"elaborate on that." "no."

[jazzfish]

Lost Highway, David Lynch (dir.)

Fred, a jazz saxophonist with a lovely wife and a heapin' helpin' of unexamined misogyny, particularly around his wife's past(?) as a sex worker(?), meets a creepy Lynchean guy and then gets convicted of killing his wife. The night before his execution he's replaced by Pete. Pete gets released, goes back to his own life, and gets involved with a woman played by the same actress as Fred's wife. They rob and accidentally kill her pimp(?), and then she vanishes (or never existed) as Pete turns back into Fred. With the help of the creepy guy he kills her client(?), who's also a rage-fueled pornographer, and drives off into chaos, pursued by cops.

It's not super coherent. I mean, it's pretty coherent if you read it as Owl Creek Bridge, but that's a cop-out. And since we get scenes without Pete/Fred in them, which scenes I am inclined to take as "true," even that doesn't hold together. (-I- think the creepy guy is some sort of devil, with a particular emphasis on wrath, who both antagonizes Fred and gives him what he thinks he wants: a new life and a new chance with his wife, and Fred responds predictably. But there's also a time-loop that I can't easily reconcile: if, at the end of the movie, Fred is back at the beginning of the movie, why are the cops already watching his house?)

It's got great visuals, a few stellar scenes, and some good dialogue. Robert Blake's "We've met before, haven't we?" is worth the price of admission on its own. It's worth seeing, and thinking/talking about afterwards, I think.

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Mulholland Drive, David Lynch (dir.)

Naive ingenue Betty and amnesiac "Rita" team up in Hollywood to figure out what happened to Rita. Turns out what happened was Betty trying to dream up a better history for herself. Betty and Rita were lovers, but Rita got a part that Betty wanted, and in the ensuing acrimonious breakup and heartbreak, Betty hired a hitman to kill Rita. I think.

There's an awful lot going on here. I suspect that it's all less than it appears to be, but the atmosphere and aesthetics are top-notch. (There's also the director character, who has no patience for being a character in a David Lynch movie but does understand mafia(?) pressure.) The amnesia plot provides enough structure to hang the surrealism on, which is I guess what I need to enjoy this kind of thing.

And I did enjoy it, quite a bit. I'd very much like to see it again, preferably with someone else so I can talk about it.

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Inland Empire, David Lynch (dir.)

This runs afoul of what I refer to as the Nicoll Dictum: "I don't object to hidden depths but I insist that there at least be a surface."

The first forty-five minutes or so are promising. Laura Dern plays Nikki, an actress who's up for a major role; a creepy woman comes to visit, insists that she's already got the role, and says spooky things, some of which are about time. In fact Nikki has got the role, in a movie about a couple who have an affair. She starts to have difficulty telling real life from the movie she's making, and at some point accidentally wanders back in time to the first rehearsal with her co-star.

From there it gets weird. And not in an interesting way: random disconnected shit happens, mostly to or around Nikki, or Nikki's character Sue, for the next two hours. Characters and locales recur; timejumps happen, I think. There's an insufficiency of dialogue. A surprising amount of the movie is extreme close-ups of Laura Dern looking confused or frightened. US TOO, LAURA DERN. US TOO.

Per Wiki, "Lynch shot the film without a complete screenplay." I should have taken that as a warning.

Comments

[reedrover]

Thanks for the writeups. Good confirmation that this is not my style of visual media.