Tags
Language
Tags
March 2024
Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa
25 26 27 28 29 1 2
3 4 5 6 7 8 9
10 11 12 13 14 15 16
17 18 19 20 21 22 23
24 25 26 27 28 29 30
31 1 2 3 4 5 6

Naked Lunch (1991) The Criterion Collection [Repost]

Posted By: Efgrapha
Naked Lunch (1991) The Criterion Collection [Repost]

Naked Lunch (1991)
DVD9+DVD5 | ISO | NTSC, 16:9 (720x480) VBR | 01:55:28 | 10.1 Gb
Audio: English AC3 2.0 @ 384 Kbps | Subs: English HoH, French, Spanish
Genre: Drama, Surrealist Film, Avant-Garde

This cinematic/literary hybrid fuses motifs from Beat writer William S. Burroughs's novel of the same name with elements of the author's biography and plenty of the cerebral alienation and biomorphic special effects fans of creepy cult director David Cronenberg have come to expect. Bill Lee (Peter Weller) wants to write, but he exterminates bugs to pay the bills. His wife, Joan (Judy Davis), becomes addicted to Bill's bug powder dust, and soon he joins her in a world of unorthodox hallucinogens; he visits the kindly yet sinister Dr. Benway (Roy Scheider) and walks away with his first dose of the black meat – a narcotic made from the flesh of the giant aquatic Brazilian centipede. Soon, monstrous beetles are whispering conspiracy theories in Bill's ears and his nebbish writer friends Hank (Nicholas Campbell) and Martin (Michael Zelniker) are sleeping with Joan under his nose. When a party trick involving a liquor glass and a gun goes awry, killing Joan, Bill flees to Interzone, a Mediterranean city full of talking insectoid typewriters, double agents, offbeat aesthetes, and plots within plots. As he navigates this paranoid landscape, Bill begins ingesting another drug called mugwump jism and writes fragments that Hank and Martin soon assemble into a novel under the title Naked Lunch. As beat literature aficionados know, Interzone is based on Tangiers – the city where Burroughs wrote Naked Lunch. The incident in the film in which Hank and Martin appropriate Bill's writing and have it published closely approximates the real-life circumstances of the novel's publication, although it was Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac who helped out the real-life Burroughs. The William Tell incident that kills Bill's wife is also drawn from the author's real life. "William Lee" is both Burroughs' literary stand-in and the name under which he published his first autobiographical novel Junky. Ian Holm, who plays Joan Frost's husband, Tom, would appear in Cronenberg's similarly experimental eXistenZ several years later.

Synopsis by Brian J. Dillard, Allmovie.com

Given that William S. Burroughs' Naked Lunch isn't so much a novel as a collection of literary fragments that riff on corporate culture, human depravity, and sexual outrage as often as they filter the author's actual life as a bisexual, expatriate drug addict, it's a wonder the book ever became a movie at all. "Unfilmable" was the adjective most often applied, especially when it was announced that maverick Canadian director David Cronenberg would give it a shot. Cronenberg was hardly faithful to either the contents or the precise spirit of the author's nightmarishly misanthropic beat masterpiece, but he did manage to transform elements of the book and the overall Burroughs mythos into a coherent entry in his own oeuvre of stylized alienation. Most any literal description of the author's prose – or the film's plot – will fail to drive home the one element that makes both so enjoyable: the absurdist humor of both auteurs' visions. Talking bugs, amphibian spies, and arcane narcotics sound creepy, and they are. But as with the book itself, Cronenberg's film is full of deadpan humor that wallows in the excretory excesses of his visual metaphors while also driving home their aptness and winking all the while. It helps that his cast is so game, from the ever-shrewish Judy Davis in not one, but two tightly wound roles to the reliable Roy Scheider and Ian Holm and the too-too tight-lipped Peter Weller. The viscous special effects, vivid cinematography, and distorted period costume design all conspire to conjure up a dream-logic 1950s of squares, hipsters, and secret agents awash in neon, cigarette smoke, and junkie delirium. Cutting up the raw materials of the cut-up king himself, Cronenberg fashions a film as idiosyncratically inspired as its source material.

Review by Brian J. Dillard, Allmovie.com

IMDB 7,1/10 from 28 780 users

Wiki

Director: David Cronenberg

Writers: William S. Burroughs (novel), David Cronenberg

Cast: Peter Weller, Judy Davis, Ian Holm, Julian Sands,


Naked Lunch (1991) The Criterion Collection [Repost]

Naked Lunch (1991) The Criterion Collection [Repost]

Naked Lunch (1991) The Criterion Collection [Repost]

Naked Lunch (1991) The Criterion Collection [Repost]

Naked Lunch (1991) The Criterion Collection [Repost]

Naked Lunch (1991) The Criterion Collection [Repost]

Naked Lunch (1991) The Criterion Collection [Repost]

Naked Lunch (1991) The Criterion Collection [Repost]

Naked Lunch (1991) The Criterion Collection [Repost]

Naked Lunch (1991) The Criterion Collection [Repost]

Naked Lunch (1991) The Criterion Collection [Repost]

Naked Lunch (1991) The Criterion Collection [Repost]

Naked Lunch (1991) The Criterion Collection [Repost]

Naked Lunch (1991) The Criterion Collection [Repost]

Naked Lunch (1991) The Criterion Collection [Repost]

Special Features:

DISC ONE:

The Film

Audio commentary by director David Cronenberg and actor Peter Weller

DISC TWO:

"Naked Making Lunch" -documentary (49 min)
Special effects and production stills galleries
Marketing campaign section including a featurette
B-roll montage
TV spots
Theatrical trailer
William S. Burroughs reads excerpts from his novel "Naked Lunch" (63 min)

All thanks to original releaser - mook45

More interesting Movies in My Blog