50 lines
4.0 KiB
Plaintext
50 lines
4.0 KiB
Plaintext
mulholland drive did very well at the cannes film festival .
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as you can see from the rating it did not do very well from me at the toronto international film festival .
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it may not be clear to the viewer why i am so negative on this film for most of the running time .
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in fact it is an interesting mystery story told on the backdrop of the hollywood film industry .
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toward the end of the film i think everything that has been built falls apart .
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the film was to be a pilot for a tv series but writer and director david lynch did not sell his tv pilot and i think he decided that he wanted to do something else with it .
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something else is what he did .
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the film opens with a woman ( played by laura harring ) about to be killed in a car when a car crash saves her life .
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she crawls away from the accident with a concussion and finds herself a bungalow with an unlocked door to sleep .
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meanwhile young vivacious betty ( naomi watts ) arrives in hollywood from canada .
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she wants to build a career as an actress .
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betty is a little surprised to find a woman sleeping in the borrowed bungalow .
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she does not know who the woman is .
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she is even more surprised when the woman awakes and does not herself know who she is .
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they fix on a name rita for her , but are not sure if this right or not .
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meanwhile local director adam kesher ( justin theroux ) has problems of his own .
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he is trying to cast one actress for his new film and is getting pressure from the producers and from crime figures to cast someone else , cammie rhodes ( melissa george ) .
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these two threads are joined by a third one in which there is a strange and comic murder that goes terribly wrong .
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there is also a strange character called the cowboy ( monty montgomery ) adding to the confusion .
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in what was probably intended for the television pilot the film opens with a great vibrancy showing dancing 60s style under the credits .
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a lot of mulholland drive starts out fun .
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lynch wants you to know he could make an enjoyable stylish film .
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he just chooses not to .
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as with any david lynch film there is strange material added for little reason .
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there are no earthworms , but there are some decidedly strange david lynch touches .
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the film is a little long for the subject matter .
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toward the end it gets into some heavier violence and sex scenes , clearly not intended for the tv pilot .
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unfortunately some of the most important comments to make about this film would be spoilers .
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i will not mention them in the main body of the review but i give mulholland drive a 4 on the 0 to 10 scale and a low 0 on the -4 to +4 scale .
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mulholland drive spoiler warning .
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i have rated this film fairly low .
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you should read this only after seeing the film or deciding that you will not see the film .
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david lynch is in large part a dark satirist .
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most of his work is done in familiar genres but in some way shows their underside .
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in mulholland drive i think he is having a laugh at the expense of the crime film genre .
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what he does with this film is ( are you sure you want to read this ? )
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playing off the audience expectations that there will be a simple explanation for what is going on .
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the first 80% of the film he tells a simple multi-thread crime story with clues sprinkled throughout .
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then suddenly at the end he turns the story on its ear with a large number of clues that appear that they should add up to something .
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the audience expectation is that they will add up .
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but he has given clues that are self-contradictory .
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lynch wants the audience to argue about what they have seen afterward and come up with theories .
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in fact , the pointers are noticeably contradictory and until i hear a better explanation , i think lynch is merely playing a joke .
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there is a visual curiosity that was popular in the sixties .
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mad magazine called it a poiuyt .
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other sources called it a tri- pronged u-bar .
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look at small portions of it and makes sense .
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look at the whole figure and it does not .
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this film is , in my estimation , the cinematic equivalent of a tri-pronged u-bar .
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