David Lynch hasn’t done one bad film. I want to mention this, because it’s easy to think of Dune as a failboat of a scifi film, which it was at some level, but still kicks ass compared to most of the science fiction films out there anyway, so fuck you if you don’t like Dune, it’s a great film. But not one of the best by Lynch. But neither is Blue Velvet, no matter how much some people rave about it. Here’s my personal top-5 by Lynch, while waiting to hear more from his next films.
Laura Palmer was definitively one of my teenage fantasies…
The prequel-feature to the ever-famous Twin Peaks -TV-series is by far Lynch’s most underrated and hated film, but the one I’m quite easily placing as Lynch’s best work. Why? Well, it smashes together faces like David Bowie, Jack Bauer, Chris Isaak and Harry Dean Stanton – not to mention the original Twin Peaks cast led by wonderful Ray Wise – adds in a wonderful soundtrack by Angelo Badalamenti, and lets it slowly boil under Lynch’s unique directoral vision. When served, it’s an unforgettable, multi-layered beautiful film with the aura of mystery around it only Lynch can create.
But what makes the film really to stand out is the naive, a bit “amateurish” filmmaking on many of the scenes, which I personally believe to be the thing that nailed Lynch from being just another strange filmmaker into a real nerd-filmmaker god. Times film critic Vincent Canby said it quite well when writing about the film: “It’s not the worst movie ever made; it just seems to be”. Quite right, Vincent! Every now and then it seems like it’s been made by some fucked-up film school kid working on his “great masterpiece of a degree work”, but unlike these kids, every scene Lynch embarks on, regardless on how naive and purposefully strange it might smell like, he’s able to nail it. And this – I believe – travels across to the minds of aspiring filmmakers in the form of “I love this and I could do this”, and results in inspiring thousands of young filmmakers, but the flipside being the endless Lynch ripoffs that never rise anywhere close to what Lynch has been able to capture.
Hot chicks kissing. Win.
Mulholland Drive has been considered quite widely as Lynch’s best work, and I’m no man denying it on a more general and filmatic level. I think Mulholland Drive “professionalizes” much of the stylistic things Lynch has tried out before, for example in Lost Highway, and polishes his storytelling to the maximum. I’m not sure if we’ll ever see a feature film so “straightforward” from Lynch again, or if this was it for him, but if it was, it was a perfect one for that.
Also included very hot lesbian action and the best scene in the history of cinema, the Winkie’s Dream scene.
The burnt-face hobo rastafari scares me shitless every time… But really, it’s the Oscar-worthy development of the whole scene that really does it.
One of the scariest moments of the film was this frame.
Three most important things in Lynch’s by far strangest film for me are the crap-quality digital cam look of the whole film, the rabbits (of course), and the grim Polish gateways and stairwells. I’ve been able to finish this film just once, and after the experience I was completely blown away. I tried the second time, but dropped out somewhere in the middle. Because of this, I wasn’t sure if the film should be actually the best of Lynch so far, or on this list at all – so I decided to drop it somewhere in between.
INLAND is a combination of awesome, haunting and very Lynchian scenes, that don’t quite connect – but they don’t actually need to. I was going through the plot on Wikipedia, and looking at it in this format made a bit more sense than when whatching the film, because what Lynch has always mastered very well is the atmosphere that really grabs you by the balls, and you forget to worry about the overall plot. But there definitively seems to be one in there, and it has a lot to do with east European girls, a woman in trouble and rabbits.
INLAND is an unforgettable experience, as a film, but also as the post-filmtheater discussion item. Go see it, get blasted and try to interpret it – I think the truth might be somewhere there.
The baby is sick. Very, very sick.
David Lynch started his career as a filmmaker with Eraserhead as his first feature-length film, and what a wonderful film it was. It’s a story of a man on the moon, and a couple who get a baby that’s quite like a fetus of a giant baby parrot.
Although I know I’ll get lynched for saying this, but I think Eraserhead is Lynch’s very own Star Wreck. He filmed it for over 6 years, and spent about 10k to his own and his friend’s money on it, nobody believed in it, but after it’s release, it became a huge cult hit in the horror genre. Mel Brooks hired Lynch right away after seeing Eraserhead to direct his next feature film -The Elephant Man – which eventually was nominated for 8 Oscars and blasted Lynch into superstardom among directors. Not a bad start for a director, but that’s what it takes many times – you really need to pull the first masterwork out of your ass with completely no money and nobody believing into it, instead of rotting in film schools and crying that nobody wants to fund your film.
Eraserhead has always been for me the film I’d loved to have directed, and I’m still looking forward into doing something similar maybe one day.
Lovely smile there, mr. Merrick.
So, fresh out of working with the strange and scary DIY-film Eraserhead, Mel Brooks, a comedy filmmaker and producer, hired young and promising David Lynch to direct Elephant Man. The film turned out to be a fantastic, a straightforward but still completely unique drama of a very badly deformed man, Joseph Merrick, also known as Elephant Man. It got 8 Oscar nominations, and won numerous awards, and it’s not a big surprise that a lot of pressure was put on Lynch after the film, and he was suggested to direct Star Wars’ second episode, but instead did Dune, which flopped madly. Nowadays, Hollywood has let go of the hopes on Lynch, and he can roam his own path as much as he wants to, if he gets his stuff financed.
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