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.

January 2008 activity

Total Log Entries: 53

Total Comments: 41

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The Elephant Man / UK / USA / 1980

I have very little to add to Tom’s compendious review of the film, except to note that the lines of “Nothing Will Die” that are spoken during the film’s final, exultant scene are from Tennyson’s Juvenilia. Tennyson is rather a strange bedfellow for David Lynch, it would seem, but I think Tom is spot-on in pointing out the similarity between Lynch and that other big Victorian, Dickens, in their rather simplistic moral characterizations. (In this light, Twin Peaks seems an awful lot like Dickens in the Pacific Northwest.) It may seem odd that a film like The Elephant Man should link two such seemingly divergently minds, but then again I can’t think of anyone who so persuasively, viscerally captures Victorian London as Lynch does here.

by Leo Goldsmith | Source: Paramount DVD
02 Jan 2008 1:52 PM | Submit Comment

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