Rating: Summary: Boredom as artform Review: David Lynch has made some great films but this isn't one of them. Nice to look at but completely confused ,tedious and a waste of 2 hours of your life.May appeal to the already confused or pretentious . Better get some spare batteries for the remote and your thumb will ache from holding down the fast forward. Mulholland Drive? Mulholland Drivel more like...
Rating: Summary: Lynch's approach: how can I salvage this mess? Review: It started as a TV pilot. Lynch apparently pasted together nearly 2 hours of miscellany from Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, and Twin Peaks: Long, pointless (dreamlike) shots with low moaning backgroun noise/music; eccentric characters for the point of eccentricity; horrible dialogue; cute, guileless people naively dragged into a seamy other world; lip-synched saccharine 50s tunes; Roy Orbison tunes resurrected to portray deep anguish. Absolutely nothing new or cohesive.When it wasn't picked up, knowing that he never intended to reach closure on the story, he used the oldest trick in the book: aha! It's a dream sequence! The last half-hour is interesting, but let's not fool ourselves. This is a (mostly) good half-hour art movie, not a great 2-1/2 hour motion picture.
Rating: Summary: Ahh, Mulholland Drive.... Review: Mulholland Drive ensnared me with its seductive, albeit haunting, feel from the first time I saw it in theaters: one can feel the sensuous, albeit palpably haunting, feel Mr. Lynch tried to invest in his film. The images colorfully decorate Mr. Lynch's dream-like mural; the acting is superb on all acounts; and the story...Oh, the story!! The topic of much debate. At first, I was confused, to say the least. Then I rented the movie and saw it again. I now understand that it does have a story, one so intricately woven that the viewer must have the patience and resolve to decipher. Although I won't go into the details of the story, it basically involves a young woman who has an "accident" (literal and metaphorical) on her way to stardom (hence, the "Mulholland Drive" as road-to-Hollywood metaphor) and instead embarks on a sexual relationship: one that ultimately consumes her. Her dreams are destroyed, she imagines herself a new life, and her life is turned upside down. Ultimately, the film is one of the best I have ever seen. The music is superb and it adds to the dark, perverse feel of the film. I recommend people to see it once...then see it again!
Rating: Summary: A complicated film best watched more than once. Review: This is not a doozy of a film. You need to pay attention, and probably need to watch it more than once. It can be difficult to follow, and is one of those films where you must listen to all the dialogue carefully. (In fact, I switched on subtitles a couple of times because I couldn't work out exactly what was being said! I'm such a saddo!!!!) If you like to be spoon-fed your hollywood movies, you'll hate this film. If you thought Minority Report was the most challenging to understand film you ever saw, you'll hate Mulholland Drive. It's not Hollywood drivel. It requires you to think and be involved with what you're watching. If you enjoy a mindful, thought-provoking, and sometimes creepy film, go ahead and get Mulholland Drive now.
Rating: Summary: dreams and nightmares Review: The other reviews are very thoughtful and worthwhile, but I personally believe this film is not an example of Eastern philosophy or specific meanings of any kind, but rather of pure dream-on-film. As such, you can make many interpretations, but it is Lynch's genius to create a work that enables and even inspires people to do so. In that sense it is like a particularly striking dream you might have - it keeps you speculating about its meaning with its vivid details and compelling images, yet never fully reveals its true nature. The actors do an excellent job with their difficult and sometimes intensely intimate roles, and the production values are uniformly high. Among the scenes that are most memorable are two of the most terrifying nightmares ever committed to celluloid - the narrated nightmare of the young man in the cafe near the beginning, which is one of the only filmed scenes to approach actual nightmares I have had in their intensity and suggestiveness, and the implied nightmare of the discovery of the heroine's dead body - by herself - in a seedy apartment. But beyond everything else in this film, it is Lynch's mastery of surrealism and cinema that make this his best film since "Eraserhead."
Rating: Summary: Lynch's Most Provocative Review: One thing is for certain - when you watch something done by David Lynch, you'd better pay attention! This movie inverts the protagonists-try-to-unravel-the-mystery cliche to present a story wherein the mystery/fantasy slowly dissolves into the real story, and the central characters are not revealed to us until the movie's final half-hour. Still, this remains an enigmatic experience that disturbs and provokes, as Lynch's films always do. Also, great performances all around.
