Deadite reviews:

__________________
#31 on SC's Top 100 Mofos list!!

Bump. I've decided to change up the presentation and try to start adding in some shorter reviews of older faves that I might elaborate on with additional posts as the ideas come. We'll see how it works.

I'm thinking Mulholland Drive for starters...

Bring it on, Deadite.

__________________
5-time MoFo Award winner.

Mulholland Drive

I find this movie endlessly intriguing. It's a... what? "Neo-noir"? Psychological horror? Surreal crime drama/mystery thiller? It all fits and yet nothing fits. MD is a jumble of events and people with few clear indicators to the viewer as to how they should fit, and that alone will test patience and push some away.

It's a cliche at this point to describe a Lynch film as a dream or dream-like. What is clear for me is that MD is a powerful albeit difficult experience, where characters exist and drift in uneasy confluences of dread and longing, deep anxiety and grim absurdity, both lucidly and nonsensically pursuing and being pursued by their fears and desires.

One scene particularly stood out for me at first: Club Silencio, where Betty's fantasy finally begins unraveling. The song "Crying" was a perfect choice, unleashing and literalizing the torrents of grief and anguish which the film's pseudo-narrative to that point had overlayed and tried to control... To Be Continued...

Indeed, it can be overlooked by the over-intellectualizing reviewer that Mulholland Drive is primarily an emotional film, not cold and distant, but a desperate negotiation with terrible trauma and the bitter disappointment, self-loathing and guilt that accompanies it.

As in real dreams, characters exist merely to play their part in the personal drama of a damaged psyche: Observe the old couple early on in the film, cheerfully wishing Betty well in her nascent adventure to pursue her dream. These are typical Lynchian figures, ostensibly harmless but any viewer can immediately pick up on the awkwardness, and it's not surprising that some would explain the oddness as poor acting. It is not.

Lynch unsubtly drives his point home as we, the viewers, witness their robotic and somehow ghoulish behavior in the car after Betty has exited the stage, so to speak. These are not real people, but merely bits of fiction invented to serve a small purpose... TBC

Or take for example the police after the car wreck, their forced dialogue straining to seem authentic, laboriously conversing until they conclude Rita escaped the crash. The viewer can be forgiven for picking up on the stiffness, the drawn-out pauses, and wondering what to make of it. Clearly, Betty/Diane was no detective fiction writer and it shows. Lynch bravely immerses his film so thoroughly in the mind of its main character that her shortcomings are its shortcomings and her ignorance, its ignorance.

MD isn't about the mechanisms of circumstance or banal expositions of motivations; It's purely aftermath, and its central conceit is the manner in which a mind seeks to escape from or cope with reality through symbolic masking of pain. It dances around the truth, trying to whittle & re-shape it into more palatable forms. The tragedy of Diane, in the end, is a variation of self-destructiveness which brings to mind the words of Oscar Wilde: Each man kills the thing he loves.

Or each woman.

Thanks! Hope you enjoyed.

This is some very well written stuff. I can excuse myself a little because I am not a native English speaker, but anyway, in my first language I also cannot write that well.

PS. I never understood why the praise for the Tree of Life. Though, not a big fan of Malick's style, none the three films that I have watched from him impressed me.

While I found Mulholland Drive very interesting and a powerful emotional roller-coaster ride.

Thank you. I hope it was an enjoyable read and perhaps even gives an insight into the movie's meaning. I adore Lynch's films, frustratingly impenetrable as they can first seem.

Re: Tree of Life... I think it is somewhat uneven in its individual scenes but ultimately a great film. I can understand how others would be put off by it but for me personally it worked well more often than not and I stand by my review and score. To me, the film's central concern was empathy, how living beings relate in a universe that is strange and dangerous, and the miracle that compassion and love can even exist at all in harsh circumstances. There's a hinting of a profound unity of life that spoke to me as a panentheist. I totally get that such a movie will inevitably receive a backlash of frustrated expectations or eye-rolling impatience, but c'est la vie.

Oh great! Just what I need, more competition in terms of movie reviews!

But seriously I look forward to seeing what you've got to say

__________________