Surveillance

Okay, so I sort of spoiled this one for myself by reading the synopsis in Sight & Sound a few months ago, back before it had a UK distributor. I think I thought I'd never get to see it, so what did it matter, right?

Surveillance is the latest picture from David Lynch's daughter Jennifer. Yes, she of Boxing Helena fame. Those of you who saw Boxing Helena may have decided to give this a wide berth. I, though, have not seen BH, so I dived straight in.

Basic premise is that two FBI agents are in Hicksville to help the local dumb cops after a series of violent roadside homicides. So far, so formulaic. The Feds are played by Julia Ormond and Bill Pullman. Most of the rest of the cast are more or less nobodies, with the exception of Michael Ironside as local cop chief.

To get to grips fully with the situation at hand, Pullman watches over three simultaneous interviews of survivors: one cop, one young woman, and one girl.

The story then unfolds in flashbacks up until the point that some fresh bodies are found in a nearby motel. There follows the denouement.

I found the movie to be nicely shot and edited. Well played. The problem is, truthfully, the storyline. While not bad, it is incredibly slight. And once you've seen it once, you'd have very little reason to watch it again. Which, of course, is directly the opposite feeling from the one I get when I watch a David Lynch film...

It's a long time since my last review, so I'm out of practice on scoring. Let's say 53 out of 100. And that might be being a bit generous.

Sunset Blvd.

Sometimes there are films that are notably absent from one's viewing history. Sunset Blvd. has long been one of mine. And I've always known very little about it. The first time I heard the name was possibly with reference to the stage musical, so for many years I thought of it as a musical, and I'm not the world's biggest fan of musicals. But I soon learned that it's not a musical, and I soon learned, too, that the beginning of the film marks the end of the film, and I was intrigued...

I don't give spoilers here, as regular readers know, so I won't say any more about that particular film-making gimmick. I will say, however, that the films tells of a man, Joe Gillis, on the run from people to whom he owes money. He's a screenwriter. To avoid capture, he parks his vehicle in the garage of a big house in Hollywood -- a house that turns out to belong to a former starlet of the silent era, Norma Desmond. The two meet and begin a relationship of sorts: she employs him to write a script for her comeback in which she will play the lead, Salome; the film will be directed by her friend Cecil B DeMille. While he writes, he can stay at her house, in the room above the garage, and her butler will attend to his needs.

But he falls in love with another man's fiancée while working together on a different script, and Norma is not impressed. Betty is falling for Joe, and he for her. Norma is in a predicament...

Of course, most of the glory belongs to Gloria Swanson, magnificent in her portrayal of Norma Desmond, though male lead William Holden is more than up to the task. And beyond that, it is the masterful direction of Billy Wilder that holds it all together. How many times have you heard someone say, "They don't make 'em like this anymore"? It's true, they don't. I don't feel I'm the sort of guy who's hung up on the past, and yet this film that is more than half a century old kept me rooted to my seat even though I knew how the final reel plays out.

If you haven't seen this yet, waste no more time! Get thee to a video-rental outlet and pick it up now. Better still, buy the DVD, for you'll most certainly want to watch it again and again. It's great fun for fans of David Lynch, too, playing spot the plagiarism! Lynch is reported to have said that INLAND EMPIRE is his own Sunset Blvd., but the latter informs other Lynch works, too.

I give this movie 83 points out of 100, and I look forward to the next viewing.

INLAND EMPIRE

Finally. I got my DVD of David Lynch's INLAND EMPIRE on Saturday. On Sunday night, at 10.15pm, I sat down to watch it. I was not sure this was wise, to start a film so late in the evening is unusual for me; to start a three-hour movie so late could almost be considered foolhardy. Double that when you know that the UK DVD has no chapter stops, so making it difficult (on my shitty "oh sorry, I don't remember where I was" DVD player) to resume at a later date. But start I did, and end I did -- or you wouldn't be reading this.

Shot on digital video, INLAND EMPIRE tells the tale of "a woman in trouble". Laura Dern is an actress who is about to star in a remake of an unfinished Polish film. She soon learns it was unfinished because the stars were killed. Her co-star (in both senses) is Justin Theroux. The actors begin having an affair, maybe. The mind of Dern's character and the mind of Dern's character's character being to merge. We are no longer sure which is which.

