Tag / isabella rossellini

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

‘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

Vita & Virginia is Beautiful, But Disappointingly Surface Level: TIFF Review

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Virginia Woolf has always been a fascinating subject for research, but many films that seek to cover the sort of person she was never really find themselves living up to what a complicated figure she was. In order to get the most obvious out of the way, she truly is one of the greatest authors ever to have lived, but it’s difficult to pinpoint the sort of person that she was. When talking more about Chanya Button’s portrait of the British author and her own relationship with Vita Sackville-West, there’s already potential for a film that can be made with a greater reach yet I only found myself conflicted about what to make of the final product. There are many admirable qualities present in what Chanya Button presents for the screen in Vita & Virginia, but in the end I’m not entirely sure about how well do all of them fully connect with one another. Not that it makes Vita & Virginia anything of a failure – but it just feels a crucial part of this story remained missing.

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by Jaime Rebanal

Incredibles 2 Review: Fourteen Years Waiting Had Paid Off Magnificently

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The first Incredibles film is one of my favourite Pixar films, and it was one that begged for a sequel the moment it had ended. But given Pixar’s track record with franchising their own films (the only film with connections to preceding films to have really made its mark on me being Toy Story 3), it was also easy enough to be skeptical of what the results of Incredibles 2 would be. However, knowing that Brad Bird was going to be returning to write and direct, having wanted to develop a sequel to the first Incredibles film ever since its release, I already had hope despite knowing how much time it would take for Brad Bird to direct a sequel that he knew would deliver what audiences would have wanted to see in the many years of waiting. And if anything else were to be said about how the wait had paid off, Incredibles 2 may not live up to what the first film had set out for, but it is nonetheless a worthy sequel to possibly the most inventive superhero film to have come out in the past decade.

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