Naked Lunch Limited Edition 4K UHD [Blu-ray] [2023] [Region Free]

Product Information

Certain items can take longer to source than the estimated week, particularly during busy trading periods and may take longer to arrive at our warehouse. On April 9th, the studio will release Richard III (Laurence Olivier, 1955), Gate of Hell (Teinosuke Kinugasa, 1953), and Naked Lunch (David Cronenberg, 1991). The interviews range from fifteen minutes to an hour plus, including a full 60 minutes with Peter Weller. Writing about Naked Lunch means you have to quickly get used to writing sentences like this) Joan, meanwhile, becomes a reincarnation of Bill Lee’s own wife, who he has already killed in a “William Tell routine” gone wrong, and who his controllers urge him to kill again, as “Women aren’t human, Bill! Antony Balch, who had attempted to make a low-budget version of Naked Lunch in the 1960s, accused Cronenberg of not understanding the book, particularly its treatment of drug addiction.

Naked Lunch is released by Arrow Video on 17 April 2023 on Limited Edition 4K UHD, Limited Edition Blu-ray and Limited Edition Original Artwork Slipcase UHD. org, one of the premier destinations on the web to discuss DVD releases from The Criterion Collection, Masters of Cinema, and other DVD production companies from around the world. We use cookies to give you the best possible experience on our site, provide personalised content and advertising, analyse our traffic, and ensure you see more of what you love. It is like an intense dream which makes sense for as long as it lasts - then when one tries to remember it, one draws a blank. Lee moves from being a timid insect exterminator to the man who wrote Naked Lunch – even the name “Bill Lee” is a pseudonym Burroughs used for his earliest work – and for the first time in biopic history, there is no sense of catharsis or achievement about this.

It was inspired by a book which many believed was unfilmable because it is essentially a bizarre summation of drug-induced hallucinations and fantasies. This picture didn't make quite the impact that Universal and Focus Features hoped for when it premiered last December; despite a prestigious topic and the visual acumen of . It is a companion piece more than it is an adaptation, and a Cronenberg film at least as much as a Burroughs one. Cronenberg, for his part, also praises the use of practical effects over CGI, even while being humble about some of the results. But even without this, it’s one of Sands’s most enjoyable roles, so louche and eccentric that Cloquet’s eye-popping secret identity actually makes a certain kind of sense.

Responding to those who accused him of “heterosexualising” Naked Lunch, Cronenberg pointed out that Burroughs himself was uncertain about his sexuality at the time of writing, that he claimed in letters to friends that the book’s explicit gay sex had somehow vented that part of his personality. I loved the neo-Noir aesthetic, the dry wit and black humour, the squishy bug effects and the deadpan performances, but ultimately, I felt no closer to understanding Naked Lunch as a result. Note: In 1992, Naked Lunch was nominated for the Golden Bear Award at the Berlin International Film Festival.Naked Making Lunch - a 1992 documentary focusing on the production history of Naked Lunch by Chris Rodley. I was unfamiliar with Burrough's body of work, so this commentary was very helpful to me in understanding the source material. throughout, and regular readers of my reviews will know that I'm not always a fan of how grain looks in the increased resolution of 4K UHD discs.

When he discovers that his wife Joan (Judy Davis) has been injecting it as a drug, he decides to try it for himself and begins to hallucinate. Black level is deep and strong, giving depth and presence to the frame, holds good shadows and doesn’t grey, white the white scale is bright, without clipping, giving prominence to the highlights. The lasting impact of these moments is made possible by the fabulous work of Effects Artist Chris Walas, who won an Oscar for his previous work with Cronenberg on The Fly. In a career dedicated to seeing the unseeable and filming the unfilmable, perhaps only David Cronenberg could really do justice to William S. There's also a rather curious if provocative quasi-homage to Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo at play in terms of two characters played by the inimitable Judy Davis.There’s also Ian Holm and Judy Davis as the Frosts, two ex-pats loosely inspired by Paul and Joan Bowles, who Burroughs had met in Tangier. Cast Peter Weller Bill Lee Judy Davis Joan Lee/Joan Frost Ian Holm Tom Frost Julian Sands Yves Cloquet Roy R. Their only comment was to tell me their favourite quote from the book, which, when I checked, turned out to be on the first page. Producer Jeremy Thomas was convinced that the film could be marketed as an effects movie for adults: all the lavish creature effects and foreign location shoots of a Star Wars instalment applied to a notoriously difficult work of experimental literature. This essay by novelist, playwright, and culture critic Gary Indiana originally appeared in the 1992 book Everything Is Permitted: The Making of “Naked Lunch.

They become actively irresistible when you discover they’re both a whole hour long – and while other conversations with Thomas and Walas aren’t that expansive, they’re no less rich in insight. While it would be futile to deny that drugs are a central theme of Burroughs’s work, Cronenberg’s film looks fresher for avoiding the cliches of heroin chic. Some traces of extremely light sharpening, most likely inherited from the master that was used to produce the transfer, also remain.

The novel still had enough outlaw cool for the film adaptation to be a more commercial proposition than it might seem. Burroughs' celebrated, though controversial, novel, Naked Lunch, due to its nonlinear storytelling, and lack of any significant narrative or structure, many fell foul, not least due to some of the subject matter. rather cheekily inserted old school into supposed tv monitors, looking at Burroughs, Cronenberg and the film. Criterion's upcoming Blu-ray release allows one to experience the film at home in the best possible way. This strand of the narrative is perhaps the most indicative of how the context and insight provided by Arrow’s new edition of Naked Lunch is so crucial to getting the most out of a movie that could otherwise seem potentially dangerous (even, difficult though it is to admit for the dedicatedly woke, invigoratingly so).