Emperor's New Clothes

Rating: 4/10 (16 October 2001)

What is the point? Well, no one is really sure (maybe Lynch knows)... but the film seems to be about Hollywood's corruption of innocence and artistic integrity.
Ok, if you'd like to make such a point, why do it in such a convoluted way? Well, apparently David Lynch thinks it's great art to leave the audience confused. That is, to make a film so surrealistic that there is really no logic, and therefor it leaves critics unable to attack the lack of structure in the story.
It's really a worthless experimental piece. Much like the exploration of jazz music in the 60's that slowly peeled away the structure of music, to the point that one is left with incomprehensible and chaotic noise. Guess what? Random noise is not music ... and incoherent structure is not great art!
Lynch spends a great deal of time developing interesting characters in the first half of the film. A comedic bent is shown with the hit man who has everything go wrong, and with the sinister cowboy Bob. But do these sub-plots go anywhere? No, they don't really... after Rita wakes up muttering "silencio", everything in the movie turns into a dream sequence. And all the sub-plots are tied together in a cursory and nonsensical way, as is often the case in a dream.
Does nonsensical dreams make great art? I don't think so ... and neither does this movie.