MANGA REVIEW: SHUNA'S JOURNEY (1983, 2022)

Written/Drawn/Colored by Hayao Miyazaki

English language translation by Alex Dudok de Wit

Edited by Mark Siegel and Kara Valdez

Cover designed by Kirk Benshoff

Interior design by Kirk Benshoff, Sunny Lee, and Angela Boyle

American edition published in 2022 by First Second

Original Japanese language publication in 1983 by Tokuma Shoten

. . .

“Spotting the slave traders’ vehicle, Shuna got in front of it and unleashed a burst of fire at point-blank range. The attack caught them completely off guard. Shuna kept firing with wicked composure, as he would when hunting snow leopards. By the time he had run a ring around the vehicle, he had shot them all down.”

-text from page 62 of Shuna’s Journey

. . .

Review by William D. Tucker.

Shuna’s Journey is a manga-adjacent work from the master animator Hayao Miyazaki, whose most recent feature length film is The Boy and the Heron, and whose other works include Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away, and Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind. I refer to Shuna’s Journey as manga-adjacent because even though it will most likely be shelved in the manga section at the bookstore it apparently is considered an emonogatari-an “illustrated story”-as per translator Alex Dudok de Wit’s afterward. Indeed, Shuna’s Journey is much more “compressed” in its storytelling than other manga works which often allow the action scenes to play out cinematically-almost moment to moment-across many pages and panels. Shuna’s Journey evokes the widescreen majesty of John Ford and Sergio Leone, as opposed to the hyperkinetic action of contemporary shonen sagas such as One Piece, Chainsaw Man, and Kaiju No. 8. Having said all this, I still personally found Shuna’s Journey to be very manga-like: it’s fast-paced, full of beautifully detailed environments, and inhabited by incisively stylized humans coexisting with fearsome, outsized monsters and bygone ruins of forgotten empires.

A boy named Shuna leaves his fading village to seek power and adventure in a vast, harsh world full of magic and cruelty. Shuna wanders the ruins of dead empires, battles slave traders, and comes face-to-face with bizarre powers which humankind can never hope to tame. Shuna’s main quest is for some magic seeds-a fairy tale element-but he is forced to do battle with the evil forces of the world using a variety of guerilla warfare tactics. All this is rendered in evocative watercolor art in a sort of storybook style which lends a peculiar grace to this hard-boiled fantasy adventure. Long time Miyazaki fans will perhaps see in Shuna’s Journey a kind of roadmap for many of the themes, character designs, production designs, conflicts, and strange creatures that would go on to achieve global pop culture iconography status. Shuna’s Journey is so dense with the primal material of Miyazaki’s subsequent work that it almost seems like the artist conjured a prophecy of his future glory via the power of a maniacal work ethic. 

Shuna’s Journey also works as a story all unto itself. It is not merely of interest to Miyazaki obsessives and collectors. If you have never even heard of Hayao Miyazaki or Studio Ghibli Shuna’s Journey offers an experience complete unto itself. The main ideas here have to do with survival and power. Shuna leaves his fading agrarian village to seek a better life for himself. Shuna is also tantalized by the prospect of finding the source of magic seeds which promise a future of abundance beyond subsistence farming, beyond hunting and gathering. To this end, Shuna manufactures his own bullets to feed the rifle handed down from the previous generation. Shuna’s a very model of rugged self-sufficiency, and yet he seeks ever more power. This restless seeking comes at a terrible price. Shuna’s adventures are grand: he kills slave traders with the bullets he himself crafted; he liberates slaves; he stands his ground against ghoulish night raiders; and, much like the player characters of The Legend of Zelda and Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest, he’s persistent and intuitive enough to see the way forward through bizarre, formidably occulted terrain. The cost is that Shuna suffers trauma from violent battle, sleepless exhaustion, exposure to the elements, and deprivation of nutrition. Shuna’s capable, yet also mortal. 

Late in the narrative, there’s a change in perspective which suggests Shuna’s single minded pursuit of the magic seeds must be tempered by ethical connection to other people. His personality and agency are evacuated by his experience of a terrible otherworldly power which requires him to enter another’s care. This level of hardship and the complexity it entails brings a sense of gravity into the fantasy. Unlike with Marvel Cinematic Universe products-where endlessly malleable computerized action figures get iterated across endless potential product outputs- in Shuna’s Journey great power comes with both great responsibility and consequences. The power Shuna attains might be wielded responsibly, but it will always do some violence to its wielder. Shuna’s hope lies in his allying himself with the oppressed who endure injustice while also fighting to expand their domain of autonomy.

