World Famous Comics: Naked Lunch - Criterion Collection
Naked Lunch - Criterion Collection
Starring: Peter Weller, Judy Davis, Ian Holm, Julian Sands, Roy Scheider Directed By: David Cronenberg Average Rating: Aspect Ratio: 1.78:1 Audience Rating: R (Restricted) Binding: DVD Format: Anamorphic, Color, DVD-Video, Widescreen, NTSC Label: Criterion Number of Items: 2 Region Code: 1 Release Date: November 11, 2003 Running Time: 115 minutes Theatrical Release Date: 1991
Amazon.com essential video: You are now entering Interzone, William S. Burroughs's phantasmagorical land of junk, paranoia, and crawly things. Best travel advice: "Exterminate all rational thought." In David Cronenberg's superbly shot, unnerving warp on the Burroughs novel, the novelist himself becomes a main character (played in an implacable monotone by Peter Weller), with elements from Burroughs' life--including the shooting of his wife during a "William Tell" game, and bohemian friends Kerouac and Ginsberg--added to frame the book's wild visions. This is, ironically, a somewhat rational approach to an unfilmable book (and it makes a hair-curling double bill with Barton Fink, another look at writerly madness, with both films sharing Judy Davis). Cronenberg is a natural for oozing mugwumps and typewriters that turn into giant bugs, of course. But in the end, this is really his own vision of the artistic process, rather than Burroughs's hallucinatory descent into hell. --Robert Horton
Too (odd)vante-garde for me Conspiring monster bugs. . .ejaculating typewriters. . .inter-zone intrigue. . . As a statement on addiction--interesting. As a statement on writing--interesting. As entertainment--duh? Well-acted, well-made, but just, at times, so flat-out weird that it makes it, well--not enjoyable.
One of the best movies ever!! If you're not a fan of the absurd, surreal, or bizarre, you will not like this. But if you are, Cronenberg created a genre defining film with "Naked Lunch." It is every bit as Bohemian as Borroughs intended, and every bit as nightmarish, as you expext from Cronenberg. In this story, the main character's art and addictions manifest physically and begin to control him in ways he couldn't imagine.... Excellant!
FYI- If you read the commentary by William S. Borroughs, included in the insert, it will make you appreciate Cronenberg's vision 10 fold!
Dark, Disturbing, and worth watching This has been a long time favorite movie of mine. Based on the equally strange book written by William S. Burroughs, this movie will make you feel as though you are hallucinating. The plot centers around drugs and homosexuality, so if these things offend you, you probably won't enjoy it much. I think the two most disturbing parts of the movie, for me, were Kiki dying, and the arabic typewriter sex scene. Very strange stuff. Highly recommended to people looking for an intelligent, mind bending movie. This one is a modern classic.
BENWAY! this here criterion collection two dvd set of cronenberg's Naked Lunch is fantastic--the film is fully clear and digitized, and the amazing soundtrack (in part by jazz great ornette coleman) is crisp and clear (i'd also highly recommend checking out the soundtrack to the film)--as is the general sound of the film as well.
the film is its own naked lunch, which has syncretized more or less the exposition (and leaving some narrative vestiges) of the book with a largely biographical elaboration on burrough's life-events--running somewhat linear to the writing of the book. the movie is really, when we get down to it, about naked lunch--about how it was written. this should be self-evident in the film--the ruse of the 'agent' being writing the book. he is not in interzone (which wears tangiers' clothes) but rather still in new york. this is evidenced in that the resturant burroughs and cloquet visit in new york is also analogous to the interior of the apartment of the americans in tangiers. etc. it's a shame they spared some of the most 'compelling' scenes of the book, yet i can appreciate one saying that they are absolutely unfilmable--or at least 'reprehensible' as to capture them on film and show them to an audience (Hassan's Rumpus Room comes to mind).
though, moreover any of this, the dvd set is very well worth it. and if you are considering to buy it--do so.
There is a bug that is bugging me in my bug's mind This is a film that leaves you disoriented, at least disoriented. A writer can only become a writer when all limits and all no matter how light and slight ethical definitions have been flushed down the toilet of our minds. The women he wants he kills and the women he does not want are men and the men he wants he gives them to some barbarian as so many sacrificial victims. Frankly who is speaking of repressed homosexuality? Here we reach a maximum that cannot easily be imitated and equaled. The writer needs to get high on something to get de-blocked, un-blocked, moving. He gets high on terminating powder that kills cockroaches, which is normal since we are speaking of a repressed cock-lover, or on all kinds of other powders and essences derived from all kinds of other caterpillars or centipedes or millipedes or million-pedes, you want it you have it. What's more that experience leads him to some creative paradise in northern Africa, speaking of politically correct that is a record of incorrectness. And then the next stage is some kind of police state that looks like some kind of gulag camp in which you can only enter if you kill a woman in front of the guards. Then the bug-typing-machines are nicely quaint today in the time of word-processors and computers. What's left after these 110 minutes? The vision of a decadent totally corrugated and disjointed if not dys-functioning world that does not have one iota of truth in it but that is not even attractive. In other words never ever ever become a writer. It is slavery, alienation and it leads to the most criminal side-effects that have nothing special in them.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines
Anything Goes Trivia
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