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Cremaster 2

  • 1999
  • Unrated
  • 1h 19m
IMDb RATING
6.4/10
1K
YOUR RATING
Cremaster 2 (1999)
Drama

A Gothic Western loosely based on Gary Gilmore's life, executed for murder in Utah. His life is represented through fantastic sequences, like a séance to show his birth and a prison rodeo st... Read allA Gothic Western loosely based on Gary Gilmore's life, executed for murder in Utah. His life is represented through fantastic sequences, like a séance to show his birth and a prison rodeo staged in a salt arena to symbolise his execution.A Gothic Western loosely based on Gary Gilmore's life, executed for murder in Utah. His life is represented through fantastic sequences, like a séance to show his birth and a prison rodeo staged in a salt arena to symbolise his execution.

  • Director
    • Matthew Barney
  • Writer
    • Matthew Barney
  • Stars
    • Norman Mailer
    • Matthew Barney
    • Anonymous
  • See production info at IMDbPro
  • IMDb RATING
    6.4/10
    1K
    YOUR RATING
    • Director
      • Matthew Barney
    • Writer
      • Matthew Barney
    • Stars
      • Norman Mailer
      • Matthew Barney
      • Anonymous
    • 13User reviews
    • 14Critic reviews
  • See production info at IMDbPro
  • See production info at IMDbPro
  • Photos4

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    Top cast30

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    Norman Mailer
    Norman Mailer
    • Harry Houdini
    Matthew Barney
    Matthew Barney
    • Gary Gilmore
    Anonymous
    • Baby Fay La Foe
    Lauren Pine
    • Bessie Gilmore
    Scott Ewalt
    • Frank Gilmore
    Patty Griffin
    Patty Griffin
    • Nicole Baker
    Michael Thompson
    • Max Jensen
    Dave Lombardo
    Dave Lombardo
    • Johnny Cash (With Drums)
    Bruce Steele
    • Johnny Cash (With Bees)
    Steve Tucker
    • Johnny Cash
    • (voice)
    Cat Kubic
    • Two-step Dancer
    Sam Jalhej
    • Two-step Dancer
    Jacqueline Molasses
    • French Bulldog
    Lenore Harris
    • Fay La Foe
    • (voice)
    James Pantoleon
    • Canadian Mountie for Metamorphosis
    James T.S. Weelock Jr.
    • Canadian Mountie for Metamorphosis
    Wally Grant
    • Mormon Elder
    Roy Hadley
    • Mounted Sheriff
    • Director
      • Matthew Barney
    • Writer
      • Matthew Barney
    • All cast & crew
    • Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

    User reviews13

    6.41K
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    Featured reviews

    tedg

    Executed

    Barney is starting to drive me crazy. It would be simple if he were worthless, but he isn't.

    Where I stand: I'm watching the Cremasters in numeric sequence and have seen number one. I've also seen two other projects. In half of the four, I felt rewarded. He's a bit too much preoccupied with notation than form, disconcerting in a sculptor, but "Drawing Restraint" and "Cremaster 1" had moments that were transcendent. The projects as whole compositions collapsed under their heft, but when they impressed, they really did.

    Where he gets into trouble is when he tries to impose narrative. You can be visually strong in terms of pure form. Or you can be narratively strong using cinematic form, which is visual in a different way. He understand the first and is wholly incompetent in the second. Unfortunately here he "has something to say." Fragments of actual stories appear where they were avoided in the other projects.

    Lynch knows how to do this. Medem. Tarkovsky. Its what I call the long form and it requires an understanding of whole realms not just bits from them.

    Stay away from this one. It fails and the collapse is uninteresting.

    Ted's Evaluation -- 1 of 3: You can find something better to do with this part of your life.
    nunculus

    Numb nuts in Marienbad

    Not since Warhol has a visual artist made movies as masterfully as Matthew Barney. "Cremaster" describes a muscle in the testicles, and Barney's career-long subjects--masculinity and the biological, rather than societal, roots of male behavior--are given a hypnotic treatment here. Barney organizes the movie as rigorously as if it were an argument; but rather than rhetoric the movie is powered by dream logic. For an image such as the soon-to-be-killed gas-station attendant sniffing around Gary Gilmore's car--two sixties beauties joined with a mass of canvas like Siamese-twin mutants--you'd have to go back to the top shelves of Kenneth Anger and David Lynch. Filled with genital prostheses and heebie-jeebie-giving hive imagery, CREMASTER 2 has a hidden, hivelike structure that suggests a way out of out post-MTV, post-web-surfing image surplus. Barney has at times seemed a preening poseur; CREMASTER 2 reveals him as focussed in his private ecstasies as Cocteau.
    chaos-rampant

    Guggenheim Kubrick

    In the Cremaster cycle, I think the whole starts to tear the further we move away from the feminine absolute. There's already signs of breakage in just the second entry. This is, I believe, because as a sculptor Barney has natural intuitions about cinematic space, so at its best the work is pregnant with a feel and subdued, but as a guy and thinker - like most of our species - he is a blowhard.

    So it's not enough to be quietly effective. He has to think big and show bigger. He has to have cool insights that hint at things of importance.

    You will need no better clue than the guys he has chosen to surround himself with here, all of them tribal tokens. Dave Lombardo has a drum session, a really cool figure to have in your art film that shows you are not effete. Steve Tucker bellows into a phone. And of course no one cooler than Norman Mailer. Barney himself plays killer Gary Gilmore.

    But wait, I get that this is meant to be about the onset of male aggression, so the figures have their proper place. Mailer wrote the book and all that. But it has to be Dave Lombardo and not just some drummer, don't you see? It's all a matter of association, as well and (skin)deep as choosing to wear a specific band's t-shirt.

