Here's my "review":
In more than 30 years of going to the movies, I've never once found a movie bad enough to make me walk out of the theater. With a few exceptions – I was one dogfight away from leaving Amores Perros, and the only reason why I didn't walk out of Mad Dog Time was that I had strict instructions from my roommate not to be home before 10 – I believe that, no matter how bad a movie is, it's worth trying to undergo the whole experience in order to give the filmmaker the benefit of the doubt. And the poster for David Cronenberg's Cosmopolis didn't seem to raise a lot of doubts. Based on a Don DeLillo novel, starring Juliette Binoche and Samantha Morton … those things, collectively, should indicate that at the very least the best thing about the movie won't be the good deal on the popcorn, right? Right? No.
The film is set in some sort of dystopia/parallel reality/cheap backlot, where the yuan is about to crash, Robert Pattinson is in fruitless pursuit of a haircut, and people invade restaurants at gunpoints throwing rats around. (No, you didn't read that wrong.) The acting looks like someone taped the script to the wall of its principal actors' hotel rooms and filmed the process of them trying to decode it. There's what's supposed to be an erotic moment with a plastic water bottle (don't ask) which instead made me wonder why someone kept kicking the back of the actress' chair during filming. It's a film where Robert Pattinson says, to one of the three love/sex interests thrown his way in the first 40 minutes, “You have your mom's breasts,” and the woman responds as if someone had asked her to please pass the salt. Maybe playing Edward Cullen has in fact frozen the acting talent he did once possess (or perhaps just his brain), because he appears to think that his character is supposed to be in a coma. In fact, everyone in the movie is a little stupefied, which I can't blame them for, given the script. In addition to the rats and the breasts, the script is so full of it pretentious art-house non-sequiturs and ham-fisted metaphors that I thought David Cronenberg must have fished it out of the Trash folder of some rejected applicant to a middling film school in Florida. If I were DonDeLillo, I'd be picketing Cronenberg's house nightly and leaving severed horse-heads in his bedroom.
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CurzonStreet
12 years ago
Sorry you didn't enjoy it. DeLillo loved it.
The book is very difficult to bring to the big screen. What do you think of the work of David Cronenberg?
Don DeLillo: "Cronenberg has done a job that really impressed me. He is a director that does not compromise and I was impressed by how he managed to make my novel to the big screen, setting the film for three quarters in a limousine. The film is very imaginative. I particularly liked the final scene, the 22-minute confrontation and dialogue between the protagonist Robert Pattinson and Paul Giamatti."
So did Peter Travers in Rolling Stone:
If you can get past the psychological density of the source material (Don DeLillo's 2003 novel) and the tabloid noise around the star (RPatz leaves KStew!), this mesmerizing mind-bender ought to prove two things: (1) Robert Pattinson really can act; (2) Director David Cronenberg never runs from a challenge.
In this fever dream of a movie, Pattinson is incendiary, notably in a climactic gun scene with the great Giamatti. Cosmopolis, demanding as it is daring, is no easy ride. I mean that as high praise.
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CurzonStreet
12 years ago
“He’s an egomaniac who wants to see some kind of spirituality in his egomania. It’s kind of like how actors feel about themselves.”
— Robert Pattinson (On Eric Packer)
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blackbeanie
12 years ago
What I understood best of your "review" is that you didn't like the movie That's okay.
But you assume that DeLillo doesn't like the movie either.
So, if you want so but I don't think you do, why don't you just try to read the book Cosmopolis? It's all there, the dialogues (mom's breasts included), the "frozen acting", everything is there. The movie is one of the most faithful adaptations I've seen for quite a time. The critics you summed up just prove how authentic the film is.
After you've read the book, you most probably won't like both, nor the book, nor the movie, but at least, if you're honest, you would admit that the movie is made very well and that the lead actor nailed Eric Packer perfectly.
That is what matters, nothing else.
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sammie1863
12 years ago
The notoriously publicity shy Delillo appeared at the Cannes and Lisbon premieres with Cronenberg and the cast, did Q/A's and other interviews and stated he was very happy with Cronenberg's adaption.
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