is it really possible that we don't as yet have a thread about DAVID LYNCH'S DUNE?

is the movie or the book closer to the video game?

it's just an unfilmable book in a 2hr time limit, isn't it? Everyone has tried and failed. That's why Jodorowsky's initial plan was a 7hr movie or whatever.

Yeah, Lynch's version was as faithful as a feature-length adaptation of Dune could've possibly been. But still incoherent. But also great to look at.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PFTS5-cIHgQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CvCeLzC2sNs&feature=relmfu

I am watching an extended version of this tonight, just short of 3 hours. Not sure if it is the David Lynch approved cut or the version that he requested his name taken off. Not arsed tbh because it is still very good.

Watched this a couple times last year - turns out it's great! Love the special attention paid to dogs, Picard brandishing one as he charges into battle. Der Schtingle. The sleeper has awakened!

I adored this as a 12 year old. The inscrutability of the plot made it seem thrillingly mysterious and grown up. Not sure I've really revisited it since.

Minneapolitans Swede this POS movie

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yIzTat3OD3w

i just saw this for the first time a few weeks back. not as bad as advertised (though what could be that bad?) but yeah not exactly a triumph either. but of course there's that lynchian je ne sais quoi that makes it worthwhile--there's something tactile about the world building in this that's missing in other similar movies (maybe it was all that puss, haha). wish he'd made another movie like this with more freedom.

Has anyone been to a screening of this yet?

http://jodorowskysdune.com/index.html

was about to ask the same thing

There are so many cool ideas and great (expensive) props and costumes and sets in Lynch's film. I always think of the one shot where Kyle Maclachlan shouts at the floor with his ~weirding~ powers and punches a dent in it - it's so sudden and intense and ~weird~ and at that moment you get "yeah, David Lynch is perfect for this material." But what gets left by the wayside is a lot. The most interesting things about the book to me - the long-term eco-planning Gaia hypothesis stuff, and Paul's burden of knowing he's in a messiah plot that can only end in tragedy - are brushed over or just can't come into their own as themes. Kind of into watching it again though.

best part of the movie is where kyle maclachlan says (or rather, thinks out loud, like many of the lines in the movie) "Where are my feelings??"

And a great post here from Ron Miller

http://io9.com/i-made-the-spice-flow-my-work-as-a-concept-artist-on-l-1509730566

Nice read! I'm always charmed by old fashioned positive accounts like that.

Has there ever been a rapper nerdy enough to reference this with "Make it rain like Paul Atreides"? Google says no so just adding it to the internet here. "Make it rain like Muad'Dib" doesn't work as well.

I got the dough, got the flow down pizzat
Make it rain... KWISATZ

nice.

there are so many ridiculous/great moments in lynch's film

Is there any place online to watch that 3 hour fan edit (DUNE SAGA)?

there are so many ridiculous/great moments in lynch's film

^^^

I feel like the film's underrated because it splits the difference between Lynch's sensibility and the source material, which results in some jarring narrative leaps and shifts in tone. These things don't bother me so much when stacked against the film's best moments - the Baron, the opening sequence with the emperor, the worms, "fear is the mindkiller", the creepy sister etc.

http://i60.tinypic.com/ad2m2c.png

the moments don't really add up to any sort of narrative whole, it's more like stuff just happening left and right

and a pug

That photo is amazing.

https://twitter.com/Kyle_MacLachlan/status/765390472604971009

pretty accurate iirc

Lol

now I need an emoji of kenneth mcmillan's face from this.

hahahaha

shaddam iv: "bring in the floating fat man -- the duke!"
not quite sure why this^^^ description needed qualifying, but i guess it does suggest quite what dopes the padishah emperor has surrounded himself by

SO MUCH exposition and inner whispered monologue

this film reminds me more of STINGRAY than i quite expected (also TREMORS and THE KEEP but that is less surprising obviously)

i need to rewatch this. i saw it once, 25 or 30 years ago, and never since. has it aged well in any kind of weird way? and the lynch version is still preferred over the extended cut?

Lynch version is definitely better. Is there any good quality DVD or blu-ray release of this? The copy I have is letterboxed into oblivion.

The extended cut is garbage

there is no "good" version of this movie but every cut is fascinating in its own right.

One very obvious way it's aged is that the green-screen (or blue-screen or whatever) SFX of the early 80s is now just beginning to edge towards the kind of datedness you become less sneery about and more fond of and indulgent towards. The space effects are all pretty terrible -- even by 70s Dr Who standards, let alone Star Wars -- but it's much easier to just take it as it had to be, given the technology. Various props look much more evidently plastic and flimsy than called for (some red kettledrums being played during the Maud'dib/Feyd-Rautha fight, for example).

There's such a strange gradient between the thought put into the look of various early set and scenes -- notably (and famously) the one where the Guildsman arrives in his big personal train to meet the Emperor -- and much the later stuff, which feels hurried and sketchy, as if they used up all their budget AND imagination in the first 20 minutes. Basically I think the Arrakis desert-scenes and the Fremen were just so much not Lynch's kind of material, visually or psychologically. The worms are 70s Dr Who-level in terms of realisation (which is not the worst thing, and Lynch has -eraserhead form w/regard to getting you to feel creeped out by such stuff) but you can feel yourself adjusting your expectations down. There's some good foetus-work.

