Silencio (or: Mulholland Dr. vs Lord of the Rings - FITE!)

Then you actually come and live here and it's more like a Beck album insert photo.

Anything that makes Edna write a nonsensical line like "a city that's an anagram of desire, which is an anagram of our dreams, which are anagrams of our nightmares" instantly worries me.

I'm all for portentious pretentions - hell, one of my favorite movies is Barton Fink. But, geez, MD was nothing more than a subpar Twin Peaks ripoff w/ boobies & some girl-on-girl action. And DESPITE that, it was terrible.

That version of "Crying", though, was certainly a memorable moment (if you can separate it from the rest of the god-awful movie). And Naomi Watts was excellent - a performance on the same level as Ed Norton's turn in the wince-heavy (as in Gere-heavy) Primal Fear.

I'm glad there's no sex in LOTR. The thought of a TARKUS mounting an ORC is too much for my STOMACH.

I haven't seen MD, but I have seen Ghost World. 5 out of 10.

But you couldn't signal more of a "Hey! Remember that Dean Stockwell scene with 'In Dreams' in Blue Velvet?" moment if you tried, it sounds like.

Aside from the tedious fact that reside is an anagram of desire, I can think of few sentences which have made me want to run run run to the cinema quite so much as this.

The whole thing still lodged deep in my psyche where I suspect it will remain for a while. The Spanish "Crying" (by no means a mere rehash of Blue Velvet's Orbison moment) had me gripping the sides of the seat with a lump in my throat and eyes damp, yet I couldn't really understand why. As someone who doesn't necessarily demand a plot, let alone a logical one, but would rather immerse himself in atmosphere and beautiful imagery, it was some kind of perfection. I haven't seen all the reference points that Edna talks about, but I was put in mind of Bunuel and Polanski's "The tenant". But no-one can create menace quite like David Lynch.

"so, the Hobbit, is that some Harry potter thing? or is it to do with that lord of the rings? sounds boring whatever it is"

Connie Stevens, surely?

Connie Francis was Stupid Cupid.

Connie Stevens was Sixteen Reasons.

This seems like a good point to link to the celebrity nudity database. I particularly enjoyed the thread discussing Katie "Dawson's Crack" Holmes in that Keanu Reeves film from a while back.

I'm glad we got to this point in a David Lynch thread.

Where are all the nude pictures?
This is a reference site of nude appearances in movies. We do not have any nude pictures. There are tons of nude celebrity sites out there that are doing a way better job than I ever could. What I could not find was a site like this: a searchable database that would help me locate movies that my favorite celebrities were nude in. That is why I created this site.

In the end though I had no emotional connection to the film or its characters and what we were left with was a sketch show not too far from a slightly sanitised film version of Chris Morris's Jam. I thought the Russ Meyer influence was surprisingly pronounced too. Far too much re-use of previous Lynchisms, the Twin Peaks and Lost Highway debts are right up there, begging the question that is he just making a career out of parodying himself.

Hopkins suggested that I would like it less than Lord Of The Rings because I require some sort of closure. Oddly I think there is a lot more closure in Mullholland Drive than in the Fellowship Of The Ring. The tagged on section post the end of the pilot (which was by the way a fantastic pilot ending) does actually explain the main plot in a half arsed and inconsistent way. I think though I would have prefered the box ending.

Fun, but rather forgettable in the long run.

LOTR bored the wotsits off me, I couldn't get involved in it at all, and there without that there wasn't much to think about. Conversely, I was swept up and off my feet by Mulholland Drive, which I thought was fabulous.

What I know about films, of course, you could write out twice in big letters on the back of a very small postage stamp and still not have anything worth reading. Are films in general getting longer?

Visually however the film is a treat and I do think there are some brilliant sequences in there. But it is a grab bag of second hand allusions which I felt were being placed without much thought - I felt that the viewer had to do a disproportionate amount of work to the film-maker to get anything out of it.

Reason directors like making longer film = mistaken belief that length = depth.

BTW I think Lynch is a great director, he just needs to work with better material. His mastery of stillness is truly revolutionary.

Presumably films can also be longer these days because there's nothing else on the bill - no short films, cartoons, second features etc., just ads and trailers. We had an intermission for 'Eureka' - v. welcome it was too!

Anyways, I'm with Edna. Finally another film that does Hollywood proud (because it's not made by someone who can ever be truly Hollywood - cf. Wilder, Polanski?). Otis was also OTM way upthread.

