensen and Michael Fassbender in such sublimely understated roles.

Posters for A Dangerous Method, The Artist, and My Week with Marilyn

Three of my most eagerly-anticipated awards seasons releases have new posters.  One I adore, another I enjoy, and the final leaves something to be desired.  Either way, I'm sure we're looking at the mug of at least 5 future Oscar nominees.

Below, David Cronenberg's A Dangerous Method, staring Keira Knightley, Viggo Mortensen, and Michael Fassbender.

Below, Michel Hazanavicius' ode to silent films, The Artist, staring John Goodman and Jean Dujardin.

Below, Simon Curtis' much-talked-about film about Marilyn Monroe, aptly titled My Week with Marilyn.  Staring Michelle Williams as the title character, Kenneth Branagh as Sir Laurence Olivier, and Judi Dench as Dame Sybil Thorndike.

Freud, Jung, and sex = A Dangerous Method

See the newly dropped trailer here, at A Dangerous Method's website, since I'm sure the YouTube video below will be removed eventually.

Directed by longtime cult director and often Viggo Mortenson co-worker, David Cronenberg is helming this adaptation of Christopher Hampton's play A Dangerous Method.  Hampton also writes the screenplay.  The film looks more vibrant, positive, and less dark than the typical Cronenberg piece.  Viggo looks remarkable and unrecognizable in his role as Freud, seemingly to be playing the confidant role.  Keira Knightley, slowly but surely easing her way into being important again, looks to be a pure fireball in this film, complete with sex and a very accurate Russian accent.  Recently seen as Magneto, Michael Fassbender looks well on his way to a Best Actor nomination for his role as Carl Jung.

It looks a little too romantic for me, but something tells me the flowery score and trailer editing has something to do with that, since I rest assured Cronenberg wouldn't stoop to a star-crossed lovers/European romance sub-genre.  Right?

OSCARRR!

If I had predictions yet (which I will soon, rest assured!) I'd have this film in just abut every category, based on topic and pedigree.  I expect, coupled with X-Men: First Class for this to be a big year visibility-wise for Fassbender, which is always helpful come awards time.

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A Weekend of Good Movie Watching

I had an exceptionally good week of weekend movie watching. The constant rain and enveloping dampness in Chicago meant it was a good opportunity to hunker down with some good movie viewing.

“Anna and the King of Siam” (1946) is the non-musical version of the famous story made even more famous by the Broadway musical and film “The King and I.” This is a marvelous film, despite the politically incorrect casting of Rex Harrison, in his American film debut, as the King of Siam. It’s a hoot to hear the famous “etc., etc., etc.” lines uttered by someone other than Yul Brynner. Irene Dunne plays Anna, and her warm presence and gentle beauty make for a memorable Anna, every bit as good as later interpretations by Deborah Kerr and Jodie Foster. (It really is an unbeatable part. The worst actress in the world couldn’t screw it up.) Linda Darnell plays Tuptim, and she’s not nearly as sympathetic as I remember from earlier versions. She isn’t given much to do, but she’s fine. It’s eerie to watch her being burned at the stake because in real life she had a mortal fear of fire, and ironically, died in a burning house while visiting friends in Glenview, IL. She was only 41.

This is a wonderful film to look and listen to. The Oscar-nominated score by Bernard Herrmann is a treat to listen to and helps act as a guide to the exotic locales. The film deservedly won Academy Awards in the Art Direction/Black and White and Cinematography/Black and White categories.

It’s a little overlong, but packed with detail and story. It runs 128 minutes and when you consider that “The King and I” (1956) ran 133 minutes, and since much of that is devoted to musical numbers, you can see where “Anna and the King of Siam” is able to allow for more incidents.

Rating for “Anna and the King of Siam”: Three and a half stars.

One of my favorite films of 2005 was David Cronenberg’s “A History of Violence”, the dark, disturbing, graphic and morbidly funny saga of a small town diner owner Tom Stall (Viggo Mortensen) in Indiana who foils a robbery in his diner and becomes a mini celebrity. This attracts the attention of mobster Carl Fogarty (Ed Harris) who knows Stall is really Joey Cusack, former enforcer for the Philadelphia mob. The effects this, and other revelations this has on his family, are equal parts horrifying, funny and heartbreaking. The film’s final scene is wonderfully ambiguous. William Hurt was Oscar-nominated for his wonderfully nutty scenes as a gangster, but I think Ed Harris should have gotten the Supporting Actor nomination. His one eyed Carl Fogarty is one of the scariest villains I’ve ever seen.

Rating for “A History of Violence”: Four stars.

A glorious slice of cinematic cheese is “Snakes on a Plane” (2006). You see a movie with a title like that, and you get exactly what you pay for. A combination airplane disaster movie with hundreds of lethal snakes, this is a perfect movie to put your brain on hold, throw all logic out the window, and enjoy the show. I wish there had been more actual snakes used instead of the CGI variety, as the real thing is always more effective, but this is still stupid (in the best sense) Saturday night fodder. It’s fortunate that Samuel L. Jackson is on hand to lend his particular brand of charisma to the proceedings. If ever I’m in a situation where all hell is breaking loose, I want Sam on my side, especially now that Chuck Heston is no longer with us.

Rating for “Snakes on a Plane”: Three stars.

The best movie I’ve seen is ages is “Tokyo Story” (1953), an unforgettable experience that works on many levels. My foreign film viewing is not as strong as it should be, and I’ve never seen a film directed by Yasujiro Ozu, revered by many as one of the greatest directors of all time, and rivaling Akira Kurosawa as Japan’s greatest director.

TCM ran “Tokyo Story” several months ago, and because it’s considered Ozu’s masterpiece, I taped it for later viewing. I didn’t have the opportunity to watch it until Sunday night and when I did…Wow! What a revelation!

“Tokyo Story” runs 135 minutes and I was spellbound from beginning to end. Reading the plot description might make you think there could be no worst ways to spend 135 minutes but you’d be wrong.

The movie is about an elderly couple who decide to visit their grown children in Tokyo, but they are too busy with their own lives to make time for their parents.

Yep, no action, no mob, no snakes on a plane, just a human drama acted and shot to perfection. No fancy camera moves or effects, just watching the heartbreak of generational indifference. Because they’re Japanese, the characters are very stoic and don’t say what they mean, but what they don’t say, and their body language, speaks volumes.

This was a profoundly moving experience, and one that I actually dreamed about that night. It will be a long time before I forget “Tokyo Story” and I now look forward with the keenest of anticipations to seeing other Ozu films.

Rating for “Tokyo Story”: Four stars.