Screening Log

This new site feature is a collective effort to summarize our viewing habits. Occasionally, you will find titles here that are coming to a theater near you, in addition to films viewed on television, and even films viewed in piecemeal. The screening log is archived each month; to view past entries select a month in the menu below.

October 2006 activity

Total Log Entries: 57

Total Comments: 43

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Dumbland / USA / 2002

If the feature-film business ever bottoms out for David Lynch, he has a fine career ahead of him making cartoons for The New Yorker — provided that the editors of that periodically venerable periodical would consent to allowing their urbane readership to be tormented by Lynch’s vile, aggressive, hilariously disturbed Dumblanders.

The series — originally aired on Lynch’s website — comprises eight episodes of black-and-white line-drawn animation. The style is extremely minimal, but somehow thoroughly in line with Lynch’s cinematic style, featuring plenty of sudden violence, banal suburbia, and very frightening living rooms, all accompanied by the constant, maddening hum of traffic, chatter, TV sounds, and neanderthal mouth-breathing. The go-to critical comparison would be something like “Dr. Katz on acid,” though I would say that ketamine is more likely.

All this said, and a DL.com price-tag of $28 notwithstanding, it’s amazing how much Lynch is able to wring from all this. Through inference alone, one can see parallels with his major films and with a host of external sources, like sitcoms (there’s a good, weird variation on Home Improvement in the first episode) and even the photography of Uta Barth (especially her … and of time series, which you can sample here and here). Best of all, it serves as a nice companion to the more foul-mouthed and white-trash parts of Inland Empire.

by Leo Goldsmith | Source: DavidLynch.com DVD
24 Oct 2006 3:34 PM | Submit Comment

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