I just saw the movie/film "Blue Velvet"

Started by ShanghaiOrange, June 02, 2003, 04:07:20 PM

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phil marlowe

try clicking on the ´quote´button in the post you'd like to quote.

Royal Tenenbaum

Blue Velvet may very well be the best film ever made. There is something wrong with people that don't like it.  :twisted:

godardian

Quote from: GhostboyPhew...not much point in jumping in here, is there? Lynch connects with some people really well, and not so well with others. I can't really say why Mulholland Drive makes me feel like crying in some scenes...it just does.

Me, too.

I'm certain at least some of Lynch's screenplays are available in Farber and Farber paperback... they have a great Lynch on Lynch book, too.
""Money doesn't come into it. It never has. I do what I do because it's all that I am." - Morrissey

"Lacan stressed more and more in his work the power and organizing principle of the symbolic, understood as the networks, social, cultural, and linguistic, into which a child is born. These precede the birth of a child, which is why Lacan can say that language is there from before the actual moment of birth. It is there in the social structures which are at play in the family and, of course, in the ideals, goals, and histories of the parents. This world of language can hardly be grasped by the newborn and yet it will act on the whole of the child's existence."

Stay informed on protecting your freedom of speech and civil rights.

ShanghaiOrange

Update!

I just saw the Elephant Man and it was awesome and I saw Mulholland Drive awhile ago and it was awesome.

And I also remember that I liked in Blue Velvet when the guy was like "that's a human ear alright!"

Yes I know this thread is a year old. :(
Last five films (theater)
-The Da Vinci Code: *
-Thank You For Smoking: ***
-Silent Hill: ***1/2 (high)
-Happy Together: ***1/2
-Slither: **

Last five films (video)
-Solaris: ***1/2
-Cobra Verde: ***1/2
-My Best Fiend: **1/2
-Days of Heaven: ****
-The Thin Red Line: ***

Finn

Typical US Mother: "Remember what the MPAA says; Horrific, Deplorable violence is okay, as long as people don't say any naughty words."

NEON MERCURY

Quote from: ShanghaiOrange
And I also remember that I liked in Blue Velvet when the guy was like "that's a human ear alright!" :(


modage

ISABELLA ROSSELLINI IN PERSON!
At the 7:00 show of BLUE VELVET on Monday, March 6.
Film Forum NYC
http://filmforum.org/films/bluevelvet.html
Christopher Nolan's directive was clear to everyone in the cast and crew: Use CGI only as a last resort.

hedwig

David Lynch, Still Disturbing After 20 Years
By TERRENCE RAFFERTY
feb 26, 06
NY Times

ONE of the very, very few rules about art you can take to the bank is that shock ages badly. But David Lynch's "Blue Velvet," unleashed on a largely unsuspecting public 20 years ago, is, I'm happy to say, breaking that rule as blithely and as decisively as, once upon a time, it broke most of the others. Even after two more decades of Lynchian eccentricity and sensual derangement — years, besides, in which the bar for serious outrage in popular culture has risen to a nearly unreachable height — "Blue Velvet" looks as odd and as beautiful as ever, and it's still a shock.

Film Forum in Manhattan is marking the movie's anniversary with a two-week run that starts Friday. This is a new print but the same old "Blue Velvet," because Mr. Lynch never revises past work; for him, that process would be as senseless as trying to fill in the gaps of a dream once it's been dreamed. What audiences will see, then, is exactly the nightmare that moviegoers of 1986 saw, in all its lurid and lyrical and stubbornly irrational glory, and context makes as little difference to the experience as it does to the experience of any powerful dream: when you wake up, it might take a minute to remember where you are anyway.

The signature line in "Blue Velvet," first spoken by its amateur-detective hero, Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan), is "It's a strange world" — a sentence that 80's viewers greeted with a you-can-say-that-again laugh, and that critics seized on gratefully, as perhaps the lone unimpeachably true statement that could be made about this movie. "Blue Velvet" is a mystery story — Mr. Lynch loves mysteries — but not precisely a whodunit: finding the single, inevitable thread of connection that makes sense of a baffling set of clues is pretty emphatically not the point here. For all the dense portent of the film's hushed, avidly watchful atmosphere, the plot is in fact extremely simple, as brutally functional as the lines in a child's drawing.

Jeffrey has come home from college to his native Lumberton, a small city where his father runs a hardware store; Mr. Beaumont, after collapsing on the lawn, is in the hospital, hooked up to ominous equipment, and Jeffrey takes over the family business. One day, walking through a field, he finds a severed human ear, moldy and crawling with insects, and dutifully informs the police, who thank him but then won't disclose anything about their investigation. The detective's daughter, Sandy (Laura Dern), however, takes it upon herself to tell Jeffrey what she's overheard her father say about the case, and before long this clean-cut college boy is hiding in the closet of a weary-looking local chanteuse named Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini). There, he watches in fascination — and in maybe a shade less horror that you might expect — as Dorothy is insulted, beaten and finally raped by a vicious thug she calls Frank (Dennis Hopper), a drug dealer who has apparently kidnapped her husband and her son.

