I simply say it has the "Eraserhead" feeling. Feelings are very subjective and I see no reason as to explain why some settings and atmosphere echos a certain deja-vu, do I?

But then I can't recall "Eraserhead" without recoiling from the taste it has left.



As I say the need seems to be subjective to your own perception.



So would you mind explaining the sense behind it?



Well, he says so himself. I remember reading something to this effect in one of his interviews, at which point I totally stopped reading or caring for what he does altogether. And you know, I used to be a fan, but then I watched "Eraserhead." Well, I still like "The Elephant Man" and "Mulholland Drive" I suppose. But even in "Mulholland Drive" you could see this pattern of putting bits randomly together. You may say it has purpose, but to me, it is as purposeful as a playful kid with a brush in one hand and a pallete in another, doing whatever comes to his mind on canvas, without having a big picture in mind.

Come on Afs, I agree with you completely on Lynch, but don't insult kids

I stand corrected. Can I say a monkey with a brush and palette, or someone from PETA would find that offensive as well?

Yeah, really Afs! Alistair wouldn't deserve that!

I said I'm sorry! Poor Al. He misses you. And me. Really, where is he again?!

Subjectivity goes without saying.

I meant what did you mean by, "there was actually sense behind this movie" (as opposed to Eraserhead's implied lack of sense). Do you mean you didn't understand Eraserhead's story? Or did you not find "sense" in its events? Or do you think there's a lack of conscious intent behind it, authorially?

What was so disagreeable about it? The imagery (eg. raw chicken evoking the female torso, blood drippage and all; or the baby)? The action (eg. Mary X having a fit; stirring dinner with the grandmother; Mrs X kissing Henry, evoking incest)? The general aesthetic (the industrial sounds married with overwhelming, bassy drones)? The story (of a man suddenly thrown into the responsibility of fatherhood)? The representation of that story (fatherhood told as an inescapable nightmare)?

Oh yeah, totally; but that's a truism. You can't escape the feelings you feel. But I was just saying, there's little in common between the two films.

You need to define what you mean by "sense" in order for my to answer this.

If you didn't understand the literal story, fair enough. It's about a guy who becomes a father due to his own irresponsibility, and how he can't come to terms with the responsibility now required of him as a father.

That's extracting allegory, too, though.

If by sense you mean authorial intent, ie. a conscious presence behind the work saying, "I am now doing this because I want to portray that, I will now do this in order to evoke that," etc., I see what you mean. Lynch is very vague and elusive about his own working method.

That he referred to his own method as "random"? I'd object both to that and to him for saying it, because it isn't random. The film-making process inherently forbids randomness. More instinctive, more intuitive, sure. But there's a lot more things going on than a mathematical term.

Have you seen The Straight Story? You should like that very much.

Some part of story aren't coherent. For instance, those you mention below are the least part of my concern and actually some points that stand out and are all right in my book.



But what doesn't go with the rest, is the space man and the last part of the movie. Yes, I think there is no prior and conscious decision as where it goes.



Okay, so for the first part the hair stands out. The detached senses of Barton throughout the movie. Sex with the beautiful woman and blood and then "Did you have sexual intercourse?" to the horrified man echoes the same feeling. A detached head perhaps ends up in the box, parallel to the head of Henry and well I suppose that's enough. There, I think that's the similarities I felt in a nutshell.



I suppose this part was pretty obvious. In fact minus the scene with the spaceman, it didn't go that bad till the ending, where it all fell apart badly.



Yes. He can't pull off a sense for the entire movie. He does random things that baffle the viewer, to somehow gather the story together to no avail.



In order for a movie to connect on some level, you need to define what you want to convey. You as a film maker should have a goal. (Or not! What do I care, but then I wouldn't care for what you do either.) I as a viewer, might get there, or have some other perception. But Lynch doesn't seem to have one. And he says he does things as he goes. So there, that's my problem. I'd like to see work of someone who knows what he wants to do before he starts filming.



No, I've not. I'll keep that in mind, thank you.

I had forgotten about these, to be honest. I see what you mean.


Fair enough. I understand you better now. Valid points, too.

Have you seen Blue Velvet? You should definitely see it, to reignite faith in him. And The Straight Story, of course. Stay away from Lost Highway and Inland Empire.

Amen

Yes, I think I saw it after "Mulholland Dr." about four years ago. I don't remember much about it now, except a piece of an ear. Maybe I should re-watch that sometime, especially because recently I've developed a great appetite for noir genre. Back then it didn't make a great impression.

I've watched "Lost Highway" and own the DVDs for the "Twin Peaks" mini series, with not much desire to watch it now. I'd have given a hand and leg to watch it four years ago... How time changes everything.

