Nadja - the disappointing
Tuesday, October 29th, 2002 04:15 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
robinturnerSome horror films are too bad for words. Most are kind of fun. Some are romantic (I'd put Werner Herzog's remake of Nosferatu in that category, though many people would think I'm a sicko to say that). A few are genuinely scary (Don't Look Now). Then there are a few that make a valiant attempt to be both romantic and scary, and end up being depressing. David Lynch's Nadja is one such. I never thought I'd give up on a David Lynch film half way, but after getting the DVD out of the library with such high hopes, I switched it off after less than an hour.
This is disturbing - I mean David Lynch doesn't make bad films, does he? I know Dune was a terrible disappointment to many, but if you forget that it's a film by David Lynch based on a novel by Frank Herbert, it's actually quite enjoyable. Now maybe Lynch was trying to make a depressing film, to show that vampirism isn't the glamorous thing other films tell us it is. But it's still weak. Giving the modern characters the same names as characters in the Bram Stoker novel isn't clever, it's just silly. And making films in black and white these days is just an excuse for directors to show off the cinematographic skills they don't have.
As for the reviews quoted on the cover, who are you trying to fool? "Truly hot! Sex and moviemaking of the unsafest sort" (L.A. Weekly). Come on! Like, there's two women kissing, and you see one of them put her fingers at least an inch inside the other's jeans. Gasp.
I also got really upset when Van Helsing killed Lucy's pet tarantula.
This is disturbing - I mean David Lynch doesn't make bad films, does he? I know Dune was a terrible disappointment to many, but if you forget that it's a film by David Lynch based on a novel by Frank Herbert, it's actually quite enjoyable. Now maybe Lynch was trying to make a depressing film, to show that vampirism isn't the glamorous thing other films tell us it is. But it's still weak. Giving the modern characters the same names as characters in the Bram Stoker novel isn't clever, it's just silly. And making films in black and white these days is just an excuse for directors to show off the cinematographic skills they don't have.
As for the reviews quoted on the cover, who are you trying to fool? "Truly hot! Sex and moviemaking of the unsafest sort" (L.A. Weekly). Come on! Like, there's two women kissing, and you see one of them put her fingers at least an inch inside the other's jeans. Gasp.
I also got really upset when Van Helsing killed Lucy's pet tarantula.
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Lynch or not Lynch
Date: 2002-10-28 08:08 pm (UTC)(Haven't seen Nadja myself, still probably will if I get the chance; some people can't be helped)
As to B&W, I think there are a few great films made in B&W after it was no longer cheaper: Pi, Zelig, Manhattan. I'm not sure if the monochrome was necessary, but I find it hard to picture them every other way. I think the clarity is important.
Re: Lynch or not Lynch
Date: 2002-10-28 08:09 pm (UTC)Re : Himmel über etc
Date: 2002-10-29 02:22 am (UTC)Let's not forget about that one.
Re: Re : Himmel über etc
Date: 2002-10-29 08:11 am (UTC)What, another Chicagoan ?
Date: 2002-10-29 09:15 am (UTC)(I always listen when the angels utter...)
Re: Lynch or not Lynch
Date: 2002-10-29 06:18 am (UTC)Manhattan arguably uses B/W to good effect because it's at least in part a film about pretentiousness, and shooting a film in black and white is a pretty pretentious thing to do. In Zelig is obviously makes sense, since there is so much fake archived material in it.
Pi is an interesting case. The black and white makes it more kind of mathematical, and it makes the film a bit more gritty (note that in places it seems to be deliberately badly shot). It goes well with the overall low-tech look (the guy gets a state-of-the-art processor that people would literally kill for, and plugs it into what looks like a cluster of old 486s). As for the film as a whole, though, I was rather disappointed - it started out so well, then seem to turn into just another "crazy mathematician" film.
Then of course there's Eraserhead, which is just so weird it wouldn't make any difference what colour it was shot in (though personally I think it would have been rather nice in sepia).