Review: "Possessor" is a true provocation

by Tony Ruggio

A worm-infested apple doesn’t fall far from a rotting tree. In only his second feature film, baby Brandon Cronenberg proves he’s everything his father David was in his heyday: stylish, provocative, and interested in more than the gore and sleazy depravity that often grab headlines, although he’s clearly interested in those as well. Set in an alternate techno-horror 2008 of corporate espionage, where agents like Tasya (Andrea Riseborough) use brain-implant technology to “possess” other human beings for carrying out assassinations, Possessor is possibly the most graphic film made since Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist. Here it’s not so much what happens, but how it happens, how it’s framed on screen via some truly horrific and terrific practical effects.

When we meet Tasya, she’s at the top of her game yet beginning to slip. As Jennifer Jason Leigh’s character puts it, “the older you get, the harder it gets”...

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Game of Thrones, Three Hours In

I've resisted commenting on the new HBO series Game of Thrones, made possible by way of The Lord of the Rings. (That's a gift that will hopefully keep on giving to the fantasy genre. No one wants to go back to the 80s when B movie status was forced upon an entire genre.) I wanted to see how the series did or did not evolve from the kick-off show a couple of weeks back. So after three hours in the Seven Kingdoms, it feels like time to discuss.

After glancing at a few reviews and comment pieces, most of which seem elated at the ratings or the instant second season renewal, it seems the general consensus is FuckYeahGameofThrones. I am personally not elated though I did want to be. I imagined that the right cast or storytelling decisions in the series would smooth over or even hurdle some of the problems with the book series. I loved the first book but grew less enamored with each until I finally gave up on the series halfway through the third. By that time we had been introduced to dozens of major characters (plus several dozen minor ones) and the story threads, splintered at the thrilling final chapters of the first book, had only been rebraided in the abstract. The characterizations were, generally speaking, quite interesting. What killed it was the lack of interaction between the characters. The map is so big and the plots so resistant to truly intertwining that it felt like you were reading 100 different novels at once and even the ones about blood relatives would almost never overlap. Great characters are great characters but even they need chemistry with other great characters to truly leap off the page or screen.

George R R Martin can turn a phrase with the best of them, build a thrilling moment, and make complex decisions about characterizations (the best longform aspects of the book may be that, aside from maybe three or four characters, most of them minor, nobody seems entirely like heroes or villains). But I found the author's voice too cruel -- the ratio of gruesome plot turns to endearing or lighter or funny or romantic bits is roughly 99 to 1 -- and the stories far too repetitve once it was clear that entire books would go by and we'd still be harping on the same points (in that way it was already a television soap opera!) and still yearning for some face-to-face time between ANY of the characters we'd seen interact in the first novel.

But here's how the pros and cons and character detail breaks down thus far.

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