capsule : potentially interesting story rendered dull and coldly distant by david lynch's perpetually smug and alienating style . there are better ways to be conned . watching lost highway , i kept thinking about a picture puzzle that you spend a week trying to solve , only to discover half the pieces are missing . i felt conned ; i'd lost two and a half hours of my life over a movie that added up to exactly nothing . everything in lost highway cancels itself out . there are people who have argued this point with me at length , insisting that was what the movie was about . i disagree , because lost highway doesn't even bother to enlist our attention long enough to be about anything . it is a self-important and boring film that builds in its own excuses for being and never tells us what they are . the story actually has an intriguing presence . a jazz musician ( bill pullman ) and his wife receive a series of videotapes in the mail . someone is walking around filming their house . then the stranger gets bolder and starts filming the * inside * of the house as well . eventually , the tapes show pullman having murdered his wife -- and sure enough , guess what's happened . pullman is sent to prison , but while awaiting execution , he has a series of bizarre lynchian experiences in his cell and morphs into someone else ( balthazar getty ) , a young punk . nobody can explain it , but they have to let him go . that doesn't mean they can't keep an eye on him , of course . as i said , all of this is potentially interesting . not in lynch's hands . everything i described is stretched out to fill the entire first hour of the movie , which slithers by * so * slowly and lingers on every insignificant gesture * so * painfully that by the time we get to the change-over , all interest in the goings-on has been buried . the actors are not bad in their roles -- they're just made into zombies . i was reminded of the way robert bresson -- the french director with an almost paranoid loathing of actors attempting to supersede the director's vision -- who made his actors repeat scenes until they simply did them with mechanical precision and no attempt at personification . except that bresson had a larger vision to communicate . lynch has nothing that we can discern , save the urge to be artfully bizarre . the other day i saw begotten , a movie with no dialogue and no real storyline that succeeded excellently in being enthralling . why did that work and lost highway fail ? probably because begotten was purer and not beholden to anything remotely familiar . lost highway is so obviously david lynch indulging himself to no good end that we're alienated and fed up in short order . david lynch has made two , possibly three films that i enjoyed : eraserhead , which was probably the best showcase for his homegrown surreal nightmares ; blue velvet , which actually set up a story in the midst of his pretentions , and the elephant man , which made the most sense and was the most human . everything since , and no doubt from now on , has proven to be a waste of time , and to be honest i'm not one to mourn . 
