Rent Naked (1993)

Hollywood antithesis. - Naked review by JD

This is about a Mancunian Jossa Hughes, only Johnny is not just frustrated but deeply unpleasant and has no redeeming features. I don't think it is good film making to have losers in a desolate background going nowhere. The people Johnny meets are all losers and lead vacuous lives. This realism is not entertaining or thought provoking, it is just sad. I pity people whose lives are like this, but why should I want to watch them? The Hollywood formula of: hero meets heroine whose indifference turns to love while lots of lovable characters do interesting things in interesting places; is a winning one, which is boring because it is a cliché, but the opposite is not necessarily good.

Alien Nation. - Naked review by Steve

Ominous state of the nation address from Mike Leigh about the collapse of society, provoked by the Thatcher revolution. It's absolutely the London I remember from this period, of rootless, insecure outsiders who got on their bikes. With the dark, desaturated colours and relentless pessimism, it feels like the end of the world.

David Thewlis dominates as a literate, traumatised Manc motormouth delivering a contemptuous stream of consciousness; roaming the capital by night while spitting out cruel, apocalyptic conspiracies. His violent misogyny prevents him from being even an anti-hero, but it's easy to identify with his wounded alienation.

He confronts the unconsidered precariat, the pitifully waged, the mentally ill and the merely anxious, the homeless and the chronically lonely in a country which he sees as irrevocably damned. The centrepiece is his meeting with a security guard (Peter Wight) who watches over empty office space... which is utterly spellbinding...

It's uneven and ends badly, but any reservations are eclipsed by the good stuff. It's so funny- but so desolate; and a must-see even if only for the rapture of Thewlis' ecstatic performance. Mike Leigh once again captures the zeitgeist forensically and prophetically; though like all his films, it gets a hugely polarised response.

Overlong preachy unpleasant film with a towering central performance - Naked review by PV

Typical Mike Leigh film in many ways - cartoon character working class and underclass characters with snappy lippy dialogues, and of course the middle class characters all mocked and demeaned and even more cartoon characters.

Leigh has been doing the exact same thing since Abigail's Party - a well-off middle-class socialist like him living in a million pound house in north London cannot stand aspirational working class people who want to be middle class.

Here it's embarrassing and reverse classism really - the stereotype posh southerner predictably called Jeremy pitted against salt of the earth northern folk. Cartoon film really. Just imagine a film portraying a black character to tat level of stereotype. If the middle class were a race then Leigh would be a racist lol.

Deeply unpleasant, meandering and pointless film really and SO long and goes nowhere. Really - there is no plot or structure at all., It just meanders around aimlessly much like its characters - none of whom I'd want to know.

But this is one man's film - David Thewlis who steals every scene he is in with his sharp sarcastic sardonic dialogue, so an anti-hero of the underclass really. Watch him in the 3rd series of Fargo now to see him steal that too, and how he has aged!

If not for that tis would be 1 star max. I only watched it as I felt guilty I never head. Glad I did - but not in a good way, I got it out the way like a visit to the dentist. It's over now...