Too weird.

Rating: 4/10 (27 April 2002)

A lot of people rate "Mulholland Drive" very highly, and I'm glad they appreciate it. The more you like, the more you like. The movie has been called a dream sequence and I've been told one doesn't have to understand it to appreciate it. But for me the king has no clothes.
David Lynch as done some fine things. "Blue Velvet" is one of my all-time favorite movies. I loved the first year of "Twin Peaks". But somewhere along the line - if memory serves I began to see it in the second year of "Twin Peaks", and certainly in Lynch's subsequent movies - Lynch lost the clarity that made his weirdness appealing in the first place. To me it appears that he is trying to be weird for weirdness's sake, and it doesn't work.
Maybe it's fun to see a movie like "Mulholland Drive" several times and sit around discussing it for hours, trying to understand what the filmmaker's grand vision was. Certainly I've done that with Ingmar Bergman flicks, among others. But if I want to have dreams I can take a nap, and David Lynch is no Bergman.