Shuna’s Journey is an engaging fantasy about power, self-reliance, and finding a place in the world against oppressive regimes of both nature and humankind. Its seemingly happy ending is shadowed by a certainty of future conflicts against the powers of the world. One is left with the sense that Shuna and his allies will endure no matter the hardships.

ONE LINE MOVIE REVIEWS #41: MORBIUS (2022)

Peak content.

MOVIE REVIEW: SKINAMARINK (2022)

Written, Edited, and Directed by Kyle Edward Ball

Cinematography by Jamie McRae

Produced by Dylan Pearce

Starring

Lucas Paul

Dali Rose Tetreault

Ross Paul

Jaime Hill

. . .

"Come upstairs."

. . .

Review by William D. Tucker.

The camera is in the house. It's looking mostly at the house itself, and the stuff inside the house. When the camera does dwell on the people inside the house it can be disturbing. Like the old philosophical warning about staring too long into the abyss, because the abyss is gazing right back at you. The camera is seemingly a mobile staring abyss thing, warping from one obtuse setup to another.

None of this was obvious to me, at first, because I basically assumed Skinamarink to be some sort of found footage flick, and, in the early going, it looks like it could be that. The look is rigorously grainy, and obviously a digital post-production effect, but it's done with such artistry and commitment that the artifice gives no offense. You stare at the swirling shadows within shot after static shot of empty corners and bare walls and your mind starts to conjure patterns from the visual noise. You try to impose order on Skinamarink, and Skinamarink sorta meets you halfway as it reveals itself to be an avant garde haunted house show, but the eeriness of the inescapable house,  the slow burn pacing, and the phantoms you invent within your mind-that's where it all truly lives.

There are kids in the house. They're watching cartoons on the TV in the downstairs living room. Adult authorities are upstairs. Legos are all over the floor before the TV. There are strange whispers. Chairs and dolls stick to the ceiling. Sometimes indistinct voices are subtitled, sometimes they are not subtitled. There's some scenes where doors and windows inexplicably disappear. Things escalate. It is both cryptic and upsetting. There's no escape from the house. Something is taking over. It's a bit like that Julio Cortazar short story where the brother and sister find their childhood house being slowly invaded room by room by some sinister something. 

Skinamarink withholds all answers. It makes you sit in a sinister place with just enough ambient light to see disturbing entities and occurrences. Amusingly, its handful of jumpscares are underplayed almost to the point of anticlimax. Skinamarink is more "Universe winding down into Absolute Zero" than anything else. The pacing is unhurried, some might say it's too slow, but the duration is part of the experience. If you want to watch the crashing cars, that's not this movie. 

Skinamarink offers visual fascination almost as an end unto itself. It could easily function as a video installation. Just put it on for the atmosphere once you've absorbed it as a narrative experience, if you want.

BOOK REVIEW: HEAT 2 (2022)

 

by Michael Mann + Meg Gardiner

Published in 2022 by Michael Mann Books aka William Morrow aka HarperCollins aka Rupert Murdoch.

. . .

"Rumors you hear about Ciudad del Este-consider 'em all half true. Whatever you want, whatever you need, people here will find a way to get it for you. If . . ." He rubs his fingers together. "Capitalism uber alles."

. . .

Review by William D. Tucker.

Heat 2 is a sequel/prequel to the 1995 movie Heat written by the movie's writer/director Michael Mann in collaboration with the respected novelist Meg Gardiner. Heat 2 is not a movie-as of this writing-but is, in fact, a book with words you can read if you are so inclined. It tells a story that picks up right after the ending of the 1995 movie, and then it goes back in time to what happened before the events of the movie, and then it goes forwards past the movie, and then it goes back, and then forwards-Heat 2 goes backwards and forwards in time. It jumps around, as your parents might say after watching Pulp Fiction.

