Digressions

Books are my second passion. Music comes a distant third. Books and movies: perfection. Even better when is a book about movies - God knows that movies based on books sometimes cannot be taken seriously- and from a competent author. Some wise fried gave me an Amazon voucher  as a birthday gift and I bought "The New Biographical Dictionary of Film" from critic and historian David Thomson. Just started reading it and is both insightful and funny. My only criticism  is that he takes the word " dictionary" too seriously: there is no pictorial evidence of movies, outside the cover. Or maybe I am the one who is out of depth here, as a dictionary, in essence, is not an enciclopedia. ..Anyway, the only thing I don´t understand is his facination with Nicole Kidman; he even wrote a biography of her in 2006, which I take it did not sell well. I myself will not buy it. But everybody is entitled to have a weird obsession or entertain strange notions. Except for Jeanine Basinger. She gave us Michael Bay. Mankind will never recover. 

The only man capable of making me forget the existence of "Basinger´s baby" is , of course, David Cronenberg. He is the modern day Tod Browning, just two steps ahead of his predecessor. Browning seemed to have lost part of his creative drive after Lon Chaney died and could not recover his reputation after "Freaks" (1932)- partly because he was working within the studio system, as an employee. Cronenberg seems to navigate rather smoothly between independent production and mainstream film distribution and has developed, through the yeras, as a very capable actors director. You feel his imprint all over his films, but the performences do not seem imposed or staged, even when they are amazingly over the top, like Vincent Cassel in " Eastern Promises".  The last of his features " Maps to the stars" is still on my mind. I can´t help myself with that, and that is good .

2016 has just begin, but I already miss Cronenberg. What is he doing now? Apparently he is planning in surprising us again.