Merry Jews-See-A-Movie Day! In the spirit of the season, I’m going to try my hand at a review:
I just got through Lost Highway and I learnt a very important lesson: If I ever have a really really good and original idea for a film, but I can’t figure out a way to make that movie more than 15 minutes long, instead of busting my balls to think of more original content, I should just pad it out with plot elements and visuals stolen from really old Film Noire.
Do you know what it makes you when you try to pass of a hacky rip-off of old movies to the younger generation as a creative and ambiguous work of art? A cunt.
Cunt Luckily, this two hour fifteen minute joyride has about a one page script, which has, I’m guessing, a 1:1000 ratio of Dialogue to Director’s Notes, and in the spirit of the internet, I will spoil the "plot" for you.
Lost HighwayBy David Lynch Characters
Dark, Dream-like Ambiance (the star!!)
Some lifeless, emotionless characters who reflect hollowness of the modern world (kudos to me, David Lynch, for coming up with this inspiring idea!!!)
Create Ambiance. Note to self: this should take a good twenty minutes at least.
Brief Tribute to Lengthy Foreplay BILL PULLMAN
How are you?
WIFE
Fine.
BILL PULLMAN
But are you really fine, or is it all a complex illusion? (note to self: SUBTEXT GALORE! Good job, self! Also, maybe adding a blue pill/red pill choice might be good here)
Create More Ambiance. Note to self: The audience feels more sympathy for characters who don’t really talk that much and live in bare lifeless apartments.
Something happens… kind of. The eighth tape has meaning of some kind.
Have something interesting happen, but as it gets too interesting, go back to more ambiance, because by this point the audience might actually have actually been paying attention to the plot for the last fifteen minutes, and forget that this movie is MOODY. Note to self: Mood equals art.
BILL PULLMAN
Boy, I wish there were some other wife-killers in this State. This sure is a lonely prison! (Subtext: Society/Bad Relationships are a prison!!! A prison… OF SOLITUDE!!! …OF THE SOUL!!!)
BILL PULLMAN vanishes, and the vaguely interesting movie becomes vaguely a rip off of black and white movies.
Car suddenly takes a
—-> Detour <—— BIG LIP WOMAN IN DRESS
Is that a gun in your pocket?… Lover, kill my ex-lover and we’ll take the money and move away and be happy (lol not really)… Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations - B - Billy Wilder Page 385… Oh shit I wasn’t supposed to read that part.
The rest of the movie should be a crappy music video for Nine Inch Nails or something. GOTHY TEENS relate to the PAIN IN THEIR SOUL and cut their WRISTS.
In the end, the guy is dead face down in the pool, regretting his love, just like at the beginning. Police look onward.
THE END… ? I thought there might be a few minutes of this film that weren’t either ripped off or pseudo-artsy gibberish, but I just missed it somehow while I was out peeing. So, in an effort to make sure this movie really was retarded, my first stop was the horse’s mouth, Wikipedia!:
"This (some medical condition)
was something I researched with a clinical psychologist at Stanford, so we had some basis in fact here. After we found that freedom, more or less it was just a matter of creating this surreal, fantastic world that Fred Madison lives in when he becomes Peter Dayton." Hey guys, I’m such an
intelligent film-maker that I went to a real life
Scientist at
Standford and asked him what his favourite Film Noire was. Hahaha just kidding! By "researched" what I meant to say was "read in a Reader’s Digest".
"He is not consigned to this fate forever… He is not traveling in a circle, but rather a spiral, and at the end of the film moves round onto the next level. Maybe eventually he can find release. The film is only a small part of the story." THE END…? Gee, thanks David Lynch! Not being an intelligent film-maker myself, I didn’t pick up on that subtle and dynamic turn!
"Then I told Barry about this series of things that came to me one night. The very last night of shooting Fire Walk With Me these things shot into my head. I was driving home with Mary Sweeney and I told her about them. What I told her sort of scared her and it sort of scared me too. And when I told them to Barry he said, ‘Jeez, I really like that,’ and that was the start of a brand-new direction." Name-dropping "It’s Pat" legend Mary Sweeny, you old card? Wow! It’s amazing that despite the brave and rebellious stance against Hollywood commercialism you take, you can still so easily socialize with the big stars!
BTW, "I’M SO BRILLIANT I SCARE MYSELF!" Fuck you, David Lynch.
—-
The following are not things that Lynch himself has said, but rather pull-lines I got from various critics. I thought I would continue to use my Lynch image, just to remind you who these fuck-ups are talking about, and what kind of pretentious shit would like this kind of masturbation.
Best on the big screen for the full effect. Consume alcohol afterwards. For the record, anyone young and Goth enough to enjoy this film is too underage to buy alcohol, or even get away with using a fake ID. This includes continental Europe where you only have to be nine years-old to buy absinthe.
If one wishes to make sense of this film, it would have to be done on a metaphorical level. In the spirit of the season, let me tell you the Jesus’
Parable of the Fucking Thief: The Shepherd madeth one good film in the seventies, and instead of bowingeth out after running out of ideas, he copieth and pasteth old scripts, which he pads with hours of pointless mood-setting nothing in order to present himself as an anti-hollywood visionary. In this case, it’s not only OK to cast the first stone, but do me the favour and cast it right at his nuts! Amen.
(Lost Highway) Continues David Lynch’s efforts to make us connoisseurs of mystery rather than robots of reason. Were you waiting for it? I was. Every time someone makes an unusual piece of entertainment, immediately every fucking armchair revolutionary comes out and hails it as fighting the fucking man and taking a vicious blow at the establishment! Take that, the man! A blurry close-up shot of who fucking knows what! The man must really be shaking in his boots now!
You know, with all the movies and songs that have fought the man over the years, you’d think the government would no longer be corrupt, and society would no longer have any conformity. Fuck? What’s fucking not working about this? I better write a fucking song to speed up the long march towards freedom RIGHT NOW!
Last but most retarded:
Famously, the film received "two thumbs down" from Siskel and Ebert — though Lynch used this to his advantage by claiming it was "two good reasons to go and see Lost Highway." Yeah, thanks cuntrag. Way to fight Hollywood commercialism by doing so much to fight the negative stereotype of artsy filmmakers being pretentious cunts with no creativity.
You know what’s funny about that? Siskel and Ebert (Ebert and Roper etc) may praise Hollywood films, but they also trash crappy Hollywood films and praise good indy and foreign films. They don’t give a shit about your Ramstein and black-makeup-driven battle against conformity, they want to see a movie that doesn’t suck balls. In fact, from now on, before I read any review by any critic, my new pre-req will be to make sure they hated that piece of shit Lost Highway; otherwise I just can’t take them seriously.
I’m not saying there weren’t some good parts about this film. It could have been a masterpiece if Lynch had spent a little more time thinking and a little less time staring into the mirror, cock in hand, repeating "Damn you’re a genius." My point is, the next time I watch a movie like this, there better be a guy and two robots at the bottom of the screen telling me what a piece of shit it is.
