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Dead Ringers Review and Discussion

post #1 of 13
6/9/05 at 6:51pm
Thread Starter 
Because I didn't post last night when the review went up:

http://chud.com/dvd/3258

Really quite a great film, and worth buying if you don't already have the OOP Criterion release.
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post #2 of 13
6/9/05 at 9:41pm
That was a great breakdown of the film and Cronenberg in general. Most welcome.
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post #3 of 13
7/4/05 at 11:40am
Holy crap, how did I ever overlook this review?
Great job, Mr. Russ. You didn't give away any details while managing a well written, level headed review with a good look at the DVD specs. And indeed, a great breakdown of Cronenberg and the film. Thanks.
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post #4 of 13
8/3/09 at 11:29pm
Spike, I didn't want to derail your "Criterion by the Numbers: A Special Edition list" thread, so I'll ask this here:

Quote:
Originally Posted by Spike Marshall
21) Dead Ringers - Jeremy Irons plays two pyschosexually charged twin brothers who descend into debauchery, madness and drug addiction. Probably Cronenberg's most audience friendly film.



Wut? History of Violence? Hell, I'd go with The Fly or his adaptation of King's Dead Zone as more audience friendly than Ringers.
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post #5 of 13
8/3/09 at 11:48pm
Yeah, there's no way that Dead Ringers is more audience friendly than those. I got my ass chewed out on another (non-movie) forum for about a week after defending it.
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post #6 of 13
8/4/09 at 12:11am
Quote:
Originally Posted by Abbott & Prospero View Post

Wut? History of Violence? Hell, I'd go with The Fly or his adaptation of King's Dead Zone as more audience friendly than Ringers.
Yeah, I think Spike either has a weird sense of what's audience friendly or he's confused on this one. M Butterfly is also way more audience friendly.
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post #7 of 13
8/4/09 at 12:12am
The Fly is what i consider to be a perfect film but Ringers is probably my favorite Cronenberg. No matter how much disgusting grue and slime Cronenberg put on the screen in The Fly, underneath it was a central love story than the audience could immediatelyy grasp on to. Ringers has a story not of love but obsession at its center, and the warmth that was such an essential component of the romance between Goldblum and Davis, and which also makes the degeneration of Brundle such a tragedy, is replaced with a cold study of destruction that, when the two films are placed side by side, will always be the more disturbing of the two.
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post #8 of 13
8/4/09 at 1:05am
Wait, I just realized that Spike was probably joking.

Wait, Spike doesn't make jokes. I'm confused.
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post #9 of 13
8/13/09 at 1:59pm
AVClub New Cult Canon article on Dead Ringers
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post #10 of 13
8/13/09 at 3:27pm
Thanks for the AV Club link. Good piece.

Cronenberg goes through his whole career in this interview.

It's well worth reading the whole piece, but here's the setup to the Dead Ringers section:

Quote:
Dead Ringers (1988) - **** (out of four)
With Dead Ringers, Cronenberg fashions a single entity from two wholes--a continuation in spirit of The Fly, exploring an idea of imposed order (with its blue-lit examination theatres, sterile red gowns, and polished penthouse surfaces) sabotaged by the ever-present spectre of sexual jealousy and addiction. Insects make a return in Dead Ringers in the form of a specially commissioned set of surgical steel gynaecological instruments (leading to a medical examination as discomfiting as anything in the director's oeuvre), illustrating Cronenberg's juxtaposition of the unassailably human with the indisputably inhuman. Described in two ways in the film--as tools for operating on "women with mutant biologies" and as "tools for the separation of Siamese twins"--the Mantles' steel insect (and crustacean) parts are canny representations of the concerns of the picture and, ultimately, of the director's keystone concerns. Jeremy Irons as both halves of the suggestively named Mantle twins ("mantle" being both a cloak of authority and a crustacean's protective covering) is simply astounding: by the middle of the film the illusion of duality is seamless, as is, by the end, the somehow more difficult illusion of cohesion. The star of the picture, however, is cinematographer Peter Suschitzky's (in his first collaboration with the director, a partnership that has lasted to this day) cold colour scheme and smooth movements--the kind of detached remove that fits perfectly with Cronenberg's sensibilities. With the addition of Suschitzky's architectural compositions, Cronenberg, with Dead Ringers, becomes the director that Roman Polanski could have been. There is an apocryphal tale concerning conjoined twins Chang & Eng retold in the film: Chang, the weaker of the two, has a stroke in the night and perishes. When Eng awakes to find his brother dead, he dies of fright. The implications of the tale and the ways with which Cronenberg winnows its essence down to a story of a sensitive dependency made fatal by the dreams of the flesh is the very definition of "auteurism"--and the Cronenberg film.
Click through to read the actual Q & A - its formatting doesn't transfer with copy and paste.
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post #11 of 13
8/13/09 at 3:59pm
Dead Ringers contains what is still one (or two, depending on how you look at it) of my all-time favorite performances in the history of cinema. Irons is just amazing in this film, and that AV Club article is on the money; the dual personalities he crafts for Beverly and Elliot make them totally distinct from one another. One of the top five performances of all time, as far as I'm concerned.
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post #12 of 13
8/13/09 at 4:03pm
Even though it's barely as explicit as Scanners or Videodrome, Dead Ringers is the film where Cronenberg's brand of body horror has the greatest effect on me. The fact that it's loosely based on a true story makes it all the more creepy.
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post #13 of 13
10/16/10 at 11:45pm
I love how Cronenberg tells stories about people who start off on the edge, and then see how far they can take it before falling off completely. This movie reminded me of Crash in that way. Jeremy Ironses are as excellent as I've heard, but the real star of the film is Cronenberg's purity of vision. It's such an intriguing premise, and he really does milk it for all it's worth.

That shot at the end, with the brothers walking through the apartment, before the "separation", was that one performance projected twice? I couldn't detect a single difference between the two brothers in that shot.
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