Mulholland Drive

My wife and I watched this together right before it went off netflix. It was pretty much our first artsy movie together, I think. Usually we watch Kung fu movies or comedies when the kids aren't monopolizing the tv. She was so pissed off at me.

ha ha!

Came here with some half-thoughts about mulholland drive, now just want to talk about how bad swimming pool is.

But maybe there's something in that juxtaposition of two films which you might categorise as 'films with sex in them'.

The Lynch film doesn't pretend not to be soft porn in its soft porn parts, whereas swimming pool spent most of its time trying to convince you that it was worthy and artistic or something.

Mulholland is also as scary and unsettling as anything Lynch has ever done, whereas swimming pool is just creepy in ways it doesn't intend. The teenage girl's character was very obviously written by a man for a male audience.

Mulholland also continued Lynch's thing of looking at the - well, I'm not going to say 'seedy underbelly of Puritan America', but you know what I mean, using the idea of the proper and the improper, a sympathy with both the nice sunny world and the dark forbidden world. Whereas swimming pool was pushing a strained 'Look, here in France we are sexy and do not care!' sensibility which by now is pretty much its own white picket fence.

And look how MD uses the conventions of Hollywood, noir, and Americana and makes them into something that frightens you, whereas SP claims to be Artistic European Cinema and ends up boring you.

Dunno. This is all tentative and I'm aware that people here know Lynch better than I do.

Blu-ray on Criterion in October

http://www.criterion.com/films/28050-mulholland-dr

*faints*

Would be happier if not for the region-locking.

It would be cool if they included the 'pilot' cut in the extras

this is so cool

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eh6JtllRkPQ

interesting to go back and see so little enthusiasm for this when it came out. this is widely now considered one of the best films since 2000, and Lynch's second best film after Blue Velvet. no?

http://images.amazon.com/images/P/B00020HB7S.01.LZZZZZZZ.jpg

taking sides

yeah it is weird, also strange that there's comparatively little press or promo for this. No talkshows iirc, total opposite of Lost Highway media blitz. Don't know why.

Lynch was on Leno when Mulholland Drive came out in 2001

I seem to remember MD was pretty big at the time. It got a swag of awards and nominations. My memory is that it came at a time when Lynch's reputation had tapered off somewhat, and this put him right back on the pedestal.

The media consensus was that Lynch had lost his way. I think the expectation after Lost Highway was that he would go on making critically divisive, minor cult films. People had also largely heard that MD was a rejected TV pilot with some new footage tacked on. This was one of those unexpected comebacks that has a hell of an impact.

this is widely now considered one of the best films since 2000, and Lynch's second best film after Blue Velvet. no?

Try best.

And it won the NYFCC's best film award, along with iirc the Village Voice critics poll.

eric OTM

yes

"So little enthusiasm" -- wha??

Naomi Watts even got faint Oscar buzz

so little enthusiasm in this thread, i think they meant

yes, I meant this thread

Mulholland Drive came out when ILX was down and all the discus was on the Sandbox iirc

yah we were goin nutz for it i saw it like 5 times in the theater

there's a couple of copies of ilx.thehold.net and sandbox.thehold.net on archive.org but I can't find that discussion I think

i saw this in the theater when it came out, it was amazing, and i was on ILX at the time, but didnt really bother posting here. don't take the lack of posts for a lack of enthusiasm me and my friends drove around the parking lot afterwards screaming with joy.

i saw it when it came out and immediately stabbed my eyes out so i would never see another movie ever again

....naido?

NA eyed 0

Holy shit lynch is a genius

lol

it was right there, staring us all in the face for all these years

this explains the lack of posts. you can't see what you are writing when you have no eyes

When I first saw his movie, I immediately started it over and watched it again.

I watched it on two screens simultaneously

seeing this in a theater that looks just like Silencio earlier this year was one of the best moviegoing experiences i've ever had

Yeah I have vivid memories of seeing an advance free screening of this on my college campus. Was stunned by how great it was. When the cowboy gave his "You will see me one more time if you do good; you will see me two more times if you do bad" bite I remember laughing at how clever it was. The rest of the movie the audience gasped whenever he appeared on screen. This is Lynch's most entertaining movie by a mile.

