Simon's Movie Reviews

  Some movies are best watched sober while others might best be enjoyed with a liberal dose of alcohol or possibly hallucinogens. With David Lynch’s Eraserhead (1977) I strongly suspect drugs might give the viewers a panic attack because they wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between a hallucination or the actual movie. I watched it while slightly drowsy from a lack of sleep and there were times when I was wondering if I was awake or if my mind was off in dreamland. It got hard to tell. This is the latest movie from Empire magazine’s Greatest Movies list from 2008 that I got to scratch off during my many, many hours spent indoors over the past months. It was not my first time experiencing the unique filmmaking style of David Lynch, and that’s a good thing because otherwise I might not have watched any of his later stuff. Eraserhead felt to me like a bizarre art house film by a young student who clearly didn’t care one bit about convention or pleasing the masses. I must no...

Exactly how do you describe a David Lynch movie? He is one of the few directors whose style is so distinctive that his last name has become an adjective. According to Urban Dictionary, the definition of Lynchian is: “having the same balance between the macabre and the mundane found in the works of filmmaker David Lynch.” To see a prime example of that adjective film lovers need look no further than Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986), which does indeed begin in the mundane before slowly sinking in macabre violence. My first introduction to the world of David Lynch was through his ground breaking, but unfortunately interrupted, early 1990s TV series Twin Peaks . This was one of the first television shows to grab viewers with a series-long mystery: who killed Laura Palmer? A mix of soap opera, police procedural, and the supernatural, it is a unique show that showed the darkness hidden in suburbia and remains influential to this day. Featuring Kyle MacLachlan as an FBI investigator with a l...