That's about it, as far as conventional mystery plotting goes: the solution, such as it is, is more or less nailed down in the first third of the picture. As "Blue Velvet" moves forward, though, deeper into the nighttime murk and daylit unease of Lumberton, it becomes clear (if anything is) that the movie's detective-story trappings were always just a means to an end — the director's scheme to lure a couple of appealing, normal young folks like Sandy and Jeffrey into the sick, strange world of the man called Frank. Mr. Lynch's idea, that is to say, is not to make new connections, as detectives do, but to sever as many of the old ones as possible.

That's what surrealists do. And one of the reasons, I think, that "Blue Velvet" seemed so startlingly fresh at the time is that there was not, to put it mildly, a vigorous tradition of surrealism in commercial American film.

About the only precedents for the deliberately disorienting method of this picture can be found in some of the later works of Alfred Hitchcock: in "Vertigo" (1958), "The Birds" (1963) and especially "Marnie" (1964), which shares with "Blue Velvet" a peculiar, awkward formality of tone and a raging undercurrent of psychosexual abnormality, and which was not embraced warmly by Hitchcock's usually loyal audience. Mr. Lynch had himself made just three previous feature films, only one of which — his brilliant debut, the low-budget black-and-white domestic horror fantasy "Eraserhead" (1977) — delivered Lynchian surrealism in its pure state. In the others, the delicately grotesque "Elephant Man" (1980) and the ungainly science fiction epic "Dune" (1984), his wilder fancies were held at least partly in check.

So for most members of the audience, "Blue Velvet" was a completely new kind of movie experience. Its sordid matter unnerved people less, I think, than its unfamiliar — hence vaguely threatening — manner. After all, most moviegoers had seen much more graphic violence than anything in "Blue Velvet," had heard a greater quantity of foul language in prestigious pictures like "Raging Bull" and had probably gazed, with some interest and maybe even some pleasure, on a naked body or two. (Though rarely, it should be said, on one quite so rawly and unglamorously exposed as Ms. Rossellini's is here.) What's tough to handle, particularly if you aren't used to it, is the volatility of the film's tone — the abrupt, unsignaled alternations between teen-movie sweetness and splatter-movie depravity, between brazenly sophomoric humor and abject horror, between innocence and the direst kind of experience.

And it's the innocence, finally, that makes "Blue Velvet" genuinely and uniquely shocking. Mel Brooks, whose company produced "The Elephant Man," once famously described Mr. Lynch as "Jimmy Stewart from Mars"; and there is something wide-eyed and wholesome and all-American about Mr. Lynch, which is real and is, it seems to me, the ultimate, improbable source of his work's power to disturb and appall.

The central question of "Blue Velvet," voiced with winning bluntness by Jeffrey, is "Why are there people like Frank?" Frank, played with insane gusto by Mr. Hopper, is such a one-of-a-kind monster of obscenity that the line might make you laugh: Are there people like Frank? But it's a sincere question, because in Mr. Lynch's imagination there are. Frank is, when you come down to it, a child's vision of adulthood, the cartoon embodiment of all the things a curious kid might picture grown-ups doing when they're on their own and out of sight: they do drugs, they curse a lot, they have parties with incomprehensible friends (like this movie's indelibly weird Ben, played by Dean Stockwell as the epitome of suavity), and, when the opportunity presents itself, they have fast, loud, ugly sex.

It takes a mighty innocent eye to see the world that way: a way that, although it generates monsters, also keeps everyday life interesting, surprising and perpetually strange. That's what all Mr. Lynch's movies are about, and why they have, in their demented fashion, a kind of Peter Pan quality: they're made by someone who has willed himself not to outgrow the immediacy and berserk randomness of a child's perceptions, and to take the really scary stuff along with the really neat stuff, just as it comes.

Mr. Lynch's Neverland, whether it's called Lumberton or Twin Peaks or Mulholland Drive, is by design timeless, fundamentally impervious to the grown-up perspective that lets most of us assimilate our experiences into something like a traditional detective story: a narrative that explains the past and allows us to move (however dully) on. The world "Blue Velvet" creates is static, an imaginative city of simultaneity in which everything, good and bad, is present all at once.

