Change Your Image
brananedgens
Reviews
Lynch (2007)
It's Lonely Being Lynch
It's Lonely Being Lynch.
The new documentary "Lynch" reveals so much about the man and his methods without pretending to understand him. I have been very disappointed by many of the reviews of this film it seems the reviewers were expecting a different movie and were frustrated they were not seeing the film they imagined or hoped to see. V.A. Musetto writes, "Provides little new insight into Inland Empire". Was it supposed to? Variety complained, "like the feature it loosely chronicles, has no immediately discernible through line and a wide variety of video-image densities". Again, this sounds less like criticism and more like complaining. The Village Voice, "Much of this is tedious -- no more or less exciting than surveillance-cam footage of a regional sales manager." Expecting excitement seems to be the failure here. And most obtuse of all is Ken Fox's review, "anyone looking for a general overview of the director will do better looking elsewhere." Again this presumes that "Lynch" should have been a general overview, when it wasn't meant to be. All of these criticisms sound like blaming an elephant for not being a Zebra.
The documentary does assume the audience is already familiar with Lynch, his work and specifically, Inland Empire. I think it would be a fantastic companion piece for the DVD release of Inland Empire.
I found the film incredibly illuminating and I have been an avid fan of Lynch's for the past 20 years. I have always respected his refusal to explain things and resistance to simple symbolism. So I didn't expect the film to offer any insight into a man who is so famously inscrutable. But the filmmakers did it right they simply present the viewers with various vignettes of the man at work and in various moods: joyous, contemplative, angry, frustrated, depressed and inspired. But throughout the work something else emerged about the man: It's Lonely Being Lynch. The man is a slave to his creative urges and it makes little room for close personal relationships. The frustration this causes is palpable and it suddenly hit me that THIS is the source of that peculiar haunted anxiety that typifies what we all now call "Lynchian". There is a scene in "Lynch" where he stands in an abandoned factory and yells into the cold cavernous space, "Sally! Do you remember me?" over and over. It's funny at first but the more he yells the more desperate it sounds and finally haunting, "Lynchian". He can fill even a candid moment such as a sound check with so many layers of meaning and emotion he seems more like a conjurer. The filmmakers knew to let the moment go for a long time to let the ghosts emerge. I knew then and there this filmmaker really knew this was the only way to make a portrait of the man.
Some people have complained that the film is not chronological enough. It is critical that it isn't. To arrange these vignettes into chronological order would create a sense of narrative and causation This doc must avoid this kind of editing. To make obvious spatial or causal relations between the vignettes would presume to know more about Lynch than even Lynch seems to know about himself. It's the only kind of approach that could ever work to describe such an inscrutable character.
I have studied Lynch for decades and read everything on him I can find. I didn't expect to learn anything from this doc but I did. There are moments of watching him work where his focus is so palpable, his need so urgent that suddenly I had new insights into his work. The insight comes from seeing what gets him excited and getting clues to his motivation. I could even sense my opinions on his films reordering retroactively as I watched this documentary.
If you are a fan, do not hesitate to see "Lynch". If you are looking for an "unpacking" of his motives then you are probably not the kind of person who likes him or his films anyway.
Birth (2004)
a perverse bit of film
After seeing, and liking, "Sexy Beast" and "Birth", I think Glazer is master of making a truly unnerving viewing experience. I'm not saying "Birth" is perfect, I think it works as a thriller and as a very adroit exploration of grief. Essentially it's more about Kidman not being able to let go of her dead husband (any arguments about who Sean really is, is beside the point). I was amazed by Glazer's mastery of tone, pacing (esp. the picture cutting). His control does a lot to fatten-up what is really a pretty thin script. I enjoyed the film a lot and Glazer had me in his palm. Then I walked out of the theater and thought, "Wait a minute, I've been had!" Glazer was messing with us- asking us to believe the impossible, working to gain our trust and then dropping us just when we think it's safe to trust him. I could almost hear him saying, "Sucker!". However, some viewers will be bothered by this and some will enjoy the trick. I have to hand it to him, he got me. Good for him.
A lot of people have been commenting on the cinematography. The murky cinematography was serviceable and can be justified by the murky story. However, this film was dangerously underexposed: no true blacks nor whites, signs of an oversimplified lighting scheme. Not that this is bad, it can always be called an aesthetic and be defended and explained retroactively. But this is not Oscar-worthy lighing by any stretch. Again, I thought it was fitting, but the Oscar people are going to see the first five minutes and it will not even be worth considering.