I hate this film!

Rating: 1/10 (11 June 2007)

'Mulholland Drive' has now replaced 'Bad Boys 2' at the top of my list of movies never to see - here's why:
1. All of the information needed to understand a film should be contained within it - if the audience leaves the cinema needing an explanation of what happened, then the film has missed it's mark. Leaving things 'open to interpretation' is what the Wachowski brothers claimed to be doing with their two dire Matrix sequels. If a writer's answer to 'how do I convey this information?' is 'I just won't bother' - that is the sign of lazy writing. If the explanation for the first half of the film is "it was a dream", then that is a piece of information that needed to be communicated by the film, not by the wikipedia entry.
2. The visuals are not beautiful, they are not haunting - they are not even cinematic. The made-for-TV pedigree absolutely shows through, the whole thing is shot at a low standard. Point me towards one, single frame that is memorable or striking, one image that actually sticks in your head. (For example: Cillian Murphy walking through the streets of an empty London in '28 Days Later' was striking imagery)
3. The music is irritating. Most of the time we have a low keyboard drone, presumably meant to generate an atmosphere of foreboding or menace, but actually it's just annoying.
4. There's no pace, especially during the first half of the film; I wondered whether it was actually running slowed-down, perhaps as some clever David Lynch trick. The dialogue is repetitive and shallow. Now I know this first part of the film was a dream - so what? It isn't an excuse for making a large part of the film feel like running through treacle.
5. The blue key. The weird man who jumps out behind the diner. The whole bit in the 'Silencio' theatre. The man spewing his coffee back up. The man in the wheelchair who gives orders. The cowboy. What? What the hell is going on with any of those things? Perhaps there's some hidden, cryptic meaning to be gleaned from them, but honestly I don't care. I don't watch a film so I can spend ages afterwards trying to make sense of it - there IS a difference between 'thought provoking' and 'needlessly confusing'.
This film is not entertainment, it is art - with all of the negative, art-for-art's-sake, "It doesn't have to mean anything" connotations that go along with it. A movie doesn't need car chases and gunfights to be entertaining, it doesn't need a straightforward simple narrative to be good - but if it's going to spend most of it's running time being either tedious or weird, it had damn well better have a good reason for it, a decent pay-off at the end, and this film really, really doesn't.
'Mulholland Drive' certainly did provoke a reaction in me - a negative one. It certainly does stick in my head, because of all the unresolved questions (see point 5). But to say that "any film that provokes a reaction is a good film" is naïve, and just because I'm still thinking about it does not mean it was good. After all, a swift kick to the nuts provokes a reaction, and an unfinished argument leaves you stewing - I'd rather avoid both.