"Mulholland Drive" Criterion Blu-ray Review

 Legendary weirdo David Lynch passed away a few days ago, just shy of marking his 79th lap around the Sun after spending about 70 of those years smoking. The director of Eraserhead, The Elephant Man, Dune (the 1984 bad one), Blue Velvet, Wild at Heart and creator of the Twin Peaks television series had a dedicated fandom who flooded social media with their sadness. For me, it meant it was time to finally open up the Criterion Collection Blu-ray of Mulholland Drive I'd bought in Oct. 2017, nearly 7-1/2 years ago.

 Released in 2001, it began life as a rejected TV series pilot filmed in early-1999 for ABC, the network that carried Twin Peaks. According to Lynch, an executive watched it at 6 am while drinking coffee and talking on the phone and hated it so the project was dead. A French producer was able to get funding to convert it into a feature and additional filming was done a year-and-a-half later in Fall 2000 leading to a premiere at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival where Lynch won Best Director. (Shared with Joel Coen for The Man Who Wasn't There)

 It opens with a limo driving up the titular Los Angeles road. In the back seat is a gorgeous raven-haired woman (Laura Elena Harring - fun fact: she was Miss USA 1985). The limo stops unexpectedly and the driver and his partner produce guns and are preparing to kill her when a car ex machina occurs, crashing into the limo, killing the assailants, and leaving the woman suffering a head injury, wandering down the hills into the city. She finds her way to an apartment complex where an older woman is leaving for a trip. She sneaks into the apartment and hides, getting locked in, and falls asleep.

We then meet Betty (Naomi Watts), arriving at LAX, saying goodbye to an elderly couple she'd met on the flight. She arrives at the same apartment complex and after checking in with the manager, Coco (Ann Miller in her last screen role), goes to her aunt's apartment and discovers the mysterious woman, who after seeing a poster for Rita Hayworth's Gilda, adopts the name. (Rita, not Gilda.) She has amnesia from the blow to the head, but also has a purse with a LOT of cash in it. Who is she and what's up with the money?

We then get scenes with an incompetent hitman (Mark Pellegrino, Supernatural) botching a job; a man who has a dream about a monster behind a diner; and a movie director, Adam (Justin Theroux), who needs a new leading actress for his picture and is being told by some humorless Italian men that there is one particular actress that he will be casting or else and when he goes home he catches his wife in bed with Billy Ray Cyrus. (He's playing a character named Gene, not himself.)

As Betty and Rita investigate where the latter could be from and where the money came from, they go deeper down the rabbit hole, making a shocking discovery. Later that night, they go to Club Silencio where mysterious blue box appears with a keyhole matching a blue key that was in Rita's purse with the cash. Upon opening it, things get weirder beginning with Betty becoming Diane and Rita becoming Camilla before escalating to an exceedingly weird and abrupt ending.

If this doesn't make much sense it's because Mulholland Drive doesn't make much sense. I saw it when it came out and I'm pretty sure I'd seen it since somewhere, but I never owned it prior to this Criterion. All I really remembered about it was the audition scene, (oddly only) one of the two love scenes between Rita and Betty (seriously, I'm a guy; how did I forget the first one?!?), and the ending was just nuts.

 Watching it intently (even during the non-Mr. Skin parts), it's still disjointed and judging from where the new footage takes over from the original pilot (i.e. the pilot has zero swearing, then suddenly the ladies are getting naked), I don't see how this was going to be a series. Robert Forester appears as a police detective at the limo scene and is never seen again. Other bits seem unconnected until the last act and then are recontextualized into new meaning in the last act, but you need to connect those dots.

You're not supposed to admit that you don't understand a movie lest you get hit with the "You didn't get it, man. You're too stupid, so you're opinion means nothing, man!" line of attack, but as with a lot of Lynch's works, I simply didn't get what he was going for. Too often, he seems to be weird for the sake of being weird like when Michael Cera showed up for a scene in Twin Peaks: The Return dressed like Marlon Brando in The Wild One to spout some random gibberish.

Sidebar: The missus is a big fan of Lynch and Eraserhead and I'd bought her the Criterion of that. When we finally got around to watching it, she seemed to be watching me half the time in anticipation of me freaking out over the strangeness. But I didn't, only waiting until the Woman in the Radiator showed up to remark, "And then it got weird." After it was over, I said, "Well, that was something," not the expected, "WHAT THE HELL WAS THAT?!?!?" I got that it was supposed to be this weird nightmare that Lynch willed into existence, making it over a period of years.

