Sunset Boulevard vs Mulholland Drive

You folks are killing me here...When I think of Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire (and Lost Highway, and Wild at Heart), two things come to mind: a portentous movie-trailer voiceover intoning "From the mind of David Lynch," and the Simpsons episode where a mesmerized Homer watches a Twin Peaks knock-off featuring a sheriff dancing with a cow, and he solemnly announces "Genius..."

I like them both, but Sunset Boulevard wins, if only for the "if the lady's paying, why not have the alpaca" moment.

hay everyone listen up - david lynch makes clemenza think of that time the simpsons made fun of david lynch - poll is null

Lost Highway is not superior to MD Tuomas you crazy

Yes, thank you for the translation--the poll is null. That's clearly what I was saying.

Inland Empire is better than both, but I may vote for the old one out of misguided duty.

Lost Highway is not superior to MD Tuomas you crazy

I would have thought they were sufficiently of a piece for it not to be a mark of madness to prefer one to the other.

lol lost highway is ass

it's basically a dry run for mullholland dr

i don't think it's ass but def. not as good

great zeitgeist-y cash-in soundtrack!

both are great,but because most ilxor's are between 20 to 40 years old - MD will win.

i think SB is also one of Lynch's top 5 favourite films ever.

I agree, if the average ilxor was 70 to 90 years old then SB in a landslide

xp

even from 50 something

ok,david lynch's favourite films,in this boring list of great movies:

8.5
sunset boulevard
Monsieur Hulot's Holiday
rear window.

I actually like Lost Highway a little better than Mulholland Dr myself, but yeah shut up Tuomas.

50 something film fans would've been 30 somethings when blue velvet came out. lol we old.

I took my girlfriend to go see blue velvet. we were 16, and she told her mother I took her to a porno movie.

on the drive she said "don't you fucking look at me!"

*drive home

should've seen ferris bueller I guess

I prefer Lost Highway over Mulholland Drive too...

To me, Lost Highway wasn't a "dry run" for Mulholland Drive, MD was more like a rehash of of LH with more boobs. I guess you could argue that more boobs automatically makes a movie better, but I don't feel so. Don't get me wrong though, I think MD is quite good (the scene in the theatre where the woman is singing "Crying" in Spanish is one of the best things Lynch has ever done), but since LH already had the exact same plot, and since LH is aesthetically more pleasing and structurally tighter (there's some scenes in MD that would've made sense if the movie would've been a pilot for a TV series, as originally intended, but in self-contained film they feel extraneous), it's not hard to choose LH over MD.

Tuomas it's like you didn't see Mulholland Drive at all.

the exact same plot?

I liked MD more than LH by quite a bit, but I did notice similarities between them.

MD is about Hollywood. Lost Highway is not.

they use some similar devices (like the big pivot point halfway through the story), but i'd say they use them differently and are about different things

I can't be arsed to type it all again, but I tried to explain the similarities between LH and MD in this thread. Here's the more relevant post:

My problem with Mulholland Drive is that it has the exact same the story as Lost Highway. Here's how it goes:

The main character gets jealous of his/her wife/girlfriend.
-> S/he kills her / gets her killed.
-> S/he can't bear the guilt, and escapes into a fantasy world, where their love story is purer, resembling Hollywood fiction. Also, s/he losts his/her memory of what has happened, but glimpses of the past are still coming through.
-> Ultimately, his/her fantasy won't last, and s/he returns to the the real world.
-> S/he kills herself / goes mad / is executed because of his/her sin.

The fact that the "dream" part of the film is the first half in Mulholland Drive, and the second half in Lost Highway, doesn't change the fact that the plot is very similar.

― Tuomas (Tuomas), 12. tammikuuta 2004 15:03 Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

But yeah, I'm not saying MD and LH are totally similar, obviously there are some thematic and aesthetic differences, I just think they have the same basic plot, and LH did it better.

"Tuomas it's like you didn't see Mulholland Drive at all."

I'm not sure he saw Lost Highway (there are tons of boobs in that movie!!!)

Yeah, but not a lesbian sex scene.