's all down to whether you prefer pseudo-surrealistic babblings or beating the crap out of the bad guys
b-b-but MD is full of bad guys coming off second best!

I'll dissent slightly on the LoTR comparison. It's difficult to inject fun, romance and mystery into a movie when the story has already become mythology. Which is why people are mostly judging "Fellowship..." on how sure-footed it is and how well it takes you somewhere you've already decided you want to go - as opposed to transporting you somewhere equally pleasurable but unexpected. (NB - MD could be said to be in former category too if you know Lynch's previous work)

BUT: I have a question... does Naomi Watts show up at the very beginning somewhere? She's listed at the top of the credits which are supposed to be in order of appearance... alas, I wasn't paying attention that soon...

Why didn't anyone ask this at the time? I'd like to know. Perhaps others could try.

I saw MD a vast bunch of times, more than I've seen anything else really, trying to understand it. By the time I gave up it'd pretty much become my favourite film ever.

mullholland drive roolz also!!

i like the scene where the nervous chappie and his shrink go behind dennys and see the homeless man, a lot! LOTR has no aquivalent scene (or even something similarly enjoyable) so lynch wins. the MD soundtrack is gorgeous also.

Adam Kesher : "Sure."

Cowboy: "Now... did you answer cause you thought that's what I wanted to hear? Or did you think about what I said...and answer cause you truly believe that to be right?"

and the same to you my friend!

Not least they both end with the word "silencio"

Mulholland Drive was the best film of 2001.

Yes, I am drunk.

he also plays the video clerk in ghost world.

Rewatched MD on Saturday, a perfectly reasonable Film of the Decade choice. I had forgotten a number of key scenes that didn't involve Watts and Harring, eg the botched killing in the shitty office.

i havent seen it since i caught it in the theater when it first came out (and it knocked my socks off). would like to revisit it.

eg the botched killing in the shitty office

Lynch-does-Tarantino, no?

I remember thinking so at the time, but I can only remember one similar incident in a Tarantino movie - the Marvin scene in Pulp Fiction. everyone did that for a while - the guy tripping over the stairs in Out of Sight was one of my favorite in that accidental killing style.

i invariably end up breaking into Silencio at least once every couple of months

i still remember the college screening of this movie. it was downright hilarious at the same time that it was creepy. watts' performance combines talent and camp on another level.

another oddball scene: hannah montana's dad

http://new.assets.thequietus.com/images/articles/1531/2001_Mulholland_Dr_166_1240407684_resize_460x400.jpg

(oh i see billy ray is cited in the original post. i just tend to forget he's in this.)

omg i NEVER got that that was him. great scene, w/ the paint etc

why did morbs choose to revive this thread i wonder? hmmmmm

i like to imagine billy ray and miley watching it together. "see honey, in 5 or 6 years it'll be time for you to do an ART movie, like this. broaden your résumé. it's a lotta bullshit, but the weirdo critics like it and you'll get on a magazine cover."

i give up, why did i?

i'm with mark s on this one.

a better reference point than LOTR might be vera chitilova's 1966 'daisies,' another surrealist film about two women with plenty of 'sex, fun and romanticism' (and pointed political satire) but without all the dreary art-school symbolism and hand-me-down fake 'dreaminess' of MD. or pointless lezzing-up for the benefit of all the straight guys in the audience (or behind the camera).

I never saw any hobbit and elf movies in a discount theater. On the other hand, Mulholland Drive was mysteriously at a theater that had dollar showings for college students on some days, and two-for-one on others. I think I saw this one twice for $1.50 total.

wow JD, that was your first rong film post in awhile. "Daisies" left me kinda cold.

srsly

i love daisies, i don't think it's cold at all! it's funny and lively (if inevitably melancholy-tinged by what you know came after). but i love mulholland drive more.

i think maybe you have to be a lot more into the sort of creepy rotting-soul-of-LA-noir stuff edna welthorpe mentions in the first post — chandler, west, 'sunset blvd' — than i am to really love MD.

Daisies makes for better repurposing for a Muffs music video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPlox5hWxFk

i give up, why did i?

― Rage, Resentment, Spleen (Dr Morbius), Monday, December 21, 2009 6:11 PM (43 minutes ago)

there's actually a decent thread on this film that you posted some really cool things called "Mullholland Drive"!

oh, if it's MISSPELLED I didn't find it!

there's some good interpretive stuff on this one:

Salvaged Mulholland Drive Thread

spelling counts, ppl:

Mullholland Drive - theories please.