Tag: drug abuse

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Features Live Action Movies

Queer

Director – Luca Guadagnino – 2024 – Italy, US – Cert. 18 – 135m

*****

A journey through the gay fleshpots of Mexico City leading, through illness, to a deeper jungle wherein can be found a drug that will enhance telepathy – challenging William Burroughs adaptation with Daniel Craig & Lesley Manville is out in UK cinemas on Friday, December 13th

Bookended with a prologue and an episode, this is a narrative split into three separate sections or chapters. In the first, set in Mexico City, fortysomething Bill Lee (Daniel Craig) spends his days and nights drinking in bars like Ship Ahoy frequented by (mostly younger male) US ex-pats. He talks with friends such as Joe Guidry (Jason Schwartzman), he watches newcomers, he attempts, sometimes successfully, to pick some up. He is taken with Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey), and the pair embark on an intense physical relationship. Lee persuades Eugene to accompany him to South America, with no stipulation other than Eugene “be nice” to him a couple of times a week.

In the second, on the trip Bill goes down with a nasty case of the chills. In the third, following his eventual recovery, he asks around about a drug called Yaga he understands can facilitate telepathy, the pair trekking deep into the jungle to find biologist Dr.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

Kneecap

Director – Rich Peppiat – 2023 – Ireland, UK – Cert. 18 – 105m

****

A fictionalised origin story about an Irish language rap band as a music teacher teams up with two younger men to turn their confrontational, anti-British poetry into Irish rap music – provocative sex-, drugs-, and violence-laced music biopic is out in UK cinemas on Friday, August 23rd

NSFW

Kneecap are an Irish-speaking rap band who came together on the eve of the 2017 Irish language march in Belfast, Northern Ireland. This drama about them, whatever else it might be and whatever other accusations can be levelled against it, certainly never plays it safe.

That’s obvious from the get-go, when the voice-over by one of the band members explains and shows how all movies abut Northern Ireland start – with footage of terrorist explosions during ‘the troubles’. The film then proceeds to have its cake and eat it, having started in exactly that manner, by starting again with the story of one of its members as a child being baptised in a wood at night and attracting RUC helicopter searchlights for their pains.

It moves pretty swiftly on to show the two fully grown lads in the band as party animals, consuming alcohol and drugs and dealing the latter, for instance giving it away free at early gigs to attract an audience, and engendering a hostile attitude to the Peelers (as they refer to the British police).… Read the rest

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Documentary Features Live Action Movies

Catching Fire:
The Story of
Anita Pallenberg

Directors – Alexis Bloom, Svetlana Zill – 2023 – US – Cert. 15 – 113m

***1/2

The chaotic life of the archetypal rock chick, told through her own words and those of her children – out in UK cinemas on Friday, May 17th

After her death in 2017, Anita Pallenberg’s two surviving children Marlon and Angela discovered a manuscript; she had written an autobiography. Marlon worked his way through it as part of his bereavement process and was so taken with the articulate text that he sought out producers to turn it into a film. (He is one of the film’s executive producers himself, while both directors are credited as among the producers). Numerous clips from an interview with him are used in this resultant documentary, along with excerpts from Anita’s manuscript voiced by an actress, along with interview footage with Angela and verbal audio from Rolling Stones band member Keith Richards, Anita’s partner for a decade and the father of her children.

Like many of the young generation who rose meteorically to cultural prominence in the swinging sixties, Anita Pallenberg was a war baby. Her first years were accompanied by the sound of falling bombs; as she puts it, she didn’t learn to walk, but to run.… Read the rest

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Animation Documentary Features Live Action Movies

Free Chol Soo Lee

Directors – Julia Ha, Eugene Yi – 2022 – US – Cert. 12a – 83m

****

Imprisoned for a murder he did not commit, Korean American Chol Soo Lee became a figurehead for a protest movement, something he felt unable to live up to – out in UK cinemas on Friday, August 19th

In San Francisco’s Chinatown in 1973, Korean loner Chol Soo Lee was arrested and subsequently convicted for a gang murder. While it’s true he had foolishly borrowed a gun off a work colleague a few days previously and accidentally discharged it into his apartment wall giving himself a police record, he was not the murderer. He was identified on the flimsiest of premises by unreliable witnesses, possibly not helped by white cops who wanted to convict a felon for the crime and consign the case to history.

