Naked
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“Do you know what this is?”
“A dada-ist nun?”
I just ordered the Criterion disc last week. Still hasn’t arrived. Getting impatient.
I have a GREAT STORY: A little earlier I was at work and decided to take something of a lunch break. I went to the nearby Subway as I so often do, and ahead of me in line was some prime piece of bait. Little shorts, flip flops. YEP YEP. Fresh out of the oven, 17, 18, somewhere in there.
The one dude makes her sandwich, then my turkey on wheat (Lexman has dropped 20 pounds since I quit drinking)… So then like a second dude shows up to run the register, and hasn’t been paying attention, so he there’s her sandwich, and my sandwich, and my man goes “ARE YOU TWO TOGETHER?”
BOOYAH, L TO THE G looking like I could pass for having a jailbait girlfriend, and without missing a beat and summoning all the dry wit of Timothy Dalton, I shoot back “I WISH.” GOOD LINE.
The chick kind of did an uncomfortable “Ew” type “Noooo,” and the cashier dude seemed to think I was a giant TOOL. But it RULED.
i am awesome
Thank goodness Glenn. It could have been a bathtub screenshot of Rita Moreno in THE NIGHT OF THE FOLLOWING DAY.
Your story wasn’t any funnier when you posted it early on David Poland’s blog, Lex.
Get a life and take your trash someone else. No one here cares.
“No one here cares.”
Yeah, I’m getting that vibe. I try to DELIGHT THE MASSES here, and it’s a bunch of humorless, dry-as-toast sexless motherfuckers who probably would jump off a building like FIRST POWER if some chick put her squack in their face.
They should call this site Some Came Gaying.
Now I will post twice as much.
BOOYAH
I kind of like LexG. As trolls go, he’s civil and at least occasionally amusing. I prefer him to that horrifying sociopath ZODIAC MOTHERFUCKER over at AV Club…
@ Kiss Me: cf the discussion earlier this week here in the Ellen Page thread – http://tiny.cc/5niw9
Kiss Me, DUH:
For the record, not a troll. I have been a mainstay on the net, and specifically on film blogs, for YEARS. I have written for Poland at Movie City News, have submitted pieces that Jeff has run on Hollywood Elsewhere. Have met and hung out with a LOT of the regulars from these blogs. Long-time buddies and/or web acquaintances with McWeeny, Luke Thompson, and too many others to count. I have a Film degree and do some acting and standup comedy; I consider myself an Internet Performance Artist. I’m certainly not a troll, and I’m no less qualified to speak on the subject of film, or even FILM HISTORY, than many others who are afforded much more respect both here and elsewhere.
In other words, YOU WILL BOW.
Also: YOU WILL bask in my great imitations of Glenn, Poland, and Jeff McMahon, in this work of genius:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rMR2G3PZ73A
Easy on the desperate pleas for respect, Lonesome Rhodes.
Laz, that’s cool and all, and you don’t have to answer this, but:
What’s the deal with you, anyway? Back in the day, you used to post on Poland encouraging me to COMMIT SUICIDE (class act, btw)… Seem to have mellowed over time, sometimes we chat civilly about movie theaters or making fun of DZ or even, God forbid, movies. So I thought any beef was well in the past, actually like your posts on HE, got no ill will on my end, all in good fun.
So, why so hostile to me of late over here, of all places? Aren’t we all one big happy family of douchebag movie blog posters? No need for the hostility, black.
Maybe you should have taken my advice. Maybe you could have been the Heath Ledger of the movie blogosphere, instead of its Vin Diesel.
If you switch your gears between “real” and “ALLCAPS” too quickly, you’re gonna strip your transmission. How do people know whether or not to take you seriously from one post to the next? You can’t get all Find Me Guilty on us so abruptly and then get mad when you don’t get the awards buzz.
“For the record, not a troll.”
For the record, that’s how you’re functioning so far over here.
“I consider myself an Internet Performance Artist.”
Suddenly I’m recalling a line in the Scorsese biography ‘Scorsese on Scorsese’, about how the only people more loathsome than performance artists are street mimes.
I agree with all the points made so far about how NAKED is a really terrific movie.
Reading (or skimming) Lex brought to mind one of my other favorite moments from the film:
“What’s it like bein’ you? Bit hectic, I imagine.”
Is “Naked” Mike Leigh’s best film? I don’t know if it’s his most perfect, per se, but it’s definitely the one that jumps out for me in the canon. Might have something to do with it being my introduction to him.
In the context of his other movies, I can’t even consider NAKED to be a Mike Leigh film. It’s like Balzac wrote Journey to the End of the Night, or something. Maybe a double feature with HAPPY GO LUCKY will reveal a two-sides-of-the-same-coin harmony with his other work, but I’m still freaked out by the fact that this awesome bile bubbled up from the same guy who made such gently satiric masterpieces both before and afterwards. And, yes: NAKED is a really terrific movie.
I’m nowhere near as well-versed on Leigh as I’d like, but of the films I’ve seen, my two favorites are what I guess would be regarded as his least typical: NAKED and TOPSY TURVY.
I love TOPSY TURVY as well, Bill– easily my favourite of Leigh’s films. I’d really like to see him apply his particular method/magic with actors to another period piece. I mean, I guess VERA DRAKE is a period piece (and a good one, at that) but it lacked the exquisite alienness of Gilbert & Sullivan’s time to our own.
Good call, joel_gordon – I walked out of HAPPY GO LUCKY and immediately thought that NAKED had finally received its complement.
Lex is clearly a troll. I’m sort of surprised (but not really) that he would claim otherwise.
