Blue Velvet Redux

Something that is keeping me excited these days. Blue Velvet is getting revived in a new print and is coming to my place in a couple of weeks. Village Voice has a brief article by filmmaker Guy Maddin and New York Times pitches in too.

"Blue Velvet," which delighted many and repelled many others in 1986, is likely to evoke roughly the same mixture of reactions today, and 20 years from now, and on and on. There's no assimilating its dark-and-light vision, no explaining its real mysteries, and no handy term to categorize it: not "hip" (as might have been said back in the day), and certainly not "edgy" (as canny marketers have trained us to say since). Why are there movies like "Blue Velvet"? Because the world is strange, and the strangeness never goes away.

One of the many hilarious scences in last year's The Squid and the Whale was when Walt (the elder son) goes to see Blue Velvet on a date with his girlfriend, that too with his father who had suggested him the movie in the first place! All three see with deadpan face, when a naked (not "nude", mind you!) Isabella Rosselini screams in anguish, "he put his disease in me"! It was genuinely funny and I also knew I didn't want to be in Walt's shoes, however badly I wanted to see it on big screen. This is one film you definitely would want to see alone :)