Neked

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After weeks of improvisation, filming took place in London from 9 September to 16 December 1992. Sandra's Neo-Gothic home was an actual interior/exterior location that Leigh featured heavily, particularly in the last shot of the film, as its corner location allowed for wide street views. [5] This is a painful movie to watch. But it is also exhilarating, as all good movies are, because we are watching the director and actors venturing beyond any conventional idea of what a modern movie can be about. Here there is no plot, no characters to identify with, no hope. But there is care: The filmmakers care enough about these people to observe them very closely, to note how they look and sound and what they feel.

a b c d e f g Coveney, Michael (1996). The World According to Mike Leigh, pp.19, 21, 25, 27, 29, 32-34, 65-67. HarperCollins, New York. ISBN 0006383394. Derek Malcolm of The Guardian noted that the film "is certainly Leigh's most striking piece of cinema to date" and that "it tries to articulate what is wrong with the society that Mrs Thatcher claims does not exist." Of Johnny, he writes: "He likes no one, least of all himself, and he dislikes women even more than men, relapsing into sexual violence as his misogyny takes hold. He is perhaps redeemable, but only just. And not by any woman in our immediate view." He praised the directing and performances, singling out Thewlis, writing that he "plays [Johnny] with a baleful brilliance that is certain to make this underrated, but consistently striking, actor into a star name ... [Johnny] is, at his worst, a cold, desperate fish. His redeeming feature is that he still cares." [9] King, Dennis (25 December 1994). "SCREEN SAVERS In a Year of Faulty Epics, The Oddest Little Movies Made The Biggest Impact". Tulsa World (Final Homeed.). p.E1.Also here, as with the Criterion edition, BFI includes Leigh’s 17-minute short film, The Short & Curlies, starring Thewlis, Alison Steadman, Sylvestra le Touzel, and Wendy Nottingham. Compared to Naked it feels like a light, fluffy comic bit, though for this viewing it had a gloomier feel. The story kind of focuses around the awkward relationship between Thewlis’ character and a pharmacist (chemist) that he's trying to woo over. Their interactions are awkward, even painful in a variety of ways (like, for starters, how Thewlis’ character has to insert unfunny punchlines in every conversation), but the characters are so vividly fleshed out, from their disappointments to their hang-ups, despite nothing direct ever really being said. Naked then. Challenging, horrifying, beautiful, objectionable, funny, exciting and exhausting. When was the last time you saw anything like that at the cinema? Equal in those he showers with rapid-fire insults and bile, elements of Thewlis’ performance suggest his character is suffering PTSD from an unnamed trauma. But women unquestionably bear the brunt of Johnny’s cruelty as much as Jeremy’s.

Perhaps surprisingly, he does later manage to scrape up some pity for Archie’s girlfriend Maggie’s plight and even buys her some food. Ironically, she unintentionally supplies one of the cruellest moments in the film when he she guesses his age as forty and doesn’t remotely believe him when he reveals he’s twenty-seven. Naked, I just want to... stop that song reference right there. Yeah, forget Falco, although, honestly, I can't say that he's too much cheesier than reference that I don't mind going on in my head when I see this film's title: "You walk into the room, with your pencil in your hand; you see somebody naked, and you say, 'Who is that man?'". It's an at least more fitting reference, because this film can get a little weird at times, and on top of that, this film is a production by [u]Thin Man[/u] Films. Mike Leigh must be a Bob Dylan fan, which would make sense, because he seems to be about as passionate as Dylan is about talking about middle and working-class society in a slightly serious manner that's still kind of amusing, whether he intends for it to be or not. I'm really not sure if he's trying to be funny here, because as cheesy as the title sort of is, this film is a little toned down, comically speaking, for Leigh, as well it should be if it's going to have so much rape, as that's hardly a laughing matter. Now, if the lead were to suddenly turn into a werewolf and eat the woman or something, that would be a little more colorful, even though I can't say that I would be especially surprised. Well, maybe I would be a little surprised, because this film came out 11 years before "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban", but as crazy as David Thewlis has always looked, he's got to be some kind of creepy, supernatural creature in real life, which is where we get this, "Werewolves East of London" (Within the first ten minutes of the film, he really does "joke" about once being a werewolf), which is fair, but a bit of a challenge, often more so than at should be, at least as a character study. All of these stylistic choices are right for "Naked," and so is the title, which describes characters who exist in the world without the usual layers of protection. They are clothed, but not warmly or cheerfully. But they are naked of families, relationships, homes, values and, in most cases, jobs. They exist in modern Britain with few possessions except their words. In a Manchester alley, Johnny rapes a woman. When her family arrive and chase him away, he steals a car and flees to Dalston, a "scrawny, unpretentious area" in east London. He seeks refuge at the home of Louise, a former girlfriend from Manchester, who is not happy to see him. Louise works as a file clerk and lives with two flatmates, the unemployed Sophie, whom she calls her "hippy-dippy friend", and the primary tenant Sandra, a nurse who is away in Zimbabwe. I imagined Johnny’s conspiracy theory babbling about barcodes, the Book of Revelations, and millennial apocalypse would now resemble the paranoid fantasies of Q-anoners. But, his proclivity for seeing the end of the world in human behaviour seems more relevant in this age of climate change and the lip service paid to minimising it. Leigh says Johnny, “isn’t a victim of conspiracy theoriyitis. He enjoys talking about this stuff but it’s banter and letting off steam.” For me this is at odds with Thewlis’ conviction when delivering those monologues.In the early 1990s, “problematic” was a term seldom heard. Almost three decades on, this seems like the film for which the word was invented. Jeremy rapes two women, and is unmistakably a villainous piece of well-groomed male rage. Johnny’s taste for rough sex is what will have audiences squirming at exactly how much consent is occurring during his surprisingly frequent couplings. In his waking hours, the only thing that ever shuts him up is when he reads and fortunately, he does like to read. Johnny’s an auto-didact, razor sharp but from a generation where clever working-class teenagers weren’t always encouraged to go to university – his fellow Mancs Morrissey and Mark E. Smith spring to mind here. Come to think of it, Johnny’s nasal twang and some of his scalding wit do remind me of the much missed Mark E. Supervising this one, Pope has applied that skip-bleach look, and he seems to be far happier with this presentation judging by his comments in that interview. Since the process is rarely done with the original negative (it’s usually done during the creation of the interpositive or internegative as to not damage the original elements) the colours have more than likely been adjusted here digitally, with the notes stating “[t]he new colour grading reproduces the film’s original bleach bypass process, referring to an original 1993 release print held in the BFI’s collection.” Memories of Murder had a similar thing done to it for its 4K restoration, though with mixed results. I have no doubt that director Bong Joon-ho did use the bleach-bypass process for the film during its initial release, but recreating it for that restoration (as presented on Criterion’s disc) did give the final image a bit of a phony, digital look. Essentially, despite my finding the presentation decent in the end,it didn’t look like it was accomplished through any sort of photochemical process.

