Patience Watson
One of those movie experiences that is so good it makes you realize you've been grading everything else on a curve.
Portia Hilton
Blistering performances.
Marva-nova
Amazing worth wacthing. So good. Biased but well made with many good points.
maxastree
In reaction to the overwhelmingly plastic culture of the 80s, 90s media started to regurgitate grainy images of "the Beats", fifties counter-cultural icons that could be easily reduced to a handful of key works, stylized photographs and design-heavy biographies dropping names like Ferlinghetti, Kerouac, Ginsgberg and of course Burroughs - a man who's inherited wealth, tragic past and anthropological interest in obscure cultures made him a hipster, low rent bon vivant and comedy artist all at once, lampooning Americana whilst somehow representing it at the same time.The film "Naked Lunch" is something of a failure. It has some fascinating qualities, such as Ornette Colemans jazz score, and Judy Davis's somewhat crazed depiction of Burroughs wife in the film which creates a story opening that has a real sense of purpose, but then it all goes astray because, essentially, this is a film without a functioning plot.Sure, the main character has a motivation: after the accidental shooting of his wife, he moves to North Africa, creating screeds of experimental writing under the influence of painkillers and alcohol as an escape, or perhaps a form of therapy. That's characterization though, whats the story actually about? Essentially, this movie is about typewriters, broken typewriters, hallucinatory moments, various confessions of homosexual guilt or reflection, and static, overly smug exchanges between Burroughs screen stand-in and his compatriots that bare witness to a story that goes nowhere.Matters are made worse by location restrictions, so the crew shoot on sound stages covered with sand and prop work. Not only does the story evaporate, but the sense of place and time is oddly unconvincing also. I almost feel after seeing this movie that it could have served better as a stage play, with a bit of tweaking. Did I mention Peter Weller is in this film? He must have hoped something as diametrically opposite to his role in Robocop would have helped his career, but his casting just contributes to the list of misplaced decisions that created this picture. After this film made back a fraction of its budget (people like Peter Suschitzky and Howard Shore hardly work for free) Weller disappeared from wide release films for many years. The least flattering thing to say about Cronenbergs "Naked Lunch", a film that isn't really related to the wild satire and poetry of the famous book, is that it continued to reduce the image of Burroughs to an aesthetic, as if the death, addiction and suffering in his life could just be recycled as part of a conveniently "hip" pop culture style.Cronenberg and Burroughs themselves are people of considerable talent, for sure, but not here.
Joseph Pezzuto
"Exterminate all rational thought. That is the conclusion I have come to." A product of the Beat Poetry generation, writer and drug addict William S. Burroughs' 1959 Naked Lunch novel's title takes it's name as described best by the author: "a frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork". The book was notably banned in many places and deemed unfilmable until Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg (Videodrome, The Fly) took the project into his own hands in 1991, adapting from Burroughs' other works as well to tell the story of this surreally strange science-fiction drama. Combining Howard Shore, known for his thunderous choir and full orchestra scores and Ornette Coleman's dizzy saxophone of free jazz together for the film's astounding score was certainly an audacious choice, as the notes sporadically swell and sway, seeming to add a hazy atmosphere to the drug-fueled ambiance of the picture. Peter Suschitzky's queasy green-and-gray-tinged cinematography only adds to the collision of varying sensibilities of a sickly uneasiness as well throughout. Did Cronenberg succeed at filming the unfilmable? Let's take a look. Peter Weller plays Bill Lee (a pseudonym of Burroughs and the name under which he published his first autobiographical novel Junky), a man of whom wants to write but exterminates insects to pay the bills. Bill sometimes hangs out with his nebbish writer friends, (of which Burroughs' modeled after fellow beat poet friends Jack Kerouac and Alan Ginsberg) Hank (Nicholas Campbell) and Martin (Michael Zelniker), of whom are both sleeping with Joan under Lee's very nose. Lee's wife, Joan, (Judy Davis), becomes addicted to Bill's bug powder dust, as she describes a shoot-up to feel like a "literary high"; a reference to Franz Kafka's 1915 short story 'The Metamorphosis'. He soon joins her in a world of unorthodox hallucinogens, involving meeting the kindly but sinister Dr. Benway (Roy Scheider), walking away with his first dose of the black meat he gives to Bill: a narcotic made from the flesh of the giant aquatic Brazilian centipede. When a party trick game known between Bill and Joan called the William Tell routine involving a liquor glass and a gun go awry, accidentally killing Joan, Bill flees to the Tangiers-like Interzone (Burroughs wrote Naked Lunch in the city Tangiers). Here in this Mediterranean location, he encounters talking insectoid typewriters, double agents, offbeat aesthetes, Mugwumps spouting and oozing from phallic appendages and plots within plots.Cronenberg's collaboration with the banned work of Burroughs between the realms of fiction and non-fiction allows the film itself to concern that nether region between the real and unreal as well, where the inspired and imaginative impetus for the creative process are not driven by drug-fueled hallucinations but are the product of it instead. With a fragmented touch of film noir realism, random routines and creepy-crawlies galore,'Naked Lunch' is a bizarre plunge into a narcotic delusion echoing that of a bitter cry from the bellows of the Earth. When combining both worlds regarding the exterminated species of the entomologic kingdom along with a few hits of insect powder, the thin line of what is tangible fades into a twisted oblivion, giving us a picture not for everyone but remains a good hit that still manages to shock and stun even today thanks to it's daring director, even with all of the bugs and the drugs.
Xander Khudanich
I think Naked Lunch is one of the best movies I have ever seen (I've seen a lot of them). The film is based on the book "Naked Lunch" by William S. Burroughs. For yet with books by this author I do not know, but I think in the future, be sure to read his work. Filming a movie based on the book of the eccentric writer, Canadian director David Cronenberg, prone in his work to the constant shocking, decided to mix with original work of reference to the rest of creation of the author, as well as elements of the biographyWilliam Burroughs. Get in the end surreal mixture is able to confuse anyone.
RevRonster
I never saw "Naked Lunch" when it came out. It was only recently that I was reminded of its existence after watching another David Cronenberg movie and I decided to finally sit down and give it a chance.I really liked Peter Weller's performance in it and I really enjoyed the animatronics that brought the aliens and bugs to life. I know hating CGI is all the rage now but seeing really solid practical effects from a time past is still really cool and neat to take in. I also really enjoyed the strange, trippy story the film provides as David Cronenberg not only made a loose adaptation of the novel this is based on but also inserted segments of the author's real life into the plot as well. In all honesty, the only thing I didn't care for was the use of a negative term for describing homosexuality in the film—but this was made during a time where that awful word was still used, so this complaint is pretty moot.The only real problem I have with "Naked Lunch" is the fact that it might be too weird for its own good. While I dig a trippy film here and there, this movie never lets up on the trip and even the ending suggests that that fantastic ride for the character of Bill Lee is far from over. Usually, strange films end with a way that sums everything up as if to say, "Look, there's a reason for the oddities." This film doesn't really have that and just has it ending with a nod and a wink that suggests that ride is far from over. That's all well and good and I dug that but it did make for a movie that doesn't offer up repeat or future viewings. In the end, it felt like, "Well, I experienced it, what's next?" Greetings, friend! The name is Rev. Ron and if you feel like reading more of my rants, ramblings, bad jokes, geek references,and other movie reviews (like a more in-depth look at "Naked Lunch" and other, less trippy films) you can visit my blog at revronmovies.blogspot.com. If you don't want to do that because of my average experience with this film and that makes you dislike me immensely, you don't need to visit.
