Woeful Misinterpretation: Mulholland Drive

What ho! A demonic homeless man.

Alas, there is a David Lynch film that is more confusing than Eraserhead! I was feeling smug up to about halfway through the film for managing to grasp the relatively simply plot, but I was soon consumed by woe as it turned out that everything I had witnessed was probably a dream. By the end of the film, the confusion was almost unbearable. Who was the strange creature that haunted the dreams of a minor character who only appeared in one seemingly unrelated scene? Who were the old couple who resulted in the death of Naomi Watts? Was the end of the film a prologue to the start? Did Naomi Watts actually see her own decaying corpse? Was I meant to be this confused?

Betty and Laura attempt to follow the plot of Mulholland Drive

Perhaps there was an antidote to my despair: it transpired that Lynch had released some notes to help gormless viewers like myself wade through his convoluted masterpiece. But this only made it worse! "Notice appearances of the red lampshade". "Where is Aunt Ruth?". Apparently Aunt Ruth is dead. Poor Aunt Ruth. And there is no less than six interpretations of how the dead Aunt Ruth interacts with the film.
In fact the beginning and the end of the film are particularly opaque. Apparently the beginning shows the Jitterbug Contest in which Diane Selwyn rose to fame. But this is only according to the internet, and therefore not true. The internet also posits that the blue haired woman shown at the end is in fact the ghost of Aunt Ruth. Why?
By this point, I had discovered that attempts to unravel the mysteries of Lynch were bordering on hysteria. Perhaps he was just being weird for the sake of it. Why not end the film with a blue haired woman and the protagonist exploding after being pursued by tiny yet demonic old people? Perhaps the laws of reason do not apply to high cinematic art. Maybe the seemingly unconnected array of bizarre images are meant to produce a profound emotional reaction deep in my core. Is it possible that I'm not really communing with my inner being? Or perhaps I'm just a bit thick.
Needless to say, David Lynch has outwitted me.

Woeful Misinterpretation: Primer

It is rare that I completely fail to understand a film. Not since Tree of Life have I been so confronted with my limited capacity for intellectual thought, and I still maintain that there was a lot less to that film than everyone seems to think there is. But watching indie flick Primer was, I can safely say, the most baffling and unrewarding period of my life.
After a pretentious voice over introduces us to some blokes in a garage, our emotionally challenged, physics obsessed heroes plunge into unending technical conversations, speaking faster than any reasonable human being ought to speak. After I'd failed to comprehend any of this, they construct a machine which is equally baffling. Why and how they do this is an utter mystery, and it is small comfort that they seem to have as little idea of what's going on as we do.
Then suddenly. "Huzzah! We've built a time machine!". That's great lads! And then in a rehash of The Butterfly Effect which is drained of all interest, they earn lots of money via stocks, and do the stereotypical things everyone with limited imagination does with a time machine. Then The Nasty One (as opposed to The Faintly Decent One) does something bad, but the viewer is left with no clue what this unspeakable act might be because in all his wisdom, the director places this key scene next to a fountain which pretty much drowns out all dialogue.
In the end, our heroes have suffered for their temporal buffoonery, as they can no longer write properly (again, a less interesting take on The Butterfly Effect, or perhaps just a random reference to The Bell Jar) and The Nasty One has stopped a gunman. The drama of this amendment in history is tempered by the fact that the viewer has been totally unaware of any gunman before this point, and this is probably because of the noisy fountain. The Nasty One waltzes off abroad after falling out with The Faintly Decent One, who now feels Great Moral Guilt about their actions.
I was left feeling a mixture of awe at my own stupidity for not having a clue what was going on, and anger at the director for not helping me in any way. The overall impression was that someone had dramatized a particularly boring physics textbook. My advice to all those wishing to avoid similar torment: avoid Primer.

An intelligent person's perception of Primer

How I perceived Primer

Woeful Misinterpretation: Pulp Fiction

John Travolta (here playing a small time gangster named Vincent), after displaying some alarming dance moves with Uma Thurman, is shot. Several times. His unfortunate weakness of going to the toilet at precisely the wrong time (which bizarrely is a common occurrence throughout the film) has finally cost him his life. Well, he did leave his massive gun in the kitchen, so I didn't have much sympathy.
But suddenly he is back with  Samuel L. Jackson, and for some reason they seem to be harassing teenagers again. And these teenagers look remarkably like the teenagers they harassed at start of the film. Do Jackson and Travolta really not like these adolescents? Don't they have anything better to do? Is Vincent's return simply Tarantino sticking two fingers up to common sense, in an ironic, postmodern way? What is happening?
By the end of the film I realised something was amiss, and so Tarantino's jumbled chronology had to be explained to me carefully and slowly. So John Travolta was dead, is dead, will now forever be dead at the hands of an insufferable Bruce Willis. It was certainly a blow. And the reason Samuel L. Jackson is absent during much of the film is because he's wandering the Earth, like Cain, after finding God. And rather than the triumphant final scene with the two mobsters triumphantly outwitting the pair of truly awful armed robbers, it ends with Bruce Willis escaping with his dreadful girlfriend and the Big Boss Man bemoaning his sore bottom.

At this point I burst into tears. Damn you Quentin, for pulling the rug of my happy ending from under my gullible feet.