Wednesday, January 19, 2005

Movie Quotes: "Naked"

Before he played Professor Lupin in "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban", I first encountered actor David Thewlis in a completely different role in a completely different film. "Naked" is the story of a loner named Johnny who wanders England, encountering old friends and making new ones in order to have someone to talk to and a place to stay the night. He's an educated and thoughtful man, but can also become very impatient and sarcastic with people. In the end, Johnny and all the other characters are revealed as very emotionally damaged, and the story does not end as happily as we would hope. Welcome to the films of Mike Leigh.

Johnny has two great little spiels that he gives his old friend Louise, so I'm presenting both:

Louise: "How did you get here?"
Johnny: "Well, basically, there was this little dot, right? And the dot went bang and the bang expanded. Energy formed into matter, matter cooled, matter lived, the amoeba to fish, to fish to fowl, to fowl to frog, to frog to mammal, the mammal to monkey, to monkey to man, amo amas amat, quid pro quo, memento mori, ad infinitum, sprinkle on a little bit of grated cheese and leave under the grill till Doomsday."

Louise: "So what happened, were you bored in Manchester?"
Johnny: "Was I bored? No, I wasn't f**kin' bored. I'm never bored. That's the trouble with everybody - you're all so bored. You've had nature explained to you and you're bored with it, you've had the living body explained to you and you're bored with it, you've had the universe explained to you and you're bored with it, so now you want cheap thrills and, like, plenty of them, and it doesn't matter how tawdry or vacuous they are as long as it's new as long as it's new as long as it flashes and f**kin' bleeps in forty f**kin' different colors. So whatever else you can say about me, I'm not f**kin' bored."

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