Year / 2005

by Edward Champion

Mike Leigh’s Naked on DVD

Years ago, when I was a gaunt student, I had the opportunity to pick up the Criterion laserdisc edition of Mike Leigh’s Naked (one of my favorite films from the 1990s and one that you should watch immediately) for what was then a colossal sum: thirty dollars. Never mind that I didn’t own a laserdisc player. But I did conjure up some cockamamie idea about duping a VHS copy from a friend’s laserdisc. I demurred on my purchase, only to learn months later that the disc had gone out of print.

mike leigh\'s masterpiece A decade has now passed since that fateful day. Never did get a laserdisc player, but I did get me a DVD player well before it was fashionable. And even though I later got the opportunity to interview Mike Leigh (who, go figure, was a major hardass in person), many tears were shed over the fact that this film, an unapologetic masterpiece, a brutally honest and almost Doestoevskyian depiction of a drifter (played brilliantly by David Thewlis) and the lives he seems to alter and disrupt (when in fact it may be other lives and class trappings that alter and disrupt him), never made the jump to DVD.

Until now. Come September 20, Criterion will finally release this brilliant film to disc. I’m not certain if the commentaries are going to be reflective of the laserdisc ones or freshly cooked up for the DVD. Either way, this film’s ballsy magnificence, multilayered characters and deceptively fragmented narrative cannot be overpraised. And if you have any cinematic awareness whatsoever and still have not seen this film, then I urge you to fill in this cultural gap immediately. Hell, if I run into you at Ameoba come September, I will put this disc into your hands and persuade you to buy it.

The film is one of those rare Rorschach tests that presents oodles of multilayered human behavior for viewers to parse. You’ll constantly question how characters relate to each other, why they relate to each other, and how they can even stand each other. And then you’ll find out more details about them and understand why. Maybe. Because in Mike Leigh’s universe, there are a lot of gray areas and certainly no clear-cut explanations. The reason the film’s characters are so vivid is that Naked is perhaps the summation of Mike Leigh’s filmmaking technique, which involves improvising and developing characters with actors over the course of six months and only then working out what the film is about.

by Edward Champion

The Post-Insomnia, Sleep-Deprived Roundup

  • It looks like Soft Skull Founder Sander Hicks has opened up a bookstore/cafe. Before it was called Vox Pop, it was apparently styled “Down With the Man.”
  • Kelly McMasters talks with Lydia Millet, who asks, “Why not be as bold as ‘Tristram Shandy’?” I’d take that sentiment a few steps further and suggest, “Why not be as bold as the Old Testament?” After all, with all that violence and cruelty and magical realism in there…oh, never mind.
  • The next hot trend? Australian surfing literature.
  • Shakespeare & Company isn’t the only bookstore going strong after 70 years. In Palo Alto, Bell’s Books continues to persevere.
  • In Moraga, mysterious scrapbooks containing odd newspaper clippings from 120 years ago were left on the doorstep of the local historical society. No one knows where these painstakingly collected scrapbooks came from them. But it was either leaving the scrapbooks or a baby in a basket. The owners decided at the last minute that they wanted to keep the kid, overpopulation crisis be damned.
  • Hiroshima haikus. What next? Auschwitz cantos? Oh wait.
  • Francis Ford Coppola’s On the Road film project has, at long last, received the green light. Because this is a loose autobiographical version, the filmed Kerouac will be about 100 pounds heavier than the real Kerouac and own a winery.
  • In Chicago, Steppenwolf will be featuring all new plays this season. Interestingly enough, they receive about 1,000 submissions a year. The remaining 990 or so will be staged at Slamsteppenwolf, Slumsteppenwolf and Nosteppenwolf.
  • If you’re into Wagner and you live in Seattle, you have until August 28 to catch the four-opera marathon version of Ring des Nibelungen Like the King Tut museum in Los Angeles, it will only be schlepped out again when Germany needs cash.
  • The Michael Jackson trial coverage isn’t over by a long shot. There are book deals to be had. What next? A finger-painting diary from Bubbles portraying Jackson’s stress during the days leading up to the verdict?
  • Paul Theroux used drugs to write his new novel. He also used this paltry sensationalism to get a CNN article.
  • And did we mention how much we heart Defamer?
by Edward Champion

Books by the Bay Podcasts

The San Francisco Chronicle, one of the few newspapers right now offering podcasts (not even the L.A. Times can say this much), has made David Kipen’s interview with Gus Lee (from this year’s Books by the Bay) available. Of course, it’s only a mere excerpt. But it’s the closest thing to being there.

(The Crime Time panel is also available. And all this sure beats uncomfortable fangirl moments with Charo.)

by Edward Champion

Michael Jackson’s On Deck as the Pitchman

I certainly hope Angry Asian Man is all over this one:

Counterpunch: “One recurring theme which runs through most of the promotional ads for skin-whitening posted at Asia registered internet sites is the claim that skin-whitening cosmetics can transform the ‘yellow’ skin tones of Asian women to flawlessly ‘radiant’ white. These advertisements often deploy the visual technique of ‘before’ images of ‘unhappy,’ ‘dark’ faces of ‘Asian-looking’ models and ‘after’ images of smiling ‘whitened’ faces of the same models .”