I don't know how to objectively measure "most acclaimed," but here MD is 64th, Blue Velvet 77th.

http://www.theyshootpictures.com/gf1000_all1000films.htm

i always thought The Elephant Man was his mainstream claim to fame but on that list it's at 464. i need to rewatch it, i remember seeing it when i lived in this house with SCAD video artists and really liking it.

Mulholland Drive was just an endless series of crazy events. it felt like someone had observed a random movie or television scene while going through an out of body experience. perhaps how an alien would replicate the human drama, only it was purposefully sending up the formalisms that tend to be taken for granted. it was thrilling to watch.

holy shit! what was with that crazy bluescreen swing scene? we lol'd almost immediately at that and the super grinny old folks with Naomi Watts as she arrives at this weird artificial California. when they are in the limo it's so comically grotesque. we almost fell out of the chairs when Billy Ray Cyrus showed up. that casting! wtf? this was years before Miley, years before his ironic cultural resurgence, years past being a Weird Al joke. David Lynch wrote him the perfect character. same with the cowboy, who apparently wasn't an actor, and who couldn't remember his lines. they had to write them on notecards and tape them to Jon Favreau's face for him to do the scene and he did it perfectly. when he shows up, i was like, what the literal fuck? that was this movie endlessly. Club Silencio -- it is all a tape! the hand signals and the trumpets!

much like the new Twin Peaks it was a lot of scenes that may not necessarily narratively connect but for sure are connected through symbols and the artistic language of emotions through more abstract forms such as lighting, colors, themes, motifs, dialog repetition, etc. i am glad to see he has gotten the opportunity to work with Naomi again! it is extra poignant when you consider Mulholland Drive was conceived at one point as a Twin Peaks spinoff.

lol when the cowboy shows up. WTF. ROTFLITMT

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0stnhrOj6p8

this is really cool

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HytOc0KxFGU

Location trail
http://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/news-bfi/features/mulholland-drive-david-lynch-locations

wow, had no idea that Diane's apartment was in the Snow White cottages. that Elliott Smith connection is nuts, yeah he spent a lot of time there in the last years of his life, sadly living very similarly to Diane, productive but completely cracked out and losing it...

pretty certain that steph1n merr1tt also lived there for a time, based on a memory from the documentary from a few years back.

that Elliott Smith connection is nuts

Positively. Didn't know what I saw when I read that!

Iirc he lived there during some of the writing for Figure 8 and maybe Basement but it wasn’t very long...

though now a 1br goes for ~$2700

you can rent a cheaper 1br on the western/nicer side of west hollywood

pretty certain that steph1n merr1tt also lived there for a time, based on a memory from the documentary from a few years back.

He wrote a song about it, "In the Snow White Cottages," which references Mulholland Drive, Elliott Smith and The Raveonettes.

covered love theme from this score, from my favourite film

https://we.tl/1Nc19Gj3Ls

you made this, Ross?

here's mp3

https://we.tl/oH8IxWLaQV

yeah i did

Hadn’t thought about that but yeah.

I wouldn't recommend it unless you've watched 60 other Bergman films.

I love Bergman's films from 1963 - 1969 and am ambivalent about the rest. I'd like to see The Touch, although the only critic who admired it was Robin Wood.

I wouldn't recommend it unless you've watched Hour of the Wolf first.

Heh

I saw a handful in college, but the only one I have a strong memory of is Scenes From a Marriage (which I loved).

Previously I was only aware of the Ingrid Bergman connection.

Just want to call out my favorite shot from the movie. The long zoom-out at the start of this clip, from what looks like a live musical performance to what is then revealed as a radio broadcast and then as a filmed scene of a radio broadcast. It breaks the 4th wall and just keeps on breaking them. I think it's a perfect little encapsulation of what the movie has to say about both filmmaking and storytelling in general, including the stories we tell ourselves. Also, it's just gorgeous to watch.