Meantime, there is some Polish stuff. Old Polish men. A Polish woman sitting watching a TV sitcom about some talking rabbits (seen above). A hypnotist. There's also a woman with a screwdriver stuck in her side, and some prostitutes.

There are also no easy answers.

In so many ways, this film is similar to Mulholland Dr., but it's also far darker; there's a greater sense of evil somehow. I had been led to believe it was "a Lynch too far" for most non-enthusiasts of Lynch work. It's tough for me to be objective there, but I was gripped from start to finish.

I loved the photography. Lynch has really made the best of his outdated Sony PD-150. He has opted, many times, to use extreme close-ups of people's faces, often with a wide-angle lens. This was a smart move, in my opinion, for digital video is at its best like this. Its shortcomings seem too evident in busy distant or establishing shots of the like seen so much in Open Water, also shot on a PD-150.


I'm going to be watching this again very soon in a bid to unravel the complex narrative, but it had me gripped from beginning to end. Dern was great, really good, in the leads (and it really is "leads": she plays at least three characters, I think!), and all the supporting cast are also strong. Cameos include William H Macy, Diane Ladd, and Pirate Master host Cameron Daddo -- I shit you not!

If you like Lynch, you've probably already seen this. If you don't like him, you probably never will watch it. For this one, though, I'm going to wheel out the old scoring system!

Acting: 17
Story: 15
Direction: 18
Enjoyment: 18
Involvement: 19
Total: 87

Review #100: Mulholland Dr.

It will come as no surprise to my regular readers to know that I liked Mulholland Dr. a lot. I am writing this review after having watched it for the third time, twice in as many months. People love David Lynch or hate him. There seems not to be much middle ground. I love him, and I've loved him for about 15 years, so I consider myself a relative newcomer.


And despite watching Lynch works for 15 years, half the time he can still leave me completely flummoxed. When I first saw this film five years or so ago at the cinema, I had no idea what was going on, but I knew I was fucking terrified. The other thing I knew was that I was surprised at how the critics were raving about the movie. Not because it was bad, but because they had crucified Lynch for Lost Highway just a few years earlier, and I felt much of the ground covered in the two movies was similar. How could professional critics hate LH and love MD, which, arguably, was in some ways derivative of that earlier work? (Indeed, such was the acclaim that Lynch was nominated for the Best Director Oscar for this film.)

No matter. Fuck the critics. I liked what I saw. But could it hold my interest a second time on DVD? Would I be able to watch it alone at night with the lights down?

Second time around, Mulholland Dr. is a little less twisty, but not much -- perhaps that was due to a gap of five years between viewings, though. And this time around I had taken the list of David Lynch's "clues to unlocking the film's secrets". While they didn't necessarily help as much as some people might have expected, they did at least help focus the mind at certain points in the film. They helped give a sense of exactly who was whom, and when, as well as starting to create a sense of chronology out of the mayhem.

For the third viewing, I had committed as much of this stuff to memory as possible before starting the film. And what's really fascinating is that the whole film seemed to take on a subtly different feel. The dark, Lynchian terror is still there, of course, but I felt more open to the humour than before. (Humour has always been present in much of Lynch's work, but the more tense you are as a viewer, the more hidden the humour is, if that makes sense.)

But not only that. I also felt that despite "knowing" the secrets of the film and "knowing" the movie's chronology, it still had many rich, as-yet-unrevealed layers to work through. The dream-like feel becomes even more so. The cuts to new scenes seem even more obviously cuts to different timelines, which sometimes they are and sometimes they're not, I guess. Just because you "know" the film, there is still so much you don't really know...

Naomi Watts plays her role to perfection. On first viewing I thought the acting was quite poor. That's not wholly unusual in Lynch work, but I'm beginning to see it as a stylistic choice, as strange as that sounds. This is more apparent here, in Watts's performance, than in any previous Lynch movie. The way she moves from quirky, ditzy, small-town wannabe actress to protective detective to actress extraordinaire (in her audition) is faultless. And what is fascinating here is the way in which Lynch seems to be saying: "Look how fake people look when they act "normal", and how "real" they look when they are clearly faking." Just excellent!

