Audio Reviews - Cosmopolis - Audo Review

Riding across Manhattan in a stretch limo in order to get a haircut, a 28-year-old billionaire asset manager's day devolves into an odyssey with a cast of characters that start to tear his world apart.

Tags:  movie review, audio, spill, spill.com, robert pattinson, paul giamatti, juliette binoche, cosmopolis

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  August 30, 2012 at 7:31 PM, said ...

  Great review, I thought it was just me, it really sucks cause I had pretty high hopes for this film when I first saw the trailer, looked like Cronenberg might be going back to his old style of movies and it just wasnt there. Not a great follow up to that boring ass Dangerous Method.

• August 28, 2012 at 3:39 PM, said ...

  Wow this film sounds like a massive hunk of shit!! Cronenberg has struck out here. Always the way as the trailer was not that bad.

  
  
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  August 28, 2012 at 2:39 PM, said ...

  @crayolablack STFU!

• August 28, 2012 at 2:55 AM, said ...

  This sounds like Cronenbergs early stuff: Stereo and Crimes of the Future. I don't know if you have seen does....but they are very slow and a lot of dialogue. Maybe the next Cronenberg movie would be a throw back to his 80s movies. 

  
  
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  August 28, 2012 at 1:23 AM, said ...

  Hey could r next video review be Cosmopolis? hearing u guys totally rant on this peice of crap again  would be awesome. I think u could do something funy with the animation. Maybe even have Korey wearng his Batman costume again, after that dumba$$ sayin he thought Dark Knight Rises was boring and then making THIS????? Lol, either way, hilarious review guys. I just REALLY hope this will be ur next video review.

• August 28, 2012 at 12:46 AM, said ...

  LOL! Korey, u are officially a part of HISTORY. Your review is posted on Wikipedia. "Korey Coleman of spill.com gave the film a rating of "Fuck You", the site's lowest rating. Coleman stated "I don't see how this, a movie that's an hour and a half long, of nothing but constant babble - which is under the guise of some sort of intellectualism - is seen as a good film." Other members of the site said in their reviews that the film was pretentious and boring, though there is an audience that will see and enjoy it." Im sorry, but after hearing ur review, i looked up the film, and there it was. I busted out laughing, and that TOTALLY made my day. Great review guys, and if u can, make a video for this one. That could be pretty funny. Keep up the good work! 

  
  
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  August 27, 2012 at 11:01 PM, said ...

  Cosmopolis

  BY ROGER EBERT / August 22, 2012

  "Cosmopolis" is a flawlessly directed film about enigmatic people who speak in morose epigrams about vague universal principles they show no sign of understanding. Its characters are bloodless, their speech monotone. If there are people like this, I hope David Cronenberg's film is as close as I ever get to them. You couldn't pay me to see it again.

  
  To Think Mr. Ebert & Mr. Coleman would have so much in common outside of there love of thick black womenly meat.

• August 27, 2012 at 9:41 PM, RabidScotsman said ...

  I do not argue that Cosmopolis is a near impossible film to decipher. It's dialogue is both vague and immensely complicated. I wouldn't be surprised if over 90% of people who view this despise it. However, the film really spoke to me. Being a Finance major, I was fascinated by the philosophy behind nearly all of the conversations. I was never bored for single moment. I may not have completely understood every single conversation/theme DeLillo/Cronenberg were trying to display but I am gearing up for a second viewing. Unlike Waking Life, a similar philosophical film, all of the conversations build on top of each other for a satisfying conclusion. Waking Life was merely a hodge-podge of half-assed philosophical bullshit that created the illusion of it being smarter than the audience. While I can see people feeling the same way about Cosmopolis, I loved every single minute of it.

  
  
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  August 27, 2012 at 6:19 PM, said ...

  If that audio clip that began 8:21 is typical of this movie as a whole, then this must be as terrible as the boys are saying it is. Thanks for taking the bullet for us, fellows!

• August 27, 2012 at 5:35 PM, said ...

  co host. "TO WHERE TO WHERE TO WHERE TO WHERE TO WHERE TO WHERE TO WHERE TO WHERE TO WHERE TO WHERE TO WHERE." get a fucking vocabulary.

  
  
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  August 27, 2012 at 3:57 PM, carlton dorelus said ...

  taken from Wikipedia:

  
     Korey Coleman of spill.com gave the film a rating of "Fuck You", the site's lowest rating. Coleman stated "I don't see how this, a movie that's an hour and a half long, of nothing but constant babble - which is under the guise of some sort of intellectualism - is seen as a good film." Other members of the site said in their reviews that the film was pretentious and boring, though there is an audience that will see and enjoy it.

• August 27, 2012 at 12:42 PM, said ...

  Here's how I would have ended the movie; Get rid of the entire "assassin" plotline and just keep it as a threat in the background. Cut the entire fucking scene with Giamatti. Packer arrives at the Limo depot, says goodbye to the driver before walking towards the barber shop which is near by. The barber is surprised to see him. They small talk while Packer gets his haircut tells him everything, how and why he lost his fortune which he deliberately flushed down the shitter to free himself from the gilded prison he made for himself. The barber asks him what he's going to do now. Packer says he doesn't know and asks the barber how his day went. The barber tells him that he just lost every cent he had invested in the company that Packer ran before slitting Packer throat with a straight razor before pulling out a gun and blowing his own brains out.

