Surveillance

I went to the 16th Annual David Lynch Twin Peaks Film Festival last night. It was largely a disappointment.

The high point was a three or four-minute short by David Lynch, presenting the film festival and welcoming the audience. It used his classic technique of shooting the scene with the actors playing the scene and saying the lines backwards (in this case, Lynch himself was the only actor), and then playing the film backwards (by turning the backwards, backwards, you get a frontwards). Inevitably this gives an extremely off-kilter quality to the scene.

The central feature of the festival was originally supposed to be one of Lynch's classics - The Elephant Man, Eraserhead, et al. Unfortunately, the producers decided to screen Lynch's daughter's new film, Surveillance. Jennifer Lynch has made one prior movie, 15 years ago, called Boxing Helena, which was poorly received. Surveillance is likely to follow suit. Although it was billed as a "psychological thriller", it was really little more than a slasher film. The production design and the cinematography were fine and Bill Pullman was fine, but the "twist" could be seen so far in advance that it might as well have been no twist at all and J. Lynch failed to take the film's genre into new territory.

Anyway, apparently the film has been picked up for distribution, but it is largely junk and should be avoided unless you are a junkie of the slasher or psychological thriller genres. I think I will have to see Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight this weekend, just to get Surveillance out from under my nails.

There were a number of Lynch acting alumni at the screening, including the short receptionist with the high voice from Twin Peaks. The people watching was great. I think my "favorite" was the guy from the AARP set across the aisle - a string of actually funny jokes in the film: silent as the sphinx; some totally unfunny, uncomfortable string of dialogue: the guy is in stitches. At the end of the show, I made sure he and I left the theater by separate exits.