This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.
“Now it’s dark.”
“Blue Velvet” is my favorite movie and has been since I first saw it in 1990.
“You’re like me.”
To me, the film is about the extraordinary, superhuman lengths a mother will go to in order to keep her child safe. Yes, the movie is also about Jeffrey’s descent into an underworld he is unprepared to deal with. It’s also about the embodiment of pure evil and what that evil is capable of doing to good. But…
It is entirely possible that I'm the world's biggest "Texasville" fan. People will gasp when I say this, but I have even been forced to simply admit to myself that I love it more than "The Last Picture Show" (a movie I love quite a bit!). Now that the two movies sit in front of me in the same Criterion set, I'm aware that I reach for the sequel more often than the original. I'm even willing to entertain the…
The first Bond movie to be enormous, over the top, action packed and gorgeous from top to bottom. The first shot in widescreen, too. While "Goldfinger" may have created the classic Bond template, "Thunderball" exploits it for everything it's worth, which just so happens to be a whole lot. The underwater photography was surely revolutionary, as well as the film's heavy use of sharks. "Thunderball" has been ripped off by so many other movies - especially within the Bond franchise…
I am never not astonished by the fact that this was John Huston's directorial *debut*. He wrote the screenplay, too. What a marvelous collection of insane characters and Bogart in the middle of it all, navigating this sea of craziness.