On what was to be his last journey through the outside world before many years in prison, he heard the Tower of Power song “You’re still a young man” on a car radio crossing the Golden Gate Bridge. It resonated. As the years passed in prison, his mother abandoned him. He had fallen for a Japanese American girl he’d met Jean Ranko who subsequently told him in a letter that she had no romantic interest in him.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Naked Lunch

Director – David Cronenberg – 1991 – Canada – Cert. 18 – 115m

*****

UK PAL laserdisc review.

Originally published in London Calling Internet. See also my reviews in Film And Video – The Magazine and What’s On In London.

Distributor Pioneer LDCE

Cat No: PFLEB 30781

£9.99

BBFC Certificate 18

Running Time 85 min

Dolby Surround

Widescreen: 1.85:1

Chaptered? Yes

CLV

2 Sides

New York, 1953. Bug exterminator Bill Lee (Peter Weller) runs out of roach powder whilst treating an infested apartment. His initial accusations against his employers’ theft of the substance are revealed as groundless when he discovers wife Joan (Judy Davis) is using the brown powder as a drug. She persuades him to take up the habit. In a downtown interview, two narcotics detectives introduce Bill to his “Case Officer” – a typewriter sized bug with a talking orifice in its back who instructs him to kill Joan, as she is an Interzone agent.

After shooting his wife, Bill seeks counselling from Dr.Benway (Roy Scheider) who gives him a counter narcotic. A Mugwump gives Bill two air tickets to the Interzone where he meets (among others) Swiss expatriate Yves Cloquet (Julian Sands) and writers Tom and Joan Frost (Ian Holm and Judy Davis).… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Naked Lunch

Director – David Cronenberg – 1991 – Canada – Cert. 18 – 115m

*****

Originally published in What’s On In London. See also my reviews in Film And Video – The Magazine and London Calling Internet.

INSECT POLITICS

Watching David Cronenberg’s film of William Burroughs’ novel The Naked Lunch, it becomes clear that the two men share a bizarre sensibility for what the protagonist of the director’s earlier remake of The Fly (1985) described as “insect politics”.

To film Burroughs’ “unfilmable” work, Cronenberg adopts the strategy of incorporating biographical details from the writer’s life into an overall fabric also comprising elements from a number of Burroughs’ books. Hence, the “accidental” shooting of his wife at a party (Burroughs was high at the time) jostles with insect typewriters turning into sex blobs (here pink, dog sized insects with prominent flattened buttocks) and animatronic Mugwumps working for the Interzone network.

Once again, Cronenberg is shown as a master not only at directing both actors and special effects but also in his sheer command of filmic vocabulary. The sequence where Joan Lee (Judy Davis) is startled by husband Bill’s “William Tell Routine” going wrong and getting her shot (he takes out his gun after she’s balanced a glass on her head) is as unforgettable as it is unsettling.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Naked Lunch

Director – David Cronenberg – 1991 – Canada – Cert. 18 – 115m

*****

Originally published in Film And Video – The Magazine. See also my reviews in What’s On In London and London Calling Internet.

PLOT

New York, 1953. Bug exterminator Bill Lee (Peter Weller) runs out of roach powder whilst treating an infested apartment. His initial accusations against his employers’ theft of the substance are revealed as groundless when he discovers wife Joan (Judy Davis) is using the brown powder as a drug. She persuades him to take up the habit. In a downtown interview, two narcotics detectives introduce Bill to his “Case Officer” – a typewriter sized bug with a talking orifice in its back who instructs him to kill Joan, as she is an Interzone agent.

After shooting his wife, Bill seeks counselling from Dr.Benway (Roy Scheider) who gives him a counter narcotic. A Mugwump gives Bill two air tickets to the Interzone where he meets (among others) Swiss expatriate Yves Cloquet (Sands) and writers Tom and Joan Frost (Ian Holm and Judy Davis). Throughout his adventures, friends Hank (Nicholas Campbell) and Martin (Michael Zelikner) encourage Bill to write his book Naked Lunch.

OPINION

Attempts have previously been made to turn William Burroughs’ seminal book Naked Lunch into a movie, but David Cronenberg’s version (produced by Jeremy Thomas of The Last Emperor fame) is the only one to reach fruition.… Read the rest