David Lynch

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Top 10 Movies of the Decade

January 15, 2010 | Permalink

Jeff Chen recently asked, “Since everybody else is making lists of their top ten films of the decade, does that mean I have to, too?” I wouldn’t presume to speak for him, but my own answer to the same rhetorical question is a sheepish “yes.” Jeff ended up making his list, too, although I don’t know how sheepish he felt about it.

Anyway, here are my top ten…nah, screw it—twelve favorite movies of the decade just completed, i.e., 2000-2009.

  1. Dogville (2004)

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    Mike D’Angelo, The Man Who Viewed Too Much:

    Inevitably, von Trier’s spartan aesthetic has American critics citing Our Town, but in both method and spirit Dogville has much more in common with Brecht’s The Good Woman of Setzuan (written in Denmark, ironically), another sorrowful disquisition on the mercenary aspects of human nature. Anything this ostentatiously artificial demands to be read as allegory, of course, and charges of anti-Americanism aren’t entirely groundless — certainly the film is very, very critical of the way that the U.S. treats its underclass, and to argue that Von Trier isn’t entitled to feel that disgust without having set foot in the continental 48 is patently absurd.

  2. Capturing the Friedmans (2003)

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    Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader:

    If Capturing the Friedmans were less shapely and less of a masterpiece, I’d find it less troubling. Both times I’ve seen it I’ve felt that by the end practically everyone associated with the film seems tarnished in one way or another: the ostensible subjects (the Friedmans, an upper-middle-class Jewish family in the Long Island town of Great Neck), the members of their community who helped destroy much of their lives, the filmmakers, and the audience. We’re all tainted by the graphic exposure of family wounds, diminished by what we think and feel–and by what we don’t think and don’t feel.

    3. Read the rest of this entry »


David Lynch and the Fallacy of Answering

February 26, 2007 | 3 comments

I was just listening to an episode of the reliably interesting radio show This American Life called “Quiz Show.” The second of the episode’s three segments was about the MIT Mystery Hunt, an annual event where teams of intimidatingly brainy puzzle geeks race each other to the solution of a puzzle concocted by the previous year’s winning team. The following passage about what the reporter calls “‘A-ha!’ moments” traveled the boomerang path of irony to cause me an “A-ha!” moment of my own:

Are absolute Answers a human construct, while the underlying Truth in nature is not knowable in such terms? I was immediately reminded of the works of filmmaker David Lynch, in particular his briefly brilliant TV series Twin Peaks, which aired in the early 1990′s.

TwinPeaks

A typically atypical Twin Peaks scene.

As many will recall, the plot of the show concerned the question of who killed Laura Palmer, the high school homecoming queen in an obscure northwestern logging town. The ABC network promoted Peaks by following the “Who Shot J.R.?” paradigm, and did so quite effectively – at the outset. Lynch was in no great hurry to resolve the Laura Palmer case, sticking instead to his own distinctive style: Read the rest of this entry »