But Mulholland Drive's structure didn't make sense to me until I got fed a couple of explainer videos on YouTube which detailed what was reality (pretty much the 3rd act) and what was a dream (everything that came before it). After that, I got what the structure was supposed to be, but the fact that I needed it explained either means me iz 2 stoopid or Lynch's storytelling is too opaque. (I'm going with the latter, thank you very much.) I know he draws heavily from dreams and as such explicitly doesn't explain them, leaving them up to our interpretations, but I think it's a cop-out as much as Anatomy of a Fall basically told the audience to make up their own ending. No, storytellers need to tell their stories, not be A&R guys saying, "I dunno. What do you think?"

That's not to say there's little to recommend Mulholland Drive. Watts' career was launched into the A List off her performance off her complex performance; the audition scene makes an impact for a reason. (It was a shock to see the black-haired Jet Girl from 1995's Tank Girl as a chipper blonde.) Harring somehow didn't despite being totally vavoom. She's appeared in 30 movies and a smattering of TV shows since and I haven't seen any of them except her brief handful of appearances on Gossip Girl which I don't even remember. It's weird how careers diverge for stars of the same film.

Even the random weirdness in isolation is entertaining, but it doesn't amount to a cohesive whole. I just don't easily get on dream logic's wavelength. (I don't need my hand held like a child, but even I was able to understand the symbolism of Elle Fanning kissing her reflection in Nicolas Winding Refn's The Neon Demon.) If you're a fan of the movie, don't let me stop you.

As for this Criterion release, the centerpiece is the new (in 2012) restored 4K scan and restoration transfer supervised by Lynch and director of photography Peter Deming. Colors are good, but sometimes the dark areas get murky as if they were intended for standard def television, which it was. This has also been reissued on 4K UltraHD Blu-ray, but due to the gauzy, dreaming, filtered look often employed, details are fuzzy so save the money and stick with the Blu-ray.

On the supplemental materials front, the bulk are new interviews with Lynch and Watts discussing her casting and the torturous making of the TV pilot and feature (27 mins); casting director Johanna Ray and Watts, Harring, and Theroux about how they were cast (duh) and tales from the set (36 mins); Angelo Badalamenti about his career, his works with Lynch, how he was asked to record low instruments that Lynch then slowed down for his spooky sound design, and how he was cast as the disappointed espresso drinker (20 mins); and cinematographer Deming and production designer Jack Fisk recounting how they fell in with Lynch and the process here (23 mins).

The remainder consists of a single deleted scene with the cops talking about weird stuff for a few minutes and 25 mins of fly-on-the-wall on-set footage showing the grinding process of making a movie. If you're super nerdy about this stuff, it's somewhat interesting, but others may be quickly bored. A booklet with an excerpt of an interview from the book Lynch on Lynch and the trailer rounds things up.

 While I remain lukewarm on the film, if you're a fan then this Criterion release will definitely fill the Mulholland Drive shaped hole in your collection. A good transfer and nearly 2-1/2 hours of extras make an easy pickup during Criterion sales.

Score: 5/10 (movie) - Catch it on cable/streaming; 8/10 (disc) - Buy it.

"Prisoners of the Ghostland" Review

 While trying to find something to watch some time ago the missus and I bookmarked a weird-looking (based on the trailer) trailer for a Shudder Original Nicolas Cage movie called Prisoners of the Ghostland. Tonight we actually got around to watching it. And afterwards we wished we hadn't.

Cage stars as Hero (movies aren't even trying anymore, are they?), a bank robber who while robbing a bank (hey, it's in the job title) with his co-robber, Psycho (Nick Cassavetes; what was I saying about names?), ended up with a lot of dead people is being held in a bizarre Japanese town which seems to be part brothel, part Western frontier town where the armed men either present as cowboys or samurais in service of the Governor (Bill Moseley, many Rob Zombie films), a white man who wears an all white suit and cowboy hat like Boss Hogg on The Dukes of Hazzard. 

