Tag: film criticism
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Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992)
What a masterful adapter of circumstance David Lynch is! Orson Welles once said that a director is someone who presides over accidents and Lynch’s ability to continually develop his stories in spite of certain actors not being available or funds drying up or various incidents occuring marks his true artistry and is proof of how…
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Twin Peaks (1990-1991)
One of the fundamental aspects about David Lynch is that he is wholly committed to the creative process, regardless of the medium. For Lynch, a painter who progressed to experimental short films, the jump to feature films is not unusual, especially since he envisioned these projects as ‘moving paintings.’ But few could have predicted that…
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Wild at Heart (1990)
Wild at Heart is the most Lynchian response to a David Lynch movie such as Blue Velvet. Adapted from a Barry Gifford novel, which focuses on a couple of star-crossed lovers attempting to rid themselves of hateful and malevolent family members, there is no doubt Lynch saw tremendous opportunity for irony and comical commentary on…
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Blue Velvet (1986)
After two subpar productions in which his idiosyncratic vision was unable to reach full capacity, David Lynch garnered the opportunity not only to make a movie with total creative control but also to delve deep into the themes and notions of his first feature, Eraserhead, which in many ways laid the foundation for Blue Velvet.…
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The Elephant Man (1980)
The Elephant Man is primarily an anti-David Lynch movie despite the bizarre surrealist sequences bookending the historical drama. How Lynch found his way to this material is as unusual as the combination of his style with that of the movie’s producers and writers. Despite his established background as a comedic writer, director and actor, producer…
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Eraserhead (1977)
Different kinds of movies make different demands on their audiences. Most simply ask you to sit back and be entertained. But every now and again, a movie makes a tremendous request on its viewers, and promises that if you participate to the best of your ability, the reward is a much deeper and more meaningful…
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Forever Mine (1999)
How can a respectable filmmaker go from producing a formidable story about a man suffering from the plagues of his family to a sappy tale of love lost over years between two people who aren’t capable of saying anything of merit to one another? This is the question to ask when watching Paul Schrader’s powerful,…