Third place:
Ghost World (Terry Zwigoff) [101 points/17 votes]
Second place:
The Royal Tenenbaums (Wes Anderson) [122/20]
And your winner...
Mulholland Dr. (David Lynch) [227/31]
"I saw David Lynch's Mulholland Dr. for the first time at the now-closed Showcase on La Brea just south of Melrose, coincidentally just a block or so from Pink's, the inexplicably famous Hollywood hot dog stand visited in the film by the world's most incompetent hitman, Joe Messing (Mark Pellegrino). It was a surreal feeling walking out of Lynch's dream world and back into it at the same time - surreal, but somehow fitting considering the way dream and reality in Lynch's universe tend to fold in on each other like a Möbius strip until you can no longer tell where one begins and the other one ends.To complete my personal dream picture, it turns out I'd moved down to Los Angeles myself not too many years before along with a Betty/Diane actress/girlfriend who had been lured by Hollywood's dangerous siren call of fame and fortune. She was gone by the time the movie came out, but I don't know if she wound up crashing on the rocks like Lynch's blonde heroine. If she did, it didn't make the papers. After she left though, I found myself on many a night afterward navigating the sharp corners of Mulholland Dr., thrilling at the old road's sloping curves while soaking in the history and the dreams and trying to forget.
Like Sunset Blvd., the namesake of Billy Wilder's Hollywood horror story from 50 years before, Mulholland Dr. feels like a living piece of the city's history. Unlike Wilder's route to disaster however, there's not much reason to take Lynch's winding artery through the Hollywood Hills unless you're one of the lucky few who have a home there or, like me, you wish you did. Literally and figuratively rising above the city glittering beneath, it's the pinnacle of Hollywood and Lynch's film immediately taps into the dream/nightmare that it represents.
For all the film's strangeness - the mysterious blue box, the creepy old couple, the monstrous homeless person, the masturbating and crying, the Hollywood cowboy at the incongruous corral in the middle of the city (a corral that actually exists in the hills below the Hollywood sign) - the most striking memory I have of the first time I saw Mulholland Dr. is simply of Naomi Watts. I was not familiar with her work up to that time, so for the whole first half of the film I wondered if she was even a serious actress. Betty from Deep River Ontario is such a cornball you're not sure at first if you're supposed to take her seriously, but then a little over an hour in she goes to the audition opposite Chad Everett and suddenly she's an entirely different person. That for me was the moment in history when Naomi Watts arrived and I thought, "Wow. This girl can act." In a perfect world, that performance would've been recognized with an Oscar nomination, but we know the world just doesn't operate that way and neither do the Oscars. That's why we have The Muriels.
Much as I love Mulholland Dr., I try not to watch it too often. I can see and enjoy most of my other favorite films over and over again without risking diminishing returns, but somehow I fear having the pleasures of Lynch's classic become routine or familiar. That would be a shame. I want it to always be like the nightmare you've just awoken from, where you feel the logic of it slipping away even as you try to piece it together in your head. Before long, all that's left is an unsettling residue - that deeply disquieting feeling that something horrible is waiting for you back behind the perfectly innocent looking family restaurant...
Silencio." - Craig Kennedy
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