Tag / david lynch

by Jaime Rebanal

‘The Fabelmans’ TIFF Review: Steven Spielberg’s Bittersweet Ode to the Magic of Movies

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Over his long and incredibly prolific career, Steven Spielberg shows yet another side to his own filmmaking that only reaffirms his status as one of the greatest working American filmmakers. To a filmmaker like Steven Spielberg, merely watching the movies alone isn’t a magical experience, but the building blocks for making them are just as magical – and have shaped an entire world for him. But the greatest thrill about watching Spielberg taking his audience to his own childhood is that for those of us who have been watching his films for so long, he’s showing us where everything we loved about his works has come about, in a work that’s clearly an extension of himself in The Fabelmans.

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by Jaime Rebanal

‘Wild at Heart’ Review: A Tender, Twisted, Dark Love Story from David Lynch

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David Lynch’s Wild at Heart received the Palme d’Or from the Cannes Film Festival in 1990, yet it still seems to have remained heavily underrated in his filmography. Among many things that one could ever find themselves loving about Wild at Heart, it’s also like looking at a new side of the David Lynch that one would be familiar with and even if the sudden shift in tone may not work for the most dedicated of his fans, it still results in what I see to be one of his most beautiful films by far. If there’s any other way to describe Wild at Heart, it would only be fitting to describe it as the happiest film that David Lynch might ever leave us behind with, but it still perfectly blends together all the distinctive elements of surrealism in order to create one of the most romantic movies that could ever have been made too.

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by Jaime Rebanal

‘Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me’ Review: The Death of Innocence in a World of Blue

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NOTE: This is a revised review that best represents my current thoughts on the film as opposed to my previous review. You can read the original right here.

Twin Peaks is one of the most influential television series ever made but the prequel film Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me has never enjoyed the same sort of acclaim – having been met with harsh reviews and also having flopped at the box office. I’m fairly biased in the favour of Twin Peaks as it is my favourite television series of all time but throughout the show you could always tell that Lynch had a particular love for the character of the deceased Laura Palmer. In fact, there are few people whose entire mystery has impacted an entire culture the same way that Laura Palmer has done so, and no one understands the effect her death has left upon many that same way David Lynch does. Yet few people knew her as a person too, which emphasizes the tragic beauty of Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me.

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by Jaime Rebanal

‘Blue Velvet’ Review: The Hypnotic Aura of David Lynch’s Strange World

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David Lynch’s films are so easy to characterize for carrying a weird aura that only he could ever perfect, yet the world that we’re seeing in Blue Velvet is one that is as ordinary as they get. Yet it’s also what makes everything about Blue Velvet so wonderful too, because it invokes his viewers to look at the world that they know a whole other way, beneath the cracks of the perfections in the “ordinary” as David Lynch brings you to see the underworlds that take the screen. It’s all a part of what makes Blue Velvet so intriguing too, because it’s characteristic of everything that has fascinated David Lynch through his long career in the form of a neo-noir mystery, yet it also happens to be one of the very best films of that sort too. Some can even say that a film like this best captures what also is best described as David Lynch’s America, for his subversion of the idealized lifestyle brings you on a journey of innocence slowly fading away through the exposure to a dark underworld unlike any other. You’re taken into a strange world by David Lynch, but maybe that might very well be the world we live in and we’ve convinced ourselves that everything happens to be moving along like it’s all fine.

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by Jaime Rebanal

Eraserhead – Review

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Cinema poses lots of different mysteries to be encapsulated within any amount of running time, Eraserhead is arguably one of the grandest of such enigmas. I first saw Eraserhead at a rather young age and what I remember rather fondly of it was that it left a specific taste in my mouth that couldn’t be described properly, and the next day I watched it once more. The idea became more clear to one like myself, yet it still fascinates me for there’s always more to pick out on every watch. When I watched Eraserhead for my first time, I was always thinking to myself about how to piece together what it was that I just watched. Parts of it all managed to make more sense when I got around to watching David Lynch’s own Mulholland Drive (which is my favourite from his body of work this far) and as Eraserhead remained in my head, I grew much more fondly of it – something that still runs within my own head today.

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by Jaime Rebanal

Mulholland Drive – Review

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Something I’ve always been meaning to write for a long while was about how my own discovery of David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive changed my own life and probably for the better at that. This was actually my second David Lynch film after having fallen in love with The Elephant Man and even at only two films I knew he would already become a favourite of mine. I first saw Mulholland Drive at only fourteen years old and immediately claimed it a favourite yet I could barely even put out a word to describe why I loved it but rather instead I just watched it again and I still couldn’t put as much as a finger on it. I almost wanted to say that David Lynch may have done the impossible but over the years I’m still struggling to capture a clear perspective because I don’t even know if I fully understand what I believe to be the greatest American film of the 21st century and at that, David Lynch’s finest work.

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by Jaime Rebanal

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me – Review

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It’ll be rather difficult for myself to speak of Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me from the perspective of an outsider as Twin Peaks is my favourite television series. It’s clear that coming into Fire Walk With Me without having watched the series prior is not particularly as great an idea given as the ideas will remain clear especially to Twin Peaks fans, and for those unfamiliar, the results will just be on a mere baffling end for it is not accessible to anyone who has not seen the series. Normally I’d refer to the criticism that it’s a longer episode of the series for film, but Fire Walk With Me isn’t that, for there’s a lot that still works even without any connection to the series. It was what I would have wanted as a fan, though if it were a single episode, it wouldn’t be ranked among my favourites. Continue reading →