David Lynch Has Died

Eraserhead was one of the most boring movies I've ever seen. Did not like it at all. Saw Blue Velvet, was unimpressed but I was young.
 
I loved "The Elephant Man". It made me cry like a baby. I liked "Blue Velvet" though it's been a while since I've seen it.
 
Dang, this really sucks. I love almost everything that I've seen of Lynch's. And Twin Peaks is one of my favorite TV shows ever.

RIP.
 
I wasn't a fan of Eraserhead either but it's a favorite of a good friend of mine whose taste in film I value highly. I just couldn't get there with Eraserhead. It was his first film though, so I'll give him a pass on that one. The rest of his oeuvre, though, is for the great most part top notch. I liked Wild at Heart better than Blue Velvet (which was filmed in Wilmington), although I think that's a minority opinion. Hell, I even liked Dune (speaking of minority opinion, which actually makes me like it more). Mulholland Drive is in the pantheon of filmmaking, IMO.
 
I liked this caption from the NYTimes piece on Lynch:

Like Frank Capra and Franz Kafka, two widely disparate 20th-century artists whose work Mr. Lynch much admired and might be said to have synthesized, his name became an adjective.
 
I liked this caption from the NYTimes piece on Lynch:

Like Frank Capra and Franz Kafka, two widely disparate 20th-century artists whose work Mr. Lynch much admired and might be said to have synthesized, his name became an adjective.
I was surprised to learn that Mel Brooks got Eraserhead made!
 
I liked this caption from the NYTimes piece on Lynch:

Like Frank Capra and Franz Kafka, two widely disparate 20th-century artists whose work Mr. Lynch much admired and might be said to have synthesized, his name became an adjective.
Between Lynch, Douglas Sirk, and John Waters, you can find, I think, three distinct ripostes to Frank Capra's brand of Americana.
 
According to the NYTimes piece, it was The Elephant Man that Brooks helped him with (I didn't know that either). Said Brooks referred to him as Jimmy Stewart from Mars...

 
According to the NYTimes piece, it was The Elephant Man that Brooks helped him with (I didn't know that either). Said Brooks referred to him as Jimmy Stewart from Mars...

Mel Brooks was actually one of the producers behind the Elephant Man but didn’t want his name attached to the picture because he felt that if it were, people would get the wrong idea about the movie.
 
I wasn't a fan of Eraserhead either but it's a favorite of a good friend of mine whose taste in film I value highly. I just couldn't get there with Eraserhead. It was his first film though, so I'll give him a pass on that one. The rest of his oeuvre, though, is for the great most part top notch. I liked Wild at Heart better than Blue Velvet (which was filmed in Wilmington), although I think that's a minority opinion. Hell, I even liked Dune (speaking of minority opinion, which actually makes me like it more). Mulholland Drive is in the pantheon of filmmaking, IMO.
Yes, I think that was my reaction with Eraserhead. I wanted to like it but I couldn't get there.

I had not heard good things about Wild At Heart, and a friend of mine told me I would loathe Mulholland Drive. Not a good friend, so his recommendation didn't carry that much weight. But I hadn't liked two other films by Lynch; I had someone tell me I would hate it; and there's lots of other things to watch. Maybe I should check out Mulholland Drive.

I never saw Twin Peaks.
 
One of the most original and creative artists in history, virtually incomparable in film, his works have inspired a number of great directors. In terms of surrealism and breaking boundaries of a given art form in a completely singular way, you can only compare Lynch to Hieronymus Bosch and Salvador Dali.

Eraserhead is the closest thing to having a nightmare that you can experience in cinema, and when I first saw it in a theater, I was sure I would never have a stranger experience with art in my lifetime. That was until Lynch's Twin Peaks: The Return. That show is beyond words or sentences any human could come up with. In making two conventional films, he showed he could do that as well, and equal to most any great director, with The Straight Story and The Elephant Man.

His supreme masterpiece Mulholland Drive is now on the prestigious and once a decade Sight and Sound lists of the greatest films of all time, including at number 22 on the worlds' film directors poll.


We have lost one of the most important artists of our time.
 
One of the most original and creative artists in history, virtually incomparable in film, his works have inspired a number of great directors. In terms of surrealism and breaking boundaries of a given art form in a completely singular way, you can only compare Lynch to Hieronymus Bosch and Salvador Dali.

Eraserhead is the closest thing to having a nightmare that you can experience in cinema, and when I first saw it in a theater, I was sure I would never have a stranger experience with art in my lifetime. That was until Lynch's Twin Peaks: The Return. That show is beyond words or sentences any human could come up with. In making two conventional films, he showed he could do that as well, and equal to most any great director, with The Straight Story and The Elephant Man.

His supreme masterpiece Mulholland Drive is now on the prestigious and once a decade Sight and Sound lists of the greatest films of all time, including at number 22 on the worlds' film directors poll.


We have lost one of the most important artists of our time.
This is neither here nor there, but how do you make a top 100 movies list and omit Zhang Yimou entirely?
 
In making two conventional films, he showed he could do that as well, and equal to most any great director, with The Straight Story and The Elephant Man.
This is certainly true. It's like Dali painting in the style of the Dutch masters or any of the great realistic painters just to show he could do it. Granted, The Elephant Man, by the very nature of its subject matter, lent itself to Lynch's penchant for the outré (and is a legitimately great film regardless), but the slyly titled Straight Story couldn't have been more conventional and it was perfectly enjoyable, almost like the Hallmark movie that Will Ferrell and Kristen Wiig did and played it completely (ahem) straight...
 
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