ggolden

I can watch this one again and again. In additon to being a brilliant film, I love the way they've made use of San Francisco locations (I live in SF). Particular favorites are when the four friends leave Sutherland's house on Montgomery St and race down Telegraph Hill on the Filbert Street steps, also the Civic Center Plaza at the film's end.

I just don't get it ... I adored PTA's first three films. Adam Sandler was just fine, as were Emily Watson and the supporting characters. Fantastic music (as in Magnolia, composer Jon Brion works miracles here) and sound design, lovely cinematography. And yet ... it's as if someone went to an upmarket grocery store, selected all the finest ingredients, and boiled them into something bland and unremarkable. By the end, as Roger Ebert might say, my hand closed on air.

There were several brilliant moments in this film. It looked and sounded amazing (I'm repeating myself). But by the end I just felt unsatisfied, which is disappointing because up til now, a new PTA film has never been less than a fully enriching experience.

I think I can put my finger on it ... the problem may have been with the writing. 1) The story is, well, kinda stupid. 2) The way people talk (the way their speech is written in the script), that hyper-realistic stuttering sputtering go-go-go blah-blah-blah that worked so well in Magnolia and Boogie Nights just seemed glaringly out of place here. 3) It seems that PTA was trying such brutal and expressionistic ways for the Sandler character to show his DEPTHS that he ended up not having much.

I think PTA is in danger of allowing his (formerly considerable)substance to be consumed by his (always amazing) style.

Really a let down. But I'm definitely gonna buy the soundtrack CD!

I see Mulholland Dr. as being Lynch's third film in the last decade to explore purely mental states, thrown up expressionistically on celluloid. We're trained to see the elements in movies literally, where Lynch often shows mental metaphors in addition to more literal elements. It can be confusing to decipher, but it's not impossible.

The first in the series of "mind movies" was "Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me." Considered dark and depressing by Twin Peaks fans on its release, the central theme is incest/sexual abuse, and how a victim of this can "split off" into different personalities, be in denial about the true nature of their abuse and their abuser, and repress their emotions. Much of what seems "supernatural" or other-worldly in this film is in fact an expressionist representation of Laura Palmer's repressed emotions and thought processes. The "mind" element in this movie is the subconcscious.

The second in the series is "Lost Highway," about a man who cannot deal with the guilt of murdering his wife except to go into a state of mental imbalance known as a psychogenic fugue, where he believes he is a completely different person in a different environment. The "mind" element here is insanity.

This brings us to Mulholland, the third in the series. I won't reiterate the "dream/reality" analysis of the plotline, which has already been done brilliantly in some of these user reviews as well as on the Salon Web site, but I will point out that, clearly, the "mind" element in this film is the dream state.

The subconscious, insanity, and dreaming. Who else but David Lynch could create such poetry about the wrinkles of the mind? Thank goodness we have him.