Click here for the review of Cosmopolis

SPOILERS must be tagged with the "SPOILER" tag!

Delillo wrote a movie, a good one, called "Game 6" (Robert Downey Jr. and Michael Keaton) that used many of the elements from his novel Cosmopolis. I'm not calling this redundant, but I am saying it has been done.

Having read the book about 6-7 years ago and being a casual fan of Cronenberg, I had higher hopes for this. Delillo's books are hard to translate into film. But I figured if anyone could its Cronenberg. A few years ago plans were made for a movie adaptation of Delillo's White Noise. This never came to pass (I suspect if one ever does get made the name will be changed to avoid confusion with the Michael Keaton starring horror film from a few years ago).

So this is one I'll probably wait for Netflix for.

I went to see it because I liked some previous Cronenberg films and Like futuristic movies and I found the name Cosmopolis appealing but I agree 100% with James's review lol

James,

I'm curious as to whether the problems with the film (including Pattinson's performance) is inherent in the source material (I have not as of yet read DeLillo's book, btw).

Perhaps this is the case, as "Jeff Wilder" pointed out here in the forums, where the book is inherently unfilmable, and that Cronenberg may have been too slavish in following the basic outline of the book.

There's a way to do the book cinematically. If they were capable of adapting Doubt, they could do something like this epic of the mundane. Glengarry Glen Ross, Doubt... it's not "unfilmable". A book like Room would be unfilmable, as would any respectable attempt at Ulysses.

Then again, the post-mods are a bit tricky to adapt. They apparently pulled it off with Cloud Atlas but that's easier than, say, Gravity's Rainbow.

JB, I'm curious as to your opinions of Cronenberg's other work, like Videodrome, Naked Lunch and Crash. Cosmopolis isn't the first time he's taken on challenging material. I can't comment on the specifics of this film, having not seen it yet. But I've always been comfortable in saying that Cronenberg is either a director you "get" or don't.

I too would like to hear a few words from James on, at least, Naked Lunch.

You are quite right in your feeling about English Canadian films. They have a habit of being talky,boring, pretentious and having to make some kind of self righteous political statement(usually Marxist dialectics). The comment of making a movie for yourself and your friends really is what a lot of Film-Can feels like. Just don't get me started on Guy Maddin and his terrible movies like Keyhole. Then Canadian artists blame Hollywood for the reason their movies don't do any domestic business. Not that the paying Canadian moviegoer find them unwatchable. Now French Canadian films from Quebec seem to be quite better all around movies like Monsieur Lazhar,Necessities of Life(really liked this one about an Inuit hunter with TB stuck in a Montreal hospital),Incendies,Maelstrom and Polytechnique. The only decent recent English Canadian movies would be Take This Waltz(slow and talky but watchable) and Pontypool which is a weird scifi about a DJ stuck in a radio station while some kind of epidemic rages outside his building. They use a unique and unusual angle about how the virus spreads.

As a Canadian, I quite agree with both James' and oakenshield32's assessment of English Canadian films. It's important to keep in mind that the vast majority of English Canadian films have typically relatively modest budgets, and much of that budget comes from federal government grants (including grants from the Film Board of Canada).

Given the publically subsidized nature of the funding, there is often less of an incentive to "play for the masses" -- in fact, many Canadian filmmakers often purposely avoid making films deemed to be too popular, lest they be seen as too "American"
(which is considered to be an insult among certain elite members of Canadian society). Therefore, English Canadian films tend towards the art-house or indie crowds. Which is ironic given that the overwhelming majority of anglophone (i.e. English-speaking) Canadians watch American (and perhaps to a much lesser degree, British and other English-speaking) films.

The situation is different in Quebec, where films made in France are not too popular, and there is a substantial demand for and market for locally produced filmmaking. Furthermore, Quebecers take great pride in local film productions as a means of protecting their French-language culture from assimilation by a sea of English-speaking cultures (both Canadian and American).

Giving the characters verbal diarrhoea? A bit like they did with 'Juno'? Oh, wow, teenagers are saying clever things! Makes the movie much better! Oh wait, teenagers don't say clever things... they talk shit constantly. Snore.

This movie sounds like a great premise gone wrong. Shame really!

One of my favorite movie review "Unknown Movies" has reviews of a lot of legimately good Canadian films, the guy who runs the site is a Canuck and he says a lot of the same things you did about the lamentable state of Canadian cinema, here's the link to the site, i't's helped me discover a lot of great films

http://www.badmovieplanet.com/unknownmovies/

As for Cronenberg, I think he's been rather hit and miss, I didn't really care for Eastern Promises, M Butterfly, Naked Lunch, Spider, or A Dangerous Method, but I liked most of his other films, Crash had a fascinating premise and was hard to forget, but I wouldn't exactly call it good. This film sounds truly horrendous, I wish David would get off his "art" kick and go back to making horror films.

Every film Cronenberg has made is a horror film. Just each in its own way, of course.

I see what you mean, but i'd much rather have him make another film like Scanners, then another film like Crash if you get what i'm saying.