"Lost Highway" is an unbelievably awful film (and believe me, being a B-movie junkie, I've seen some pretty bad films) that pretends to be an art house film. Well, I've got news for you, art house films have more substance than "Lost Highway"'s contrived drivel. Lynch made the huge mistake letting his images tell the story (which, I have no problem with unless the imagery lacks creativity and skill, which this film does). As a whole, the way most of the scenes were shot were pedestrian at best. On most accounts, Lynch failed at letting his images do the "talking". I absolutely adore dark films that have a penchant for being weird and offbeat, but Lynch can't even manage that. In "Lost Highway", he uses forced artfulness. Compositions of dialogue and images cease to be artful when they're crammed down the throats of the viewers, which was exactly what Lynch did here. Everything about this film is so claustrophobic that it denies the viewers of their freedom to interpret what they're seeing on screen in their own way (which is the worst thing a director can do). The lack of coherence was not one of the many main gripes I had with this film; the pacing was. The pacing of "Lost Highway" was wrought out so much to the point that it was torturous. And those damn pauses in between dialogue, and even in between words in sentences of dialogue drove me up a wall. There were, literally, at least three occasions where there were twenty second pauses in between exchanges of dialogue between characters, and one where some moronic blond girl that has no self-worth (the movie was so mind-boglingly lumbering, I can't even remember her name) takes a twenty second pause (in the middle of a freakin' sentence!) while talking to some ugly young man (I can't remember his name, either, nor care to) while they are driving. I guess Lynch thought that this film would be more true to life (or at least pretend to give it some sense of realism, which it doesn't) if he had his actors take those long pauses, but again, he made another huge miscalculation: people in real life do not talk like that! If anything, people talk too fast, not too slow. The only characters that were memorable were Bill Pullman's character Fred (but this performance left much to be desired), and the creepy man with the video camera (too bad he wasn't in the movie for longer).
My rating: 1 out of ten.
*Side note: "Lost Highway" rivals "Castle Freak" for worst film I've ever seen. And guess what, we have a new winner! Yes, that's right, "Lost Highway" is my new least favourite film. At least "Castle Freak" had one redeeming quality in it: the amazing Jeffrey Combs who delivered a decent performance despite one of the worst plots I've ever seen in my life (excluding the attempted one in "Lost Highway").
My rating: 1 out of ten.
*Side note: "Lost Highway" rivals "Castle Freak" for worst film I've ever seen. And guess what, we have a new winner! Yes, that's right, "Lost Highway" is my new least favourite film. At least "Castle Freak" had one redeeming quality in it: the amazing Jeffrey Combs who delivered a decent performance despite one of the worst plots I've ever seen in my life (excluding the attempted one in "Lost Highway").