Rating: Summary: Best Movie I've Ever Seen Review: I am a 41 year old man, and this is the best movie I've ever watched. It is amazing because most of the movie is the movie a young lady invents inside her own mind to explain and subsume her real life. In other words the images and speeches are all filtered through her troubled mind, and any details of her real life, aside from a few brief minutes in the film, must be inferred from the film-inside-her-head, which is most of the movie. That said, let me proceed with the explanation, as I think it is not too hard to figure out. The chief problem in figuring out the film, is deciding what is dream/fantasy sequence, and what is real. Leaving aside the disturbing questions that Lynch raises about the illusory quality of life in general, I believe there is a definite part of the film that can be called real-life and another that can be called dream/fantasy. The first short sequence of the dancers is fantasy. The seconds- long scene which follows - the first-person camera going down to the red pillow - is real, probably Diane Selwyn as she drifts off to sleep or death. The rest of the movie, up until the descent into the secret box, is fantasy. The scenes and characters and lines are inventions of Diane Selwyn. Whether they are based on real people, or are composites based on several people, or are completely unconscious formations is not revealed; we can only infer. The next real life scene begins after the box thing, when she wakes up and lets in her ex-roommate to pick up her things. She soon descends into madness/fantasy again, with the hallucinatory sexual fantasy of Camille. In my opinion the hit man scene, and the dinner party are hallucinations (they are simply not logical enough to be real life), and the real Diane Selwyn doesn't return until the ominous knocks on the door propel her into the mad despair which causes her to take her own life at the end. One of the more interesting things about the film is when in real time the fantasy takes place. Is it a life-in-fantasy review as she lays dying, a haunting dream, or a premonition? I think Lynch is telling us something very important about the illusory quality of our lives, and how life imitates art in very important respects. Thank you for reading this review.
Rating: Summary: Mind Boggling Review: This is the best film ever! The first time I saw it, I was a bit confused. I had to watch it again and again to really see what was going on. I thought it was brilliant for keeping the audience guessing. Sine watching the movie, I have done lots of research to find other people's interpretation of the movie. I recommend this movie to people who are tired of seeing the same plot play out in every movie. This one is definitely different. Thank you David Lynch.
Rating: Summary: For Lynch Fans Only Review: Few films polarize audiences like David Lynch's Mulholland Drive. The vast majority of average filmgoers will be unsatisfied with this movie, because it is unconventional to the point of confusion. Some viewers don't see this as a problem, however, calling the movie "eerie," "provocative," and "cerebral." People who are fans of Lynch have a thirst for the challenge of traditional aesthetics and the disruption of the conventional rules for watching films. As a study of art, Mulholland Drive is rich and fascinating. As a motion picture, however, it just does not work. Hollywood produces many films that are hard to understand at first (Momento, Fight Club, Pulp Fiction, etc). Each subsequent viewing helps clear the muddiness. Mulholland Drive, on the other hand, becomes more confusing. The harder you try to understand it, the more frustrated you will become. When the traditional filmgoer sees this movie, the viewing is as difficult as someone who enjoys landscape paintings first encountering the art of Andy Warhol. The experience is totally foreign. Unless you have a background in some form of art analysis and admire works labeled "Post-Modern" or "Avant-Gaurde," I would not suggest this film. Those who do love "art for art's sake" will call this the best film of 2001. Therefore, the question of whether you should see Mulholland Drive really is contingent on your own expectations. I expect a movie to by marginally comprehendible, and so, I found the viewing to be less than enjoyable.
Rating: Summary: Objects in relation to other objects Review: The interconnections between the caracters, their identities, objects and places, suggest that all the pieces could somehow fit together... witch in fact they do, in a sense of dreamlike surrealism, witch dosen't really answer qustions in a concrete fashion. The thing that really gets my atention is how David Lynch wrote something that so strongly suggests a co-dependence in all the elements in the movie without really tying them together with a certain conditioned logic as frame of reference. If you want to feel as confused as the main caracters, and find pleasure in that, you will certainly like M.D.
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