03 Oct
The bride-t0-be and I saw Zombieland on Thursday night in a just-advanced screening (thanks, Aint it Cool!). The movie, which is getting plenty of attention and giving plenty of advertisement, is excellent in a funny and violent and ludicrous way. It’s also receiving comparisons to Shaun of the Dead, since both movies are zombie comedies with a touch of romance. Shaun of the Dead is also one of the better zombie movies ever produced, and for its part, Zombieland is the best effort to date in the realm of Fast Zombies (as portrayed in 28 Days Later and the Dawn of the Dead remake).
Despite these obvious comparison points–all zombie movies are always compared to Romero, and now, presumably, all funny zombie movies that are successful will be compared to Shaun of the Dead–the movie I found myself most thinking about as the credits scrolled is one I remember being called The Legend of Hidden Lake, but since I cannot find that title on IMDB, I can only assume I’m misremembering this film, The Legend of Evil Lake, which seems as though it has a roughly similar plot.
Legend of Evil Lake is a Korean movie about ancient warriors and magic and power-lust. What struck me most about it, however, was that each action scene in the movie managed to reveal elements of the character. The way each character fought revealed their emotions and motivations and who they were. Zombieland is similar in this regard. Its narrator, Columbus, played by Jesse Eisenberg, is nervous and awkward, and keeps alive by following an ever-expanding list of survival rules that he keeps in a small notebook with him at all times. He runs before he shoots. Woody Harrelson’s Tallahassee, meanwhile, is sadistic in his zombie killing. The zombies have taken everything away from him, and he, crazed, will take some back. The world is now a videogame for Tallahassee.
Don’t see the movie for that, though. See it for big trucks and guns and bloody clowns and the quick fire jokes. The fact that the action isn’t just empty noise is merely a bonus.
15 Sep
I confess: David Lynch simply does it for me. I’ve seen now four of his movies: Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, Mulholland Dr., and now Lost Highway. His movies engage a variety of esthetic features. Eraserhead is black&white, with German expressionism popping in there; Blue Velvet touches film noir and has the rough, grainy feeling of the story it tells; Mulholland Dr is rich and daring and colorful; Lost Highway has the the aching calm of the ride home after a car accident.
Part of the appeal is the inscrutability. Lynch’s films can be explained in a sentence. Lost Highway: A movie about a man who may have killed his wife. This sentence is entirely true, and fails to reach any of the conflicts that make it so compelling. While talking about the movie today, a friend, entering the conversation late, asked what it was about, and I used that very sentence. His reply was a demanding: “And what?”
To get at the heart of the movie, it’s perhaps better go almost on a scene-by-scene basis. Fred Madison and his wife, Renee, are receiving unlabeled videotapes of their house. The tapes continue, and with increasing detail, coming inside the house to a shot of the them sleeping. The police can do nothing. Fred Madison, saxophonist and the husband, meets a mysterious and patently creepy man at a party. Meet Robert Blake:
The Mystery Man is a man of talent. He has Fred call his own house, and when Fred does so, the Mystery Man, standing in front of Fred at the party, answer’s the house phone. The scene is executed with malice and restraint. Fred is, like the audience, sufficiently creeped out.
The next day, another videotape comes in, unmarked as ever, and this one shows Fred killing his wife in their bedroom. Suddenly, Fred is convicted of murder. Suddenly he is in prison. Suddenly he is a man named Pete Dayton, and Pete Dayton is free. Free to fall in love with a woman named Alice, who looks identical to Fred’s deceased wife, and whom is the mistress of Mr Eddy, an apparent gangster.
In an effort to escape Mr Eddy, Pete and Alice attempt to rob an associate of Mr Eddy’s. They take what they’ve stolen, and drive out to the middle of the desert to visit a fence, who will give the money for the stolen goods. The fence isn’t home, so they’ll have to wait. Alice and Pete start to go at it on the desert floor. Pete tells Alice he wants her. Alice replies, “You’ll never have me,” and she darts up and into the fence’s cabin. When Pete stands up, he’s Fred Madison again. The Mystery Man appears, again, mysteriously, and leads Fred into the cabin. Alice is gone.
Fred, of course, asks where she’s gone. The Mystery Man replies with hostility, that she is gone and her name is Renee. If she said her name was Alice, she lied. And your name? What the fuck is your name? The mystery man is wearing a camcorder, and he is angry, and he is dangerous in ways that are entirely left to the audience’s imagination. Fred’s imagination has him pegged as damn frightening, also, and Fred books it from the cabin back to the car. The mystery man keeps pace without running or hurrying. Fred gets the car’s engine started and drives away.
He drives to the Lost Highway Motel. He pulls Mr Eddy from his room there, brings him outside. The mystery man reappears, shows Mr Eddy a handheld TV depicting Eddy and Renee having an affair. The Mystery Man shoots Mr Eddy, and drives away in Mr Eddy’s car. Fred goes off to tie up one little loose end, and ends up getting chased down the highway by cops. As he is doing so, he is getting apparently electrocuted, and is metamorphosing into yet something else. End scene. End movie. Being sober contemplation as to what the hell happened.
There are a few guidelines, I think, that are helpful when watching Lynchian cinema.
First: time is an illusion. Or, rather, it is flexible. The sequence of events should be questioned at every turn.
Second: if it is too fantastical to be real, it’s probably someone’s imagination.
My guess: Fred found his wife cheating, and killed her in a fit of rage and madness. The madness continues, and while in solitary confinement in prison, he imagines himself younger, free, and with his wife again. The dream unravels and reassembles, until the end in which Fred receives electroshock therapy. You can make your own theories.
On this view, the movie reminds me a bit of Finnegans Wake, in that both LH and FW take place in at least two distinct realities, with no clear lines of demarcation between them. The major difference, I suppose, is that the individual scenes that compose LH are deeply interesting and compelling the narrative forward, while FW is exhausting at every opportunity.
Images come from here, here,.
