Mulholland Drive

One of the best, most fascinatingly perplexing films from a director who knows a thing or two about fascinating and perplexing films.

“Funny how secrets travel,” David Bowie croons as the music thumps. The camera zooms down a dark desolate highway, illuminated only by the twin beams of a speeding car’s headlights. This is the beginning of David Lynch’s Lost Highway, and it sets the mood for the chaos to come. Lynch rose to auteur status with …

The Conversation is a feature at Sound on Sight bringing together Drew Morton and Landon Palmer in a passionate debate about cinema new and old. For their fourth piece, they will discuss David Lynch’s film The Straight Story (1999). Drew’s Take I am in the midst of my 1999 class and I assigned two films I had yet to …

In Brian De Palma’s Sisters, the titular siblings are French-Canadian Siamese twins surgically separated as adults. Danielle is gentle and lovely, and Dominique gloomy and anguished. This dynamic is complicated by the fact that the former needs the latter to develop her persona. Without Dominique, Danielle has no identity. To weave the fiction of her socially acceptable behavior, she must have Dominique bear the burden of her most disturbing desires. Yet the film, oddly enough, is not about Danielle or Dominique, but about the journalist Grace Collier. As Dominique recedes into the background, Danielle and Grace become the main antagonistic pair, a transition that culminates in an intense climax, a hypnosis dream, that imagines them as conjoined twins. As we learn, Dominique has been dead from the outset, and Danielle has transformed into her in moments of sexual and emotional excitement.

Growing up gay as a suburban teenager in the mid 90s, my access to queer culture was severely limited (ie nonexistent). Before the proliferation of the internet, one relied on the “gay” section in bookstores and video stores, if there even was one, to seek out examples of visible representation in the media throughout the …

The Grandmother Written by David Lynch Directed by David Lynch USA, 1970 Mrs Bates lived on inside Norman’s fractured psyche. Her continued residence compensated for the guilt her son felt following her murder. Ever present, her spectral presence kept watch in the guise of a maternal superego overlooking the Bates motel from close quarters. Psycho …

Mulholland Drive Directed by David Lynch Written by David Lynch 2001, USA I have never seen a David Lynch film. I know very little about him. I doubt that I truly grasped that Lynch was a surrealist filmmaker before now, yet Eraserhead and Mulholland Drive have been on my to-be-watched list for a decade. So …

Kiss Me Written and directed by Alexandra-Therese Keining Sweden, 2011 Like in Mulholland Drive, the first intimate encounter between the two female leads is delicately depicted. Perfuse with undeniable eroticism and composed with such seductive elegance, this moment is mediated on absolute and instinctive passion. Framed amongst the forbidden circumstances of their carnal convergence, the …

39- Talk To Her (2002) Directed by Pedro Almodóvar Genre: Dark Comedy, Drama This is Almodovar’s stab at serious drama, and the result is compelling, engaging, thought-provoking and in the end, an invitation to countless interpretations. Talk To Her is both unnerving and comforting at once with superb work in front of and behind the …

Undertones: Volume 8 As we approach the end of the decade, it seems fitting that this installment of Undertones concern itself with some of the most memorable film scores of the ‘00s. Though the films range in financial or critical success, and opinions may be divided as to the strength of some of the films …