Laura Harring also makes a strong impression as the car-crash victim with amnesia -- the catalyst for the whole movie. Again, it's one of those "is thais bad acting or good acting" performances that just might not appeal to you. No such questions can be asked of Justin Theroux, however, who puts in a great showing as the director of the film-within-a-film. He's a real standout.


And the Spanish-language version of Roy Orbison's "Crying", performed by Rebekah Del Rio, is simply phenomenal.

When it comes to films that make you doubt everything you see, this must surely be the zenith. It's a twisty-turny thing of beauty that must be seen to be (dis)believed. While not currently my favourite David Lynch movie, Mulholland Dr. is making great strides in the right direction, currently sitting in fourth place, after Twin Peaks Fire Walk With Me (91 points), Blue Velvet (88), and just one point behind Lost Highway (84) at the time of this review.

Scores
Acting: 14
Story: 16
Direction: 18
Enjoyment: 17
Involvement: 18
Total: 83

Note: Check out Candy Minx's post here for 10 clues to unlocking Mulholland Dr., and this page of IMDb for notes on the movie's timeline.

Lost Highway

As a longtime David Lynch fan, I have decided to rewatch both Lost Highway and Mulholland Dr. in advance of seeing Inland Empire next month. I've previously seen the former twice (once at the cinema and once on DVD); this was my third viewing.

I find Lynch movies to be terrifying. Most of the most Lynchian ones among them -- i.e., not The Straight Story, The Elephant Man, and Dune -- are, to me, more horrific than most horror movies. Indeed, I think of Lynch as the creator and one true exponent of what I term the "urban horror movie", a genre that takes the most grotesque elements of our everyday lives and tosses them all into the pot, making us hope we never have to venture out into the world again.

Third time around, I found LH to be less scary than the previous times, but this is almost certainly because I was already aware of the gist of the movie, and also because I was watching with a view to seeing things I hadn't noticed before.

On the surface, LH is a murder mystery. There are touches of noir and Hitchcock in there, too: the doppelganger; the platinum blonde; the wrong man. But beyond that, don't ask me to say what's going on. And there's a lot of humour, as always in Lynchland: who among us can forget the "I hate tailgaters" scene with Mr Eddie (expertly played by the great Robert Loggia)? Less funny, of course, is the glass-table scene.

The acting -- going back to a comment-box conversation I recently had with Red and Candy -- was something I paid particular attention to this time. And I found it more convincing than I have before. It's so awful and so stilted, and the dialogue so ... banal ..., that it is absolutely the way people are in real life.

I loved Lost Highway. But then I never understood why the critics hated it anyway. And now I'm itching to see Mulholland Dr. again too.

Scores
Acting: 15
Story: 16
Direction: 18
Enjoyment: 17
Involvement: 18
Total: 84

Hidden (aka Caché)

This is an old review, but I'm re-running it up-front, so to speak, because I think it's a sin that this movie has been overlooked in this year's Oscar nominations.

Michael Haneke is fast becoming one of my favourite directors. I think of him as the David Lynch of "foreign" cinema. Indeed, so much so that Hidden starts with a couple receiving video tapes of their house under surveillance, à la Lynch's Lost Highway. A little further in, a dinner guest tells a story about a dog, the punchline of which is identical to Jack Nance's canine tale in Wild at Heart. A fair amount of the film plays out in near darkness, as does much of Lynch's oeuvre, especially the last third, apparently, of his upcoming Inland Empire.

So, is Haneke a dirty robbing bastard? Well, I rather think not. What he is is a great film-maker creating often challenging pieces of work that play with notions of time and personal interrelations. Hidden sees a return to the theme of rewinding time, in this case, videotape, much as he did so brilliantly in one key scene in Funny Games. It also adds fuel to my belief that he is obsessed with doorways.

I really liked this film, despite having to watch it in three sittings. Just think how much more I would have liked it in one. 80 out of 100.