Sholay (Ramesh Sippy, 1975)My first foray into Bollywood, and boy oh boy is it something. Whatever you think of it, there is just a lot of cinema in there. Obviously it's 3 hours long, but still, in that time Leone can only give you a spaghetti western : this gives you that (it might as well be called The Magnificent Three), plus romance, comedy, an extended Great Dictator/Great Escape cross-over bit, and several 5+ minutes long musical numbers of course.
It's uneven as hell, with the acting all over the place and especially the tones : it's a little hard to go from a reasonably exciting opening featuring a cop and his two captors defending a train from bandits to the bandits in question singing a song about how great friends they are while goofing around on a sidecar. And when I say goofing around, I mean goofing around as if they were two 9-year old kids in the middle of a sugar rush. It's... fun, but also makes it somewhat hard to take them seriously as badasses that routinely face overwhelming numbers and come out unscathed. It probably helps that their opponents suffer from a very bad case of Stormtrooper Syndrome : not only are they rather poor at aiming, they frequently seem to forget that they own weapons, and even use those weapons as clubs rather than firing them during the final climax. The action overall is often silly... except when it's phenomenally cool, and then there are those precious instances where it's both : let's just say that seeing an old armless man beat up a terrifyingly cruel baddie is pretty fun.
Fun really is the operative word here : that's also how I'd describe the shameless cribbing of Leone's masterpieces here, or Hema Malini's performance as Basanti, a character I initially though would only have one scene, but turns out to be the female lead, even joining in on the ass-kicking towards the end. The musical numbers - aside from that first one which really doesn't work - are also fun... even when they get interrupted by sudden explosions. Twice ! Now
that is a tonal shift I can get behind.
Again, there's a lot that doesn't really work, but it's a good time, and I was pretty invested in the main relationships by the end. It might not always make sense, but it generally works on an emotional level.
7/10Blue Velvet is in no way tough to follow. It has weird things in it, but I was surprised by how conventional it was, given Lynch's reputation, Dune being the only other one I've seen. It's also Very Good.
Hm, Blue Velvet may be conventional in its setup -- a sort of boy detective coming-of-age story. But it takes that conventional premise then throws it down, rolls it around in the dirt and the muck, then skins it alive.
See, I feel that's way hyperbolic. It's weird, but it's not "skins premises alive" weird.
@Martin : Where would Twin Peaks (the TV show) rank on that scale ? Presumably near the movie ?