Blue Velvet.

"What's interesting about watching Blue Velvet 20 years after it was made is not that it finds us wallowing in the swampy nihilism of Frank Booth-land but that it finds us clinging to the fantasies of home, hearth and wholesomeness," writes Carina Chocano in the Los Angeles Times. "We may be soaking in another reversion to idealistic conservatism, Hollywood-inspired political posturing and empty mass-culture referentiality, but it's hard not to notice how postmodern, how pliable and un-curious, our inner Jeffrey has become."

"Has any movie since created such a stir (by which I mean a sea change in the way we look at movies - Breathless, Bonnie and Clyde, The Godfather - and not just a Passion of the Christ-sized controversy)?" asks Scott Foundas. "Will any movie ever again? What dazzles still about David Lynch's Blue Velvet is its total authority: Not a single false gesture."

The LA Weekly's also running the review John Powers wrote in 1986: "Blue Velvet has the air of a movie that flows out of the artist's obsessions the way silk comes from the worm; in Susan Sontag's terms, it has been 'secreted, not constructed.'" And there's his interview with David Lynch, too, which ran in the same issue.

"While a sequel to Blue Velvet would have been about as likely as Citizen Kane 2, Twin Peaks - an attenuated version of the same turf - was presumably conceived as (in spirit) Blue Velvet: The Series," Andy Klein reminds us in the LA CityBeat. "During its first 15 or 16 episodes, the show provided a more leisurely tour of the fascinating, scary jungle of Lynch's subconscious. (While it's hard to say that Blue Velvet, for all its notoriety, was influential, Twin Peaks, its serial cousin, has been remarkably so, paving the way for The X-Files, American Gothic, Carnivale, and others.)"

Exactly one month ago, when the revival was in Boston, Peter Keough wrote in the Phoenix, "Having watched Blue Velvet a dozen or more times, and being a film critic, I can be more reflective during some of its more outrageous and harrowing moments. Dorothy, even as she wields a butcher knife and starts snipping at Jeffrey's extremities, brings to mind Dorothy of The Wizard of Oz, a reasonable enough comparison since every Lynch movie, probably every movie made since 1939, alludes to that ur-text." The weekly also re-ran Owen Glieberman's 1986 review and talk with Lynch.

Posted by dwhudson at July 14, 2006 9:08 AM