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Wednesday, December 22, 2010

BD impressions: Videodrome

4:06 PM / BD Impressions / 5 Comments

The film: David Cronenberg is a director whose work I have to be in the right frame of mind to enjoy. I find his films to be very cold and misanthropic, and while I sometimes suspect that Sturgeon's Law applies as much to human beings as to anything else, I suspect my outlook on life is generally more optimistic than that of old Croney.

I liked VIDEODROME a great deal the first time I saw it, several years ago, and rewatching it the other night I found myself still admiring its obvious strengths, despite being a little less taken by it as a whole than I previously was. It's typical of early-to-mid-period Cronenberg, turning on a dime between gross-out horror and biting social commentary. (Although I've described the evolution of Cronenberg's style in recent years as "mainstreamification", it's fair to say that his old body horror obsessions haven't left him - they've simply been submerged beneath a more "accessible" surface.) The world he depicts is as grim, cold and unfeeling as anything else in his filmography, and the protagonist, Max Renn, is a character for whom it's difficult to like, dislike or feel any real sympathy for. I often feel that the characters in Cronenberg's films are not really intended to be seen as people at all but rather collections of flesh and bone destined to be graphically disembowelled or transformed. In a sense, they feel like films told from the point of view of a dispassionate observer - a scientist, which of course is precisely what Cronenberg started out as.

I remember reading somewhere that Cronenberg was still writing the script while the film was shot, and I suspect that may have something to do with the film's somewhat disjointed feel and uneven pace. At times I feel it lacks cohesion, even when taking into account the fact that its protagonist spends a great deal of time hallucinating. I'm not convinced it really conveys the feeling of being in a waking nightmare (at least not in the way that films such as MULHOLLAND DRIVE and INFERNO do), and I have a feeling that this is at least partly due to Cronenberg's cold, detached approach conflicting with a desire to convey an experience as deeply personal as hallucination.

Still, although it probably sounds like I'm coming down pretty heavily on it, I like VIDEODROME. It's a style of filmmaking (more overt body horror) that I'd love to see Cronenberg get back to one day. I really liked the unusually humanist (for Cronenberg) EASTERN PROMISES (I was less taken by A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE and my reaction to SPIDER was downright lukewarm), but I think there's something to be found in films like VIDEODROME, THE FLY and DEAD RINGERS that Cronenberg does better than anyone else, and the horror genre is a poorer place without his input. Love live the new flesh! 7/10

Image quality: Not exactly stunning, although the extent to which it could reasonably be expected to have looked any better is open to debate. Universal licensed the film to Criterion, and certainly the disc's look is of a piece with a number of Universal catalogue titles. The encoding, which in my experience tends to be Criterion's strongest point, is uniformly excellent, detail in close-ups is reasonably good and the grain, while a tad clumpy, is probably a pretty accurate representation of the source elements. When all said and done, I suspect that for it to look substantially better, we would have to go back to the original camera negative as opposed to the interpositive used here. Still, it looks substantially better than Criterion's DVD (derived from the same master) and is, on the whole, a worthwhile upgrade. 7/10

Videodrome
studio: Criterion; country: USA; region code: A; codec: AVC;
file size: 24.5 GB; average bit rate (including audio): 39.57 Mbit/sec

5 Comments

 
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