You folks ready to talk about some movies? I didn’t get to a huge number of new features this week, but the films I did watch left me with plenty to talk about, so hopefully we can spin a satisfying Week in Review out of my ramblings. Eraserhead in particular turned out to be one of the most unique films I’ve seen in… well, ever, I suppose, but I guess that’s what happens when you remove all of David Lynch’s power limiters. I’m frankly kinda lucky I got to see it; one of my housemates recommended it without really knowing how resolutely anti-narrative it was going to be, and while I actually did have an inkling of its structure, I am certainly not above abusing my housemates’ ignorance to trick them into watching unabashedly surrealist madness. Anyway, enough preamble, let’s get to the movies!

This week my house screened a couple of films I’d actually seen before, starting with Alfonso Cuarón’s spectacular Children of Men. I loved Children of Men even when I saw it back in high school, and watching it now, it feels like an almost perfect “gateway film” for genre or blockbuster enthusiasts that you’re hoping to draw towards more varied, artistically interesting films.

Children of Men succeeds brilliantly as an incredibly grounded dystopian thriller, as Clive Owen works to shepherd humanity’s last hope through a world where all of humanity has been rendered sterile, and no children have been born for eighteen years. Its world of brutal inequality and lost hope, marked by refugees and rigid nationalism, actually feels even more relevant to today’s world than it did back in 2006. But rather than conveying any of this storytelling through voiceover or even conversation, the nature of this world is realized in every single background detail, from the reassuring advertisements for suicide medication, to the subtly not-quite-familiar designs of their near-future cars. Between that, the tight script, and the excellent cast, Children of Men is likely to please any thriller or scifi enthusiasts from start to finish.

However, Children of Men’s most distinctive claim to fame, and certainly its most visually apparent one, is its reliance on unbelievable long cuts for all of its major action sequences. In keeping with the thoroughly realistic tone of its dialogue and world design, Children of Men stages ambushes, chases, and full-on war scenes as if we were watching actual documentary footage, with virtually no cuts, and a camera that chases Owen and his compatriots through cars, across siege lines, and out of one near-death experience after another.

Children of Men’s long cuts are spectacular, and they are spectacular in a way that even a total film novice can understand as something that emphatically enhances the tension of these scenes, and the sense of immediacy experienced by the audience. Cuarón would continue to use exceptionally long cuts to create a grand sense of tension and place in future films, like Gravity and Roma (Roma in particular is a masterpiece), but Children of Men is likely his most crowd-pleasing work, and a natural introduction to the dramatic power of cinematography in its own right.

We also watched the Rocky Horror Picture Show, which I believe I hadn’t seen since I was around twelve years old. Rocky Horror is pretty close to total nonsense as a narrative, and both its jokes and songs have significant peaks and valleys, but it remains an engaging watch for precisely one, undeniable reason: Tim Curry’s incredible performance as Dr. Frank n Furter, the “sweet transvestite from Transexual, Transylvania” with a penchant for outrageous pleasure-seeking and Frankensteinian reanimation. Across a series of disjointed but frequently amusing setpieces, Tim Curry drapes himself with infinite confidence and visible relish, killing song after song, vamping tremendously at everyone else, and generally making the most of his eight inch heels. I can’t say Rocky Horror holds up on the whole, but Tim Curry’s performance possesses a power and energy that has not diminished in the slightest.

As for new films, this week I continued my exploration of David Lynch’s catalog by checking out his very first film, Eraserhead. Having watched about a season and a half of Twin Peaks so far, as well as Wild at Heart, my understanding of the usual “Lynch formula” is about three parts strained, tongue-in-cheek Americana for every one part bizarre, surrealist nightmare fuel. Not so for Eraserhead, which goes Full Lynch from its opening moments, and presents a painfully anxious portrait of a man whose every moment is a waking nightmare.

Eraserhead takes an off-kilter, quietly depressing domestic drama and submerges it in water until all the ink has blurred, resulting in a largely impressionistic vision of the unhappy life of its protagonist, Henry. Henry staggers through dark alleys and interacts in glum, staccato bursts with the people around him, inhabiting a world where every decision seems preordained for him, and every new setting is a prison. His apartment is a dank closet full of mud and brush; when he visits his girlfriend’s family for dinner, the too-small chickens bleed profusely when he attempts to cut them, while his girlfriend’s father just smiles and smiles.

Every scene of Eraserhead proceeds like that, driven by characters who act as if there were guns pointed at their heads, and dissolving into either surrealist chaos or sordid domestic frustration. The grotesque industrial setting, claustrophobic narrative, and fantastical touches all make Eraserhead feel like a living Kafka story – a nihilist parable about urban living, or perhaps just the peeling walls of one man’s fraying mind.

It’s really good, basically. Though its slow pacing, largely tonal focus, and lack of any clear narrative structure would undoubtedly frustrate general audiences, if you’re looking for an unfiltered journey into the darker recesses of Lynch’s mind, Eraserhead is full of images and sequences unlike much else in film. The film’s sound design is remarkably oppressive, and Lynch is able to use black and white photography to fantastic effect, creating stark compositions out of the encroaching darkness and fleeting glimpses of light. Lynch draws on styles of horror that have been well explored in short fiction, but frustratingly underrepresented in film; Eraserhead is a gripping testament to his vision.