by David Lynch, 1986.
Starring: Laura Dern, George Dickerson, Dennis Hopper, Kyle MacLachlan, Isabella Rossellini, and Dean Stockwell.
Rating: 8/10, 9/10.
Argh! Just for the sake of these reviews, I should really just stick to watching movies like Legally Blonde and Back To The Beach and Footloose, that are ridiculously fun but don’t really mean much, aren’t really good movies. I know how to talk about movies like that. But when it comes to great films like Blue Velvet, I just don’t know what to do with myself.
Jeffrey Beaumont (MacLachlan, who was much dreamier in 1986 than five years later on Twin Peaks) returns from college to his small hometown of Lumberton after his father suffers a stroke. Walking home from the hospital one day, he happens to find a severed human ear on the ground. He takes the ear to the police station, where he is informed by a detective (Dickerson) that it’s great that he’s brought them the ear, but he must promise to tell no one and not inquire into the matter any deeper. But of course, with the help of the detective’s daughter, Sandy (Dern), he uncovers a number of extremely shocking things (Rossellini, Hopper).
I honestly don’t know what to say about Blue Velvet. One of my favourite things about it (mad props to Matthew for pointing this out) is also one of my favourite things about Twin Peaks: the way Lynch alternates humour and horror. We’ll get a very funny scene followed immediately by a cut to something really awful that’s going on, and you’ll still be laughing and then think, "Wait. This is horrible. I shouldn’t be laughing!", which just heightens the horror of the movie. It’s a fascinating and potentially maddening technique (for a very convincing argument on the evilness of this, click on the link at the bottom of the page; I disagree completely with what Ebert has to say about this film but have a deep respect for it), one I’ve never seen anywhere else, or at least I’ve never seen it work anywhere else, but in the works of David Lynch.
As usual with Lynch, this film is beautiful, ugly, uplifting, disturbing, and any other set of antonyms that exist. And I say that knowing it sounds stupid; it’s still true.
roger ebert hated this movie so much he found it necessary to write two reviews of it.
i've considerately linked you to both.