Blue Velvet (Special Edition)
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Movie Reviews of Blue Velvet (Special Edition)
Movie Review: A fantastic movie from the world's greatest director.
Summary: 5 Stars
With Blue Velvet, David Lynch creates a world of the truly bizarre. You will never see Dennis Hopper being more creepy than you will in this movie. A great performance and great film; one that belongs at the top of Lynch's impressive resume.Movie Review: Faux-Bizarre Failure
Summary: 1 Stars
David Lynch is a man commonly praised as a genius of bizarre imagery and stories. Well, "Blue Velvet" is the only one of his films I've seen, and while I'd still like to see several others, it most certainly turned me off of him quite a bit.
The film follows Jeffrey (MacLachlan), a curious small town boy who discovers a human ear in a field. This causes him to enlist the object of his desire (Dern) to help him investigate and uncover a strange mystery involving a masochistic lounge singer (Rossellini) and a psychotic pervert named Frank Booth (Hopper).
Though the film featured horrible acting from (almost) the entire cast, ridiculously stupid dialogue, and an extremely corny-looking fake bird (don't ask), I think what really bothered me was Lynch's script. It seemed full of contrived plot twists and insanely over-the-top characters meant only for shock value and nothing else (e.g. a laid-back cross-dresser with a fetish for aged overweight women). He seemed to be purposely trying to be bizarre and disturbing, and I really didn't find the film to be much of either. It seemed like your run-of-the-mill "quiet suburbia with a dark side" story.
The film's only redeeming quality is the good performance from Dennis Hopper, but the man is a reliable actor. He did the best that could be done with his role, which was over-the-top and pointless, again, nothing but shock factor.
There are plenty more interesting and well-made films out there about the bizarre and the disturbing, this is one that you really don't need to bother with.
2.5/10
Movie Review: American Surrealism
Summary: 4 Stars
In my opinion this is Dennis Hopper's best performance ever. Great film. Some senstive viewers might get offended by Isabella Rossellini's nude scene or the voyeurism/rape/torture/murder undertones.Movie Review: Its a strange world !
Summary: 5 Stars
David Lynch's "BLUE VELVET" is a brilliant display of artistic story telling & film makeing! A perfect example of the director forceing the viewer to take part in the movie by filling in the missing puzzle piece's with his or her own imagination. David Lynch is so far above the rest its ridiculous!Movie Review: Silly
Summary: 4 Stars
What is most intriguing about this film is the contrast between the reaction of the average moviegoer (so mind-numbingly boring that they were barely able to sit through it) and the local intelligentsia ("brilliant", "innovative", one comment compares Lynch to "Bergman, Fellini, and Bunuel" - insert the sound of gagging here).
Although these extreme comments are very entertaining they are pretty much useless for anyone thinking about whether to view this film. So what did those with extreme opinions find or fail to find in this film? My guess is that they found about same thing but reacted to it in very opposite ways. The film is a rather obvious dark satire on the hypocrisy of American culture-what lies under the thin veneer of middle class society. So the disparate viewer reactions may just be political. And while an entertaining film with subtle subversive messages can have mass appeal, Blue Velvet is not a particularly entertaining film. Nor is it a particularly subtle film although Lynch does try to keep the viewer confused by suggesting that some of what we are viewing (or have viewed) is a dream and by keeping many details ambiguous (such as just what is Hopper inhaling-helium?).
It is not important that we know any of this stuff for sure anyway, as viewers can fill in the missing pieces with whatever fits their personal agenda. This is the same technique that Lynch relies on in "Mulholland Drive". Both films are filled with contrived plot twists, misdirection, and insanely over-the-top characters. You stay with the story to find out how Lynch will manage the seemingly impossible task of pulling all these disparate plot elements together by the end of the film. Of course what seems impossible is impossible, Lynch has to cheat at the end, turning what appeared to be realism into expressionism. Lynch relies on the fact that instead of feeling cheated, a large segment of his audience will instead credit him a degree of vision never seen before in cinema history. Since there is nothing to contradict their interpretation they credit him with the visionary genus to have intentionally placed each element that supports their interpretation in the film.
Despite the many negative comments, this cheating does not make "Blue Velvet" a bad film. Indeed Lynch's ability to make something expressionistic look like realism is amazing as long as you credit Lynch with a brilliant technique and not with a brilliant vision. That said there are some basic problems with "Blue Velvet.
The first problem is that the underlying depravity in suburban and small town America is very ordinary and unexceptional, not the imaginative "deep into the recesses of our minds" stuff portrayed in this film. Even less controversial suburban portrayals like "The Graduate" and "American Beauty" feature what would be considered extreme behavior, as the average suburbanite is more mundane and far less adventurous than the protagonists of those films.
The second problem is that you have to constantly work at suspending your belief that this is a film. Burning mental energy just trying to stay 'in' the story does not make for a good movie-going experience. Although Dern and Hopper are fine, MacLaughlin and Rossellini are simply awful. So the viewer tends to wonder what is going through Rossellini's (the actress) mind during the filming of each scene and not what was going through her character's mind. And I am writing in terms of cast names and not character names. MacLaughlin seems to be in almost all Lynch's films and his career specialty is sapping the energy from scenes.
"Blue Velvet" starts with some great images: ideal suburbia - kids crossing the street, firemen waving as they go down the road on their truck, and a man watering his garden. Then the guy has a stroke and collapses. We are then treated to the best shot of the film: his dog playfully jumping around the squirting hose he continues to hold as a toddler ambles toward him. Then the camera moves down for a macro shot of the insect world in his lawn. This bears an interesting similarity to Blair Treu's 2003 film "Little Secrets", where one of the children runs a business of keeping all the neighborhood secrets in a safe place for a fee. Ostensibly a squeaky-clean family film, "Little Secrets" takes Lynch's basic theme and turns it into a lesson about friendship and trust.
"Blue Velvet's" strong point is the cinematography, which is absolutely gorgeous and dreamlike. It's weakness (in addition to those already mentioned) is that its weirdness is positioned midway between 'The Graduate' and 'The Doom Generation'. It somehow manages to be both inaccessible and uninteresting.
Suburbia is a place to escape the problems of the world and those who choose to inhabit suburbia do so because they are either afraid of the world or just too lazy to be exceptional; and not because they are the creatively perverse villains of "Blue Velvet".
Then again, what do I know? I'm only a child.