From the two "Mulholland Dr." and "Lost Highway" dealing with mixed up identities, I actually like his later attempt better, and I think he has resolved some issues of the "Lost Highway" in "Mulholland Dr." It makes more sense to me anyway and feels more thought through. I'd give it 8 out of 10.

You should definitely delve into Twin Peaks. It's widely associated with Lynch, and has his "Lynchian" stamp to it, but it's also very accessible, with other writers and directors involved too.

Weird stuff happens, but it's more of a clever, fun-to-watch critique of soap opera melodrama. (Just as his Rabbits is his version of the sitcom; as Blue Velvet is his noir.) It's got the scratching beneath the surface (of innocent communities) that Blue Velvet offered, and it's quite a hilarious and tragic exploration of the underbelly of American society.

It was a big influence on David Chase for The Sopranos, too.

Lynch didn't write and direct every episode (just the best ones ;D ).

WANTED (2008) - ***

If you've read enough of my reviews, you should know that I'm just a sucker for action pulp. When its done just right, there is nothing more satisfying within cinema for me. Despite it's visceral barrage of visual effects and physics-shaming scenes (all made possible by a generous budget) in trying to be THE MATRIX meets FIGHT CLUB, Timur Bekmambetov's WANTED is far from meeting that biased gold standard of mine but at times it does work.

This in spite of the fact that the first act wasn't that promising. Like Doug Liman's lame JUMPER we got earlier this year, we get stuck with an emo guy (James McAvoy) who is helpless about being bossed around by his ugly obese female manager, that he is in a cuckhold relationship, and oh yeah she's screwing his supposed best friend. He nearly whined me out of giving a damn about this picture before it even began. Such nonsense is a technique of hack filmmakers to create what they mistaken as sympathetic complex emotional depth, and I just despise it.

Yeah I understand the whole point is that he's the generic corporate-cog loser like the rest of us, wanting (pun!) to be something more mighty and ultimately fulfilling that masculine destiny, a critical plot commonality of both MATRIX and FIGHT CLUB. However, remember how in FIGHT CLUB that director David Fincher never had Edward Norton be stuck with such contrived writing, and despite Norton basically being a materialistic shallow asshole, we dug him anyway? Likewise, how much time did the Wachowskis bother with Keanu Reeves to explain his predictament in the first MATRIX picture? Enough to make their damn point, and move on.

I mean, why can't we have more dickish protagonists in popcorn flicks? What is wrong with rooting for a true anti-hero that's comfortable with being a jerk? YOJIMBO and Clint Eastwood showed us this truth decades ago, and yet that wisdom keeps bobbing in and out of the Hollywood action cinema conciousness like apples. That said, I did enjoy when McAvoy finally snaps, mans up to his boss, quits his job, and beat the hell out of his backstabbing buddy with his keyboard in a shot worthy of SHOOT'EM UP.

Now despite the ratings, if you had to ask, I enjoyed TRANSPORTER 3 more than this. Sure both have completely ridiculous action sequences full of bullets, stunts, and brawling (hell, both films feature a car crashing into a commuter train), but TRANSPORTER 3 was successful pulp because it was very simple: Guy cuffed with bomb, does everything from kicking ass to being creative to save his own skin. It has limited narrative goals, but it satisfingly delivered them with blunt action cinema. With WANTED, it's style over substance whenever Bejmanbetov tries to shoot a script inbetween his eyecandy, a complaint I've heard too about his Russian vampire movies. If TRANSPORTER never had serious mental or character ambitions, WANTED does, and that shortcoming when it fails is glaring.

Certainly the elements are there to craft some truely delicious pulp. McAvoy is recruited into a thousand-year old assassin society with the mission to kill to save lives. Though tell me, considering the last century with two World Wars, several Holocausts and Al Qaeda, I think chairman Morgan Freeman shouldn't be so damn proud of his group's so-called accomplishments. There is room for improvement, you know?

Also, instead of McAvoy being trained in some exotic location, it's in the middle of Chicago. I had flashbacks to the 1980s solid B-actioneer REMO WILLIAMS: THE ADVENTURE BEGINS and THE DESTROYER pulp novels which REMO was based off, with top assassin Angelina Jolie having McAvoy run and duck on top of a moving subway train, or McAvoy beaten daily like cookie dough until he's as tough as wood. Now he could survive ATONEMENT.

I even liked the concept that this clique kill according to orders given by interpreting random notches they find in tapestry, which gives these murderers both divine sanction, and room for some good time ole religious manipulation. Some people have grumbled on the Internet about the point behind Jolie's last sequence, but come on folks this aint rocket science. She was the only True Believer among that brood. Then I would even add the plot twists, but they just lack punch because of how they're just tossed about without meaning. If the movie doesn't care about them, why should we?

