Cheap Blue Velvet (Video) (Isabella Rossellini, Kyle MacLachlan, Dennis Hopper) (David Lynch) Price

Related Products

Customer Reviews of Blue Velvet

The Best Film of the 1980's
I just recently saw David Lynch's "Blue Velvet" on the big screen (and in widescreen) for the first time. Having seen it now in its original aspect ratio, I can't bear to go back to my pan-and-scan videotape. Thank goodness that it's coming out on DVD. "Blue Velvet," quite simply, is the best film of the 1980's; the only film that comes close to it is Scorsese's "Raging Bull." "Blue Velvet" was so ahead of its time when it was first released back in 1986. In fact, it remains so today, judging by the bewildered faces of people who were at the revival showing I attended. The film precedes "American Beauty" in blowing the doors off of the closet that Suburbia keeps its skeletons in, telling the story of a young college kid who, after finding a severed human ear, gets caught up in murder and mayhem in his hometown of "Lumberton USA." Lynch goes to great lengths to set up his picture-book depiction of small-town American life (complete with bright red fire trucks, white picket fences, and blue skies) before taking a wrecking ball to it. Like he did in his debut, "Eraserhead," Lynch shows us what we look like (tedium and all) but purposely twists our view of it, like a mad optometrist giving us the wrong eyeglass prescription. Apart from the fine directing, "Blue Velvet" boasts an excellent cast that delivers each line with patented Lynch-quirkiness. Kyle MacLachlan plays Jeffrey Beaumont like a modern-day Dante, travelling through the Inferno he never knew his hometown was. Isabella Rosselini is spectacularly disturbing as Dorothy Vallens, a lounge singer whose husband and son have been abducted. Her character is a first: a femme fatale who is more dangerous to herself than anyone else. And in what may be one of the top ten tour-de-force performances of all time, Dennis Hopper, as oxygen-huffing crime boss/hedonist Frank Booth, makes you laugh one minute, and cringe with fear the next after realizing that such a person probably does exist. You may not agree that "Blue Velvet" is the best film of the 80's but you'll have to do some digging to find one more original. It is a contemporary film noir classic that deserves to withstand the test of time like older noir classics such as "Double Indemnity" and "The Big Sleep." So far, it appears to be holding up. It's a strange world and "Blue Velvet" (both the film itself and the fact that it was made) is solid proof of just how strange it can be.

Much Less Than its Rep
Weird, dully acted, occasionally gross and sometimes unintentionally funny. Lynch desperately wants to have his cake and eat it too by being so uncool that he's cool. Lynch cannot just tell, he has to show. All the time. Like the weird kid in 3rd grade who always brought something unsettling to show-and-tell and the kids told their parents and the parents complained and the teacher had to talk to his parents about his not bringing anything else. The weirdos Lynch populates his underworld with are hilariously overacted by actors who obviously don't know what the heck is going on and probably think Lynch is full of it. Dennis Hopper is hysterical. He basically didn't change his act a bit from Apocalypse Now and, of course, the critics and fans raved about how "brilliant" ansd "electrifying" his performance was. After Blue Velvet, I imagine Hopper got down on his knees every night and thanked God for giving most people short memories and short attention spans.