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The Fly tickets are now available to be purchased or sold online at Stubhub.com. Where does high art and low art meet? You’d best pose that question to David Cronenberg, the famed cult film director whose visions of insect and flesh-inspired horror have influenced movies for decades now. But while he’s made his name in the world of cinema, he’s branching out into an entirely new field. An opera adaptation of Cronenberg’s best known movie, The Fly, will premiere in September 2008 at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles. Cronenberg directed the opera, and the music was composed by Howard Shore, who was also responsible for the film’s score (as well as many others he’s collaborated on with Cronenberg). There’s a good chance the opera crowd might not be familiar with the gory special effects Cronenberg’s fan base appreciates. For them, this series of articles will be helpful. Each article briefly examines one of the films from the director’s extensive canon. 1991’s Naked Lunch represented a return to form for Cronenberg after his previous film, Dead Ringers. Back was the bizarre world of shape-shifters, hallucinatory talking insects and fleshy, sex-crazed creatures. Turning William S. Burroughs’ infamously unfilmable book into a film was a task he accomplished with a prodigious special effects budget and a little bit of rewriting: The movie is more an autobiographical account of Burroughs’ life told through the drug addicts and alien fiends that peopled the beat writer’s imagination. With a talking insect typewriter that appeared to have a sphincter for a mouth and the lanky Mugwumps, a species of alien that were being harvested for their addictive jism, it was by no means for the faint of heart. And still isn’t. The difficulty of adapting the book to film was the inherently plotless nature of its story. Similarly, the Burroughs surrogate of the film—a William Lee, played deftly by Peter Weller—shoots his wife in an improvised William Tell act, a crime that the real Burroughs committed and was haunted by (he always claimed he missed the apple and that the shooting was not intentional). The major flaw of the film is that, while Cronenberg still creates a unique world, the film doesn’t have a lot of discipline, and does tend to meander and lose the audience—even after repeated viewings and a familiarity with Burroughs’ work. Another flaw is that everything looks stagey and artificial, especially the scenes that take place in the Interzone, or Tangiers. But it’s still a classic example of Cronenberg creating a universe and further exploring the themes that drive so many of his movies. The next time he would accomplish something like this would be 1999’s eXistenz, which felt far more artificial, and which employed CGI graphics that deadened the hallucinatory feel of the special effects. Here, they seem more "real," even if they clearly are rubber and animatronics. Written by Andrew Good and sponsored by StubHub.com. StubHub sells sports tickets, concert tickets, theater tickets and more to just about any event in the world. Don't miss this Cronenberg classic with The Fly tickets.
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