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Posted by
zacharythax June 1, 2009 -
597 views
Re/Search books once put out a volume dedicated to him. He wrote some incredibly flipped out stories in the late 60's on a par with anything by William Burroughs or Thomas Pynchon, some more straight sci-fi and then scored a hit in the mid-80's with Empire of the Sun based on his own life in a POW camp in China during World War II. Stephen Spielberg only lightly brushes on some of the more unpleasant aspects of the book, but the air battles are great and it's interesting now to see Christian Bale as a kid (as Jim Graham) after his famous meltdown on the set of Terminator Salvation "Oooh! Good fer you!!!"
The budget was $35 million and was filmed in Japan, China and Spain. It was a box office flop despite having grossed 22.3 million over its lifetime. With John Malkovich, Ben Stiller and Miranda Richardson. Ballard himself appears (uncredited) as a guest at a costume party.
Which brings us to
The Atrocity Exhibition
2000 The Business D/S/P: Jonathan Weiss
This mind-blowing grim surrealist film contains insanely disturbing clips of cadaver crash tests, the Kennedy assassination, plastic surgery, hard core porn close-ups, the space shuttle blowing up, atomic bomb tests, Japanese burned by radiation and more!. The story is the documentation of the mental meltdown of a doctor/professor at a medical university. It's all divided academically into chapters.
There's a lot of stuff about Marilyn Monroe, World War III (medical students are assigned to create wound profiles for the next war, a subject touched on in Empire), the sexual turn-on aspects of car crashes, building geometry, and the mental effects of space travel.
Viewers will find a lot that resonates with David Cronenberg especially his very early films Stereo and Crimes of the Future. The cars have New York license plates and there's a sexy flat-chested girl who does a glomour photo shoot during an operation with a group of surgeons, gets naked, and gets nailed doggy style in a car with a photo of Ronald Reagan strapped to her face.
"This film may have been produced as therapy, but for whom?"
Crash(1997) is another one not to be confused with the more recent film of the same title and has already been reviewed in the pages of Psychotronic Video
