Cronenberg's angry because Paul Haggis stole his movie title, and then made a flick about sassy coppers and human trafficking

I have to give Cronenberg credit; J.G. Ballards novel would be difficult at best to transcribe into film. While I'm a big fan of Cronenbergs other movies, such as Scanners and Videodrome, it was difficult for me to accept his interpretation of the novel. It's hard to translate some of the fantastically large scale mental images of structurally complex underpasses and overpasses, of miles of highway stretching endlessly out of and into the city. It just felt as though the film struggled to convey that sense of unease and other-ness that the setting in the novel does. Even though Cronenberg does a good job avoiding typical pedestrian areas, it still cannot be as striking and isolated as Ballard's images are. I also found that while the movie didn't really shy away from the sex and the violence, the combined sexual arousal because of violence didn't disturb me as it did in the novel. It's difficult for actors to really portray the kind of detachment that comes with a violent paraphilia, and so at times their car-sex seemed more like bored gropings and less like a "new sexuality born of a perverse technology". I feel as though any other director given this task would probably not do a very good job; while I can't say I was that into Cronenbergs adaptation, he did a fairly good job at transcribing a book whose plot isn't really that structurally defined. Also, the setting of Toronto kind of blew it a bit for me.