Movie (DVD) Reviews
Crash (1996)
Directed by David Cronenberg. Starring James Spader, Holly Hunter, and Deborah Unger. Written by David Cronenberg, from J.G. Ballard's novel.
When Canadian horrormeister David Cronenberg ( The Fly , Videodrome ) teams up with experimental novelist J.G. Ballard ( Concrete Island, Day of Creation ), you know something perversely original is going to come of it.
Cronenberg's films are famously wet, slimy things -- his adaptation of William S. Burroughs's Naked Lunch practically oozed its way out of the screen. From the beginning he's mined an obsession with sexuality and man-machine interfaces; Videodrome featured James Woods growing a vagina-like orifice in his stomach, into which he inserted a black, throbbing.videotape.
Ballard's novels are no less graphic. His The Atrocity Exhibition (dedicated "To the insane"), a surrealist march of genital mutilations, napalm-scorched children, and decayed humanity, was initially pulped by publisher Nelson Doubleday. He's also one of the few authors able to pull off a title like, "The Assassination of JFK Considered as a Downhill Motor Race."
In Crash, based on Ballard's novel of the same name, TV scientist James Ballard (Woods) is severely injured in a car wreck. In the other car, Dr. Helen Remington (Hunter), is also injured, her husband killed. As the two recover from the accident, they begin to fall in.well, you wouldn't call it "love," exactly, but "lust."
They discover an underground of car crash fetishists, who, addicted to the rush and horror of colliding metal, blur with the fine line between sex and death. The group re-enacts famous car crashes -- James Dean's Porsche 550 Spyder is a favorite -- and as the crashes, and the sex, get more intense, Ballard and Remington's world threatens to spiral out of control.
-- Eugene Furrows
Quills (2000)
Directed by Philip Kaufman. Starring Geoffrey Rush, Kate Winslet, and Joaquin Phoenix. Written by Doug Wright.
If I could make a plush toy out of the Marquis De Sade, it would look like Geoffrey Rush. It would be the cutest little sadist you have ever seen, and when you squeezed his belly it would say, " Are not laws dangerous which inhibit the passions?" "One is never so dangerous when one has no shame, than when one has grown too old to blush," and, "Religions are the cradles of despotism." When you left him alone with your children, you would return to find them weeping, a roguish smile on the Marquis's stitched face.
But enough about the torture (excuse me, "rites of passage") awaiting my children should those foul and doomed beasts ever walk God's earth. This review is a celebration of Geoffrey Rush, who really makes the Marquis come alive in Doug Wright's adaptation of his play. In Quills , De Sade (the inestimable Geoffrey Rush, whose praises I cannot sing highly enough) is near the end of his life, confined to a mental institution for publishing his "blasphemous" tales of debauchery. Determined to keep writing, he finds a collaborator in Maddy (Winslet), a chambermaid who's got a wicked imagination of her own. They conspire to smuggle the Marquis's writings to the outside world, wreaking all kinds of havoc for the asylum's administrator ( Phoenix ), who, despite his repressed sexuality (or because of it?!), generally defends De Sade. But there's nothing he can do when Dr. Royer-Collard (Michael Caine) arrives and begins a vicious therapy intent on "curing" the Marquis.
We know the Marquis's story can only end in tragedy, but while he's on the screen he burns bright, another martyr to the possibilities of life -- and art -- below the waist.
-- Ricardo Octavian
Salo, or The 120 Days of Sodom (1976)
Directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini. Starrring Paolo Bonacelli. Written by Marquis de Sade, Roland Barthes, Pier Paolo Pasolini, etc.
Back in 1975, Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini set out to adapt the Marquis de Sade's 120 Days of Sodom for the screen. Pasolini already had a reputation as a controversial filmmaker: His contribution to Ro.Go.Pa.G. (1963) earned him a visit from the Italian police, and a suspended sentence on charges of blasphemy. Tackling one of history's most infamous sexual libertines would be a fitting challenge for Pasolini, though it turned out to be his last. Pasolini was murdered shortly after completing Salo , in what some consider mysterious circumstances.
His vision of 120 Days of Sodom fuses the World War II Nazi-Fascist collaboration to De Sade's tale of all-powerful rulers who lock themselves inside a castle for 120 days, determined to plumb the final depths of depravity. Pasolini's rulers are Fascists, their castle a secluded compound in Northern Italy . They kidnap local boys and girls and with the aid of several prostitutes, proceed to see just how sick they can get. They demand that any perversion be explored, forcing their victims to eat shit, bark like dogs, endure whippings and mutilations, and finally, die.
Which is less hot than it sounds. Ha!
De Sade's writing, as plodding and repetitious as it is (I personally challenge you to make it through 120 Days of Sodom or even Justine without glazing over for 50-100 pages at a time), is not about eroticism, but about power. It's about victims and oppressors, and ultimately we are all victims. Salo , for all its controversial, button-pushing depravity, has a very simple message at its heart: We are not free.
-- Raymond Luxury-Yacht |