So, in order to get the full value of Heat 2 you have to have seen the movie Heat. And if you haven't seen the movie, well, there's a concise prolog that serves as a "Previously on Heat-"

-BTW try saying out loud "Previously on Heat," it's good for a laugh-

-so, I guess Heat 2 technically functions as a stand alone read . . . but not really. Of course, I cannot assess this objectively, because I've seen Heat numerous times over the years. My widescreen double cassette VHS copy was a prized possession of my adolescence, and my 2005 two disc DVD edition has seen much play over the years. If I were into numerology-two tapes, two discs, Heat 2-my head would be kinda fucked'n'sputtering right about now. In my opinion, Heat 2 is marketed towards the fans, and we're probably the ones who'll get the most value out of this spinoff novel.

If you have never seen Heat, it is a hard-boiled crime thriller about a supercop on the hunt for a supercrook. The supercop and the supercrook-a professional thief-develop an unexpected rapport and mutual respect even as they escalate their war-in-the-streets. Basically, they are the ultimate frenemies. The supercrook tells the supercop that he will never return to prison, even if that means blasting the supercop. The supercop tells the supercrook that he, too, is not going to give up, even if that means he has to kill someone he sorta respects. It's all very fraught. The supercop is played by Al Pacino. Robert De Niro played the supercrook. The scene where these two connect over coffee has probably launched a fair few Honors Thesis statements about the nature of masculinity and friendship, or so I assume. Heat also features a large supporting cast of cops'n'robbers, all played by top notch actors. Among them is another supercrook memorably portrayed by Val Kilmer. Heat 2 primarily revolves around these three: Pacino, De Niro, and Kilmer-the same three actors marketed as the stars of the original film. 

Now, these characters do have names: the supercop is named Vincent Hanna; De Niro's supercrook is named Neil McCauley; and Kilmer's supercrook is named Chris Shiherlis. However, even the marketing copy on the dust jacket mentions the actors' names, so we are clearly supposed to visualize the people from the 1995 movie even as we read the book. Of course, you could imagine different people in these roles. Bruce Vilanch could be interesting casting for Hanna. Or maybe even G.Gordon Liddy. Did you know Liddy had a career as a film actor? As for McCauley, either YouTube's Rich Evans or Shaq would work for me. I could see Report of the Week-another YouTuber-as a fitting replacement for Kilmer. But those are just my picks. Feel free to come up with your own casting choices!

Heat 2 offers a lot of 'Extended Universe' content, if you will, including flashbacks to both Hanna's and McCauley's experiences with the madness of war in Vietnam; Hanna's cocaine and Adderall habits; McCauley's attempts at maintaining a family; and, most significantly, Hanna and McCauley's parallel histories of making moves on the streets of Chicago. But my favorite passages concerned Shiherlis, especially his endeavors in the Paraguayan Free Trade Zone of Ciudad Del Este, in which Mann and Gardiner rework material from the 2006 movie version of Miami Vice. Shiherlis's evolution into a kind of anarcho-capitalist mafia's field commander has the feel of a Grand Theft Auto avatar evolving into a criminal iteration of a 4x strategy gamer. It's undercooked, but the ideas are there. It's also weirdly hilarious. There's even a needle drop of Tupac's "California Love" as Shiherlis guns his motorcycle through the traffic of the Paraguayan tri-border Free Trade Zone. 

I was less taken with what Heat 2 does with Hanna and McCauley. Much of the novel revolves around their conflicts with a character who is original to Heat 2: a scuzzbag named Otis. Otis did not work for me. I was not convinced that a character as single mindedly violent and reckless as Otis would achieve the station that he eventually occupies in Heat 2. Moreover, what was fascinating about Heat was the moral confusion experienced by Hanna and McCauley as they realize their true soulmate is someone they'll either have to kill or be killed by, and how that dilemma illuminates the wastelands of their private lives. Otis is just a bad guy from a 1980s action flick who deserves to get lit up, a scapegoat of a kind that allows Heat 2 to avoid the really difficult shit that Heat faced head-on, with no apologies, and no compromises. So, unfortunately, even as a Heat fanboy, I cannot recommend Heat 2.

Allegedly, Michael Mann has plans to make a film out of Heat 2. If he does, I hope he shitcans the Otis character, and just focuses on Shiherlis's adventures in the Free Trade Zone and beyond. It's undercooked in the text, but the basic ingredients are there. Just needs a little more time in the oven. Basically, I hope the movie ditches the prequel stuff, and leans into the sequel material. Although, honestly, I have no plans to watch it no matter what form the movie version takes. First off, Heat 2, the book, left my ass kinda chapped. Secondly, the 1995 movie has no need of a sequel. Heat's loose ends and ambiguities are part of the point. If you've seen it, you know exactly what I'm talking about. If you haven't seen it, well, I recommend you give it a shot. Even if it doesn't sound like your kind of movie, you may be surprised by its depths. Hanna and McCauley are a couple of hardasses, yet the final moments of their saga are unexpectedly tender. Heat 2 doesn't have anything like that, but it does have a big fiery car crash/shootout on a freeway. 

