It’s likely that I’m bringing up a film many here has seen, but recent looks at apocalyptonazis/cult-crit hand-wringers et al had me thinking of sort of nihilistic apocalyptic dread that seem to come over people in waves.One of the creative highlights in the carreer of Mike Leigh, and David Thewliss in the performance of a lifetime, Naked is not soon forgotten.I find the following section from a review written a few years after the film was made amusing. I wonder at those films mentioned, (Brassed Off, Four Weddings And A Funeral, The Full Monty), being in the category of great films. Maybe by those critics who do the reviews for the lunchtime tv news. Maybe it’s the same half-blind hindsight that makes people think that, in the America of the -50’s, everyone lived like th’Beaver. Or the way the middle-brow faction who make up the majority of modern classical audiences and patrons who feel very comforted to be told that neo-classicism has vanquished and negated modernist movements in music.
From – http://www.uncut.co.uk/film/mike_leigh/reviews/11953“It’s easy to forget Naked now, particularly as within four years of its 1993 release the grim, broken remnants of Thatcher’s Britain had been washed away in the triumphal swell of Cool Britannia. When folks on those talking heads shows reminisce about the Greatest British Films Of The 1990s, they usually direct their praise to the feelgood films that reflected the euphoria of Tony Blair’s rise to power – Brassed Off, Four Weddings And A Funeral, The Fully Monty. Even the nihilism, heroin and dead babies of Trainspotting was deemed acceptable in the mad-fer-it, anything-goes mid-’90s.”
There always seems to be another Armageddon waiting to take over the the one before. Similarly, people will fit a work of art into, or in opposition to their world view. Left and right trade off glib dismissals of any given time period. Blair has certainly left a trail of nihilism and a flood of Afgan heroin much greater in scope and reach in the UK than any other time. That’s saying a lot.
I must add that I think this film has more in common with the existentialists than the kind of art that specifically addresses issues of a particular moment in time. I come away feeling that the main character’s agony is spiritual, and he’s just the proverbial canary in the shaft… The dis-ease is manifest in every single character, and the journey is Rabelais by way of Martin Amis mediated by Sartre. Substitute every mention of 1999 with 2012, and we’re up to date, and perhaps on the subject of a perpetual condition.
The end came and only the crazy-eyed wastrel on the corner noticed.
Download torrent (vcd avi | size: 1.36gb)
Yep, we have definitely jumped the shark here in meat-cyber-space. 
