BlackBook

During the fall of my sophomore year in high school I hostessed at a restaurant on the beach. As the weather grew older, the customers came less frequently and the only companion I had was the smorgasbord Sunday morning breakfast buffet, which I wasn't even allowed to dive into. So I figured—why not start reading William S. Burroughs' Naked Lunch instead of answering the phone, that would quell my appetite right? Perhaps spark up some other desires, but that calamari on the table would look a bit less appetizing. And like any teen uncovering for the first time the things that would eventually become the back catalogue of your personality, the books or films that stack up, creating the DNA of whatever mess a human being you become, Naked Lunch poisoned me with its potency.

By definition, a virus is a small infectious agent that can replicate only inside the living cells of an organism. It may be a far-removed thought from your mind when you're in the throws of sickness, but those tiny agents attacking your healthy cells once lived inside of someone else—be it a stranger or someone in close contact. "These physical little virons have travelled into your body and infected your cells, and that's why you're sick," says director Brandon Cronenberg, whose nauseatingly great debut feature Antiviral investigates the idea of disease as a marketable and desirable product for consumption. 

It's David Cronenberg's birthday—let's get weird, very weird. Today the master of body horror, the maestro of visceral and erotic terror turns 70-years-old and this is certainly cause to celebrate—in the most grotesque fashion. For the past 40 years, Cronenberg has given us visually-striking and mind-melding thrillers that coagulate the psychological to the physical, making a potent kind of cinema that we cannot get enough of. So in honor of this day, here's a 90-minute recent interview with the prolific director as well as some favorite scenes from his long and audacious oeuvre.

As one could have foreseen, confounding writer Don DeLillo and director David Cronenberg are melding worlds yet again. But this time sans Robert Pattinson. After their creative success with last summer's perplexing and guttral, Cosmopolis, the two are collaborating once more to bring another one of DeLillo's acclaimed works to the screen. Cronenberg will star in the cinematic adapation of The Body Artist, reports Variety. At the helm will be Italian filmmaker Luca Guadagnino, whose incredible keen sense of authentic, subtle dramatics and beauty brought us the richly powerful I Am Love. He will also be penning the adaptation, now titled Body Art. The film will center around Isabelle Huppert (recently seen in Amour), as well as the man of many faces, Denis Lavant (who just gave one of the best performances of the year in Holy Motors). 

Oh, how I love an angry old white dude, and David Cronenberg is no exception. Over the summer, you may remember, the director went on the attack against "superhero movies," particularly The Dark Knight Rises (remember that?): "I think people who are saying, you know, Dark Knight Rises is, you know, supreme cinema art, I don't think they know what the fuck they're talking about." Bless his heart! I love it. I love him. I've only seen, like, three of his movies, but I love him. So angry! Rich and angry people: my favorite. Anyway, last month, in an interview with Movieline, Ol' Cronie announced that he's got a new thing he hates: Oscar season.

Maybe this is naked metropolitan bias, but I’d thought the audience for an art-house David Cronenberg flick at Lincoln Center would know what they were getting into. Not true! A good handful of moviegoers shelled out $13 for a ticket to Cosmopolis on Saturday night and ran for the hills halfway through. There are a multitude of factors to consider in such a decision.

Cosmopolis, David Cronenberg's adaptation of the Don DeLillo novel, opens today following weeks of a post-cheating scandal media blitz that has blown up in its leading actor (and BlackBook cover boy) Robert Pattinson's face. He's hurting! He's confused! People are forcing him to eat on camera! And everyone forgot about poor David Cronenberg, the beloved director behind cult hits like Scanners, Dead Ringers, Videodrome (and also the unfortunate A Dangerous Method, but we'll let that one slide). What's a critically acclaimed director to do in order to get people to pay attention to him? Well, bash Christopher Nolan's Batman franchise, of course.

The heart of the world's biggest heartthrob weighs in on the life of a young man caught in the flashbulbs and the pages of glossy magazines.

When David Cronenberg’s repressed psycho-sexual snoozefest A Dangerous Method was released, I was disappointed to find the only presence of his signature fascination with body horror was limited to Keira Knightley’s jutting jaw. For a moment there, I felt saddened that the man who gave us Videodrome and Dead Ringers and is known for visually-striking and mind-melding thrillers had ventured into the world of the cerebral in a way that seemed stifling, as if he left himself behind and made someone else’s film. However, when I heard he was adapting Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis, my cinema-sense perked up and I thought this was something he would really be able to take a bite out of. 

Today the 65th Annual Cannes Film Festival kicks off, meaning gorgeous people are spending time watching movies and frolicking on French beaches while you sit in the office and read about it. Glamorous, no?