“As my Memorial Day weekend-o-movies continues, I’m determined to quickly squeeze in this write up, lest I end up sitting at the cafe tomorrow for three hours catching up on everything. Shall we?
Cosmopolis comes to us from David Cronenburg. I was gonna say we recently talked about him with Existenz until I saw the date stamp says it was almost exactly two years ago since we spoke. Even earlier we had Eastern Promises. He’s one of the great directors of our day, excelling at dark dramas but standing out with some rather strange fare too. The former is his strength, the latter his signature. Cosmopolis seems an attempt to bridge the two, but at least for me, it doesn’t quite work right.
Robert Pattinson is a young billionare in NYC. We follow him for the day as he rides in his limo to get a haircut on the other side of town. Colleagues and companions join him at various points throughout the trip. And yes, it is a trip. It has a very dreamlike quality as it seems to take an endless amount of time to reach his destination, yet other characters keep cris-crossing his path along the way.
I’ve tried watching it a couple times and I just don’t get it. Midway through I kinda gave up on it and it served more as background noise than anything else. Part of me wants to read the book it was based on, just so I can make sense of the damned thing. But the other part isn’t convinced it’ll be a worthwhile use of time. Well as great as Cronenburg is, there hafta be some misses in the bunch I suppose.”