Tag / dean stockwell

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

Paris, Texas – Review

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Gracefully slow-moving, much like the flow of the course of life, what Wim Wenders creates and presents in Paris, Texas is one of the most beautifully moving tales that I’ve come across in my whole life so far. Yet reviewing the film was always a struggle, for I get a different perspective on it every time I watch it, but one mutual link between all viewings is that I always come out satisfied. And it’s not merely being satisfied to the degree it’s only a good film, because something as astonishingly gorgeous as this means so much more. Paris, Texas only grows to captivate me more upon each revisit, and it’s a feeling I can’t possibly describe any better. A feeling that comes only from experiencing the power left behind by Paris, Texas and not merely from alone just watching the film take place on the screen. Continue reading →

by Jaime Rebanal

The Player – Review

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It’s nice to see a film that plays with the usual Hollywood tropes yet at the same time expose something rather truthful about the way the system works, and suddenly the in-joke being presented hits you. Robert Altman, a director who always was searching for a manner to go against the norms amidst the studio influence gives a clear picture of what harm it does to the most valuable thing behind what forms what we come to view; the visions. Amazingly, The Player chooses never to head into the territory where it would highly offend anyone working within the business, but there’s a uniqueness to the satire we’re finding here that just allows it to stand out from other films that poke fun at the system, especially with what it hides under. Continue reading →