Of course that's shocking. "Blue Velvet," which delighted many and repelled many others in 1986, is likely to evoke roughly the same mixture of reactions today, and 20 years from now, and on and on. There's no assimilating its dark-and-light vision, no explaining its real mysteries, and no handy term to categorize it: not "hip" (as might have been said back in the day), and certainly not "edgy" (as canny marketers have trained us to say since). Why are there movies like "Blue Velvet"? Because the world is strange, and the strangeness never goes away.

grand theft sparrow

Guy Maddin on Blue Velvet


Velvet Underworld
David Lynch's traumatizing neo-noir masterpiece turns 20

by Guy Maddin
February 28th, 2006 12:47 PM


The last real earthquake to hit cinema was David Lynch's Blue Velvet —I'm sure directors throughout the film world felt the earth move beneath their feet and couldn't sleep the night of their first encounter with it back in 1986—and screens trembled again and again with diminishing aftershocks over the next decade as these picture makers attempted to mount their own exhilarating psychic cataclysms. But no one could quite match the traumatizing combination of horrific, comedic, aural, and subliminal effects Lynch rumbled out in this masterpiece—not even Lynch himself in the fun-filled years that followed before he recombined with himself to invent The Straight Story and Mulholland Drive.

Lynch was born in 1946, part of that first litter of boomers sired by the paranoia of unmedicated war vets jittering and fisting their way through the sudden proliferation of film noir product. In spite of Lynch presenting his tale in the comforting saturated Kodachromes his generation associates with the "innocence" of their childhood years, there is much of what noir does best in Blue Velvet: Kyle MacLachlan's Jeffrey Beaumont slips past the safety rails and hops right into a raging maelstrom of guilt and evil as blithely as any noir protagonist ever did; and Dennis Hopper's Frank Booth is just the necessary incarnation of nightmare that Steve Cochrane's Eddie Roman was in Arthur Ripley's The Chase (1946), the most surrealism-propelled crime film ever to sleepwalk out of the Dark City.

But perhaps it is Isabella Rossellini's femme fatale Dorothy Vallens that is Blue Velvet's greatest gift to posterity. Director and neophyte actress collaborated to retool the old genre's often stock figure, to deglamorize and humiliate the supermodel, to knead her pulpy nakedness into a bruise-colored odalisque of inseminated sensualities and untrusting ferocity. There is something sharply porno-entomological, something of the implacable godless terror with which insects mate and devour, and something terrifyingly true, in the bearing of this bravely performed character. Nuns at Rossellini's old high school in Rome held a series of special masses for her redemption after the release of this film—still a hilarious, red-hot poker to the brain after 20 years. A new print has been struck for the special anniversary two-week run at Film Forum.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Guy Maddin's My Dad Is 100 Years Old—a short made to commemorate the centenary of Roberto Rossellini, starring and written by Isabella Rossellini—will premiere in U.S. theaters this year.


colbent


The Red Vine

ok that one made me laugh. but I'm also easily amused.
"No, really. Just do it. You have some kind of weird reasons that are okay.">

SiliasRuby

The Beatles know Jesus Christ has returned to Earth and is in Los Angeles.

When you are getting fucked by the big corporations remember to use a condom.

There was a FISH in the perkalater!!!

My Collection

Pubrick

Quote from: RedVines on March 07, 2006, 05:03:36 PM
ok that one made me laugh. but I'm also easily amused.
really? this is an example of how NOT to do these fake trailers. it lacked subtlety, creativity, or any sort of redeeming quality. the one joke it had was drilled so deep into the ground it had to rely on two uses of the word "fuck" to barely seem interesting.
under the paving stones.

The Red Vine

Quote from: Pubrick on March 10, 2006, 05:01:19 AM
Quote from: RedVines on March 07, 2006, 05:03:36 PM
ok that one made me laugh. but I'm also easily amused.
really? this is an example of how NOT to do these fake trailers. it lacked subtlety, creativity, or any sort of redeeming quality. the one joke it had was drilled so deep into the ground it had to rely on two uses of the word "fuck" to barely seem interesting.

worked for me, although it's not as great as the Toy Story or Shining ones. the trailers love to make these movies look like the opposite of what they are, that's the point. so here they try to make "Blue Velvet" look like an outrageous romantic comedy. I can't tell you how many trailers I've seen like this. particularly with that "Under Pressure" song. personally I hate those kinds of movies (Something New, Hitch, Meet the Parents, Meet the Fockers) so it was nice to see a trailer that criticizes the formula.
"No, really. Just do it. You have some kind of weird reasons that are okay.">

SiliasRuby

Saw this again recently, It was my first Lynch film and still my fav.
The Beatles know Jesus Christ has returned to Earth and is in Los Angeles.

When you are getting fucked by the big corporations remember to use a condom.

There was a FISH in the perkalater!!!

My Collection