Which is the damndest thing, isn't it?

The book ends up dumber than the movie.

Sorta genius, that . . .

BOOK REVIEW: OFF THE EDGE (2022)

Off the Edge: Flat Earthers, Conspiracy Culture, and Why People Will Believe Anything

by Kelly Weill

Published by Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill in 2022.

. . .

"Hughes had an advantage that most other would-be zetetic Flat Earthers lacked: he knew how to build a rocket and had no fear of dangerous stunts."

. . .

Review by William D. Tucker.

You ever wonder where that Flat Earth bullshit comes from? Off the Edge has answers. 

You ever wonder if and when people who have bought into Flat Earth bullshit will grow up and read an actual introductory astronomy book, or, at the least, watch a Crash Course YouTube video on the subject? Off the Edge . . . well, it has answers, but none of 'em are easy or satisfying. In fact, Off the Edge makes the case that even discussing such fringe ideas as Flat Earth poses a risk of pushing the true believers into a more fervent defense of their crackpot beliefs. There's also a risk of inadvertently spreading the intellectual contagion to vulnerable minds by even offering up the option of believing in something as wacky and contrarian as Flat Earth. I mean, to even engage with such ideas-however critically-means acknowledging that they have a following even if it's nothing but a hypervocal, insular minority, and this merest acknowledgement may be twisted into a form of validation. Mockery and satire have comparable perils in that true believers don't like having their core beliefs ridiculed, and so they dig in deeper.

Off the Edge is written by a reporter-Kelly Weill-who spent time attending Flat Earth conferences and interviewing the people she encountered, including key organizers and leaders. Weill puts the Flat Earth idea in its historical context as well as showing how it became incorporated into other aspects of conspiracy thinking. Weill shows how Flat Earth flourished despite being treated as a joke for many decades by scientists and journalists, and achieved a sinister new life with the ascendancy of Donald Trump, Alex Jones, and Qanon. Moreover, Off the Edge illustrates how people can gain power through appealing to antisemitic racism, anti-immigrant bigotry, misogyny, and homophobia; and by exploiting popular resentment of government, academia, and scientific institutions. Even the most elite of elites are prone to conspiracy thinking, including politicians, wealthy CEOs, and even Winston Churchill. Weill reminds us that Churchill-who stood strong against Nazi Germany-was himself an antisemite who actively promoted conspiracy theories falsely accusing Jewish people of evil plots. Yes, even those we revere as heroes can fall prey to crackpot thinking. 

Weill describes the systemic factors that contribute to people embracing conspiracy theories as a perverse means of empowerment, but she also explains the downsides. For every successful grifter, there's a score of largely unrecognized  folks who lose jobs and friends over crazed social media posts. Tying one's identity to Flat Earth and other conspiracy theories can drive people to make disastrous financial and relationship decisions. Family gatherings become argumentative battlegrounds. Bonds are sundered. Any dinner or PTA meeting or city council can become a (not so) civil war as conspiracists assert their extremist identities and play out persecution fantasias before the public eye.

Extreme conspiracy beliefs can also lead to acts of harassment,  full-on violence, and terrorism. Parents whose children were murdered in mass shootings have been targeted by denialists who claim the shootings were staged by the US government. Anti-Asian hate crimes have been motivated by conspiratorial lies that exploit the COVID-19 pandemic. Doctors and nurses have been harassed by anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers. Most notoriously, the grotesquely idiotic Pizzagate shooting was motivated by conspiracism. It's all a joke until people are harmed or killed. 

Off the Edge is a deft and sobering read. It reminded me that many of those who truly believe in Flat Earth and other forms of conspiratorial nonsense are being scammed by the handful of heavy operators who build media empires, political machines, and merchandising regimes off the backs of gullible folks. It's kind of a conspiracy to benefit the conspiracy theory grifters-which is a bit of a mindfuck to contemplate. 

