Lots of classic Lynch touches, but ultimately fails to deliver

Rating: 6/10 (2 November 2002)

This movie starts very promisingly and, in classic David Lynch style, contains lots of bizarre and often ugly takes on modern human existence, focussing especially on the hypocracies and dark motivations of a wide variety of characters. The visual style of the movie progresses from his earlier work, continuing to find new and thought-provoking viewpoints of his subjects. So far, so good. The problem for me in this movie was that it seemed to lose its way half-way through. Too many undeveloped threads (female lead for director's movie), too many broken threads (still haven't sussed the link between Betty and Diane) and maybe he didn't quite succeed in tying all the diverse threads together into one entity (a movie). I guess the Lynch-mob will lap all this up, but I found my mind wandering mid-movie, which hasn't happened for me in earlier Lynch flicks.