8/19/2023 0 Comments Wild at heart is a shitty filmThe stiff acting and stilted dialogue inch Blue Velvet just past the realm of realism into a space without signposts that gets more disorienting the longer you stay in it. To encounter or revisit the film now, decades later, is to realize that we still don’t. To peruse the early reviews is to sense the emergence of the slipperiest of sensibilities, one that no one quite knew how to talk about. The shock of the new fades by definition, but if it has hardly done so in the case of Blue Velvet, that may be because its tone remains forever elusive. Yet Blue Velvet has weathered the passage of time better than any other Oscar nominee that year, possibly better than any Hollywood movie of its decade. He lost to Oliver Stone for P l ato o n, which also won Best Picture. The critical enthusiasm at the time of its release - many reviewers put it on their year-end lists - propelled Lynch to a second, even less probable Academy Award nomination for directing. “It’s a strange world,” the people of Lumberton keep telling one another, and the lasting impression is that it never gets less strange. (After the media storm subsided, Lynch and Rossellini confirmed that they were a couple. Her agents at ICM dropped her upon seeing the film the nuns at her old school in Rome called to say they were praying for her. Rossellini had by far the riskier part, as the reactions made clear. While Frank Booth is remembered as one of his defining roles, he earned a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination for playing the town drunk in that same year’s much tamer sports movie Hoo s ier s. For Hopper, Blue Velvet was the crowning achievement of his latest comeback from Hollywood exile. Outside a Los Angeles cinema, two strangers got into a heated disagreement, which they decided to resolve by going back in for a second viewing. A man fainted at a Chicago screening after having his pacemaker checked, he went back to catch the ending. A N ewswee k article, headlined “Black and Blue Is Beautiful?”, described the clamorous scene at theaters. Lines formed around the block in New York City and Los Angeles there were reports of mass walkouts and refund demands. The conservative journal N ational Review branded the movie pornographic, “a piece of mindless junk.” The Christian Century named it the magazine’s film of the year, praising its serious treatment of sin and evil and even invoking Saint Paul’s Epistle to the Romans. ![]() In her N ew Y or k Time s rave, Janet Maslin wrote that the film confirmed Lynch’s “stature as an innovator, a superb technician, and someone best not encountered in a dark alley.”īlue Velvet became an instant cult film, a lightning rod for think pieces, and as more people saw it, the reactions grew ever more polarized. Ebert accused Lynch of being even more sadistic than the psychopathic Frank Booth in submitting Rossellini to all manner of on-screen humiliations. Roger Ebert’s one-star review in the Chicago Sun-Time s bemoaned its “sophomoric satire and cheap shots.” In the N ew Y or k Po s t, Rex Reed pronounced it “one of the sickest films ever made.” Pro or con, the reviews tended to make things personal, as befits a film that was unmistakably “charged with its maker’s psychosexual energy,” in Hoberman’s words. In the C hicago Tribune, Dave Kehr raved: “There isn’t anything else quite like it, and it’s pretty wonderful.” The detractors were no less vociferous. ![]() Hoberman proclaimed it “a film of ecstatic creepiness” and lauded its “boldly alien perspective” in the V il l a ge Voice. ![]() When Blue Velvet opened on September 19, 1986, in fifteen American cities, some of the most influential critics were effusive in their praise. One response card read: “David Lynch should be shot.” (Producer) Dino De Laurentiis was unfazed, but the negative feedback lowered expectations considerably, which may have worked to Lynch’s advantage. Excerpted from “David Lynch: The Man From Another Place”ĭavid Lynch’s films have rarely fared well at test screenings, and Blue Velvet triggered some of the worst early reactions of his career.
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