You didn't specify more lesbian boobs.

in Finland, it doesn't count unless they're lesbian boobs

Straight from the big book of finnish boob rules.

girls aren't naked unless they're naked together

u americans are soooo uptight

I've touched a lot less boobs than I originally thought by finnish boob rules.

so are our boobs

I've touched a lot less boobs than I originally thought by finnish boob rules.

those were merely "chests"

(or as they say in Finnish: "lihaperäpukamat")

Oh I think my IKEA cabinet is called that.

IKEA chest

(or as they say in Finnish: "lihaperäpukamat")

Wtf, do you know what this actually means?!

I don't want to even ask how Dan found that word.

hahahahahahaha that worked better than I could have possibly imagined

(as an explanation, "meat/flesh" should be obvious but I translated "piles" without really thinking about what I was doing)

LOL

Oh, so it was just a mistranslation? I thought you'd actually found some very weird Finnish euphemism for "boobs".

Actually, in a way you have.

was originally going to go for "globes" but the Finnish translation had no umlauts

but Fedora has no shots of Bill Holden emerging wet from swimming pool.

he appears briefly in tighty whities tho!

i think SB is also one of Lynch's top 5 favourite films ever.

― Zeno, Tuesday, October 20, 2009 12:06 PM (4 years ago)

yeah, for sure. from an interview with Lynch in the book Lynch on Lynch (Lynch! Lynch!!!):

Q: I understand that you screened Sunset Boulevard for everyone before you began filming Eraserhead. Why that movie?

A: Sunset Boulevard is in my top five movies, for sure. But there wasn’t anything in particular about it that related to Eraserhead. It was just a black-and-white experience of a certain mood.

xp in 1978

not sure any other Golden Age star did so... even at sixty

^ RIP.

Morbs would be jovially disappointed in me for not ever having seen Sunset Blvd but I plan to remedy that in a couple of weeks - there's a 16mm print screening in Hackney.

Bill Holden? He’s been dead for…oh.

I second his recommendation of the film Fedora, not to be confused with the erstwhile restaurant of the same name. https://www.nycgo.com/articles/fedorable-slideshow

well i finally saw it, in a glorious (actually not glorious) 16mm reduction print, with optical sound track, at the Castle Cinema. actually the quality was not terrible. What a film. Holden's curdled rejection of love at the end was genuinely shocking to me. and Gloria Swanson, i mean what is there to say. I get it now. All the amazing lines, sure ("we didn't need dialogue then! we had FACES!") but she travels across the lines like a spirit animal, just amazing. probably the greatest single moment for me is when she stands up during the private screening of one of her own movies, with the light flickering across her face, she holds up a claw-like hand, i don't even remember what she was saying, but that image, the memory of cruel command, still lingering like an aftertaste, the light washing over her.. sheesh

Famous image, I think.

https://www.denofgeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/sunset-boulevard-1950-wallpapers-2.jpg?resize=768%2C432

yes, that scene but there’s an eerier shot where it’s just her and the light is actually strobing over her as she speaks, and the effect is like a horror movie, like the bride of frankenstein or something

IIRC it's an "I'll show them all" moment as she's running up the Salome project.

she’d make such an incredible salome!!

Her Chaplin impersonation was first-rate too.

^^^^ favorite part of Waxman's score there, too

yeah, incredible. she had it down.

i DIED during her parasol bit. in a bathing costume, standing on a side table, twirling and twirling and jumping into bill holden's disgruntled lap. oh she was so happy.

i'm sure acres has been written on holden's cynicism - 'pictures that mean something? oh, that was last year' and you're rooting so hard for him to snap out of it that you're even rooting for him to steal his friend's girl. but he's too honorable for that - or too cynical? that you don't know where one stops and the other begins is part of the genius of the ending.

paris review interview with wilder re: SB here: https://cinephiliabeyond.org/sunset-boulevard-billy-wilder-charles-bracketts-sobering-exposure-dark-side-hollywood/

as well as an early script where the first scene would have been set in a morgue, with holden's 'spirit' conversing with the other corpses.