MANGA REVIEW: BOMBA! (2022)

 by Osamu Tezuka

English translation by Polly Barton

Edited by Daniel Joseph

Proofread by Micah Q. Allen 

Production by Risa Cho, Shirley Fang, and Evan Hayden

Published by Kodansha USA.

Original Japanese language publication in 1970 as a serial in Bessatsu Shonen Magazine.

. . .

"Oh, shit, there's a horse in the hospital!"

-Dr. Octagon, "General Hospital," from the good doctor's album Dr. Octagonecologyst (1996).

. . .

Review by William D. Tucker.

CLIP CLOP CLIP CLOP-

Tetsu is a boy who is terrified by the sound of approaching horse hooves.This boy is horrifically bullied by one of his school teachers, a macho authoritarian asshole. He's also mistreated by his mother, who seems to resent his very existence. His father is a doormat, and offers no protection to his son. The boy's only solace is his hopeless crush on a kindly and beautiful female teacher. All the while, there is the sound of a horse approaching, which seems to be an omen of doom for Tetsu. As it happens, it's not just Tetsu's doom. 

BOMBA! is, to be cute about it, Equus as written by Harlan Ellison, a saga of an adolescent male whose burgeoning sense of sexuality crashes into a hostile, traumatized/traumatizing world in which people haunted by the legacies of World War II-empire, sexually enslaved comfort women, Imperial Japan's atrocities against Asia, firebombings, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, defeat, occupation, reconstruction, politically convenient historical amnesia-inflict neuroses and psychoses upon the postwar generation. These historical traumas constitute a curse which manifests as a spectral horse that both oppresses and liberates Tetsu. Tetsu fears the horse as a bringer of death . . . and then Tetsu revels in the horse as a bringer of retribution against his enemies when he realizes he can summon the beast to serve his desires. 

BOMBA! offers atmospheric black and white art that stalks back and forth across the past and the present. We begin in an eerily desolate train station, where the CLIP CLOP CLIP CLOP sounds find and afflict young Tetsu, and then, through his point of view, we start to unpack the impossible burdens of World War II that have fallen upon his shoulders. Tetsu's mother-as awful as she is-has powerful reasons for resenting her offspring. Tetsu's father-a veteran of World War II-comes to embody the disillusionment of many men who fought for a government that tossed them into an infernal meat grinder of death, atrocity, defeat, and profound shame. 

BOMBA! comes down to Tetsu's choice: can he let go of his vindictiveness, or does he pursue his vision of unlimited conquest with the aid of the spectral doomsday horse? Will Tetsu become Death, Destroyer of Worlds, or can he forge a path of his own? BOMBA! dramatizes the plight of a generation of young people caught between a devastating past of total war and an uncertain future that might well be more of the same. 

MOVIE REVIEW: CRIMES OF THE FUTURE (2022)

 Written and Directed by David Cronenberg

Cinematography by Douglas Koch

Production Design by Carol Spier

Music by Howard Shore

Edited by Christopher Donaldson

Produced by Robert Lantos 

Starring

Viggo Mortensen as Saul Tenser

Lea Seydoux as Caprice

Scott Speedman as Lang Dotrice

Lihi Kornowski as Djuna Dotrice

Don McKellar as Wippet

Kristen Stewart as Timlin

Nadia Litz as Router

Tanaya Beatty as Berst

Welket Bungue as Detective Cope

Yorgos Pirpassopoulos as Dr. Nasatir

. . .

"SAVE THE TUMORS!"

-bumper sticker slogan attributed to the American stand-up philosopher George Carlin in the late twentieth century or thereabouts.

"BODY

IS

REALITY"

-slogan appearing on a tube tv screen in the film Crimes of the Future (2022)

. . .

Review by William D. Tucker.

A body changes. A slogan appears on a screen-"BODY IS REALITY." So, reality changes. We are not what we once were. Gestation, birth, growth, exercise, diet, thoughts, beliefs, politics, art, sex, doubt, drugs, tattoos, piercings, aging, surgeries, modifications, medications, infections, sickness, death. Changes we choose, changes we seek, changes by chance, changes imposed by religion, changes imposed by the state. There's who you are, who you want to be, and what others want you to be. A lot of times, instead of the word want the word need gets used, but maybe that's stating the obvious.