― a man often referred to in the news media as the Duke of Saxony (tipsy mothra), Monday, April 19, 2021 12:00 PM (six days ago) bookmarkflaglink

man good post have not watched this in too long, its kind of sad the popular conception of lynch is dark/weird/abstract which doesnt give him credit for mastery of the form

Silencio.

I really have to ban myself from using the word vertiginous when talking about certain lynch moments but that (and inland empire locomotion) is this incredible moment where you feel the trapdoor give

El resto es silencio.

I think Hour of the Wolf was maybe the 4th Bergman film I watched and I still like it, totally worth seeing as long as you like the idea of Bergman doing gothic horror.

Yeah, I remember enjoying it, but that it was kind of atypical, Bergman-lite maybe, like almost a self-parody or close to what detractors thought he was doing.

Max von Sydow didn't turn into a werewolf, so it sucked

Count Floyd: "Oh well, it wasn't scary but they got depressed at the end, didn't they, kids? You think it's not scary to be depressed? Did you see them? They, they couldn't... function in this world... with the faces... all those faces..."

Watched this again last night and the crescendo of the old couple slipping under the door and terrorizing Diane until she finds the gun to end her screams ... it's just unbelievable what this guy does with overlapping images and sounds and effects. Nothing else like it in film excepting maybe the end of The Return.

Yep. Besides all his weirdness and originality, he's also just a virtuoso of image and sound.

Lol at Count Floyd coming over from the Midnight Cowboy thread. #onethread

What's amazing is how the old couple are smiling in exactly the same way at the beginning and end of the film. They might even be more terrifying in that hired car after meeting Betty/Diane.

Yeah, that whole thing is WTF.

Like where are they going and why are they behaving that way?

Having not watched this in the intervening decades since it came out all I could remember was the prurient interest and the general vibe, so was pleasantly surprised how much good stuff there was from beginning to end to appreciate. I don’t have much to add on that front. Trying to think of their is any use in comparing with a film on a somewhat similar theme, The Limey, but the two movies are so different, maybe don’t want to go there.

Also trying to remember the substance of a National Lampoon Bergman parody I read once, The Høwl of the Muppets.

xxp the smiles and laughter of the old couple are echoed by Adam Kesher and Camilla Rhodes later in the film
https://www.mulholland-drive.net/pics/cast/oldcouple1.jpg
https://www.mulholland-drive.net/pics/cast/adam_camilla.jpg
(images from mulholland-drive.net where of course someone noticed it way before I did https://www.mulholland-drive.net/theories/18.htm )

That’s an interesting pairing of images, but it’s hard to take a site seriously that conflates the two different “realities”:

First, we've seen how the hitman operates. It is hardly a stretch to imagine him taking out Adam in the process of killing Camilla. In fact, I think it's a bit of a stretch to imagine him killing ONLY Camilla. This guy murdered a vacuum sweeper for crying out loud.

(FWIW, I only vaguely know what to make of the old couple, but it does seem awfully reductive to declare they “represent Adam and Camilla”)

I don't think the hitman is in the dream reality, he doesn't interact with any of those characters. Some "reality" elements are intercut with Diane's Betty dream (e.g. Dan in the diner). Oddly Adam is the only character who seems to have continuity/identity through both worlds, although several faces repeat.
And no, I don't think that the old couple "represent Adam and Camilla" any more than the diner waitress Betty/Diane "represents" Diane/Betty. The whole film is about twinning, representation, offset realities, dream logic.

Oh, that’s interesting, I definitely don’t agree with that first part of what you wrote… but cool to hear the idea! I guess there’s a lot of ways to read even just the basic “presentation” of the movie.

tbh I'm not even sure I agree with myself!

I mentioned this movie to a friend, and he wrote: “Napkin… NAPKIN!!!!!”

So I guess there are more memorable quotes than I initially thought.

So glad I watched this again.

I’m watching Barry Lyndon—there’s a nice analogue of the dinner party scene near the beginning of the movie (it doesn’t play out the same way, of course…).