David Lynch is out to get you...

Rating: Null/10 (28 March 2002)

David Lynch is one of those crazy/brilliant filmmakers who simply WILL NOT bend to the standard Hollywood mode of movie making. This movie starts out conventionally enough, but quickly transforms into something nearly impossible to explain.
The great achievement of this movie is that it really doesn't matter. It's convoluted, sometimes maddening, perverse and yet also sharp, insightful, sexy and thought-provoking. Both of the women in this movie are beautiful and inhabit the screen like dream begotten fantasies.

Ostensibly, this movie is about Hollywood itself (which the real Molholland Dr. winds through), and much of the storyline is devoted to the workaday realities of making movies. Naomi Watts is a wannabee actress and the lead male in the movie is a director. Time and time again, however, the consciousness level of a dream state is where everything inevitably turns, so that the movie is as much about what goes on in an imaginative director's mind (such as that of Lynch) as much as anything else...possibly more so.
A great love of mine is to be completely taken away by the "world" of a movie and this one succeeds in that for certain. Yet I can tell you that I saw this movie with a friend and my friend grew impatient with it. What some might enjoy as dreamlike and engaging, others will find random, tedious and possibly pretentious. Not me. I saw it for everything that I believe Mr. Lynch intended and am not at all surprised that it has generated great admiration in addition to controversy.