In the movie Crimes of the Future, the human species has stopped feeling pain, and it has stopped getting infections . . . so, like, where's the orgy at? 

Whoops. I guess I just laid my cards on the table. Sorry 'bout that.

Clears throat.

In the movie Crimes of the Future, the human species has stopped feeling pain, and it has stopped getting infections. Therefore, naturally, cutting becomes a recreational/sexual activity, and surgeons become performance artists. Instead of going to some boring museum to look at LCDs of some atrocious NFT monkeys, you crowd into what used to be a BDSM fuck dungeon in a post-industrial sector, and watch people get sliced open by precision robotic surgery machines, and then laser-cauterized shut just for the hell of it. I suppose the orgy is to be inferred. Hey, this is still a mainstream narrative movie. You can literally expose someone's guts as part of your content, but heaven help you if you have people fuck in any combination. It ain't boring, that's for sure.

We have various couples:

Saul Tensor and Caprice: Saul has a rare medical condition wherein he constantly grows novel organs that have to be cut out of his abdomen before they crowd out his essential viscera. Caprice is a former trauma surgeon. Together, they are the premiere power couple of the surgical performance art scene. Saul grows it, Caprice uses robotic scalpel armatures to slice it. The harvested novel organs are catalogued and stylishly illustrated into art objects.

Lang and Djuna Dotrice: These two had a son that was a mutant who lived by eating plastic. Mom Djuna was disgusted by this and so murdered her offspring to express her disaproval of such an abomination. Dad Lang is convinced his son was the next stage of human evolution, and so he establishes a radical evolutionary front movement to advocate on behalf of this new mode of being.  So, the question is: was their son an aberration to be shit-canned or the embodiment of the human future?

Wippet and Timlin: These are a pair of colleagues, working on behalf of an evolutionary enforcement agency. They're supposed to be policing radical evolutionaries, but each of them seem to be drawn to the radical surgeries put on by Saul and Caprice, and, possibly, to the radical transformations that Lang is advocating. They're kinda like establishment squares wrestling with their inner freaks. 

Router and Berst: Colleagues, but also a couple. They're technicians who service the biomechanical surgical beds that make the avant garde surgery scene possible. They represent the interests of what passes for Big Tech in this peculiar world. 

Detective Cope and Dr. Nasatir: Not actually a couple, but these two each represent the ideological hardcore. Cope's a lawman looking to gather intel on the evolutionary outlaws. Nasatir's lending his medical expertise to the surgical artists and the mutant faction promoted by Lang. They're enemies, but they don't quite know it.

Crimes of the Future has a lot going on, much of it conveyed through layered, witty dialogue, and cleverly realized special effects setpieces embedded within moody, subterranean production design. The surgery beds have a gristly organic look evoking technology as an extension of human bodies and human desires. 

Accelerated evolution brings about changes in technology, values, identity, sexuality, law, and economics. Some resist the future, others embrace it, still others react with violence. 

I find the characters of Wippet and Timlin especially amusing. They're supposed to be government regulators but they're woefully underfunded and stuck using antiquated dead tree methods of record keeping. 

Saul and Caprice have a couple of memorably perverse scenes of what I suppose could be described as, um, Surgical Sexuality? I said that this is a future wherein people have stopped feeling pain, but there's also the implication that humans have rapidly evolved new sources of pleasure. 

Of course, Crimes of the Future, like many works of science fiction, can be interpreted both literally and metaphorically. We have here themes of sacrificing oneself for one's art; dealing with change; coping with sickness; asserting identity; art criticism; sexuality-it borders on the didactic, but I didn't mind this. Here's a movie with ideas, goddamnit, not a bunch of computer generated wrastling matches. It's funny, it's disturbing, its reach exceeds its grasp, it did not waste my time. 

This is a David Cronenberg movie. He's the guy who made movies like Scanners, The Fly, Dead Ringers, Shivers, Rabid, Crash, Naked Lunch, eXistenZ, The Brood, The Dead Zone, Cosmopolis, Eastern Promises, and Videodrome. These are all movies dealing with questions of the body, of technology, of radical transformations-all within the context of a world driven by greed and the desires of established factions to impose controls upon outlaws, freaks, and rebels. Crimes of the Future is a worthy addition to this ever-mutating body of work. Internet tells me that Cronenberg is almost eighty years old, which makes me think that experience must count for something in this world. 

I look forward to the next one.