Governor wants Hero to find his "granddaughter" (read: escaped sex slave), Bernice (Sofia Boutella), and to keep him focused on his task he puts him in a swank leather suit with explosive charges on his arms and crotch (in case he gets any bad thoughts) and his neck (to kill him) and a five-day lifespan, the last two only if he finds the Bernice by the third day. Tick-tock, Hero!

As he sets off into the bizarre wasteland, he is captured and taken to an odd community built around trying to literally stop time by holding a rope attached to the minute hand of a clock tower. Again, while the people are mostly Japanese, the leader is a white guy. Hero learns of the nuclear accident that occurred there involving a prison bus and tanker of nuclear waste. By the time you factor in the choreographed background cultists dancing, it's all pretty wacky.

And it's also quite dull. Apparently director Sion Sono is a name in the Very Weird Movies genre (I only recognize a couple of his titles), but this, his first English-language movie, while being packed with weird, doesn't make much sense no matter how hard Cage tries to keep us focused. I was wondering if this was all some sort of journey to Hell parable, but it ultimately comes off as being just weird for weird's sake. By the time the final scenes with some action occur, they're welcome because they indicate the movie's almost over.

 I can see why Cage signed on to this freak show (other than for the paycheck) and he doesn't phone in his performance, but there's not much of a character for him to play and he spends too much time unconscious and carted around from one weird spot to another. Boutella has even less to do other than be exotic looking and a flashback revealing how she got a scar and how it connects to Hero's crime confuses as to what sort of timeframe things take place in. Moseley's Governor is a cartoon, again due to the script.

 While the setting and details clearly required thought and planning to execute, the underlying story is simply too thin, confusing, and ultimately irrelevant to merit the time to watch it. If you subscribe to Shudder, randomly flip through it and stop at random spots to see some weird.

Score: 2/10. Skip it (or just skip around the timeline to see some weirdness).

"I'm Thinking of Ending Things" Review

Certain screenwriters names in film credits give a strong hint of what kind of movie experience you're in for. Quentin Tarantino and Aaron Sorkin are synonymous with hyper-literate characters (who may or may not all sound the same) and wildly verbose, yet quotable, dialog (e.g. "Do you know what they call the Quarter Pounder in Europe?" "If you guys were the inventors of Facebook...you would've invented Facebook.") But when it comes to Charlie Kaufman - writer of Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind - the general consensus is "weird." 

So that's how we went into I'm Thinking of Ending Things, his third film as a writer-director,  expecting a long (running time: 2h 15m) slog of oddness and it certainly does take a leisurely stroll to nowhere in the process.

The film opens with a Young Woman (Jessie Buckley; and her character is literally credited that way) waiting on a cold winter's day for her boyfriend Jake (Jessie Plemons), whom she has been dating for six (or seven) weeks, to pick her up for a road trip to meet his parents for the first time. During the exceedingly long drive there, which almost feels like real-time, there is a building sense of tension underscored by her voiceover internal monologue repeatedly saying the movie's title. 

When they arrive, the parents aren't immediately evident, so he takes her on a tour of the farm's barn where the sheep stay and he tells a gruesome story about what happened to the pigs. Returning to the house, she meets his odd parents played by Toni Collette and David Thewlis, and after a half-hour something finally happened to pique my interest. 

On the drive out Jake mentioned that his mother hadn't been feeling well and there probably wouldn't be a big spread for dinner, but when they adjourn to the dining room it is laden with a feast suitable for  multiples of the four present. I had been lulled into a light stupor by the tedium and actually backed the movie up to check what had happened; in the previous shots the dining room was clearly empty and dimly lit, but suddenly there was warm light and all the food.

As the meal proceeds, other anomalies present themselves: Her career seems to have changed from what they discussed in the car; she is getting a stream of text messages with someone with her same name, except her name seems to have changed; and as things move along sharp-eyed viewers will begin to notice some subtle changes to the parents appearances which eventually become so jarring that the WTF?!? alarms start sounding constantly. 

Eventually Jake and Young Woman head for home as she has work in the morning and as the blizzard intensifies things become even more surreal to the extent that in one moment an actress seen in a weird (there's that word again) scene from a rom-com shown replaces Buckley as the Young Woman. Whut?!?! The weirdness compounds itself until they end up at his old high school for the express purpose of throwing away milk shakes they'd bought (another weird scenario) and an ending where the vaguely surreal vibe of the movie manifests into full-blown crazy pantsness.

