The people who gush over this film are simply not to be taken seriously.
Firstly, it's shot with hand-held digital cameras (not the kind of digital used in, say, the recent Superman, where digital comes close to being a passable substitute for film if you lower you standards only a hair's breadth; rather, it's the kind of lousy, cruddy, mud-o-vision digital which makes you wonder why you bothered walking into the theatre) - with an absurd overuse of fish-eye lenses. And it's not even in focus all the time. I know the out-of-focus shooting was deliberate - well, actually I don't know, but let's suppose it was - but it adds insult to injury: the image definition isn't anywhere near good enough for even a half second's out-of-focus shooting to be endurable.
Why do we stand for this kind of thing? Why don't people who pay good money to see a movie rise up in spontaneous rebellion when they find they've been swindled? It's one of those mysteries of modern life, like the mystery of why all modern buildings are ugly, when we certainly don't have fewer technical resources than our ancestors did when they made buildings that were beautiful.
And secondly, Lynch's latest is about (inasmuch as it's about anything) an actress, and about the production of a film. It's set in Hollywood and most characters are film-makers of one description or another. Does the resulting work consist of tedious, puffed-up, self-referential tomfoolery? Is there any serious doubt? Mulholland Drive was a more lifeless, inferior knock-off of Lost Highway chiefly because it was about Hollywood rather than something external to Hollywood: the most versatile directors in the world have difficulty making films about films without turning out something tiresome and trite, and Lynch, although he has on occasion been a great film-maker, and although he did make The Straight Story, is not renowned for his versatility.
One of the basic plot points is silly. Being based on a Polish folktale does not curse a production. Being set in Hollywood, does.
Lynch usually relies heavily on his is-it-real-or-is-it-a-dream ambiguity, but in this instance, there's nothing else - and the lousy digital images mean that even this stalwart gimmick doesn't stand a chance of working. Obviously, in excrement-brown digital, it's all a dream. Or might as well be. The digital cameras have robbed Lynch of his power to invest mundane items with menace (in digital, the mundane simply looks even more mundane); they've preventing him from using his slow, gliding camera; they've led him into the by now well-known just-let-the-camera-operator-follow-the-actors trap, and encouraged him to be self indulgently profligate in compiling more and still more footage for the thinnest script he has ever worked on.
You don't have to take my word for any of this, or trust my aesthetic subjective sense. Let's suppose for the sake of argument I'm a lousy judge of cinema. Nonetheless, the movie was shot on low-definition, muddy digital video: that's a known fact: look it up. The movie is set entirely in Hollywood and features actors, directors and technicians; again a known fact: look it up. You now know all you need to know to infer that Lynch has laid an egg.
Firstly, it's shot with hand-held digital cameras (not the kind of digital used in, say, the recent Superman, where digital comes close to being a passable substitute for film if you lower you standards only a hair's breadth; rather, it's the kind of lousy, cruddy, mud-o-vision digital which makes you wonder why you bothered walking into the theatre) - with an absurd overuse of fish-eye lenses. And it's not even in focus all the time. I know the out-of-focus shooting was deliberate - well, actually I don't know, but let's suppose it was - but it adds insult to injury: the image definition isn't anywhere near good enough for even a half second's out-of-focus shooting to be endurable.
Why do we stand for this kind of thing? Why don't people who pay good money to see a movie rise up in spontaneous rebellion when they find they've been swindled? It's one of those mysteries of modern life, like the mystery of why all modern buildings are ugly, when we certainly don't have fewer technical resources than our ancestors did when they made buildings that were beautiful.
And secondly, Lynch's latest is about (inasmuch as it's about anything) an actress, and about the production of a film. It's set in Hollywood and most characters are film-makers of one description or another. Does the resulting work consist of tedious, puffed-up, self-referential tomfoolery? Is there any serious doubt? Mulholland Drive was a more lifeless, inferior knock-off of Lost Highway chiefly because it was about Hollywood rather than something external to Hollywood: the most versatile directors in the world have difficulty making films about films without turning out something tiresome and trite, and Lynch, although he has on occasion been a great film-maker, and although he did make The Straight Story, is not renowned for his versatility.
One of the basic plot points is silly. Being based on a Polish folktale does not curse a production. Being set in Hollywood, does.
Lynch usually relies heavily on his is-it-real-or-is-it-a-dream ambiguity, but in this instance, there's nothing else - and the lousy digital images mean that even this stalwart gimmick doesn't stand a chance of working. Obviously, in excrement-brown digital, it's all a dream. Or might as well be. The digital cameras have robbed Lynch of his power to invest mundane items with menace (in digital, the mundane simply looks even more mundane); they've preventing him from using his slow, gliding camera; they've led him into the by now well-known just-let-the-camera-operator-follow-the-actors trap, and encouraged him to be self indulgently profligate in compiling more and still more footage for the thinnest script he has ever worked on.
You don't have to take my word for any of this, or trust my aesthetic subjective sense. Let's suppose for the sake of argument I'm a lousy judge of cinema. Nonetheless, the movie was shot on low-definition, muddy digital video: that's a known fact: look it up. The movie is set entirely in Hollywood and features actors, directors and technicians; again a known fact: look it up. You now know all you need to know to infer that Lynch has laid an egg.