Everything about Lynch's Dune feels compromised. The source material is so lore-heavy and dense with plot that anything in this film which would establish the characters and the world is jettisoned in order to hit that 135 minute runtime and still feel at least somewhat coherent.
The end result is a film scrambling so frantically to get from A to B that we lose all sense of why everything is happening or why we should care. By contrast, Denis Villeneuve…
Perhaps the greatest testament to David Lynch's artistry is that, in another life, he could have made countless blockbusters, prestige dramas and crowd pleasers. He didn't go down that route and we as an audience are all the more blessed because of that but, in The Straight Story, we're reminded that he was and always had been someone who deeply understood how to tell an accessibly powerful and moving tale.
That's not to say The Straight Story isn't Lynchian because…
Other than a very brief acknowledgement at the end, the real story of this Netflix documentary is the one it isn't trying to tell: The story of the media trying to exploit someone who was clearly mentally unwell.
Many of the talking heads featured in The Hatchet Wielding Hitchhiker are the reporters, producers and other hangers-on who stumbled across an oddly charismatic and seemingly heroic young man who reached meme status and tried to capitalise on his popularity. They quickly…
The Substance is the bastard child of Showgirls and Society. This is a film with a message and it has no interest in delivering that message with any kind of grace or subtlety. This is a film that just goes and goes and keeps going until you’re physically exhausted by endless repetitions of grimacing and laughing nervously. Watch it with an audience.
(Might revisit this review later and expand on my thoughts when more lucidity returns to me. What a…
