Thinking of Rob   It's all about Robert Pattinson

Indie Movies Online has a great break down of Cosmopolis and the Pattinson-Cronenberg duo. It’s a great read and if you don’t mind spoilers then I highly suggest you read the full article.

Here are some excerpt:

So now you’re all to speed as to who isn’t doing the movie (Colin Farrell, Marion Cotillard, Keira Knightley), as well as who is (Robert Pattinson, Paul Giamatti, director David Cronenberg). Which means we can now delve into people, places and events of Don DeLillo’sCosmopolis, the 2003 novel upon which the new movie is based.

People including billionaire Eric Packer and his secret nemesis Benno Levin (the respective roles Pattinson and Giamatti will most likely play). Places confined – if that is quite the right word – to New York City, where the whole of the book takes place. And events including murder, infidelity, mass nudity, and a whole lot of driving around at very slow speeds (and yes, there are possible spoilers ahead).

1. Packer and pals

Set over the course of a single day in April 2000, Cosmopolis commences with Eric Packer, sleepless in the small hours of early morning, on the loose about his 48-room apartment situated at the apex of an 89-storey NYC skyscraper (cost of purchase to its owner, it is later revealed: a cool $104m).

A 28-year-old billionaire (Pattinson will turn 25 during the NYC and Toronto-based shoot), Packer seems almost as much a melding of flesh and machine as such prior Cronenberg protagonists as Max Renn from Videodrome or the boring morons from eXistenZ. Harbouring an obsession with charts, patterns and knowledge, he is every bit the tech-savvy plutocrat for the modern age, though we soon learn that he and his company, Packer Capital, are haemorrhaging money after leveraging heavily against a yen that is performing above expectations.

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5. Pattinson sets his sights

Whether you agree with the choice or not, the exit of Colin Farrell and the replacement casting of Robert Pattinson has put an entirely new complexion on the Cronenberg Cosmopolis.

With his critical rep having followed the example of the man himself and gone into rehab, most would have viewed Farrell as a very solid, very laudable choice for the role of Eric Packer. In contrast, no-one as yet has seen Pattinson play this kind of part, meaning that the entire production has suddenly taken on a fresh frisson of excitement (not least for all those teenage girls who know which film shoot they’ll be staking out from this May).

It is easy to discern what Pattinson hopes to gain from the endeavour. Just as the day-long journey of Eric Packer can be seen as that of a God falling from the sterile sanctuary of Mount Olympus, to the dirty streets below where he is free to love and steal and kill with all the other humans, so Pattinson clearly wants to scrub himself of the stifling sheen of teen exaltation, and instead have the opportunities to make the kind of movies he wants to make.

But that is a quest with an inherent deadline. As any member of Bros will tell you, the idols of young girls are not renowned for their longevity, and the opportunities that Pattinson’s ephemeral pin-up status brings him now will not necessarily be there in the not too far-flung future. He must therefore seize the day if he is to make the successful transition to adult star.

Water for Elephants appears a bridging picture in that process, a movie that won’t startle his core fans but will perhaps hook in a slightly older crowd than that which flocks to the Twilightfilms. The collaboration with an internationally-respected director such as Cronenberg then forms another facet of that process – one that can, he will surely be hoping, bolster his credibility in the eyes of critics and those film fans who have given him such a hard time to date. Those film fans being, as we determined yesterday, precisely the kind of auteurists who bow down and worship at the knee of Cronenberg.

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As Packer tames the torrents of information coursing through the Manhattan (and beyond) of the new millennium, making monster loot via his understanding of the financial maelstrom, so too Pattinson exists – to an extent – within these torrents, with his extraordinary following built from the ability of his fans to form an epic network trading specifically in information about him. Both have achieved preternatural success at a youthful age, both live in a world that wants a piece of them, and given the abnormal manner in which others relate to them both could be forgiven for considering themselves a near-deity on Earth.

However what Cronenberg does get through the casting of Pattinson – and what he wouldn’t have got had Farrell not exited – is the ideal movie star embodiment of Eric Packer. Because while the Pattinson devotees might present him as a throwback to vintage teen icons (both James Dean and Holden Caulfield have been regularly invoked in connection with Remember Me), he is in truth as much a 21st century man as DeLillo’s boyish billionaire.

You can read the full article here. Take note that there are SPOILERS in the article.