College kid returns to his hometown after his dad is injured in a freak accident. Kid finds severed ear on the ground. Kid plays Scooby-Doo detective. Kid hides in a closet. Kid gets caught in the middle of a crazy kidnapping scheme. Kid falls in love. Kid has final boss battle with loco Dennis Hopper. Just another day in the sleepy town of Lumberton, right?

Imagine if you could show Blue Velvet to someone unfamiliar with any of the actors. Now, ask them two questions. When was the movie made, and what year does the story of Blue Velvet take place? To me, Blue Velvet looks ageless and timeless. The cinematography and the look of the actual film are flawless.…

White picket fences, suburban subversion, sexual repression and violence - David Lynch’s recurring themes and obsessions emerge fully formed in this hyperreal nightmare of wholesome Americana and sadomasochism. The term ‘Lynchian’ immediately conjures up dreamy images of small town America distorted by dark forces and although Blue Velvet marked Lynch’s fourth directorial effort it is a film that best encapsulates his entire career as he continues to recycle and reexamine these nightmare fantasies.

Causing a stir upon its release in 1986, Blue Velvet captures a world of contradictions as Lynch contrasts the neat gardens and painted smile facade of suburban life with its dark underbelly of crime and sexual perversion. By the director’s later standards the film is far more…

I basically crawled up from my "cinema cave" to write this. My body, mind, and soul is like half-cooled jello. I feel like I was assaulted and beaten in a nightmare, only to wake up into another nightmare that's even worse. Blue Velvet just gave me a cinegasm, an experience so thoroughly sensational, terrifying, ingenious, and astoundingly perfect that all I could do at the end was cry and collapse onto the floor.

David Lynch's film is both his finest masterpiece as well as the greatest film of the 1980s. It's that brilliant, mind-boggling, devastating, goofy, disturbing, hilarious, and saddening. Let's say that there was a giant semi-truck carrying every emotion in the world, and it just hit me. All…

100

MKE Film Fest #5

"Are you the one that found the ear.....?

And then she emerges. Out of a simmering, endless night, one of mystery and strange occurances, Sandy is a figure of innocence; pink and bold, radiant and curious. She's another version of Jeffrey in many ways ("You're a neat girl." "So are you...I mean you're a neat guy."), but still tied to small-town perspective, unraveling clues and revelations long past their due date (particularly when Dorothy is taken back to her parents' household) and unconsciously clinging to the façade. It makes the basement house party scene fascinating in that Jeffrey yearns to regain the shining purity which Sandy beckons, yet he cannot turn back from what he's…

It’s a mystery film that is a true mystery. There’s a lot of symbolism and interpretations that can be made of this film that would make this post a near novel, so I want to discuss about the tangibility of David Lynch’s direction and how he uses that to strain out the surrealism. 

The one thing I have to commend David Lynch on is, although his films are quite frankly a lot to grasp, his direction is reserved for the most part and flashes where it needs to. “If something is, just let it be”. Many unexperienced filmmakers want to heighten it’s hypnotic qualities, but by not doing that David Lynch does. It’s like a double negative. That’s what gives…