The DVD-Laser Disc Newsletter November 2022
Like a two-lane road with traffic moving in both directions, David Lynch’s 1997 feature Lost Highway, released by The Criterion Collection as a two-platter 4K Blu-ray (UPC#715515277518, $50), has two crime plots that do not so much intersect as periodically merge and separate. In one, Bill Pullman is a jazz saxophonist whose jealousy over his apparently wayward wife, played by a brunette Patricia Arquette, leads him to murder. In the other, Balthazar Getty is a young garage mechanic pulled into having a fling with a gangster’s girlfriend, played by a blonde Patricia Arquette. They scheme to rob one of the gangster’s associates, who may also be the guy the saxophonist’s wife is sleeping with, since both men are played by the same actor, Michael Massee, with the same hair color. Robert Loggia is memorable as the gangster. Fusing the two tales are shifts in reality—Pullman’s character becomes Getty’s character, and vice versa—and other dabbles in the supernatural—Robert Blake plays a white-faced Beelzebub character that leads others to their destructions. It is suggested in the disc’s supplement that the film is exploring the psychological denial that can be triggered in someone who commits a heinous act, but the film is no way limited to such an explanation. Lynch draws enthusiastically from landmark films, including Kiss Me Deadly and, most significantly, Meshes in the Afternoon (the brunette Arquette even looks like Maya Deren), emphasizing that the point of the 134-minute Lost Highway is not its plot but the manner in which it keeps the viewer untethered and in a state of mesmerized unease.
To this end, the 4K presentation is the version best designed to manage the film’s rejection of expectations and embrace of the cinematic arts. Letterboxed with an aspect ratio of about 2.4:1, the colors are subdued by design (the filmmakers did their best to avoid the color, blue) but delivered with an intricate precision, and darker sequences are detailed and free of distortion. The 5.1-channel DTS sound has a somewhat primitive mix compared to Lynch’s later work, even on TV, but it is also replicated with a fully satisfying crispness and power. When the soundtrack incorporates the studio-recorded music of Rammstein, Nine Inch Nails and the like, the audio welcomes the increase of complexity without missing, as it were, a beat. On the standard Blu-ray, the film still looks and sounds terrific, but the tentative nature of the movie’s composition is easier to ascertain because a subliminal resistance to its uncertainties is greater. In 4K, the world that Lynch invents and the characters residing there are all that matters.
Both platters have optional English subtitles, and neither platter is chapter encoded. The standard Blu-ray also features an outstanding 81-minute production documentary that doubles as a profile of Lynch’s entire life up to the making of the film, with an additional 14 minutes of juicy interviews that didn’t make it into the documentary’s final cut. Similar to the profiles of Lynch we reviewed in Jul 20, the program nevertheless has materials not seen elsewhere, including glimpses of Lynch’s first short films, interviews with his children, and a visit to the buildings where Eraserhead was shot. Like those other profiles, it is fully engrossing whether it is attempting to drum up excitement for his new movie or exploring the indelible impact of his older ones. Along with a trailer, there is a marvelous 44-minute audio only collection of anecdotes and trivia about the film and Lynch, some of it read by Lynch (including his memories of Marlon Brando), and a classy 13-minute production featurette.
Finally, there is also a terrific 11-minute interview with Lynch, apparently from 1997, in which he looks back at the film and his experiences making it. Just as novels are built by thoughts within chapters and paragraphs, and symphonies by measures and movements, films are compiled from scenes, but for Lynch, there is as much (or even more) passion being put into a scene, its details and the minutia of each shot as into the project as a whole. “Film is made up of millions of moments, and that’s the thing about it, all the elements have to feel correct. And when they feel correct, it’s kind of a seamless flow. If one is out of being correct, it’s so obvious, it’s a disaster. So, it’s a constant kind of watching and feeling, until it all feels correct, and that’s what making a film is. That’s it. Ideas, when you’re lucky, they come along, an idea that you fall in love with, or it’s a series of ideas that string themselves together to a big idea—a film, a script—and a big idea that you fall in love with enough to want to go change that into film, translate that into film. And since the ideas are the most important thing, you just follow those ideas and stay true to those ideas, and there you go. It’s the same on every film, even though the ideas are different. The process is so fantastic, and so this, Lost Highway, was the ‘Lost Highway ideas.’ To me, they were cinema ideas, that film can tell those ideas, where there’s still room to dream, and there’s abstractions and mood and feelings, and I love Lost Highway for those things.”
Lynch’s once-upon-a-time-in-Hollywood mastery of the experiments he put forward in Lost Highway, Mulholland Dr., is also available from Criterion as a two-platter 4K Blu-ray (UPC#715515265812, $50). The standard Blu-ray platter is an exact replication of the BD we reviewed in Nov 15. The 4K platter has optional English subtitles, but no special features and, like the standard platter, no chapter encoding. Letterboxed with an aspect ratio of about 1.85:1, the 4K presentation is smoother and more film-like than the standard Blu-ray. The standard Blu-ray looked fantastic, but the 4K is even more engrossing and more subliminally captivating because of its movie theater perfection. The DTS sound is also richer and more detailed, particularly in the lower registers, where a lot of unnerving action occurs. As we detailed in our previous review, the standard BD platter comes with a 2-minute deleted scene, a 25-minute collection of behind-the-scenes footage, 22 minutes of interviews with cinematographer Peter Deming and production designer Jack Fisk, a 36-minute collection of interviews with other members of the cast, a 19-minute interview with composer Angelo Badalamenti, and a great 27-minute interview with Lynch and Naomi Watts.
If Lynch’s Blue Velvet plays like a perverse maturation of The Hardy Boys, then Mulholland Dr. does the same thing to Nancy Drew. The film uses its amnesia mystery plot to waft the viewer through the dynamics of Hollywood like a slumber boat skimming past the stars, its mojo rising as it proceeds. Watts and Laura Harring, twinned with a Persona-style rack focus, are actresses who find themselves enmeshed in the lust, greed and power struggles that have become an accepted part of the Hollywood myth, while their characters seek to discover who they are and if there is any difference between that and the characters they are playing. Where Lost Highway established its anomalies and offered them up as an alternative entertainment, Mulholland Dr. integrates its strangeness and narrative wormholes with a more assured confidence that the miasma of sex and curious alterations in character and situation, decorated with a knowing appreciation of the Los Angeles environment, will be sufficient to hold a viewer’s attention and enthusiasm from beginning to end. In 4K, it certainly does.
4K Dead
A horror film made on the cheap in 1968 by filmmakers whose previous experience was primarily in industrial movies and commercials, Night of the Living Dead is expertly shot and edited, but raw in its performances, production designs and narrative execution. The film is so raw, in fact, that it plays magnificently well regardless of its presentation format. The rougher it looks the less obvious its production compromises and the more realistically discovered it seems. So what is one to make of the Criterion Collection’s 4K Blu-ray presentation (UPC#715515277419, $50)? Well, just because the movie works when the presentation is lousy doesn’t mean that it doesn’t work when the presentation is outstanding. It just works differently, that is all.
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