The movie started off good. Everything was simple, Peter Weller was some exteriminator and his wife was a junkie on bug powder. Gradually the movie snowballed into a shitload of details that got confusing and then eventually too boring to bother following. I sat through the whole thing and felt 2 hours was way too long for a movie based on not much. The story was a mess. I didn't know what the fuck was going on after 30 minutes of the non-stop talking about umm I dunno. There was something about being an agent and typing reports....also something about being homosexual. The movie does have some interesting surreal moments though with the creature typewriters (organisms fused with mechanisms is a signature of director Cronenburg's work). Pretty much, the only scenes I enjoyed were the ones with the Star Wars looking aliens and that one scene with the creature dry humping stuff. This movie was based on a book I never read before so there probably were some hidden meanings or metaphors that went over my head, although I did read somewhere before that this movie was based more on the author's real life and his drug usage that gave him hallucinations. Apparently the author writes in an unstructured way too so that explains the lack of anything to pay attention to in the movie. I'm a Cronenburg fan, not my favorite film of his even though his other fans love this the most. Hell, I even liked "History of Violence" more, a very unpopular thing to say around hardcore Cronenburg fans. "Videodrome" had a more interesting concept and "Brood" was a solid story, "Naked Lunch" just left me frustrated to try to get into. Good thing I only rented this from netflix, Criterion DVDs are too damn expensive.
1 comment:
Naked Lunch was based on Bill Burroughs real life accidental shooting of his wife Joan Vollmer and depicted much like it was in the film. His literary method of "cutting-up" story-telling was employed by Cronenberg with maximum effect right to the end.
Taranatino would exploit the method of giving the audience bits of a story and returning to them later. That being said - there is still a lot of great stuff in Naked Lunch you won't find anywhere else.
I've enjoyed the film a great deal over the years and have recently mentally re-edited the film myself to include Sabina Kelly as the Mugwump for maximum personal enjoyment.
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