How did I miss this movie?
polycounter lvl 18
eXistenZ:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120907/
I guess we had a thread about it on the old messageboard, but that movies is seriously one of the best movies I have seen lately
Try to rent it NOW, as every game-developer should have seen this movie
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120907/
I guess we had a thread about it on the old messageboard, but that movies is seriously one of the best movies I have seen lately
Try to rent it NOW, as every game-developer should have seen this movie
Replies
I can usually appreciate Chronenburgs work, but this one didn't do it for me.
Ya. Slow and pointless. Cronenberg has done much better.
r.
I thought each scene was a well crafted exercise in absurdity. What was bad about it? I mean, it's no Fight Club but I would put it in the top 10% of movies I have seen.
Brilliance in a box.
Sides, I want to get a game console that gets sick. ;D Seriously though, there is investigation into organic circuitry.
I remember when my friend and I watched it. We thought we were the two old dudes in the audience when they are beta testing the game, and the go YES! and clap their hands together. Yep.. that was going to be us in 30 years.
I liked Existenz. It has its weak points, but the best parts are the conceptual bits, with the game pod being like an organic construct that hooks into you with an umbilical cord. The main problem is, you can tell the Cronenberg doesn't know that much about video games, and so the underlying mechanics of the game dev backstory are weak. I LOVED the parts where they were 'in the game' and trying to figure out what to do based on intuition, with no prompts, clues, or conventions (compare this to 'SpyKids 3' which is saturated in conventional video gameplay mechanics). That kind of game play has yet to make an appearance in the real world, I think, but I wish I had time to work on a mod concept that would imitate it.
Worst line: "Arrrgh. Spores. No. No, spores. Deadly spores." That's right, no exclamation points.
I like the somewhat unexplored idea that the organic game pod was somehow responsible for the characters and events present in the game, like it was a game world built by an AI and merey 'coached' by the designer. And part of the game play was figuring out the AI's logic.
Oh, wait... (thanks, IMDB!) [ QUOTE ]
Ted: We're both stumbling around together in this unformed world, whose rules and objectives are largely unknown, seemingly indecipherable or even possibly nonexistent, always on the verge of being killed by forces that we don't understand.
Allegra: That sounds like my game, all right.
Ted: That sounds like a game that's not gonna be easy to market.
Allegra: But it's a game everybody's already playing.
[/ QUOTE ]
The gun made from half-eaten boiled lizard and Jude Law's bridgework was brilliant. The best thing about that is not the bizarre grossness, but the fact that the players accept it and roll with it, despite its being completely nonsensical.
And big-ups to Mr Cronenberg for showing us that Jennifer Jason Leigh has such great legs. Wow.
I don't put Existenz up with Cronenberg's masterworks, like Videodrome, or the Fly, but it's on the same shelf with Rabid and Shivers, and I'd put it right next to another of his which isn't much of a movie, but what a hell of a concept, The Brood.
If nothing else, it stands as the no. 2 in the inevitable Hollywood 'high-concept trio', where somebody makes a big-ass movie (The Matrix), someone else makes sort of a knock-off which is basically all right (Existenz), and somebody else makes a piece of total rip-off trash (The 13th Floor).
Long live the New Flesh.
/jzero
If nothing else, it stands as the no. 2 in the inevitable Hollywood 'high-concept trio', where somebody makes a big-ass movie (The Matrix), someone else makes sort of a knock-off which is basically all right (Existenz), and somebody else makes a piece of total rip-off trash (The 13th Floor).
[/ QUOTE ]
No. Sorry. Not letting that stand. Those others where not a rip off. All three where released in 1999. There would have been no time for a "rip-off" of the Matrix. Given the timeperiod between the releases. In fact, I cant find the dates, but I believe Existenz was before or at the same time as Matrix. Also, Matrix was not a big ass movie if you meant budget.
BTW: I found the thirteenth floor to be much more of a engaging movie than the oversaturated Matrix.
When I say 'based conceptually', I'm not talking about the writers, not at all. I'm talking about the mechanics of Hollywood and the system of idiot execs who decide what gets made and what doesn't. I suspect that scripts with coincidentally similar plots or concepts sit around for years, but not until a huge project comes lumbering along do they get dusted off and actually survive the pitch meetings.
In the case of the Matrix, all you would have to say to Mr Studio Prez is, "those guys that made 'Bound' are doing with this big-ass movie about how everyone's reality is really a computer simulation." Doesn't that description fit Matrix, eXistenz, and 13th floor pretty well? I mean the dumbed-down, one-sentence description that the cerebrally challenged latte-sluppers of LaLaLand can understand.
Now, I am not accusing Cronenberg, or the 13th floor writers, of plagiarizing the Wachowskis. ( they're good enough at it themselves! LOL! I kill me!) But I think that you see patterns of similarly-themed movies getting made around the same time when one is judged to be a potential moneymaker. The scripts were probably around for a while, and their time came.
That's all I'm sayin'.
/jzero
of plagiarizing the Wachowskis. ( they're good enough at it themselves! LOL! I kill me!) B
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Yea, heh. It was "their" idea after all. Not Sophia Stewarts
I think that it is an open question about how much of a plot should be explained, and how much should be left open for the audience to interpret. I think that if movies or video games are totally explained they have a flat predictable feel to them. On the other hand you have nonsense like Eraserhead.
My fave Cronenberg cameo: He's the hit man who comes to meet Nicole Kidman at the end of 'To Die For'. Evil!
/jzero
Rhinokey : So did you hate The Fly, Dead Ringers, M. Butterfly, The Dead Zone, or History of Violence? I doubt you saw all of them, but if you hated any of them, then why
[/ QUOTE ]You missed Spider, my personal favourite of those that I've seen.
exestienz and video drome were by far the most horrible in my opinion,
Ghost? Prince of Tides? Dances with Wolves?
History of Violence was actually decent, odd, but it had some very non-hollywood moments that surprised you.
Now, I am not accusing Cronenberg, or the 13th floor writers, of plagiarizing the Wachowskis. ( they're good enough at it themselves! LOL! I kill me!) But I think that you see patterns of similarly-themed movies getting made around the same time when one is judged to be a potential moneymaker. The scripts were probably around for a while, and their time came.
That's all I'm sayin'.
[/ QUOTE ]
I disagree. A wrtier/director team with exactly one film credit to their name (Bound), a film which grossed all of $4 million, talks a studio into funding a sci-fi movie they've scripted. This script and the film's pre-production is so impressive that, with the finished film still unseen, a second studio rushes out to tap an already successful writer/director to jump into production on a similarly themed script he has written. The rival studio gets their project to theaters just three weeks after WB and the Wachowskis. Is that the theory? I don't shave with Occam's Razor all that often, but I've got to say this is much more likely pure coincidence than anything else. Cronenberg was producer on eXistenZ, and I can't see him sitting on that script for long while waiting for whichever Canadian production company scraped up the nickles to pay for the film.
Moreover, I don't have any faith that Hollywood has the slightest idea what sort of film is a potential moneymaker. Look at the unfathomable crap that gets bankrolled - Catwoman for instance. Somebody somewhere thought that flick was worth wasting $100 million on. Meanwhile, The Matrix actually brought in nearly 3 times what it cost to make, despite being so poorly thought of that it was given a Wednesday opening in early spring. I think most movie studio's production decisions are heavily based on Ouiji boards and hard drugs rather than any sort of understanding what good films look like.