This movie is not confusing...

Rating: 4/10 (7 December 2006)

POTENTIAL SPOILERS WITHIN!!!!
This movie is not confusing. That would be an inappropriate and highly inaccurate adjective. Some more accurate adjectives would include pretentious, dull, self-absorbed, uneven, tedious, and irritating. Don't give me the whole, "it was all a dream" excuse. That is one of the weakest of all plot line excuses, and a plot line excuse that is often reserved for these overly ambitious films that try to convey some sort philosophical, surreal aspect or meaning but fall flat because they're just a bunch of pretty colors, spooky sounds, and celebrity tits. It is quite clear that the plot is out of order and rearranged. In fact, one of the few endearing qualities of this two and a half hour mess is how elegantly that story was wrapped up. Those twists were effective and certainly had a lot of work put into them by Mr. Lynch. But is this movie really worth two and a half hours of our time to see a fairly good ending wrap up? In this case, no, it is not. Why? Because the vast majority of this meticulous, obnoxious, pompous movie is made up of pointless visual effects, shots that go on way past their expiration date, and uncomfortable, and, even worse, uninteresting dialog. And seeing Naomi Watts prance around with the attitude of a caffeine addicted, giddy moron with the off-kilter adrenaline dysfunction of a high school theater student makes me want to punch her in the scrawny face. It's that grating. Sure, there are some lovely ladies, some intriguing and artfully used shots and cinematography, and at times the psychedelic effects work. But not for the whole movie! This is a tiresome quagmire of a film. It's not confusing -- the elements that might seem confusing actually work fairly well. It's the fact that it's so full of itself, so poorly executed (for the most part), and so uneven that makes this film junk. It wants to be good. It wants to be provocative. It wants to be sexy. It wants to be deep and surreal. Sadly, this movie does not succeed in those goals. The good parts are rare and sparsely distributed. The provocative parts are tame. The bedroom scenes seems forced. The supposed deep quality is horribly shallow and unconvincing, and the surreal bits are unoriginal, irrelevant, and feel like the discarded remains of previous, better Lynch films. I would almost feel sorry for this mess, if it didn't annoy me so much.
4/10