Naked Lunch | | Cast : | Peter Weller, Judy Davis | | Director : | David Cronenberg | | Studio : | Criterion Collection | | Format : | Color, Widescreen | | Released Date : | January 01, 1991 | | DVD Released Date : | November 11, 2003 | | Language : | English (Dubbed), English (Subtitled), English (Original Language) | | Audience Rating : | R (Restricted) | | | BUY THIS DVD FROM AMAZON |
Customer Reviews
| Rating |  | | Date | August 22, 2005 | | Summary | Criterion makes the best dvd's! | Content
 | If you're a fan of this movie or Cronenberg's movies in general (like I am) you will want to have this version. It's not cheap but you get great picture and sound quality, a 30 page booklet with a lot of good information and a second disc with a lot of cool extra's. One of the extra's is william s burroughs reading bits out of naked lunch, the documentary 'naked making lunch' is also very good. Last but not least a great commentary track is included from Cronenberg and Peter Weller. Get it now! |
| Rating | | | Date | August 05, 2005 | | Summary | Well... | Content
| This film is what people who masquerade as artists produce. Which accounts for much of Hollywood today. This is your film if you like pain. This film is like a puzzle that is just plain cardboard on both sides. One thing can be said for this, it will leave images in your mind that will take far too long to disappear. But then alot of Hollywood "artists" just want to get inside your head and disturb you. A picture void of all hope which leaves you feeling dirty and intellectually violated. If you would like to be raped mentally, this film is for you. A drug induced world of pain from tortured minds. |
| Rating | | | Date | July 20, 2005 | | Summary | Exterminate All Rational Thought. | Content
| Naked Lunch is a well crafted satire about the life of an average working man who discovers that he is an Agent of InterZone and that everything is not always as it appears.
Watch this twice (not on the same day), first to get aquainted with the visuals and second to follow the dialog.
|
| Rating | | | Date | June 26, 2005 | | Summary | Not for me nor Most Everyone Else, I Suspect | Content
| I picked up a book a few years back entitled "The New York Times Guide to the Best 1000 Movies Ever Made". Although I have had qualms with some of their choices, I found it a fairly reliable guide to good movies I might never have seen otherwise. "Naked Luch" is a selection in that book which is the only reason I chose to watch. I mention that because I feel compelled to justify why on earth I would have ever decided to waste 115 minutes of my life watching this disgusting movie. I know, I know...I could have rescued most of those minutes by turning off the TV as soon as I realized how awful this movie is. However, in the interest of fairness, I have tended to try and watch a movie all the way through. Many a time the last half hour will make up for all the meandering in the first 90 minutes. As a public service to anyone reading this review, I will publicly declare that, once you've decided for yourself that "Naked Lunch" is pointless, disgusting depravity, it is time for you to turn it off. Nothing gets better, nothing becomes suddenly meaningful, nothing emerges in any sort of redemptive awareness, nothing will happen to make you glad you staid with it. After the first 20-30 minutes, I had to check to see how long the movie is to know how much more I was going to have to suffer.
OK, this movie will be appealling to a significant segment of the movie-viewing world. I pass no judgement on them; to each his own. I will admit that the film is well put together; not like some shoe-string, basement cutting room, self-financed "art" film. The special effects are grotesquely well done. The leading character is played by Peter Weller who defines the term "dead pan". Overall, the cast, in human form, does well at what they're supposed to emote. There are, I suppose, a great many symbolisms about writing, addictive behavior, the meaningless of life, whatever. I was not motivated to search for any of that; I was just looking for the movie to end. This is one depressing film. |
| Rating | | | Date | June 08, 2005 | | Summary | Makes about as much sense as the book | Content
| Although I was fascinated with the disturbing and often obscene imagery that Burrough's painted in his book Naked Lunch, I found the book itself barely comprehensible and hard to deal with. The book itself feels like one big wild hallucinogenic tangent with only the skeletal remains of story locked deep inside. Is the book hellish? Yes. Is it well written, yes. Is it actually about something? I'm not sure.
I was immediately interested in seeing the film adaptation of Naked Lunch because I really wanted to see what someone else's take on this whole thing was. I was hoping that maybe the book would make more sense now after seeing the movie. But I was proven wrong.
Cronenberg's adaptation is just as incohesive as the book itself and is just as hard to deal with. I guess the movie does do the book justice because it borderlines from being really weird to really boring at the same time. In the two hours duration time, this movie lacks in an overall feel of story progression and more importantly a point, also just like the book. Unless you're actually on drugs when you watch this, you might find yourself biting your fingernails.
I'm not saying this movie was bad overall, it's well shot and as some good performances, I just feel this movie falls victim to its source material. When you "film the unfilmable," and in this case from a book as inexplicable and hard to understand as Naked Lunch, you can pretty much film anything you want and no one's going to argue with you as long as you keep familiar things from the source material, in this case Interzone, Junk, and Mugwumps and the underlying homosexuality story. So I don't consider "filming the unfilmable" much of a feat in Naked Lunch's case. |
|