With his snark and point-scoring contrariness, Johnny would definitely be blogging and podcasting nowadays, shifting political leanings if one opinion became too fashionable. Jeremy would have found fellow travellers in the misogyny and violent porn that exploded online when highspeed broadband became the norm. Plus, Johnny is an emotional vampire. He cannot bring himself to be close to people, but feeds off their energy, leaving most encounters invigorated while the other party is drained. Note how often the character, vampire like, waits to be invited into someone’s home or workplace. Leigh has said in an interview that while his earlier films (including " High Hopes" and " Life Is Sweet") might have embodied a socialist view of the world, this one edges over into anarchy. I agree. It suggests a world in which the operating systems have become distant from such inhabitants as Johnny and the women in the flat. a b c Jeffries, Stuart. "'I got dangerously close to Johnny'". The Guardian. 14 August 2008. Retrieved 12 November 2014. Mr. Mason is a pretty young principal of a thriving private high school. The dude is in his late 30s and has had a pretty smooth ride up until a few weeks ago. He used to love going to his job and monitoring the success of his perfect high-society students. However, the girls in one of his classes are growing restless in their final year of school. These 18+ teens are having none of the discipline they were used to just one year ago. It’s all about showing off, making TikTok videos, and being sexually provocative. Mr. Mason is a young principal, and this is the first time

Since putting his schooldays behind him, Johnny’s only known Conservative rule. It’s 1993 and the countdown to 2000 has started with millennial anxiety on the rise – anybody else remember the Y2K scare? Homelessness is rife on the streets of Britain’s big cities, and unemployment is hovering around the 3 million mark with economists predicting it might soon rise by another half a million. Leigh first had the idea for the story while a student in Manchester in the early 1960s: "We had a very enlightened teacher who endlessly reminded us that the next total eclipse would be in August 1999. Later I started thinking about the millennium and the end of the world. In 1992 the millennium was impending, so I brought that idea to the film." [2]

With thanks to Andy Willis and HOME, Manchester. Naked is also released to buy on Blu-ray on November 29th. Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave the film four out of four stars and analysed the message behind the title, saying it "describes characters who exist in the world without the usual layers of protection. They are clothed, but not warmly or cheerfully. But they are naked of families, relationships, homes, values and, in most cases, jobs. They exist in modern Britain with few possessions except their words." He praised the directing, writing: "[Leigh's] method has created in Naked a group of characters who could not possibly have emerged from a conventional screenplay; this is the kind of film that is beyond imagining, and only observation could have created it." He concluded: "This is a painful movie to watch. But it is also exhilarating, as all good movies are, because we are watching the director and actors venturing beyond any conventional idea of what a modern movie can be about. Here there is no plot, no characters to identify with, no hope. But there is care: The filmmakers care enough about these people to observe them very closely, to note how they look and sound and what they feel." [10]So, is the film the working out of an idea of violence? It isn’t. The violence is an organic function of the characters. On the basis that people behave in all sorts of ways in private, and are vulnerable or susceptible to their own impulses in different situations.” For a film this contradictory then, it is handy not to just have my thoughts, but Leigh’s comments from that Q&A, plus input from Andy Willis, curator of the Mike Leigh season at HOME and Professor of Film Studies at the University of Salford. There have been many fine performances in Mike Leigh films over the years; Imelda Staunton in Vera Drake and Timothy Spall in Mr. Turner for starters. I’ll even happily admit that James Corden was pretty damn good in All or Nothing. But best of all is David Thewlis as the in-yer-face Johnny in Naked. Wonderfully, it looks as though the film has also received a new restoration and is presented in high-definition, unlike Criterion’s. Sadly, Leigh’s commentary from that release hasn’t been ported over. He meets a homeless and aggressive young man from Edinburgh called Archie, who speaks (or shouts might be a more accurate description) with an accent that Johnny finds almost impenetrable although not as impenetrable as Archie finds his spiel about self-fulfilling prophecies and Nostradamus.