The Fly is a nearly perfect horror film—it has tight writing, excellent performances, visceral practical effects, and well-developed themes about the horrors of deteriorative genetic inheritance. It was a breakout performance for Jeff Goldblum and, before that one episode of Rick & Morty, the most likely reason the average moviegoer would know the name “Cronenberg.”
But what many don’t know is how pivotal the film is in Cronenberg’s body of work—re-examining some of the themes of his earlier film The Brood and serving as a turning point for how his movies depicted women.
This season, perhaps we could hear and answer the trees’ invitation: Inhale. Smell the needles, wood, oil and fruit. Then, expand the bounds of ritual and celebration to include the trees and the living Earth to which we belong. In these dark days, it is good to remember that we need one another.
When we find the right friend at the right time in our life, or the right teacher, or the right student, our lives are changed forever. Max was the voice that answered back. And he still is.
Does it bug you that we’re living in a world where even the lettuce threatens our health? I have a solution. Toss out the romaine; dump the iceberg while you’re at it, too. Lettuce is bullshit. Lettuce has always been bullshit. Here’s why.
You might think of a prose poem as a bastardised form – neither one thing nor another; a modernist mongrel. But this anthology is an invitation to rethink its place in literature (mongrels are, after all, prized for their intelligence). It is a wonderful book – an invigorating revelation. Jeremy Noel-Tod has done a stupendous job in corralling 200 poems from around the world. His definition of the prose poem boils down to “the simplest common denominator… a poem without line breaks”. Not a single piece here is unworthy of notice and the excitement is that, alongside indispensable familiars – Turgenev, Oscar Wilde, Seamus Heaney, Geoffrey Hill, Czeslaw Milosz – there are many unusual suspects. Noel-Tod maintains that the prose poem “drives the reading mind beyond the city limits”. It does – and its suburbs are extraordinary.