As Reviewed by James Brundage
Did you ever feel, if only for a second, that your entire world was redefined? Everything changes in one instant and, although the change may be gone in the next, you are never the same. For that instant, in the complete weirdness of the moment, you feel your entire world collapse as everything is questioned. Truth, lies, God, life, death, reality (with Lynch, especially reality). Your entire world doesn't feel right even if it is.
That's what Lost Highway does to you, gives you that queasy feeling in your stomach, instantly altering everything we ever knew and ever suspected. Nothing is true, and nothing is false. Reality means nothing. Who you are means … nothing.
This is a conclusion that, along with other things, took me watching it four times to realize.
Does is sound utterly and irrevocably insane to you? Well, it is. Without a single doubt, the weirdest of the upwards of a thousand movies that I have seen (of course I'm still trying to find where in the hell I can rent Eraserhead).
The story is as complex (if not more) than I've made it out to be. It begins in a small room, with a tenor sax (Fred, played by Bill Pullman), smoking on a cigarette when his buzzer rings. He presses it and someone tells him "Dick Laurant is Dead"
Huh?
Things get weirder. His wife is cheating on him, there is a man looking like a vampire able to be in two places at once, and time has absolutely no meaning. Don't make the mistake of thinking this is some sci-fi movie, either. It fits the bill of a rarity, something that only one person has pulled off more than once (David Lynch being that one person), a Nightmare World movie. The weirdest and most interesting type of movie because they go where others never will. I'd tell you more, but this one's so screwed up that you'll have to see it on your own. A forewarning, though, the movie has about as much profanity as JFK, as much sex as Showgirls, and as much violence as Platoon.
Movie Reviews by James Brundage