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Blue Velvet

Blue Velvet

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Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Can't Wait To See It All
Review: I knew well enough not to order the earlier DVD release of BLUE VELVET, knowing a "special edition" couldn't be too far away (what is up with companies that do this by the way?). I cannot wait to see the extras included on this DVD, including deleted scenes I've read so much about, and a documentary on the making of the movie. In a way I'm actually surprised there are any extras at all, as David Lynch seems to completely move on from each film or project after it's finished. I don't think you'll ever find him adding banal audio commentary to any of his films, nor does he make director's cuts available (and he could since many of his movies have been edited for sexuality and violence to get that R rating). So this is a treat of a treat for the fans one of the best movies ever made.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Isabella Rossellini!
Review: She rapes Kyle MacLachlan. Abusive, gas-huffing Hopper hollers and guzzles PBR. I believe it's the first episode of the Blue-on-Red motif that continues through Wild at Heart, Twin Peaks, and everything else.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: dark, disturbing, and extremely delightful!
Review: Blue Velvet for me is one of those rare films that you can watch over and over and never get tired of.This movie has remained in my top five favorites for over 12 years.All the actors are supurb
in thier performances.Especially Dennis Hopper and his airmask!One of the most suprising things about the film is how quickly it turns from an innocent bit of story telling to one of the most
contriversial masterpieces ever! Although I will not give any details about the plot,I recommend this one with a vengence! However, this is not a movie for everyone. Lynch's trademark strangeness shows no mercy and could perhaps shatter the senses
of some more conservative mainstream viewers.I only wish that Lynch had followed this same pattern with Wild At Heart.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: David Lynch's masterpiece
Review: How does one describe Blue Velvet? Disturbing, entertaining, romantic (yes, I did say romantic), mysterious, brilliant. Those words all describe Blue Velvet. This is a masterpiece of cinema. With all of David Lynch's brilliance, he has or may never touch a film this great again.
Dennis Hopper. Why isn't this man in a category of the legends? Why isn't he revered as much as Pacino, DeNiro or Nicholson? Dennis Hopper can take the most wacked-out roles and transform them into legendary villains (Speed, Apocalypse Now).
Kyle MacLachlan does an incredible job with his protagonistic role as does Laura Dern, playing the innocent virgin. Isabella Rossellini is also incredible as the victim, and there is always the cast of crazy characters David Lynch is famous for (Dean Stockwell, Jack Nance, to name a few). But the show is stolen by the script and cinematography. The scene of Dean Stockwell's lip sync is one of the greatest scenes in the history. It's why we have film. Plus, extra mention should me made about the score.
Blue Velvet is not for the kids. It has graphic language, nudity and some violent moments not for the squeamish. But if you're in the mood to be disturbed, Blue Velvet is the movie for you.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Evil brewing under the surface
Review: This film is a modern noir-drama by David Lynch which deals with the evil things happening underneath the surface of a seemingly perfect world of the 50's. It involves a college guy who discovers a dismembered ear in a field and is curious about it so he gives it to the police and begins his own investigation. What he finds out is that evil can be contagious if you're not careful and it can suck you into its destructive path. On a technical note, the film has a very rich color and often uses the color in the title. David Lynch also tampers with the sound in this and creates some haunting moments with it.
As far as soundtracks go, this one takes the cake and will probably confuse some viewers as to it's immediate significance.
ALSO!!! IMPORTANT!!! This is a Lynch film and it is morbid in some places that I will not go into explaining. So if you're into straightahead films, this is not it. Some of his elements come from left field. Let me put it this way, this is a mainstream film that goes so far into left field that it almost fits the art house category. In fact, it is an art house flick. Knowing this, proceed carefully unless you are already a fan of Lynch(like I am). Very Challenging Film

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: DISTURBING, BEAUTIFUL, HORRIFYING, BIZARRE & SURREAL
Review: Set in the quiet picture postcard logging community of Lumbertown, Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan), a somewhat naive and squeaky clean college boy, finds a severed human ear. Shocked and disturbed he reports it immediately to the police whilst, with the help of his girlfriend (Laura Dern), he begins his own investigation, which soon leads him into stumbling into the seedy and violent world of abused nightclub singer Dorothy (Isabella Rosellini) and drug-sniffing psychopath (Dennis Hopper).

