Cheap Lost Highway (All Region NTSC Import) (DVD) (Patricia Arquette, Bill Pullman) (David Lynch) Price

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Customer Reviews of Lost Highway (All Region NTSC Import)

Terrible
This scattered and incoherent film never builds any empathy or interest in the characters that populate it. Cinematography is darkly beautiful. I defy anyone to get all the way to the end of this film in one sitting.

A Double Life
In David Lynch's 1997 cult film, Jazz musician Fred Madison (Bill Pullman) lives in a swank Los Angeles house with his wife Renee (Patricia Arquette, in a prankishly awful brown Betty Page wig), whom he suspects of adultery; they receive mysterious videotapes that seem to have been taken in their house while they both sleep. At a Hollywood party, Fred encounters a mysterious stranger (Robert Blake, in the film's most memorable bit), a nightmarish joker character without eyebrows who uncannily seems to be able to be two places at once. Before he knows it, Fred is under arrest for the gruesome murder and dismemberment of Renee; in prison, he seems to undergo a metamorphosis and become a whole new character, Pete Dayton, a handsome younger mechanic (Balthazar Getty). Dayton becomes involved with Alice, the girlfriend (again played by Arquette, now a blonde) of his best customer, a gangsterish figure named Mr. Eddy (Robert Loggia); Alice tries to escape with Pete from Mr. Eddy's clutches, and then things get really wild. <
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>In retrospect, LOST HIGHWAY film seems now mostly to pave the way for his superb 2001 MULHOLLAND DR., covering many of the same obsessions (the dark dreamy tone, the split narratives, a divided main character, the Los Angeles wasteland) but without the later film's very welcome moments of comic relief or its charismatic and complex central performance by Naomi Watts (in her famous star-making performance). Although Bill Pullman is quite fine at conveying torment, he is less adept at suggesting inner depths or self-division. And its quite puzzling to see why Lynch cast Arquette for any reason (other than for her physical similarity as Alice to Jayne Mansfield). Both Getty and Robert Blake are much more memorable, but they're in smaller roles and can't hold the films together by themselves. The film has some superbly unsettling visual moments (the empty vortexes of Pullman's hallways, a dream vision repeated twice of a desert cabin exploding in flames in reverse), and the film creepily evokes some of the most infamous deaths in Hollywood history, such as the murder of the Black Dahlia (suggested by the bisection of Renee and her dark 40s wig) and the car accident that killed Jayne Mansfield (evoked by the death of the character of Sammy, and by Arquette's appearance as Alice). Even so, MULHOLLAND DR. shows how much stronger a film Lynch might have made, with all the same narrative enigmas but a much stronger emotional connection.