NAKED LUNCH
A film review by Sarah Elkins
Copyright 1992 Sarah Elkins
NAKED LUNCH: An examination of the creative process? A spy story? The new, updated version of REEFER MADNESS? Or just writer/director David Cronenburg playing head games? You decide.
PLOT/KICKOFF: Bill Lee, an ex-addict, ex-writer (?), turned bug exterminator turned bug powder addict, has to flee the US to go to Interzone, an Arabic-style refuge populated mainly by the Interzone boys (hustlers) and giant talking cockroaches, centipedes, and creatures who eject narcotics from tubes sticking out of their heads. Or is most of the action a hallucination?
CHARACTERS/ACTING: Peter Weller (ROBOCOP, BUCKAROO BANZAI) plays Bill Lee in a low-key way. His character reacts to the strangest of events not with hysteria, but mostly with an air of taking it all in, sponge-like, except when he's having drug reactions. I found this worked for the movie on all levels. An excellent job. Judy Davis (IMPROMPTU) plays Joan, Bill's wife in the US and a pawn in Interzone in a dry, zombie-like way which also worked for this movie. I did like her better in Impromptu, but that was a much more likable character, after all. Julian Sands plays the mysterious Yves. I don't know who played Joan's husband in Interzone (Ian Holm?), the Interzone boy Kiki (?) or the various bug voices. A fine cast, all in all.
CINEMATOGRAPHY/FX: A tribute to this movie is that all the unbelievable things going on in this movie didn't *look* unbelievable; they looked like reality, not F/X. There's a lot of ugliness in this movie.
SCORE: I didn't notice it.
VIOLENCE/GORE: bullet holes in bodies, drug injections, but the major disgust factor was those bugs - gore when they're splattered, gore during "sex," gore gore gore. Much worse than THE FLY, IMHO.
LANGUAGE: very offensive language, and lots of homophobic slurs and talk about them as being perverts, but I think considering the rest of the movie we weren't supposed to take it any more seriously than the spy-vs.-spy bugs.
SKIN/SITUATIONS: This movie was a turn-off for me. Bug "sex" portrayed, and it's not a pretty sight. Yeah, some people have sex too.
Analysis: I understand this movie was sort of inspired by William S. Burroughs' NAKED LUNCH. I haven't read it, so can't comment on that aspect of the movie. As seen in the first section of my review, this movie has several different levels and possible meanings. Taken separately, I don't think they hold up, but strangely enough as a whole this movie *does* work. However, yesterday my reaction of "Gross! Yuck! Ugh!" etc., still had the upper hand. It took a couple of days before I could get past that reaction, but now that I have, I liked much about the movie, and only wish I'd paid more attention to some of the lines in the movie (they may have been straight from the book), particularly the ones about writers. I don't want to give spoilers, and I don't want to lecture on what I thought different parts of the movie meant, but this movie did make me think about what makes a writer tick, what drives them to write and why they sometimes have to be driven to do so, what they may have to sacrifice, and how involved they should get whatever they're writing about. And surprisingly enough, parts of this movie were very funny.
- Sarah elkins.wbst139@xerox.com
.
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews