Product Description

An engaging dark thriller about a young man after discovering a human ear in a field begins an investigation into a subculture of killers addicts and sexual deviants. Studio: Tcfhe/mgm Release Date: 09/20/2005 Starring: Kyle Maclachlan Dennis Hopper Run time: 120 minutes Rating: R

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #4917 in DVD
• Brand: Velvet
• Released on: 2002-06-04
• Rating: R (Restricted)
• Aspect ratio: 2.35:1
• Formats: Anamorphic, Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, Dubbed, DVD, Special Edition, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
• Original language: English, French
• Subtitled in: English, Spanish, French, Portuguese
• Dubbed in: Spanish
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 120 minutes

Amazon.com essential video
David Lynch peeks behind the picket fences of small-town America to reveal a corrupt shadow world of malevolence, sadism, and madness. From the opening shots Lynch turns the Technicolor picture postcard images of middle class homes and tree-lined lanes into a dreamy vision on the edge of nightmare. After his father collapses in a preternaturally eerie sequence, college boy Kyle MacLachlan returns home and stumbles across a severed human ear in a vacant lot. With the help of sweetly innocent high school girl (Laura Dern), he turns junior detective and uncovers a frightening yet darkly compelling world of voyeurism and sex. Drawn deeper into the brutal world of drug dealer and blackmailer Frank, played with raving mania by an obscenity-shouting Dennis Hopper in a career-reviving performance, he loses his innocence and his moral bearings when confronted with pure, unexplainable evil. Isabella Rossellini is terrifyingly desperate as Hopper's sexual slave who becomes MacLachlan's illicit lover, and Dean Stockwell purrs through his role as Hopper's oh-so-suave buddy. Lynch strips his surreally mundane sets to a ghostly austerity, which composer Angelo Badalamenti encourages with the smooth, spooky strains of a lush score. Blue Velvet is a disturbing film that delves into the darkest reaches of psycho-sexual brutality and simply isn't for everyone. But for a viewer who wants to see the cinematic world rocked off its foundations, David Lynch delivers a nightmarish masterpiece. --Sean Axmaker

Customer Reviews

The Best Film of the 1980's
I just recently saw David Lynch's "Blue Velvet" on the big screen (and in widescreen) for the first time. Having seen it now in its original aspect ratio, I can't bear to go back to my pan-and-scan videotape. Thank goodness that it's coming out on DVD. "Blue Velvet," quite simply, is the best film of the 1980's; the only film that comes close to it is Scorsese's "Raging Bull." "Blue Velvet" was so ahead of its time when it was first released back in 1986. In fact, it remains so today, judging by the bewildered faces of people who were at the revival showing I attended. The film precedes "American Beauty" in blowing the doors off of the closet that Suburbia keeps its skeletons in, telling the story of a young college kid who, after finding a severed human ear, gets caught up in murder and mayhem in his hometown of "Lumberton USA." Lynch goes to great lengths to set up his picture-book depiction of small-town American life (complete with bright red fire trucks, white picket fences, and blue skies) before taking a wrecking ball to it. Like he did in his debut, "Eraserhead," Lynch shows us what we look like (tedium and all) but purposely twists our view of it, like a mad optometrist giving us the wrong eyeglass prescription. Apart from the fine directing, "Blue Velvet" boasts an excellent cast that delivers each line with patented Lynch-quirkiness. Kyle MacLachlan plays Jeffrey Beaumont like a modern-day Dante, travelling through the Inferno he never knew his hometown was. Isabella Rosselini is spectacularly disturbing as Dorothy Vallens, a lounge singer whose husband and son have been abducted. Her character is a first: a femme fatale who is more dangerous to herself than anyone else. And in what may be one of the top ten tour-de-force performances of all time, Dennis Hopper, as oxygen-huffing crime boss/hedonist Frank Booth, makes you laugh one minute, and cringe with fear the next after realizing that such a person probably does exist. You may not agree that "Blue Velvet" is the best film of the 80's but you'll have to do some digging to find one more original. It is a contemporary film noir classic that deserves to withstand the test of time like older noir classics such as "Double Indemnity" and "The Big Sleep." So far, it appears to be holding up. It's a strange world and "Blue Velvet" (both the film itself and the fact that it was made) is solid proof of just how strange it can be.