Now there is some nice cool moments, like when McAvoy blows a hole in someone's skull, sticks his gun in there, and firing away while using that corpse as a shield. Then when someone tries to stab him, he moves his piece so that the blade is jammed into the barrell. He fires it back like a glorified harpoon gun. I also dug when Jolie abruptly kisses McAvoy in his apartment, just to humiliate his bitchy ex-girlfriend who suspiciously looks the uglified version of that Jennifer...what's her name? You know, the one that Tyler Durden (irony!) ditched in favor of Jolie?

Don't forget also the rat explosive, a slight improvement on the bunny bomb engineered by Walter Hill in his underrated EXTREME PREJUDICE.

And yet, I felt underwhelmed. Now I shouldn't complain about the lack of story, since some action pictures suffer from having too much of a bland story, but I WANTED more from WANTED. On my Top Ten list last year, I included SHOOT'EM UP, an audaciously entertaining action-fest like WANTED, but with a smaller budget and the gall to go for broke. It didn't just push the envelope, but in the tradition of THE TOXIC AVENGER, it tried to shred it. Imagine if the creativity behind that spectacle in SHOOT' EM UP where Clive Owen is shooting down thugs as he is copulating with Monica Bellucci was featured in WANTED.

Then maybe it would have become something special, worth being an asshole about in endlessly pimping it on the Internet to anyone that will listen, and more than just an decent rental which never bored me, a generous recommendation with pizza and beer on a friday night. Also, Jolie shows off her nice ass. That's a plus. Why she was willing to go topless in a piece of shit like TAKING LIVES but not this, I don't know.

Let me add Botched (2007; uncut) to this list.

I love this despite all the negative reviews:

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Watched it for the sixth times I think!

Despite the reviews, I just saw Punisher: War Zone (w/ DMC, who was in town w/ his girl). This was a fun "guy flick", but also pretty hilarious in parts. I'm not certain if that was intentional. It also seemed to steal bits here and there from some gangster films -- all in good fun, though, if you like bloody violence.

Also the first time I went to the new digital theater w/ stadium seating in town -- the picture looks fantastic!

Who doesn't??

Is that a trick question?

Anyone see The Gambler (1974) starring James Caan, with Paul Sorvino and Burt Young? Because I'd really appreciate an explanation of the ending (in a Spoiler tag or PM, please). Maybe I'm dense, but WTF was that bit with the pimp and whore about??

That scene was put in to reflect how unstable and self destructive addicted people tend to be. Don't forget, it was based on a Dostoevsky novel. You weren't going to get a Capraesque ending.

I watched Munich yesterday. Wonderful movie!! 9/10. IMHO Munich was better than either Crash or Brokeback Mt. Not sure how it lost to these films that I rate both 5/10.

Crash was pretty bad. I liked Munich and Brokeback Mountain

Did you feel any love between the two character in the Brokeback? The whole thing felt forced and insincere.

I don't remember it vividly, but I didn't get that impression. One of the reasons to like it perhaps was the fact that others hated it for being a gay movie. I subconsciously had to take a different stance then, I guess

But I remember one scene where the wife finds out when she spots them hugging (or kissing - forgot) outside. That was passionate I guess.

Well, it is unfortunate to dismiss a movie based on a prejudice against the premise, but it is even worse when you give a nod based on the premise and not the merit of the movie itself. That's I suppose what happened when Crash got the Oscar, the Academy felt racism is the most important issue at hand, and be as it may, that movie didn't deserve any recognition at all.

And I can't believe the score of Brokeback beat that of Pride & Prejudice.

I know of at least 3 guys on here that love Brokeback Mountain.

Crash is atrocious. Brokeback Mountain is mediocre. Munich is rubbish.

Watched No Country For Old Men and it was as good as I had hoped. The film is worth watching for the conversation within a conversation that the killer has with the owner of a small gas station, just for that one scene alone. Plus, I just love Tommy Lee Jones in almost anything, and this role seemed so perfect for him.

I think that it needs several watchings, and that your appreciation for the film would just grow. Very violent, graphic in parts, and yet several laugh-out-loud moments. I look forward to seeing it again.

I didn't quite get a lot of stuff Tommy Lee Jones tells the wife of that guy in the restaurant. And also the stuff he tells his wife in the last scene. I definitely need to watch it again.

I don't remember anything from Munich too, but remember liking it.

I found the recitation of his dreams to be interesting. He was dreaming of his father and his father had died when he was much younger than he (Tommy Lee) was.

Or, I could be completely wrong.