Blue Velvet (1986)
Directed by David Lynch
The discovery of a severed human ear found in a field leads a young man on an investigation related to a beautiful, mysterious nightclub singer and a group of psychopathic criminals who have kidnapped her child.
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What critics compared Blue Velvet to
Having captured the strange suburbia within Lynch’s Blue Velvet, Elmes assists in highlighting the poetic beauty Paterson from Paterson sees within his hometown, which permits Paterson to soak up inspiration from the town and its people for his own poetry.
Frederick Elmes, who previously shot things as stylistically varied as Blue Velvet and The Ice Storm, sticks to muted, warmer tones, recalling faded family snapshots from the 1970s.
The stunning camerawork and expressive lighting by Frederick Elmes (Blue Velvet; River’s Edge; Synecdoche, New York) add further dimensions to Jarmusch’s storytelling, and the original music written and performed by Carter Logan, Sqürl, and Jarmusch lend Paterson a noodling quality that provides an aural equivalent to the reworking of lines of verse.
Lensed with a painter's eye by the great Frederick Elmes ("Blue Velvet"), the movie conveys an aura of Blakean mysticism through such homely sources as an 8-by-10 mugshot of Lou Costello; the connections to previous Jarmusch releases — Masatoshi Nagase, the Carl Perkins fan of the made-in-Memphis "Mystery Train," returns as a tourist — posit the film as the latest chapter in a bemused serial epic that is Knausgårdian in its appreciation of life's epiphanies and humiliations.
Indeed, Nicolas Winding Refn’s thriller has shades of Blue Velvet, Wild at Heart, Mulholland Dr ., and Lost Highway — but it’s the Chilean-French surrealist Alejandro Jodorowsky that Refn refers to most directly, particularly in those moments that speak to the spiritual or imply otherworldliness.
Lynchian in its violent, sexually viable weirdness, like 1986's " Blue Velvet " transported to Thailand and given an extra splash of gore, the film enthralls and, on occasion, perplexes.
Pitched somewhere between Kubrick and Lynch, Only God Forgives possesses the same formal precision of A Clockwork Orange and Eyes Wide Shut and the same what-the-hell-is-happening nightmarishness of Blue Velvet and Inland Empire.
When a kid finds a severed human ear during one of the opening sequences of I Saw the Devil, you might mistake it for an homage to the comparatively placid world of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet or the dark pop poetry of Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction.
There are references to other films (Blue Velvet, The Silence of the Lambs, Hostel) while never turning everything completely over into homage.
An insect motif evokes Blue Velvet, a violent nature doc on a motel TV nods to Wild at Heart, and much of the rest pays homage to Twin Peaks: comical high-school toughs (including a biker teen at a roadhouse), the threat of incest, crossing train tracks to a dangerous woodsy rendezvous, dreamy ceiling-to-floor drapes, and frequent close-ups of saddle shoes, as a signifier of innocence on the cusp of sexual awakening.
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Jeffrey discovers a severed, ant-infested human ear near a grassy trail (Lynch's homage to Buñuel's Un Chien Andalou ), bringing it to the attention of the local police chief.
That's because "Killer Joe" is as degrading, disturbing and wholly jaw-dropping as "Blue Velvet" or "Videodrome," but, like those 1980s masterpieces, it's also expertly directed, even more brutally well-written and features a cast that acts the hell out of every scene.
Kin to Blue Velvet's Frank Booth, McConaughey's Joe is sociopathy incarnate in black-leather Tony Lamas, looking to profit, or kiss, or kill, or, preferably, all of the above.
It’s far more straightforward, but the only movie I can compare it to for immediate recognition is “Blue Velvet,” and I say that as praise.
The tone could be best described as the darkest of Coen brothers films, with some Blue Velvet oddity sprinkled in.
In any event: I don't know where or whether it's appropriate to say yes, it's tempting to wish that Synecdoche, lensed by Blue Velvet's Frederick Elmes, looked a bit more polished or had a visual imagination to match its verbal and structural and philosophical aspirations.
He’s like David Lynch if Mr. Blue Velvet dropped the dream logic and applied a more analytical angst to his projects.
I do wonder in a rhetorical way whether the film would be received differently were it a lost Kieslowski or a Godard at the peak of his narrative aggression, though it reminds more as a whole of David Lynch's "Hitchcock" pictures ( Blue Velvet , Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive ), which found in their rhythmic Americana banality the dull thrum of existential horror.
The granddaddy of them all is “Blue Velvet,” the great postmodern Hitchcockian noir that turned pulp sensation into a surrealist high.
Clearly borrowing from Dennis Hopper’s performance as Frank Booth in Lynch’s Blue Velvet , Taylor-Johnson nevertheless crafts one of the year’s most frightening villains.
The whole sequence plays like one of those superior yuppie-in-peril movies from the early 1980s, Jonathan Demme’s Something Wild, say, or David Lynch’s Blue Velvet .
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Though Jyn had never exhibited any spirit of revolt—she’d had enough trouble surviving, even pseudonymously, merely keeping her head down—she’s thrown together with a venerable figure from her past, Saw Gerrera (Forest Whitaker), who huffs with a breathing mask seemingly borrowed from David Lynch’s “Blue Velvet” and reminds her of long-standing affinities.
As he ventures deeper into the night, he is challenged by the darker side of society, not unlike Kyle MacLachlan in “Blue Velvet” or even Griffin Dunne in “After Hours”.
By the time Bill cruises voyeuristically through the mansion’s orgiastic set pieces, we should be feeling the same fascination and horror we did when Dennis Hopper took Kyle McLachlan on the psychosexual highway to hell in “Blue Velvet.”
Unlike, say, Kyle MacLachlan in Blue Velvet, William may be tempted, but he never makes it past voyeurism.
Like Crash and Blue Velvet, two similarly fearless, sexually transgressive but ultimately moralistic films that straddled the fine line between genius and lunacy, Eyes Wide Shut is above all a masterpiece of sustained tone, a tightrope act that pays off in rich and unexpected ways.