As coherent as it needs to be.
Although I was once inclined to agree with Roger Ebert's dismissal of "Blue Velvet" as a shocking albeit skillful montage of pointless images and effects, I've had to do a 360 turnaround after seeing it on DVD and reconsidering it in relation to some similar texts. The film certainly makes sense in comparison with a quest narrative such as Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown" and in light of Freud's ideas about love as well as Nietzsche's thoughts on the Dionysian self. It's also a film that pays constant homage to Hitchcock's best work, notably "Rear Window" and "Psycho," in its preoccupation with spectator psychology.

The most important lines occur early in the film when the protagonist, Kyle MacLachlan, tells Laura Dern that he needs to investigate the mysterious circumstances surrounding Isabella Rosselli because "knowledge requires risk" but with the possible reward that "you might learn something." By the end of the narrative, MacLachlan's character should have learned a lot, but here's where Lynch flinches, much like Robert Altman in the conclusion to "The Player." MacLachlan emerges neither a sadder nor wiser man from his rite of passage and his descent into the dark corners of the psyche. Instead, Lynch cynically reprises the film's innocent opening with its hopelessly artificial, Pollyannish, pastoral idyl that is most likely the preferred reality of the American mainstream movie consumer. At the same time, he preserves the tenuousness of such a naive vision with the shot of an insect impaled on a robin's beak and with a soundtrack that subjects the theme song to a disturbing treatment out of some internal, subterranean sound studio.

The film's meanings are inexhaustible, though a few important details should not be missed. Jeff confronts, first, mortality (his father stricken by a life-threatening stroke), then a severed, decaying human ear. The ear, the organ of hearing, is also the sense that fully awakens only in the dark, granting access to the Dionysian, deep intuitive wellsprings of the self. But the ear we see on screen has become a diseased, useless instrument in a "sunny" culture whose idea of music is Bobby Vinton's version of "Blue Velvet." Rossellini's alternative version of the song, with all of its sensuous, alluring darkness, will draw MacLachlan in to the same degree that it repells girl friend Dern (contrast this relationship with that of Jimmy Stewart and Grace Kelly in "Rear Window," where Kelly becomes increasingly drawn to the voyeuristic and "ghoulish" activity initiated by Stewart). Soon MacLaclan will discover the love substitutes embodied by both Rossellini and Hopper--the sadism and masochism, fetishism and scopophilia that, like it or not, are present in every son and daughter who has inherited from birth and learned from upbringing the pleasure/pain principle that underlies even the most well-intentioned, "selfless" love (the absence of any shown feelings between MacLaclan and either parent is another tip-off to the basis of his attraction to the dominitrix/sex slave character played by Rossellini).

As for the "villain," the foul-mouthed Dennis Hopper did not seem so frightening or repelling to me on this viewing. If anything, he's less the personification of evil than another version of insecure, overcompensating macho desire, perhaps better seen as a projection of the searching MacLachlan than as anybody's nemesis.

Lynch must know the risk, and even believe in the necessity, of coming to terms with the feelings of a darker but far from inauthentic self. MacLaclan tells the naive, shielded and conventional Dern from the beginning that it's extremely dangerous business. But the alternative is a Salem where everybody is "good," a Lumberton where people get sick but never die, a Disney fantasy that can exist only in artificial movies. I still think that "Blue Velvet" (in fact, most any other film since 1980) is eclipsed by his own "Elephant Man," where the camera takes us into the eye-hole and interior world of John Merrick, whose world we discover is also ours. But "Blue Velvet" is a more personal film, revealing not simply the mind of its creator but capturing a distinctively American experience.

A CLASSIC MASTERPIECE
David Lynch is without a doubt the most brilliant talent in the movie business. His movies are always crafted with intelligence and bizarre creativity. "Blue Velvet" is one of the most original and fascinating movies I've ever seen. It is dark, funny, and very disturbing. The seemingly perfect town has an eerie sense of similarity to small towns everywhere. Nothing out of the ordinary on the surface of this littlle place, but underneath lies something far more sinister. A lounge singer's husband and son have been kidnapped by a lunatic and he wants this poor woman to perform sexual tasks for him. And in the middle of this is an innocent and curious college student who's life is altered forever when he discovers the secrets. He falls for this abused woman who is coming apart from the terrible tragedy that she has endured. Can he help? Will the madman have mercy and let her family go? This film is a fantastic look at the suffers ordinary people have to survive when unordianry circumstances are thrown their way. David Lynch is a master of modern art. He shatters molds and boundries and has become the most creative and talented director in film.