Lynch DVD Review

 

I love documentaries, and I’m also a major David Lynch fan as well.  So when I heard that a feature length documentary was going to be shot about the man that directed films like Blue Velvet, Lost Highway, and Mulholland Drive I was pretty excited.  Any chance at a peak into the life of an artist like Lynch and I’m there.  

The film starts out with various landscape shots that are beautifully framed, and intentionally blurry, but it doesn’t take long for for director S∅ren Larsen (who calls himself BlackandWhite in the credits) to focus in on Lynch.  One of the first scenes shows Lynch giving a weather forecast on his website, offering a glimpse into his studio.  Lynch tells stories about what it was like when he first moved to Philadelphia, he talks about art, and offers his take on transcendental meditation.  My favorite parts of the film though came from watching him paint.  I thought it would have been the footage of him directing Inland Empire, but to my surprise I didn’t find that as interesting as the scenes that have nothing to do with filmmaking.  

The film’s synopsis says that Larsen followed Lynch around for two years, but you wouldn’t draw that conclusion from the film itself.  I got the impression that Lynch is extremely set into a routine of working in his studio, smoking lots of cigarettes, and telling captivating stories to whomever will listen.  I really enjoyed this intimate look into Lynch’s life, but was at times distracted by the quality of the video used by Larsen.  At times the video is blown out and it doesn’t seem like any attempt at color correction was made.  Also the juvenile way that some of the shots were framed irritated me as well.  I understand that Lynch is an artist and any attempt at capturing his true essence has to be made by an artist, but at times it felt like the filmmakers were trying to hard to be like Lynch instead of just being themselves.  Fans of Lynch’s work are going to enjoy this film, but the casual moviegoer wouldn’t last five minutes, still Lynch was a killer film.

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