Shane Buettner

Well, now that I’m Seeing It, What Is It?

Writer/Director David Cronenberg translated William S. Burroughs’ “unfilmable” book Naked Lunch in a (ahem) novel way, creating an intensely hallucinogenic, psychosexual trip that’s more about the writer himself than the writer’s cultural lightning rod of a book. Cronenberg incorporates bits of the book, but infuses his film with a profound statement on the artistic process, and especially the inner turmoil that fuels many artists’ best work. Cronenberg’s movie sees Naked Lunch the novel through Burroughs’ shame and torment over being a homosexual and his consuming drug addiction. Other aspects of the author’s life are also interwoven into the film’s narrative with the most notorious being that he was married to a woman, Joan, who Burroughs shot and killed during an intoxicated “William Tell Routine.”

Rebel director Robert Altman was buried and resurrected countless times in his long career, beating the system and making vital films right up to his death in 2006. 1975’s Nashville was his high-water mark, a great film and the zenith of his 1970s glory years. A musical, a political drama, a romantic drama, a country music mockumentary, and a tragedy, Nashville defies description as a story.

Based on director Joseph Kosinski’s (Tron: Legacy) unpublished graphic novel “treatment,” Oblivion plays like a patchwork quilt of samples from just about every popular science-fiction movie made since 2001: A Space Odyssey. While Kosinski’s graphic novel concept supposedly predates Pixar’s 2008 blockbuster Wall-E, the similarities aren’t at all subtle, especially with flying drones that look and act so much like EVE that I’m surprised Universal isn’t getting dinged for likeness royalties.

Oscar again made the safe choice for 2012’s Best Picture, choosing Ben Affleck’s blandly competent Argo, virtually ignoring the most provocative film of the year, writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master. More egregious is that Anderson’s tour de force only garnered Academy nominations in the acting categories. One can’t help but wonder if the film’s Oscar fate would have been different if the subject was any other cult than Hollywood-chic Scientology. One also suspects Argo will occupy a place in film history closer to How Green Was My Valley, Ordinary People, and Driving Miss Daisy than to Citizen Kane, Raging Bull, or Do the Right Thing.