Boat
Boat
| 30 January 2007 (USA)
Boat Trailers

A journey into night.

Reviews
Cathardincu Surprisingly incoherent and boring
PlatinumRead Just so...so bad
filippaberry84 I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.
Guillelmina The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.
Red-Barracuda Boat is a short film from David Lynch. I have to first say that I am a huge fan of Lynch's feature film work where I have found he has often displayed a touch of genius. However, I cannot unfortunately say the same thing with regard to his post Mulholland Drive (2001) output which mainly has consisted of short films. Boat is quite honestly a fairly typical example where there is nothing more than a specific tone and little beyond that. The content of this one has Lynch himself at the controls of a small boat while a female voice-over relates her connection with it. It really isn't very interesting at all with little to recommend it in any way. It also suffers visually from the digital video on which it was shot on. Lynch became entranced with this format as it allowed him to make films more easily himself with no need for much money or extra personnel. Which is all well and good, the unfortunate thing about this though is that the films are almost all universally uninteresting and lacking; and Boat is sadly another example.
Horst in Translation (filmreviews@web.de) "Boat" is a more recent project by filmmaker David Lynch, even it it soon will be 10 years old as well. It's a short film that only runs for 7 minutes and in it we see Lynch himself on the wheel of a motor boat, while a female voice tells us about her special connection with the boat. I wonder what Lynch was thinking when he made this. Probably as impossible to explain as his usual approach to filmmaking. To me it shows that it is seemingly even possible to make a most emotional approach to a most inanimate object if you have the right voice actress and the right words. Or maybe that it is impossible to do so? Somehow, it sounded pretentious at times I must say. I am fairly certain that, if an unknown filmmaker had made this, it would probably not be known at all. So yeah, it's probably only famous because of the name David Lynch attached to it. Not recommended.
mroach0917 I hate David Lynch too. He killed John F. Kennedy. He was the man on the grassy knoll. He references in all of his films. Why do you think his first long magnum puissant crappie delicti was Eraserhead. He rubs people out.My best friend is David Foster Wallace. We're going to get him. David Foster Wallace is the best lover in the whole world (barring Casanova, but he's in his 300s these days.) Grindhouse is the best movie ever made. Tarantino is getting back at Lynch for banging him in the butt. Don't go on the boat. It's the Titanic. It's a death trap. Cou-RAGE, handsome sailor. (Big Wet Sloppy German Kiss). I love you all.P.S. You can't say the "F" word on this site. They love free speech.
MisterWhiplash This little short film/experiment from Lynch is meant to be some kind of home movie-cum-fever dream where the basic act of going out onto a lake with a motor boat becomes like some sort of journey to some unknown destination. It's at it's best an immense jolt of visual splendor, shot on Lynch's hardy digital camera, where one of Lynch's expressed joys as a filmmaker- to be able to make the flow of water a truly cinematic feat- is put to a successful test. At first he just shows images of the boat, with a girl doing a voice-over meant to be very mysterious but somewhat cognitive of having an idea of what's around her (or it, as it might be). Then the boat goes off, Lynch himself (steering the boat) says to the camera "we're gonna try to go fast enough to go in to the night", and soon all there is to see is water rushing past, very fast, and then superimposed is night over day. The voice-over itself is probably the lesser part of the experiment; Lynch says on the DVD the short is on that he thought there was a story there, so he put on a voice-over track to go with the images. The narration, truth be told, makes it a tinge more poetic, but not necessarily for the better; I had flashbacks during some of the narrative bits to short films (and not the better short films) I used to see in film classes at school. Yet it's a good little effort that Lynch has strung together here at least by way of eye-catching digital video, where everything seems a little extra heightened (very bright by way of daytime, then nighttime is much darker, naturally) and the movement of water at such a fast clip, as one might take for granted, makes for some powerful viewing.
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