  THE END   

  
  
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  August 27, 2012 at 12:29 PM, said ...

  I wrote this review after seeing Cosmopolis in late June.

  This movie is a horrible piece of shit. Now, Crash and Naked Lunch are my two favorite Cronenberg movies so it's not like I have ADD but this movie had me grinding my fucking teeth. The concept had soo much potential; billionaire taking a limo ride to get haircut while his empire collapses and an anti-capitalist movement raging in the background. There was many opportunities for allegory and symbolism. The limo being Eric Packer's own coffin in that he's already dead on the inside and being taken to his final destination. Taking a "haircut" meaning losing your ass financially. Marrying not for love but because you find a woman who's lifestyle and wealth is comparable to yours. The clips that I saw got me excited because I thought this was going to be a movie filled with alienation, existentialism, philosophy and maybe a bit of metaphysics all through stimulating intellectual dialect. I also happen to LOVE movies that focus on talk (Talk Radio, Fail Safe,The Ninth Configuration, Clerks 1 & 2, The Silence of the Lambs, Network, The Hospital, Pulp Fiction etc...) but talk without focus is meaningless and that's how I feel about Cosmopolis.

  The problem is that Cronenberg is too cerebral and seals this movie soo hermetically that I couldn't connect on it on any level. Now you might ask "how does that differ from, say, Crash, which has people crashing cars, fucking and talking about the taste of semen?". Well, Crash was, as I understand it, a Science Fiction movie dealing with the abnormal psychology of people who are sexually aroused by car crashes. People who are so cut off from feeling that they see the car crash as a liberating of sexual energy as said in the movie. So the cool, measured tones of the actors and their performances fits perfectly within the context of that movie.

  But that style just didn't work for Cosmopolis. What was missing was context for everything. We see Eric Packer, 28 year old billionaire venture capitalist riding through New York to get a haircut. First question, why does he soo need to get a haircut at this specific location when he could have it done at the office? At the end of the movie we see that it's a small barber shop run by someone who knew Eric when he was a child and was acquainted with his parents which tells us that he came from a lower economic background. This could have explained many things but Cronenberg fails to use it to tell a human story as the destination should have meant something. Not to mention that the barber is a fucking idiot who cuts giant chunks out of his hair and babbles to himself. Packer is obviously some kind of child genius and a self made billionaire. The way he speaks, his money, the limo all symbolize someone who is soo wealthy that they've been cut off from the real world. He's married to an ice queen who rejects him sexually because she was born into a wealthy billionaire family. A self absorbed "artiste" who writes poetry and prefers to isolate herself with books as opposed to having sex with her husband. In the book he loses not only his own fortune but that of his wife and her family. This is not done in the movie and I felt that this was a crucial mistake as it could have shown Packer's attack on aristocratic capitalists from the inside which brings me to my next point....

  Packer has bet against the Yuan and loses his fortune over the course of a day but it doesn't seem to make an impact one way or the other as Cronenberg doesn't show us anything that happens from outside of the limo, always from the inside which creates a deadening vacuum with no emotional contrast. We never find out whether Packer deliberately blew his fortune although we are made to ASSume that it was because had such belief in the market, that every single equation and outcome could be predicted, that he had somehow miscalculated. The problem with this thesis is that Packer, who is supposed to be a genius, completely fails to take into account that markets are created by people and people are fallible and will fuck things up either by accident or by greed. Perhaps this was Cronenberg's way of saying that Packer had become soo isolated from humanity that he had forgotten about human nature which is why he failed to see this coming? But that's not as interesting as a boy king deliberately taking everything down to assert his individuality and break free of the gilded prison he's built for himself. Eric Packer reminds me of the protagonists of George A. Romero's Dawn of the Dead in that once they have everything they could ever want inside the mall their lives become stagnant as the need for survival is what drives us as a species and once that want was filled, the characters became no better off than the zombies surrounding the mall who represent mindless consumerism just as the protesters in Cosmopolis aren't actually anti-capitalist but are in fact fighting for their piece of the pie in the face of cyber-wealth and the changes in the global economy which will leave them behind as one character puts it. My point is that a tale of self destruction is more interesting than the ennui odyssey that Cronenberg gave us.

  Finally, the so called "threat" against Packer's life is nothing more than noise in the background and comes to nothing as Eric confronts his would-be assassin during the final excruciating tedium of this boring fucking movie. What should have been a visceral, emotional climax is fucked right in the ass with nothing but two characters droning on endlessly and pointlessly as we learn that Paul Giamatti's Benno Levin wants to kill Packer to give his life meaning (ala John Hinkley Jr.) but also that he's a fucking nutzoid (David Mark Chapman) while the correct ending of Benno deciding not to kill Packer once he's learned that all of his wealth and influence is gone, thus making his killing of Paker a meaningless act in his own mind, was not taken by Cronenberg who fucking cuts to black with Benno talking about the fungus between his toes and pointing a gun at the back of Packer's head. No gunshot, no resolution, NOTHING!!!

