GBU Season 5, Episode 2: Crimes of the Future

Kicking off Spooktober a little early, is David Cronenberg’s first body horror movie in like twenty years.

In only our second podcast of 2022 (I’m so sorry) we take a look at Crimes of the Future, my first Cronenbergian body horror affair. Starring Viggo Mortensen, Léa Seydoux, and Kristen Stewart, this film has turned out to be very divisive. Some people call it a cheap and shameless edgelord exposé, while I, at least, considered it to be making an artistic statement that was valuable, regardless of the over-the-top way in which it is packaged.

While it isn’t nearly as bad on the final recording as it sounded in our studio monitors at the time, we had some buzz creep in, as it always does, threatening to ruin the show, and this finally caused me to drive out to Guitar Center the next morning to purchase a power conditioner. Thanks to friend of the show Esquared for bringing to my attention that such a thing even exists. You’ll find on season 5 episode 3, Haggard: The Movie that the show is, indeed, practically buzzless. I will be forever grateful for this magical ability to subdue the ancient, poor electrical grounding of the creaky old Dayton Upstairs Recording Studio.

We touched on another film I saw recently, Sara Colangelo’s The Kindergarten Teacher starring Maggie Gyllenhaal, Gael Garcia Bernal, and Rosa Salazar. It’s a remake of a 2014 Israeli film of the same name by writer and director Nadav Lapid. It took a while for me to warm up to it but by the end I was sold on this picture, about a sad woman’s dangerous obsession with trying to bring some kind of art into the world, even if it can’t be her own.

We also risked cancellation by discussing another Rick Worley video essay, What if JK Rowling is Right About Everything?, an imperfect but challenging examination of current affairs and the relationship between artists and their fans, which I recommend even if it might lose me all my social credibility. In case it needed clarification, because this is the world we live in and I know for a fact it needs clarified: trans rights are human rights and are fully deserved, and ours is a show which fully supports trans people, full stop.

Thank you for stopping over to the blog. We’d love it if you shared the show with your friends if you like what we do. You can get in touch with us by e-mailing me at Brian@candidpodcast.com. If you want to keep up with what films I’ve been watching or see my ranked lists of movies, follow me on Letterboxd.

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