Word: dern
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Wild at Heart, which sends a pair of loser lovers (Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern) on a trip into the dark night of the Southern Gothic soul, is a tonic for the senses and an assault on the sensibilities. Heads splatter, skulls explode, biker punks torture folks for the sheer heck of it, and a pair of loopy innocents find excitement in a side trip to hell. Pretty much like Blue Velvet. Yes, it's different, but the same kind of different; Lynch could no longer shock by being shocking. Many critics figured they had solved the mystery...
Wild at Heart begins with the moody Sailor (Nicolas Cage) bashing a black man's head into pulp. And Sailor is the good guy in this storm-sky fresco of two crazy kids on the run. Sailor and his girlfriend Lula (Laura Dern) hightail it to New Orleans and Texas, where they encounter fat-lady porn stars and a slick psychopath (Willem Dafoe) who loses his head, literally and spectacularly, in a bank heist. To Barry Gifford's source novel Lynch adds a murder plot, an Elvis impersonation, a few torture scenes, a drug cartel, some cockroaches and a happy...
...Heart is splendidly grotesque and mammothly entertaining -- the director's first for-sure comedy, Blue Velvet for laughs. The plot, from Barry Gifford's noirish novel, is your standard slice of poisoned American pie: a pair of loser-friendly lovers, Sailor Ripley (Nicolas Cage) and Lula Pace Fortune (Laura Dern), hit the road to escape Lula's mom and a phalanx of psychos who vividly illustrate Lula's contention that the "whole world's wild at heart and weird on top." But the picture is charged with so much deranged energy, so many bravura images, that it's hard...
...cigarettes at a time. And, aptly for a film shown in the living movie museum of Cannes, Wild at Heart is Lynch's fond homage to The Wizard of Oz. Lula clicks her red slippers to get out of a jam. Her mom (played with lubricious abandon by Dern's mother Diane Ladd) is the Wicked Witch, all long nails, daft cackles and unquenchable vengeance...
...budget sci-fi movie Dune, was a critical and commercial disaster, but Blue Velvet brought him widespread critical / acclaim. A couple of aborted projects later (including a script for Steve Martin called One Saliva Bubble), Lynch is finishing a new film, Wild at Heart, starring Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern...