Chicago – I adore David Cronenberg. He’s one of the most important filmmakers of his generation from “Videodrome” (also available in a great Criterion release) to “The Fly” to “Dead Ringers” to “The History of Violence.” He matters. And yet I’ve never been in love with “Naked Lunch,” recently released in Criterion Blu-ray and DVD. It’s one of those movies that I always admired but never loved. It’s about all that could be done with a Burroughs’ book, one that clearly could not be directly adapted into film, but I find it more interesting as a filmmaking exercise than an enjoyable piece of work on its own. Having said that, the Criterion treatment of it is expectedly stellar.
Rating: 4.0/5.0
Criterion HD transfers should be the model for all. “Naked Lunch” doesn’t look overly polished like too many movies from before 2000 often do. It just looks right.
Rating: 4.0/5.0
Criterion HD transfers should be the model for all. “Naked Lunch” doesn’t look overly polished like too many movies from before 2000 often do. It just looks right.
- 4/22/2013
- by adam@hollywoodchicago.com (Adam Fendelman)
- HollywoodChicago.com
Blu-ray Release Date: April 9, 2013
Price: Blu-ray $39.95
Studio: Criterion
Something's bugging Peter Weller in Naked Lunch.
Peter Weller (Firstborn), Judy Davis (To Rome with Love) and Roy Scheider (Jaws) star in David Cronenberg’s (Cosmopolis) 1991 film adaptation of William S. Burroughs’s hallucinatory, once-thought unfilmable 1959 novel Naked Lunch.
Weller takes the lead in the biographical drama-comedy as a part-time exterminator and full-time drug addict named Bill Lee who plunges into the nightmarish Interzone, a netherworld of sinister cabals and giant talking bugs.
Alternately humorous and grotesque—and always surreal—the film mingles aspects of Burroughs’s novel with incidents from the writer’s own life, resulting in an paranoid fantasy and a self-reflexive investigation into the mysteries of the creative process.
The Blu-ray contains the same bonus features that were offered on the Criterion DVD that was issued back in 2003 (and that’s still available). Here’s what’s included:
• High-definition digital transfer,...
Price: Blu-ray $39.95
Studio: Criterion
Something's bugging Peter Weller in Naked Lunch.
Peter Weller (Firstborn), Judy Davis (To Rome with Love) and Roy Scheider (Jaws) star in David Cronenberg’s (Cosmopolis) 1991 film adaptation of William S. Burroughs’s hallucinatory, once-thought unfilmable 1959 novel Naked Lunch.
Weller takes the lead in the biographical drama-comedy as a part-time exterminator and full-time drug addict named Bill Lee who plunges into the nightmarish Interzone, a netherworld of sinister cabals and giant talking bugs.
Alternately humorous and grotesque—and always surreal—the film mingles aspects of Burroughs’s novel with incidents from the writer’s own life, resulting in an paranoid fantasy and a self-reflexive investigation into the mysteries of the creative process.
The Blu-ray contains the same bonus features that were offered on the Criterion DVD that was issued back in 2003 (and that’s still available). Here’s what’s included:
• High-definition digital transfer,...
- 1/22/2013
- by Laurence
- Disc Dish
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