  This was the last straw as I stormed out of the theater, fucking pissed that I had wasted two hours of my life on this piece of shit which is easily the lowest point of Cronenberg's career and that's saying something after that fucking wretched fucking trash Spider. There were about 20 people in the theater that I saw this in and within 30 minutes half of them were gone and I regret that I didn't join them as Cosmopolis is a fucking terrible movie and not worth wasting your time on.

  AVOID LIKE THE FUCKING PLAGUE!!!

• August 27, 2012 at 5:59 AM, Jon Baley said ...

  Just being facetious, Lucas. I know there were plenty of critics everywhere who think the same way (Cosmopolis is still at 64% on RT, for some ungodly reason). But as a Frenchman, you can't deny the existence of the snooty French critic as a stereotype anymore than I as an American can deny the existence of the backwards, country hick stereotype. It exists because there's enough people out there to convince others that it's the norm. 

  
  
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  August 27, 2012 at 5:38 AM, said ...

  Loved Leon's Green Goblin laugh best thing about the review.

   

   

   

• August 27, 2012 at 4:06 AM, said ...

  Maybe him talking to random people who somehow got into the limo and just happened to be his "financial advisers" was him loosing his mind.

  
  
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  August 27, 2012 at 2:03 AM, said ...

  As a member of the Destiny, Cohost your being called out for excessively whining like a bitch. Everyone else are giving out good points while your just trying so hard to be funny.

• August 26, 2012 at 5:08 PM, said ...

  I'm done giving moves the excuse of being smart. Christopher Nolen makes smart movies AND he makes them entertaining. So u know what, FUCK movies like these. Fuck um up the ass.

  
  
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  August 26, 2012 at 3:55 PM, said ...

  David Cronenberg....you have my permision to die.

   

  Get him, Co Host and i'll film it.

• August 26, 2012 at 3:51 PM, Lucas said ...

  Do you know a lot of French critics ? Do you read a lot of French Magazine ?
  Do you have any particular film that ONLY french critics pointed as Art Films ?
  If not, please don't generalize. I was only refering to this movie and there's certainely a fair part of american critics who gave it 5 out of 5 stars just because they didn't want to look clueless or uneducated.
  Hipsters and wannabe intellectuals are not from one nationality.
  If you don't believe me, go to the nearest starbuck and check some I.D.

  
  
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  August 26, 2012 at 3:08 PM, Jon Baley said ...

  @Lucas Pretentious French critics who praise hollow, meaningless movies as art films? The hell you say. :b 

• August 26, 2012 at 9:10 AM, Lucas said ...

  This review illustrates EXACTLY the reason why I spend so much time on this website :'-)
  Back in France, I was so ashamed to see how unethical & shallow critics were while praising this "PRENTENTIOUS" manipulative sub essay trying to fill it with alternative arguments that it couldn't come up all by itself !
  I was so pumped up to watch this movie when it aired at Cannes but this was so dull and empty that it went as far as make me forget that I could have just walked out of the theater :-o
  
  Merci Spill, Sincèrement Merci.
  
  @ Korey : If you do love Kevin Durand (He's on my Black list, personally) call him and get him to fire what is propably the Worst agent in Hollywood. 
  I mean, seriously : Legion, X-Men Origins Wolverine, Number 4, Robin Hood, Wild Hogs, Winged Creatures, Big Mamma 2...
  I know you have that puppy rescue syndrome, supporting actors that everyone dogpill on, but this right here screams for an intervention.
  Usually I would run if I see his name on the cast, and in restropect, Pattinson was a pretty big hint too, but I had to go for Cronenberg.
  The Good thing is, now we're fucking even.

  
  
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  August 26, 2012 at 6:52 AM, Johnnie Montgomery said ...

  I love Leon's laugh so much! XD

• August 26, 2012 at 4:11 AM, Martin Lottie said ...

  It looks and sounds like a bad stage play.

  
  
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  August 26, 2012 at 2:51 AM, said ...

  @Mason Daniel: Wow. I really see what you're saying. I really understand what you're saying! What you said.....is....so full of shit.....Yeah shit. Just chock full o shit. You wrote four paragraphs of nothing. See thats what Korey is talking about. People trying to be above everyone else, trying to look like you're a supreme intellectual. This is a movie. It's supposed to tell a story and it didn't. It didn't! Sorry, you sir do not know what you're talking about. Want an example of an intelligent movie, Star Trek 2: the wrath of khan. Plenty of literary themes to mull over, it's done very very subtly and above all else, IT TELLS A DAMN STORY AND IT'S ENTERTAINING!!!!!!!!!!!!! This movie is not saying anything intelligent. It's not smart. It's not that I or any other "common man" are too stupid to get. Some joe schmoes probably don't get it. But the rest are smart enough to understand that this movie is full of shit and it has nothing to say. Any idiot can learn some big words and string them together to sound intelligent. That is what Cronenberg did. And that is what you did. You're full of shit sir. 

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