A Wistful Take On Life Is Beautifully Realized In Lucky

Some of my favorite movies ever are simply laid-back movies following a normal human being going about their lives over the course of a few days. When you do those type of films right, you get something just so riveting, a cinematic replication of either the world we live in everyday or a glimpse into an authentic portrait of a world we're unfamiliar with. Want a great recent example of this strain of cinema done well? Look at Lucky, a small-scale dialogue-driven drama that serves as both a star vehicle for the late great character actor Harry Dean Stanton as well as the directorial debut for John Carroll Lynch.

You Can't Erase The Imagery Of Eraserhead From Your Brain

David Lynch's debut effort as the director of a motion picture, Eraserhead, has your typical cookie-cutter plot, the kind we've all seen in dozens of Hollywood movies before. Henry Spencer (Jack Nance) is living in some sort of hellscape where he toils away his hours by either working at the factory or catching some sleep in his tiny apartment. While visiting his girlfriend, Mary X (Charlotte Stewart) and her family, he's hit with a bombshell revelation: Mary is pregnant. Like anyone whose presented the news of being a father-to-be, this news rocks Henry's world and he can barely comprehend the prospect of being a dad.

Director Darren Aronofksy Offers Up A Slice Of The Unconventional With This Pi

The 1990's saw a large number of great directors make their feature film debuts, particularly in the first half of the decade that saw the likes of Richard Linklater & Quentin Tarantino make their marks on the world of cinema. But that doesn't mean all the notable directorial debuts could be found in the first half of the 1990's since Wes Anderson leaped into the realm of feature films with 1996's Bottle Rocket while Darren Aronofsky entered feature-length filmmaking with his 1997 motion picture Pi, a film that certainly establishes a large number of the specific filmmaking traits many associate explicitly with Aronofsky to this very day.

Go Down The Scenic Route In The Enchantingly Unique And Abstract Mulholland Drive

Sight & Sound Voyage Entry #36
Placement On Sight & Sound Top 50 Movies List: #28                                                                                                                                                                                
SPOILERS AHEAD

Well, if anyone thought Blue Velvet, with its plot that hinges on a human ear in a field and Dennis Hopper's crazed baddie, was too weird, Mulholland Drive is not gonna be the movie for you. I would have really loved to see this movie in its theatrical release, as I'm pretty sure audiences would have been left bamboozled at best and likely asking movie theater attendees for their money back in an angry fashion. Me? My main reaction once Mulholland Drive was one of being impressed by what an absorbing experience David Lynch had concocted, even if I needed to do a little reading up on Wikipedia afterwards to fully figure out what was going on in this movies final scene.

I'm Blue (Velvet) Da Ba Dee Da Ba Daa

The unusual seems to just come natural to David Lynch. His movies are world-renowned at this point for having incredibly idiosyncratic visual touches to them and extended dream-like sequences while his 1982 movie The Elephant Man (previously the only David Lynch movie I'd seen) concentrated on a man whose physical appearance was so different from society it caused him to be ostracized from the rest of the world and treated unfairly like a freak. For his 1986 feature Blue Velvet, Lynch once again embraces the unorthodox to create incredible and distinctive cinema, the kind that really feels like it could only come from the mind of Lynch himself.

There Aren't Enough Words To Describe The Virtues Of The Phenomenal The Elephant Man

"People fear what they don't understand" is an oft-repeated axiom that feels exemplified by the events depicted in David Lynch's 1980 film The Elephant Man. I mean, look at where my own country, America, is right now. A President got elected by playing to people's ignorance and hatred of people slightly different from themselves. And this is far from the first time people of great power have gotten their high levels of authority by playing into humanities distrust of anything that dares to not adhere to the status quo. But those people who get mocked for being different are human beings, with a beating heart and dreams and their own personal ambitions that far too many refuse to acknowledge even exist.