Also, when you frequently and regularly declare your intention to commit suicide to a public audience of strangers, it shouldn’t be a shock when one of those strangers throws it right back at you. As the phrase goes, you asked for it.
Also, Naked is a really terrific movie. A bit flawed in its rhetorical structure, but terrific performances. My favorite Leigh film, though, is Vera Drake. Topsy Turvy, on the other hand, I couldn’t comprehend the praise for.
lex, i made sandwiches earlier in life. the sandwich maker could have just meant ‘is your order together?’ which means you could have been mistaken for cousins or uncle and niece or friends or addict and sponsor or whatever. i don’t think you should accept it as a tacit understanding that he assumed you were engaged romantically.
naked: best last shot ever
I love that shot, bp. Pialat executes a similar move–from the back of a moving car–in the second-to-last shot of La Gueule ouverte.
It’s powerful to see only what a character is leaving behind, the camera barring access to what’s ahead, the “what’s next,” etc. Especially powerful in concluding a story, when what they’re moving away from is, essentially, a relationship with us, a set of experiences we’ve been a part of. They move forward into a space we can’t see, while we’re focused on the background, the place of the story, receding…
Joel, Leigh is “gently satiric”? The man’s work has been full of bile and misanthropy going right back to ABIGAIL’S PARTY and NUTS IN MAY.
LondonLee: That’s true. “Gently” was the wrong word, I guess. But the satire always seems more social than philosophical. NUTS is misanthropic because people, especially pretentious twits, do things that Leigh despises. NAKED is nihilistic because Thewlis’s character, for most of the film, seems to despise life itself–and that psychotic yuppie dude only makes the viewer agree with him. Among the post-Life is Sweet films, at least, this one seems kind of unusual.
Great mysteries of the universe:
1) Why Glenn allows LexG to post.
2) Why Jeff Wells allows LexG and DeeZee to post.
Strange days.
@Mark J: As I’ve said before, I just can’t bring myself to actually ban anyone who isn’t propagating actual spam. And by “actual spam” I mean, well, you know what I mean. Whatever Lex G.‘s motives are, he’s a real person spouting real…thoughts? Or whatever they are. Like Kent J., I’m a little confused as to what he’s on about in these particular parts—I suppose he might tell you this site ought to be flattered to have him—but, well, it is what it is. But as you bring up Dee Zee; well, him I believe I would not allow. But I have every confidence he would never show up here anyway. And no, I don’t know why Wells tolerates him.
The idea of Leigh being some kind of bile-spewing misanthrope has always been greatly exaggerated, if not utterly wrongheaded. If he starts out as a satirist (as he did in some of his earlier films) he almost always ends up as something else entirely; the pathos that’s found in the climax of, say, Bleak Moments goes far beyond any kind of condescension or send-up. Basically, he almost always illustrates an investment in the emotional lives of his characters that’s entirely out of keeping with the harsh or deterministic attitude often imputed to his films. Even in Naked, there’s a fair amount of sympathy for Johnny, as well as for several of the other characters, but it’s played subtly and complexly, which is just as it should be in great storytelling. He’s shown more of his sweet side lately, but the empathy’s been there all along, even if it was initially more overshadowed by the texture that was crudely labeled as “miserablist.”
“…it’s definitely the one that jumps out for me in the canon. Might have something to do with it being my introduction to him.”
It was my introduction to Leigh as well, and it stands out for me in his canon because I’ve never seen anything else by him since then; I HATED the film with such a passion that I’ve never wanted to see anything else he was responsible for. Apart from a hospital interlude last year when I inadvertently caught a few loathsome minutes of “Happy Go Lucky” on the hospital’s movie service before changing the channel, I never have done, either.
Happy-Go-Lucky was one of my three or four favorite films from that year, thanks for the shoutout opportunity.
Good Lord. Leigh is not a bile-spewing misanthrope. That’s so reductive, and so separate from my reaction to the (only four) Leigh films I’ve seen, that I don’t really know what to say. Other than “No he’s not.”
Seeing SECRETS & LIES might be educational for some of you, though.
Bill,
My hasty remark above shouldn’t have implied that Leigh is always a “bile-spewing misanthrope.” But, in the context of his much subtler and sympathetic post-LIFE IS SWEET films, NAKED is a Celine-like blast of hatred. Otherwise, the bile only comes through in the social satire, as in NUTS IN MAY. I’ve only seen maybe eight of his films, so I’m just giving my impression. But I agree that no one who loves Gilbert and Sullivan, or who created Timothy Spall’s character in SECRETS, could be much of a crank.
“…NAKED is a Celine-like blast of hatred.”
Toward whom? And why? Because “he’s mean?”
I think it’s a rather loving portrait.
I meant a hatred toward everyone. It fits into that literary niche of the Underground Man, Celine’s narrators, Hamsun’s nameless HUNGER narrator, and all these others who seem to treat life itself as a mistake. Leigh, being Leigh, certainly sympathizes with his characters, but NAKED confirms its nihilistic hero’s philosophy: the yuppie rapist moves with ease, the voice of religious conviction is an anti-intellectual loser, and the world finds new ways to disillusion the seemingly without-illusion character that Thewlis plays. This seems weird for Leigh. For example, I can’t imagine any viewer taking the driving instructor’s world-view seriously in HAPPY GO-LUCKY. After this thread, though, I’ll definitely go back and watch NAKED. If it really is “a rather loving portrait,” I’ll probably love it even more. I look forward to re-evaluating it.
I think the point of Naked is to show how and why Thewlis’s character is the way he is, without necessarily agreeing with him in all respects. In some respects, sure, but the mere act of filmmaking is itself a refutation of nihilism.