Product Description

Two beautiful women are caught up in a lethally twisted mystery and ensnared in an equally dangerous web of erotic passion. Studio: Uni Dist Corp. (mca) Release Date: 09/02/2003 Starring: Justin Theroux Laura Elena Harring Run time: 147 minutes Rating: R Director: David Lynch

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2500 in DVD
• Brand: Universal
• Released on: 2002-04-09
• Rating: R (Restricted)
• Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
• Formats: Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, DVD-Video, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
• Original language: English, French
• Subtitled in: English, French, Spanish
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 147 minutes

Amazon.com
Pandora couldn't resist opening the forbidden box containing all the delusions of mankind, and let's just say David Lynch, in Mulholland Drive, indulges a similar impulse. Employing a familiar film noir atmosphere to unravel, as he coyly puts it, "a love story in the city of dreams," Lynch establishes a foreboding but playful narrative in the film's first half before subsuming all of Los Angeles and its corrupt ambitions into his voyeuristic universe of desire. Identities exchange, amnesia proliferates, and nightmare visions are induced, but not before we've become enthralled by the film's two main characters: the dazed and sullen femme fatale, Rita (Laura Elena Harring), and the pert blonde just-arrived from Ontario (played exquisitely by Naomi Watts) who decides to help Rita regain her memory. Triggered by a rapturous Spanish-language version of Roy Orbison's "Crying," Lynch's best film since Blue Velvet splits glowingly into two equally compelling parts. --Fionn Meade

From The New Yorker
A woman wanders away from a car wreck and into a strange house. Little old people scurry under the foot of a door, squeaking like mice. Yes, it's a David Lynch project. This one began life as a TV pilot; you can just imagine the aghast faces of the network executives as they saw what they had commissioned. In the event, the elongated weirdness, stretching to two and a half hours, feels discomfortingly at home on the larger screen; if you ever wanted to see an epic horror-soap, this is what it would look like. Many established Lynch motifs are in place, most of them summoned from one corner or another of the nineteen-fifties: the innocent blonde (Naomi Watts), the baffled brunette (Laura Elena Harring), the clueless cop (Robert Forster). Addicts of the director will tie themselves in knots trying to pick the lock of the film; the rest of us can lie back and enjoy the spooking. With Justin Theroux and, as a tough old landlady, Ann Miller. Yes, that Ann Miller. -Anthony Lane
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker

Customer Reviews

The best film released in 2001
David Lynch movies are usually love it or hate it affairs. Some think they are overindulgent ego trips, or pretentious, overly symbolic mishmoshes that need the cinematic equivalent of a Rosetta stone to decipher. Others, look on them as works of inscrutable genius. Lynch's range is actually quite remarkable. The 2 most normal and prosaic (in terms of plot structure) films he directed, THE ELEPHANT MAN and THE STRAIGHT STORY, exist at one edge of the Lynchian universe. At the other you have ERASERHEAD, WILD AT HEART, LOST HIGHWAY, and INLAND EMPIRE. David Lynch can be as coherent and sober as any other mainstream director, or he can be as wildly experimental and innovative as the most obscure artist. His greatest films I believe are the two that fall somewhere in between the 2 extremes, and they are BLUE VELVET and MULHOLLAND DRIVE. They are mysterious puzzles, but also simply great movies that can be enjoyed on many levels, and like most Lynch films, better appreciated with repeated viewings.

MULHOLLAND DRIVE was the best film of 2001. It was the most daring, the most beautifully filmed, the bravest, and the most unsettling movie of that year. It had the grotesque elements Lynch is famous for. It had the sardonic humor typically present in his work. It also had in Naomi Watts, the best performance given by an actress that year. It's understandable, that people just scratch their heads and wonder what this movie was all about, but if they can separate the dream elements from the real, they will be on the right track. Lynch movies are open to various interpretations, and they are purposely designed as cinematic Rorschach tests for the viewer. MULHOLLAND DRIVE has important things to say about Hollywood and the nature of fame and celebrity, and it has important things to say about love, jealousy, guilt, and ambition. But these things aren't spelled out for you. They are more opaque than transparent. What precisely is being said may not be clear, but clues are given, and the fun of watching MULHOLLAND DRIVE is finding those clues and playing detective. Lynch frequently uses colors and objects as clues; a symbolic shorthand to describe thematic elements of the story. MULHOLLAND DRIVE is also a hybrid of Surrealism and Expressionism. In Surrealism, dream logic replaces reality, and in Expressionism, emotional response through internal conflict, supplant rational motive and pragmatic action.

If you just want to sit back and be entertained for a couple of hours, I don't think you will enjoy this film, but if you want to be puzzled, astonished, and shocked out of complacency, as well as amused and entertained, watch MULHOLLAND DRIVE once, or twice, or even better, half a dozen times..and while you're at it, do the same for the other Lynch masterpieces currently available.

How do I hate thee
I hated this movie. I watched it several times. I was interested, but there was nothing to be received from this movie. It was like I was eaves dropping on someone's drugged out consciousness. I refused to believe that there was something to get from this movie. If there was a key to the movie ... the Director swallowed it. You would be better off watching Limbo. With Limbo, you will at least know why you're mad.

Still happy
Once again, a pleasant buying experience buying from Amazon. Although the movie was a bit darker than I expected, it still is a noteworthy addition to my collection.