This movie looks intriguing.

Well, that's reassuring. I love most of Cronenberg's work, so I'm sure I'm in for a treat.

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/arts/review/get-in-the-car-for-david-cronenbergs-film-adaptation-of-delillos-cosmopolis/story-fn9n8gph-12264 41312898

WHATEVER you think of Canadian director David Cronenberg, and I admire his work, you can't deny his willingness to have a crack at filming "unfilmable" books.

In 1991 he brought William S. Burroughs's hallucinatory drug trip, Naked Lunch, to the big screen and five years later he delivered an adaptation of J. G. Ballard's tale of auto-erotica, Crash, that out-weirded its source material. Now he offers us Cosmopolis, based on the 2003 novel by Don DeLillo, the American writer who is a permanent finalist in any discussion of the greatest living authors.

Cosmopolis was generally considered the least filmable of DeLillo's novels, not least because the story unfolds almost entirely inside a white stretch limousine. Other works, such as his 1988 Lee Harvey Oswald novel Libra, were thought to be more cinematic. Yet Cosmopolis is in fact the first DeLillo novel to be filmed. In a terrific interview with the author provided as part of the publicity material, he admits he is surprised none of his other books has made it to the screen, but adds: "Anyway, don't expect me to take care of it myself and write a screenplay."

...While DeLillo was enthusiastic about the project (and declares himself "thrilled" with the finished product), he didn't participate in it, even declining an invitation to visit the set. Cronenberg, who hadn't read the book until he was offered the job, wrote the script, which more or less cut-and-pastes DeLillo's waking dream-like dialogue.

Cosmopolis centres on Eric Packer, a 28-year-old master of the universe who has made billions on the financial markets. He is played by Twilight heart-throb Robert Pattinson, who brings a convincing meld of arrogance and vulnerability to a demanding role (he never leaves the screen).

As the film opens Packer enters the palatial limo in which he, and we, will spend most of the next 108 minutes. Packer is having a bad day: he has made a ruinous bet against the Chinese currency, he's being stalked by a potential assassin, his wife of 22 days, Elise (Sarah Gadon), is refusing to sleep with him and the city (New York in the novel) is in gridlock because of a presidential visit and violent anti-capitalism street protests.

But all of that is happening outside. Inside his cork-lined limo ("I had it Prousted," he tells Elise, who is a poet), Packer continues his usual routine: doing business, meeting associates, having his daily medical examination (including a prostate probe), having sex with women not his wife and, above all, engaging in cryptic conversation with his driver, bodyguard and those who come and go in the back of the car. This last category includes his art dealer (a sexy, sad Juliette Binoche) and chief adviser (a tough, smart Samantha Morton).

Yet the thing Packer wants most in the world is to get across town for a haircut. The reason for this quest becomes clearer in an understated (well, as understated as Cronenberg gets) Rosebud moment towards the end of the film.

Those worlds inside and outside are important in considering Cosmopolis. Is what we see on the screen really happening or is it only taking place, American Psycho fashion, inside Packer's head? Or is it a combination of the two? You will make up your own mind, though I think the film is better appreciated if you note Cronenberg's remark that the limo "is not so much a car as a mental space".

And this is not to say that reality doesn't bite throughout. If anything, Cosmopolis is more timely now than when DeLillo published it almost a decade ago. In the post-GFC, European debt crisis world, capitalism is under even greater scrutiny than it was following the dotcom implosion at the start of the century. The Occupy Wall Street movement is a milder incarnation - so far - of the protests Packer watches from behind his tinted (and bulletproof) windows. And we've all seen pies thrown in famous corporate faces, as happens in one of the funniest set pieces of the film.

Cosmopolis is a talky film of a talky book. There's a fascination with words as agents of destruction ("A person rises on a word and falls on a syllable"; "Computer. Even the word sounds backward and dumb"), with epigrammatic truth telling ("Talent is more erotic when it's wasted") and with foreboding questions ("Where do all these limos go at night?").

This trial by conversation reaches a crescendo in the powerful final sequence of the film, the longest to take place outside the limo, featuring Packer and a character played by Paul Giamatti. I won't reveal any more because I don't want to spoil the plot. But the sequence features brilliant one-on-one acting from Pattinson and especially Giamatti, who was Oscar nominated in 2005 for the Russell Crowe boxing film Cinderella Man. Don't be surprised if he needs to dry clean his tux next February.

This culminating sequence also gives Cosmopolis something it could otherwise be accused of lacking amid all the stylised, cynical talk: a heart, one found in an unexpected place. I'm not saying Cronenberg provides any great insights into the human condition in the way his American contemporary Terrence Malick (both born in 1943) does, but I left this film with a heightened sense of being alive, and that's not a bad result from a trip to the cinema.

Cosmopolis: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwehC_EuN-k
http://ow.ly/1iTyiC

http://www.totalfilm.com/features/50-greatest-movie-events-of-2012-so- far/cronenberg-goes-weird-again
50 Greatest Movie Events Of 2012 So Far
#44 Cronenberg Goes Weird (Again)

The Event: David Cronenberg re-channels his dark side with the Robert Pattinson-starring adaptation of Don DeLillo's Cosmopolis. The first full trailer is every bit as baffling as one could have hoped for, with the film's Cannes screening proving just as off-beam. Take another look at it above to see for yourself.

Future Implications: After a couple of more mainstream offerings in the shape of A History Of Violence and Eastern Promises, it looks as though Cronenberg is going back to the bizarre…

http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_mcg1wj78eb1r7rghpo1_500.png

http://blogs.indiewire.com/thompsononhollywood/cannes-review-david-cro nenbergs-cosmopolis#

Lately Canadian director David Cronenberg is tending toward talkier films, heavy on dialogue and discourse. "Cosmopolis," like "A Dangerous Method" (2011), imagines pseudo-intellectual characters prattling on about The Human Condition. But unlike "Method," which reduced its characters to pint-sized archetypes of psychoanalysis, "Cosmopolis" digs deep. The film is arranged episodically, as characters appear briefly and are unlikely to show again—although Giamatti's character, Eric's madcap employee, circulates with menace along the film's fringes.

While Cronenberg has elicited nuanced, naturalistic performances from the likes of Viggo Mortensen, Maria Bello and Naomi Watts ("A History of Violence," "Eastern Promises"), he often teases out intentionally stilted performances from his leads ("Crash," 1996). As Eric, the brooding Pattinson eroticizes every move, glance and revolver-spin. Travis Bickle is gliding beneath his dead stare.

Although the profligate Eric professes ideas and obsessions, he is ultimately a wannabe nihilist. He asks one of his many girlfriends (Patricia McKenzie) to tase him, because he's ready for something new, because he wants to feel something besides empty sex and asymptotic human connection. A person who has everything, in effect, has nothing. That doesn't make Eric a deep person but, in the film's final stretches as he confronts his fate, something is roiling beneath that dark, handsome shell.

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“There’s a really magic shot in the film — perhaps my favorite moment in his performance, also — when he’s stumbling down the alley with the gun, and he’s looking for Paul Giamatti, and there’s this particular look that comes over his face in that one moment and you can see his derangement. It was really wonderfully played." ~Luke Goodsell

David Cronenberg: “Yeah, it was beautiful. It was the only take that Rob did exactly that on, and I thought, 'Well that’s the take.' It was unexpected. I mean, Rob was constantly surprising me, I have to tell you, with things like that. Lovely, lovely things that were spontaneous but dead-on.”
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Dude, I agree. I dunno what's wrong with movie producers, since this hasn't happened, yet.