Here's my beef. Perhaps as the opening salvo to director David Lynch:
"Dear Sir:
Have some respect for your audience. Quit indulging yourself like an NYU film student and give us some narrative flow to work with. We're with you, dude. Some of us still like your work in spite of ourselves. Remember Twin Peaks? I remember one evening at a division party in grad school. It may have been the first year we did away with the "Halloween party" tradition and just got together. Still obligatory, but no dopey costumes to worry about. It was held on whatever evening that show ran (who remembers...Friday nights, maybe?) We were all standing around feeling obligated to be there (naturally, since we were) but getting sauced all the same, one and all. Hell, the host was so knotted he staggering where he stood. Good times. And then a group of us peeled off from the main party, found a den or entertainment room or something off the living room and turned on the TV. To watch that show.
"So it isn't like we don't love the bizarro-world you create. But I submit that show failed for similar reasons that Mulholland Dr. is suboptimal -- the perverse pleasure you seem to take in tangential symbolic side-roads just when it feels like we all know what's going on. Twin Peaks during its last season kept introducing new absurd mysteries, one on top of the other, with no resolution and no sense of how the latest tied back to the narrative. It's frustrating. It reminds me of playing those old text-based computer puzzle games, like Zork, where a good portion of your time was spent trying to figure out what the programmer was up to. Sometimes the logical choice worked, but other times, it wouldn't. I can pick this thing up, but not this other thing. If I twist the orange thusly, I get the following response, but not when I tweak the onion. So to speak.
"I felt that way all through this movie. Now, I'm not opposed to a little work if there's payoff at the end. Like, with Memento. Excellent film, completely non-linear and intricate, but there's a thread to follow and the questions you are left with are central to the story itself -- how much faith do you place in a story told by a man with brain damage? So it works. But not here -- here the loose ends are often narrative cul-de-sacs scattered about like the shells from sunflower seeds. Looks like a thing, but it's really the shell of a thing."
I'm not sure why I spent this much time ranting about this. I think it's because cinematically it is a lush and lovely film, and Naomi Watts is a staggeringly brilliant actress, if her performance in this film is any indication of her talent. So it's hard to dismiss the whole production, but dammit, it's about the story ultimately, and I couldn't get behind it. After reading the Salon analysis, I feel a little better, but only a little. I'm all about a film that requires lots of post-game analysis to get it all together, because that's always part of the fun in seeing a movie. And I suppose it says something that I went online to satisfy the magnificent cognitive itch this thing created for me. But dude. Too much.
And speaking of...
Nobody is a bigger fan of The Sopranos than me. But what the hell is going on this season? Am I the only one who wonders why it is being hailed as equivalent to the second coming just because it's on TV at all? What the hell was up with last week's episode? All that nonsense about Columbus Day...like a big PSA about dissing Italian Americans or something. Oy. Get it together guys. Oz has spoken.
ClothMother_old