Thursday, May 26 2022 | 8PM Wild At Heart USA 1990 d. David Lynch with Nicolas Cage, Laura Dern, Diane Ladd, Willem Dafoe, Harry Dean Stanton, Isabella Rossellini, Calvin Lockhart, J. E. Freeman, W. Morgan Sheppard, Crispin Glover. Grace Zabriskie, Freddie Jones, John Lurie, Jack Nance, Sherilyn Fenn, and Sheryl Lee. Colour. 124 m
“Thirty years ago, Wild at Heart arrived in theaters after winning the Palme D’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, where it was greeted, according to the critic Dave Kehr, with ‘the most violent chorus of boos and hisses to be heard in a decade’. Such a reception at Cannes can often be a badge of honor – L’Avventura and Taxi Driver also got an earful – and Lynch would get booed again when he premiered Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me at the festival two years later….Wild at Heart is a film of extreme violence and ugliness, and it’s far more conceptually loaded than it needs to be, with a complicated thicket of murderous lowlifes and Wizard of Oz references that are sometimes clumsily grafted on to the action and the dialogue. Coming after a tightly constructed noir like Blue Velvet, the film feels deliberately unruly, loaded with discursive flashbacks and soap opera twists, and moments of glib provocation, as if Lynch were aiming to repulse people as a lark.” Scott Tobias
See Also: Raising Arizona (Coens, 1986), Natural Born Killers (Stone, 1994), True Romance (Scott, 1993)
Series: Spring 2022 :: David Lynch Wild At Heart And Weird On Top