From: Jim Fehlinger (fehlinger@home.com)
Date: Sun May 09 1999 - 15:17:20 MDT
Max More wrote:
>
> (If I put the capitalization in the right places.)
>
> Since I have extremely limited time for seeing movies or other
> entertainment right now, I thought I'd ask for opinion's on Cronenberg's
> movie eXistenZ. ... Has anyone seen it? Does it contain ideas worth going to see? Is it
> stylistically excellent (like Matrix)?
I saw _eXistenZ_ last weekend; I thought it was well worth seeing,
though quite different from _The Matrix_. It wasn't stylish at
all, at least in the slick style of _The Matrix_; it looked distinctly
low-budget by comparison. On the other hand, I got the idea that
the low budget look was part of the "point" of the movie (substitution
of drab VR scenarios, with shallow characters, hackneyed plot-lines,
and circumscribed possibilities, for the real thing). As you might
gather, it casts a rather jaundiced eye at the possibility of "total"
VR.
Much of the film had a squishy, slightly gory character in keeping
with some of Cronenberg's earlier films (_Videodrome_, _The Brood_);
the game consoles are fleshy, vaguely sexual-looking appliances
that gurgle and squeak, and have breast-like extrusions that have
to be squeezed, and nipples that have to be stroked, to operate them.
They're connected to their human operators with a cable that looks
a lot more like an umbilical cord than a wire, and is plugged into an
opening in the spine called a "bioport", which looks like (in closeup),
and in some scenes is treated as, an additional body orifice in a
quasi-sexual
sense.
I thought it was a hoot -- by all means, see it.
Jim F.
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