    So here's the overall problem with Cremaster; I believe they were conceived in terms of space first, solid sculpted space communicating the air around the matter. He decided for whatever reason to make films around the actual objects, to be sold together, and because a story would be too ordinary, he came up with the testicular concept, as silly as that, for a map and to give him a pattern to sculpt to, ovaries, penises, vaginal tunnels. The copies made would be limited, 10 of each package, so important enough to own, another tribal token of underground music. Later, he could have the chance to explain that all of that also substitutes for the creative process and has personal value (a less precocious insight is that every film reflects its creative mind, down to Bay's Transformers).

    So look what happens. The film itself is the air around the things he wants to present and that air, let's say the breath of the camera as it dissects space, has appealing qualities. It resonates with a female mystery, nearly transcendent, discovered.

    You should know, however, that when the Buddhist - or any spiritual practice - speaks of transcendence, the word is not vaguely synonymous with any other superlative, the 'ecstacy' is always a transcendence of self; a transcendence of who you think you are and what you think you have to say, all of that conscious effort about propping up a self. In practical terms, it means Marienbad. It means The Passenger.

    So the film works in the way it was put together, in this being sculpted with a camera. But when we reach the stage where the form in front of that camera has to mean something, all of that associative context is bogus. None of it cultivated with deep intuition.

    Our insight is that the landscape does reflect its creative mind. In our case, all of it is ego satisfied at its own erection. It's Kubrick with Guggenheim pretensions. It's Greenaway without the sometimes deep thinker in Greenaway.
    6Latheman-9

    David Lynch + Alejandro Jodorowsky = Matthew Barney's Cremaster 2

    In the second film of the five-part Cremaster cycle (chronologically the fourth made), Matthew Barney indulges his obsession with Gary Gilmore, the murderer who made legal history by insisting that his execution proceed in spite of efforts by the American Civil Liberties Union and others to postpone it, if not rescind it altogether. Does an individual have the right to insist on his own state-sanctioned death?

    The film opens with Gilmore's parents visiting a medium of some sort, segues into a heavy metal/Goth band with lots of bees, moves on to the reenactment of the first of two murders Gilmore committed in Utah (that of gas station attendant Max Jensen; ironically, it was the second murder for which Gilmore was tried, convicted, and executed), and effectively ends with Gilmore's symbolic execution. Interspersed throughout are scenes involving Harry Houdini (Norman Mailer), from whom Gilmore's mother claimed descent.

    Although Gilmore was intelligent (reputedly with an IQ of 130) and artistically talented, he was also an alcoholic habitual criminal completely lacking in impulse control. Barney himself plays the role of Gilmore (what a surprise!) and the casting of Norman Mailer is inspired. Some may remember that Mailer was instrumental in securing the early release from prison of Jack Henry Abbott who authored "In the Belly of the Beast: Letters from Prison." Mailer felt such a talented individual should be given special consideration. Shortly after his release, Abbott stabbed a deli worker to death because he had the temerity to tell Abbott he couldn't use the employees' bathroom. Thanks, Norman.

    With panoramic shots of the Utah salt flats, the western setting is reminiscent of the surreal films of Alejandro Jodorowsky set in Mexico (e.g., "El Topo (1970), "Santa Sangre" (1989)) as well as the latter part of David Lynch's "Wild at Heart" (1990), and there are hints of David Cronenberg's influence in the early scene involving Gilmore's parents. In one scene, the viewer is treated to some fine Texas two-step dancing by a couple who clearly know their way about it, and there is one notable use of theremin and modern synthesizer music that slowly climbs in pitch, reaching a physically uncomfortable sonic range before ascending to the frequencies privy only to dogs and bats. Very artsy and a bit overwrought, Cremaster 2 is the kind of work one expects from Barney. Rating: 6/10.
    runamokprods

    My favorite of the series

    For me, this is the most interesting, and most 'story driven' of the series, although it's still very surreal.

    Cremaster 2 combines the story of Gary Gilmore – who spends most of the 1st half sitting in a Mustang at a gas station that has an umbilical like tube attaching it to another Mustang (he and Nicole both drove Mustangs). He commits the murder, and then is executed by being forced to ride a rodeo bull until both rider and animal die of exhaustion.

    We then go to a section involving Harry Houdini (played by Norman Mailer?!?) who may have been Gilmore's grandfather.

    None of it makes a lot of literal sense, but it does work as cinema poetry. I suspect how anyone responds to this kind of work is highly subjective, and there are no right or wrong opinions. Only whether it speaks to something deep inside you or not

    More like this

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    Storyline

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    Did you know

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    • Trivia
      Baby Fay La Foe was played by Cathie Jung, known for having the smallest waist on a living person - 15 inches.
    • Connections
      Edited into The Cremaster Cycle (2003)
    • Soundtracks
      The Man in Black
      Music by Jonathan Bepler

      Lyrics by Gary Gilmore

      Drums by Dave Lombardo

      Vocals and Bass by Steve Tucker and 200,000 honeybees

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    Details

    Edit
    • Release date
      • July 6, 2005 (France)
    • Country of origin
      • United States
    • Language
      • English
    • Also known as
      • Кремастер 2
    • Production company
      • Glacier Field LLC
    • See more company credits at IMDbPro

    Box office

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    • Budget
      • $1,700,000 (estimated)
    See detailed box office info on IMDbPro

    Tech specs

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    • Runtime
      1 hour 19 minutes
    • Color
      • Color
    • Aspect ratio
      • 1.77 : 1

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