This is the first movie in which David Lynch really showed us all his cards and united themes and imagery, now familiar to millions through the likes of Mulholland Drive, Wild At Heart and Twin Peaks. Although 16 years old, David Lynch's Blue Velvet has lost none of its shock value. It is still deeply and uniquely disturbing, at times incredibly surreal and utterly compelling viewing. Beautifully filmed and directed by Lynch, its aesthetic value is often deliberately at odds with the subject matter and it is a work of dark genius. It also features superb acting performances all round. In particular, MacLachlan, Rosselinni, Dean Stockwell and Laura Dern shine, but it is Dennis Hopper's magnificent performance as a drug sniffing twisted psychopath that most people will remember.

Bizarre and frequently haunting, beautiful but frequently surreal, this is a movie that will stay with you for a very long time and really is a must see!

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: now its dark
Review: I think no other filmmaker in modern times has had their work analyzed and intelectualized as much as David Lynch. I'm not saying his work doesn't sometimes call for heavy conversations about the nature of reality, but sometimes understanding a lynch film takes nothing more than just allowing yourself to be immersed in the mood. That being said, i think this film is the best introduction to the Lynch Universe.

People will call this movie weird and confusing, but i think anyone who is confused by it must be suffering from a short attention span. The story is very simple, and at times coincidental. The tougher (yet not impossible) part, is picking up on the things that aren't being said, such as why exactly Jeffery feels the need to observe the details of an ongoing police investigation from the inside, and what has made Dorothy so confused that she thinks the only thing that can bring her happiness is pain. Its all about what lurks behind the curtain, its about who's hiding in the closet, its about what goes on underneath the mask of humanity. Watching this film, you get to ride shotgun with Jefferey Beaumont as he peels the layers away little by little... and you may feel yourself becoming as much of a voyeur as he has become.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: saw it at age 18, 22, 25, 26, 29, 32, still watching...
Review: "this is it" How could a movie with such a slow first 30 min explode into a nightmarefest? This is the film to watch to find out!!!!! The gangs all here/// Frank Booth, the mask inhaling, ultra foul mouthed, kidnapping, murderous, and downright un~best friend you could ever have, compiled with Jack "My name's Paul"
(Eraserhead) Nance, Brad Dourif (Chucky the doll), MacLachlan, Dern, Rossellini, and did I mention Dennis Hopper/Frank Booth????
You cant miss this/////// It's just one of those films you may remember forever. I watch it every few years from VHS to DVD and still watch the "GOOD" scenes!!! Put down that copy of Scream 3
and watch this!!!!!

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: In dreams.
Review: 'Blue Velvet' is a Douglas Sirk melodrama recast as a Surrealist film noir. I had thought that the film might have dated, that David Lynch's bugs-beneath-the-smiling-small-town-facade worldview had long since passed into self-parody, but Lynch was never much interested in social criticism. What may be fascistic violence, misogyny and abuse of physical vulnerability in the film's surface crime narrative becomes liberating when seen in its true dream colours, as elements of the hero's unconscious. The film begins with the hero's father, connected to candy-coloured images of suburban, robotic conformity, suffering from a stroke. Freed from this paternal authority, Jeffrey begins exploring the dreamscape of his own desires, falling for women under male control (trying to assert Oedipal primacy), testing various kinds of sexual experience, facing a world of metamorphosing identities and locations. This only remains possible so long as his father is in a coma - once he resumes control, the deviant can be suppressed, and automated complacency restored.

'Velvet' is a frightening but hilarious black comedy - from the dog gulping hose water over a stroke victim (a different - or related? - kind of unconscious) to earnest medical discussions about a severed ear to Dennis Hopper's pre-camp violence to Isabella Rossellini's 'Bride of Frankenstein' strapping to an ambulance stretcher. Andre Breton once defined black humour as the key Surrealist characteristic, and 'Velvet' is, after 'Vertigo', the greatest Surrealist film of the American cinema, from its interior spaces evoking the paintings of de Chirico and Magritte, and the dream-imagery of corridors, stairs and doors (as portals to another world; as embodiments of (female) sexuality, especially Dorothy's bathroom and her urethral nightclub stage) to the dream-logic of the plot, with its emphasis on the nocturnal; on unconscious walking; on repetition; on the fetishised focus on items of clothing, lips, colours etc.; on the existence of various worlds in a circumscribed space, like the conflicting desires in our mind.

