mustard_monkey

Ironic that someone would recommend Pi over this, since Pi would be a completely different film were it not for Eraserhead.

Yes, it's very slow, yes, it may even be boring, and yes, it may not make complete sense, but at least Lynch was daring enough to do something different rather than jump on some bandwagon like so many other directors.

People have a tendency to think that people who watch films like this are trying to be really intellectual. While there is some intellectual insight to be gained from this and many of Lynch's other films, part of the appeal is also quite the opposite. Lynch is really quite childlike, he's playing with ideas and images, and part of the appeal is the way he abandons conventional narrative and just has fun with the medium. Although you could hardly call this film fun. Lynch is also a painter, and really his films are more like moving paintings, it's about the images, and the sounds. People watch films, and really they're not looking at the pictures of listening to the sounds.

People are also unaware that his films are meant to be funny. I've seen people laugh nervously at this film, presumably because they thought it was unintentionally funny, but that's not true, one of Lynch's major style points is to have scenes which are both sick and hilarious.

Whether you love it or hate it, this film should be seen, and seen all the way through, even if it seems very boring at first. It's probably even better to watch it more than once. In my opinion, I'd rather watch a film that's different but I don't like, than some paint-by-numbers hollywood junk that offers nothing different and wastes two hours of my life. There's far more experience to gain from the former, and if you don't at least try something different, how do you know you don't like it?

I knew nothing about this film before I saw it, so I was hoping it would be some undiscovered classic. Quite soon, however, I realised that it was pretentious nonsense. It had the air of being made by some studio in order to appeal to teenagers who write rubbish goth poetry in their bedrooms. It makes awful, contrived attempts to be "arty", while forgetting to add any actual meaning. The characterisation is almost non-existent, people don't seem to have any justifications for their actions, and while they may occasionaly give reasons verbally the acting is so poor that the motivation just isn't there. The dialogue, especially in the voice overs, is terrible and amateurishly written. The pace is painfully slow, since I hadn't read a synopsis of the film (and I'm not familiar with the source material, and the same probably goes for the target audience, which shows how misjudged the film is) I spent a long time wondering when this film would get to its point and indeed where it was going. There is no need for it to be so slow, and there is also no point in dividing it up into sections other than to have "cool" titles like "Damaged little f***ers" flashing up on the screen. Dividing it up into sections only serves to highlight the lack of structure and the inconsistency of the plot. The film is narrated from the point of view of a character who only appears sporadically throughout the film, and the film ends by concluding a plot line that is not very prominent except at the very beggining, so is quite pointless, yet acts like it is some kind of high art.

I realise this review probably reads like a jumbled mess but then so does this film. Life is too short for garbage like this.