Mulholland Drive Directed by: David Lynch Dave's Rating: A Fans of Twin Peaks take note: Mulholland Drive is the best television show that never happened. Mulholland Drive, the latest cinematic foray into the unknown by director David Lynch, started out as a two-hour television pilot for ABC, who hoped the series would reel in viewers the way Twin Peaks did in the early nineties. The pilot was deemed too bizarre for the already golden prime time lineup, and given that Mulholland Drive doesn't take place in the familiar television backdrop of either a hospital emergency room, a courtroom, or the office of a homicide detective, the series was dropped. So Lynch added forty minutes to the Mulholland Drive pilot, and released it as a movie. The decision was for the best, because this is one hell of a film. Powerful enough, and with enough erotic overtones, that several people walked out of the film both times I saw it in theatres. The French New Wave film director Jean-Luc Godard said all you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun, but Lynch inches it up a cinematic step and clearly states with this film that all you need is a midget, lesbians, loads of screaming, and Roy Orbison's "Crying" sung in Spanish to keep an audience entranced. He had me at the midget. The story revolves around Betty (Naomi Watts), a mouse like little blond, and Rita (Laura Elena Harring), who takes her name from Rita Hayworth, and has the looks to live up to the silver screen icon's name. Betty arrives in Los Angeles, her eyes full of wonderment, and with childhood dreams of stardom finally becoming a reality. When entering her new apartment for the first time, she encounters Rita standing naked in the shower. Suffering from amnesia spurned from a car crash at the beginning of the film, Rita evokes helplessness right off. Betty, still under the innocent but obvious spell of her small town upbringing, attempts to help piece together Rita's existence, thus putting the hips back into the detective genre. Betty is anything but pragmatic, as she's seen far too many Hollywood endings. These two photogenic graduates of Nancy Drew's Detective School make decisions that are reminiscent of the golden years of Hollywood, back when the entire plot of a film wasn't given away to you between Pepsi and K-Mart commercials. In the midst of their detective work, Betty still finds time to audition for movies, because that's what aspiring actresses in Hollywood like to do. She ends up on the movie set of a young director named Adam (Justin Theroux), who besides sporting the hippest hair and glasses of any actor in a movie thus far this year, has an Armani clad lynch mob on his back about putting a certain "girl" in his movie. This "girl" just happens to be Betty, who herself is unaware the director knows her face all too well before the audition. The lynch mob controlling Adam's every move expect their espressos to be the right temperature and they ride in black stretch limos, because that's what lynch mobs in Hollywood like to do. While building this twisting plot in Mulholland Drive, Lynch never hesitates to take time out to comment on the plasticity of the commercial movie-making world. As the mystery thickens (in which Lynch film doesn't it?), Mulholland Drive starts to lead on that a conclusion is right around the corner. Then suddenly, just as a climatic payoff is about to occur, the film changes, completely. It would be wrong for me to discuss the last 40 minutes of Mulholland Drive, but once seen, it's impossible not to mentally dissect or openly discuss what's happened. It's a film up for debate, and there is a surprise element to be discovered in watching Mulholland Drive, but the revelation isn't a gimmick that so many films of late have relied and built a foundation around. Where the film begins and ends is up for debate. Like Memento, Mulholland Drive exists on multiple levels and planes of time and reality, the true meaning and existence of the first two hours not making its surreal entrance until the last thirty or so minutes. Hollywood is an enigma where for almost 100 years dreams, glamour and glitz have come and gone in spades. Mulholland Drive isolates its main characters in what seems to be a small corner of the larger city of Los Angeles; a city on its own is full of endless possibilities. A fantastical pleasure occurred when I realized that Mulholland Drive has to be seen, that it's beyond my explanation. The film doesn't treat the audience watching it like idiots, or in the 12-17 age demography. It's an adult film, with mature themes and emotional ties requiring an "awake" mind to comprehend. Sure it has its fair amount of oddball characters and unexplained moments, but David Lynch isn't a director who likes to guide the viewer by the hand. Mulholland Drive is by far the best film I've seen so far this year, and one of the most involving films to be released in recent years. The secret may be in the multiple dimensions and possibilities the film contains, or that Lynch has trust in his audience when using shots that hold more than 20 seconds without a cut and presents an ending that will frustrate the viewer as much as it fascinates.
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