'Velvet' is Lynch's most successful film because it is structured by genre. At one point Sandy asks Jeffrey whether he is a detective or a pervert; both types are defined as voyeurs. Jeffrey belongs to the great tradition of anti-detectives headed by 'Vertigo''s Scottie Ferguson, men who believe they are solving a crime in the external world, but are really getting lost in their own mind. The detective might seem to be the 'reality principle' opposed to the liberation of Surrealism, but there are points in common - the interpretation of visual clues, the search for an elusive ojbect, the playing with time and space. Ultimately, however, the restitution of order must mean death to Dream and Desire.

What makes 'Velvet' more successful than most Surrealist films is character - although Frank (surely an outcast from Celine, or the Wizard in this twisted return to Oz?) and the rest are figments of Jeffrey's unconscious, they are fully-formed and compelling in their own right. Lynch's visuals are so unforgettable and potent, it is easy to overlook the unnerving genius of his sound-designs, the hyper-reality of 'real' or background sound, the menacing atmospherics and Hollywood pastiche in Badalamenti's score or the brilliantly destabilising use of familiar pop standards. 'Velvet' was the first 'serious' film I ever saw - looking back at it over a decade later, I hadn't realised how much it had infiltrated my own unconscious and private mythology.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Cowardly masterpiece. Grudging 5 stars.
Review: Despite its notoriety as a weird or kinky film, "Blue Velvet" should be both structurally and thematically clear to anyone who has read a narrative such as Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown" and who has at least a moderate interest in Freud's ideas about love as well as Nietzsche's thoughts on the Dionysian self. It's also a film that pays constant homage to Hitchcock's best work, notably "Rear Window" and "Psycho."

The most important lines occur early in the film when the protagonist, Kyle MacLachlan, tells Laura Dern that he needs to investigate the mysterious circumstances surrounding Isabella Rosselli because "knowledge requires risk" but with the possible reward that "you might learn something." By the end of the narrative, MacLachlan's character should have learned a lot, but here's where Lynch flinches, much like Robert Altman in the conclusion to "The Player." MacLachlan emerges neither a sadder nor wiser man from his rite of passage and his descent into the dark corners of the psyche. Instead, Lynch commits the ultimate cynical sin, reprising the film's innocent opening and throwing in the viewer's face the hopelessly artificial, Pollyanna-ish, pastoral idyl that is most likely the preferred reality of the American mainstream movie consumer.

This is not the place for a detailed analysis of the film, though some of the following may help the viewer make sense of the narrative. Jeff confronts first mortality (his father stricken by a life-threatening stroke), then a severed, decaying human ear. The ear, the organ of hearing, is also the sense that fully awakens only in the dark, granting access to the Dionysian, the deep intuitive wellsprings of the self. But the ear we see on screen has become a diseased, useless instrument in a "sunny" culture whose idea of music is Bobby Vinton's version of "Blue Velvet." Rossellini's alternative version of the song, with all of its sensuous, alluring darkness, will draw MacLachlan in to the same degree that it repells girl friend Dern (contrast this relationship with that of Jimmy Stewart and Grace Kelly in "Rear Window," where Kelly becomes increasingly drawn to the voyeuristic and "ghoulish" activity initiated by Stewart). Soon MacLaclan will discover the love substitutes embodied by both Rossellini and Hopper--the sadism and masochism, fetishism and scopophilia that, like it or not, are present in every son and daughter who has inherited from birth and learned from upbringing the pleasure/pain principle that underlies even the most well-intentioned, "selfless" love (the absence of any shown feelings between MacLaclan and either parent is another tip-off to the basis of his attraction to the dominitrix/sex slave character played by Rossellini).

Certainly Lynch must know, along with every other artist who has dealt with the theme, the risk along with the necessity of making touch with these feelings in order to achieve a fuller, richer, more knowing life in the time one has left. MacLaclan tells the naive and shielded Dern from the beginning that it's extremely dangerous business (think of Mann's "Death in Venice"). But the alternative is a Salem where everybody is "good," a Lumberton where people get sick but never die, a Disney fantasy that can exist only in artificial movies. Lynch may have thought he was being ironically clever by giving his viewers the "escape" they probably crave. I'd say "cowardly" is more like it. This film (in fact, most any other film since 1980) is easily eclipsed by his own "Elephant Man," where both the screenplay and the circumstances of the historical John Merrick insured the right ending. Unfortunately, someone let him write his own script for "Blue Velvet."


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