Throughout the movie we're given baffling cutaways to an old janitor as he goes through his workday and his significance is hinted at throughout, but it's not until the end when his significance is explained (somewhat) and if you were wondering if all this oddness was going to amount to anything, the answer is decidedly "not really." 

I suspected that this trip was going to end up in a disappointing dead end and it did. It's frustrating to have to immediately look up explainer articles after finishing a movie to have opaque narratives illuminated, especially when a movie made large changes to the source's narrative as Kaufman did to Iain Reid's novel. While film snobs like to sniff about lowbrow plebes not "getting it" the fact remains that if you can't tell a movie story without reading the book first or having someone who did explain it after the fact, it's a failure of the filmmaker. That it all amounts to almost nothing of any relevance that a viewer can relate to makes the time wasted even more acute.

The performances are all adequate to the task with Buckley doing the most heavy lifting which is ironic considering where it's going. Once you get hip to what Kaufman is doing with the breadcrumb drops, it strings you along, teasing something coming until it doesn't, ultimately devolving into a self-satisfied wank at the expense of the audience. (There are elements of David Lynch's oddness at play, but the quality it shares the most is how Twin Peaks: The Event Series continuation also ended in audience time-wastage.)

While it's presented in Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos audio (on properly equipped sets), there's little to showcase the formats potential benefits given its mostly dark and gray palette and dialog-driven audio. 

Perhaps if the movie had been trimmed down to a shorter running time (say, 90 mins) befitting its slight narrative, I'm Thinking of Ending Things may've merited the jaunt, but as it stands it's best to not even begin things.

Score: 4/10. Skip it. 

"Vivarium" Review

A vivarium is defined as "an enclosure, container, or structure adapted or prepared for keeping animals under semi-natural conditions for observation or study or as pets." It's also the title of an odd fantasy drama starring Jesse Eisenberg and Imogen Poots as a young couple in England or Ireland (it's not specified; nor is how American Eisenberg landed there) who decide to go house hunting and find themselves trapped in a literal forever home. (The definition at the beginning of this review is a huge hint as to what happens.)

After stopping in an office displaying models of the homes on offer, which all look the same, they follow the very oddly-mannered salesman (Jonathan Aris) to Yonder, a subdivision with very suspiciously identical houses. While cookie cutter subdivisions are a long-running thing, Yonder is next level artificial. After a tour of the house with #9 on the door and an a nursery already painted blue for a boy, the couple find their guide has disappeared, leaving them behind. They attempt to leave the sub, but repeatedly find themselves looping back around to #9 eventually running out of gas after driving until after dark.

After staying the night, they climb up on the roof and discover the neighborhood sprawls as far as they can see, one identical row after another. The Sun seems artificial and the clouds are unnaturally uniform. They decide to follow the Sun, climbing over fence after fence (why not use the roads?), in hopes of eventually finding the end of Yonder, but as with their attempt to drive, they end up right back where they began at #9. This time however, there is a box waiting in the street filled with packaged food and toiletries.

A frustrated Eisenberg proceeds to set the house on fire and while they watch it burn from the curb across the street, they fall asleep. When they awake, they find the house is unscathed and another box awaits them. This one contains a baby boy and a note printed on the lid: "Raise the child and be released." We next see the boy being measured against the door frame and while the mark is dated three months later, the boy looks to be about eight-years-old.

In addition to being unnaturally large, the child mimics them or speaks in an adult voice. Other times he shrieks tot bully them into catering to his whims. When he watches television, it's a psychedelic monochrome flashing pattern. Of course, all this weirdness and confinement takes a massive toll on their relationship with him become obsessed with digging a very deep hole in the front lawn, unearthing some non-dirt artificial material, while she attempts to figure out what exactly they're raising.

While the initial scenario of Vivarium piques the interest, it's not long before one starts to wonder where this is all going and what's it supposed to mean? While merely 97-minutes-long, it feels very drawn out and repetitive; it feels as if it could've been if not a half-hour classic Twilight Zone episode, a sub-hour-long Black Mirror installment. Once the premise is set, we're just waiting for it to pay off.

It eventually resolves in a manner that explains the opening nature film passage involving the life cycle of cuckoos, but it's not as much of a twist as it clearly thinks it is as we're too bored to really care in the end.

Score: 5/10. Catch it on cable.