Apart from the Harkonnens the casting is uniformly weedy. Thufir Hawat and Alia aside, The Atreides -- family and household -- are all super-bland (which is a problem inherited from the book). Maybe the right lead could have been found for Paul: it's definitely not Kyle M (who apart from anything was just too inexperienced on-camera to play it with anything but a "what me worry?" grin). Also you have to worry about how much of Bene Gesserit witchcraft he's expending to keep his hair so perfectly processed in the desert. Lynch is a director with a longstanding and adirable gift for deploying character actors well, old-school and almost-lost Hollywood-style, as minor but super-memorable figures: Freddie Jones and Bard Dourif, the two mentats, don't have to do much more brandish their amazing eyebrows, to step ahead of nearly everyone else, even if their specific role in the book's plot is barely sketched in the film: as mentats, viz human calculating and remembering machines, in a culture where computers are forbidden (not sure that the "Butlerian Jihad" is even referred to in the film) (to be honest it's a fairly under-explored element in the book…)

The Harkonnens are inspired -- they're cartoons, obviously, but there's just so much glee and energy there, primarily bursting out of Ken MacMillan as he hurtles around in mid-air, plump distillate of cackling and pustules. Beast Rabban is minor, but there's a mutual joy in his evil-doing -- the Baron is just agog with love with the georgeousness of his nephews, whether in deed or body, and Sting (in his one good film performance?) has hit on the exact method motivation, playing Feyd-Rautha as a quivering penis of a warrior. Even Jack Nance -- stood at the back carrot-topped and always appalled -- is great: he is just constantly open-mouthed in horror at what his employers are up to (whether Harkonnen or Lynch).

But the moment they're off-screen -- until little Alia arrives (also a Harkonnen, of course, and in subsequent books actually possessed by the spirit of the long-dead baron who she executes) -- everything that isn't a nutso action set-up,constantly slumps into exposition or whispered inner-monologue, and the announcement of characters you don't have time to learn why you're to care for them beofre they die (even Dean Stockwell's treacherous Yueh is weak tea: and you literally end up with no idea why Halleck or Idaho or Kynes or the Shadout Mapes have been given names you're meant to remember).

The care put into the very first scene -- including unnamed bit players, like the Guildsman's crowd of monkish acolytes -- does kind of get you thinking that a 3 or 4 hour version might have ironed out some of these issues. But ppl's responses up-thread suggest that the extended cut does not bear this out? (Or is it just that Lynch is no longer involved -- I guess I'd like to see it, just in case it has any deranged mini-scenes not used in the Lynch cut, but I think you are telling me I will be disappointed…)

I enjoy that the nosepieces of the stillsuits makes all the Fremen look as if they all have little Hitler mustaches -- a semi-inadvertent BOYS FROM BRAZIL effect that lets you in on a secret abt the story's underlying politics? I like to think Lynch did this deliberately but who knows…

there is no "good" version of this movie but every cut is fascinating in its own right.

What he said. (Extended version does provide Patrick Stewart's Pat Metheny impression so there's that.)

Great thoughts by mark s of course. I'm surprised I hadn't mentioned this before -- an absolute must-read is Ed Naha's The Making of Dune book, released in conjunction with the film. It's no Devil's Candy in terms of start to stop history -- it's an official tie-in release, the spin is by default positive and it ends riiiight before the team goes in the editing room to start winnowing it down, which is where it all fell apart a bit. But even given the built-in puffery of the enterprise, it's still an engagingly detailed read with a slew of details that pretty much haven't surfaced elsewhere since I still think there hasn't been any proper documentary/look-back on the film. Naha's definitely looking at it all with an eye of 'okay how is this huge book AND this director all going to work with Dino de L. behind it all?' It also gave me a bit of a feel for the history of Churubusco Studios and working in Mexico, and he does a reasonable job of looking at numerous elements of behind the scenes work -- costumes, practical visual effects, design and so forth.

You can get it for pennies on Amazon and I do recommend it if you have any interest in the film or Lynch at all:

https://www.amazon.com/Making-Dune-Ed-Naha/dp/0425073769/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1474211729&sr=8-1&keywords=ed+naha+making+dune

I had this book and the official film storybook to hand from the start. And got the soundtrack. Which for all the Totoness does have a couple of good moments -- the main theme is short but memorable -- and it was the first time I'd ever heard anything by Eno, so hey. Had actually read Dune for the first time a year and a half before the movie came out so I was kinda primed.

lol yes, i'm half way through the 3-hr fan-cut right now (it's here: https://yadi.sk/i/kciUCmMSiRhHS ), so just watched everyone sat listening to gurney halleck's baliset solo -- i like the way paul just bursts into this wide joyful grin at every moment of halleck's artistry (poems or music), either becasue he can't believe how talented he is or how awful he is

most of the extra scenes are yet more leaden-paced exposition (at the start over paintings, possibly the art director's sketches of sets and costumes), but there's a good confrontation between jessica and the shadout mapes , plus feyd-rautha gets to torment leto (sting opens his mouth so the quality of his performance drops quite a lot)

also a good pug-in-the-palace moment as the atreides compound is being destroyed

There's probably fanfic about the pugs...somewhere.

sting opens his mouth so the quality of his performance drops quite a lot

Imagining a cut where he just carries that cat around, all while wearing the jockstrap, and saying nothing.

are the "weirding modules" in the book? i don't remember them at all

Invention for the film. In the book the 'Weirding way' is a martial art form via the Bene Gesserit. Brief breakdown here:

http://dune.wikia.com/wiki/Weirding_Module

https://twitter.com/fireland/status/773690179299053569

the weirding modules were the best invention of the film and also provided a sample-rich scene:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O4PeZ6YsbQ8

the pugs are the best invention of the film

the flip side, Deep Sleep, mines Paul's waking dream and the Prophecy Theme by the Eno bros and Lanois:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qSsjugznEJY

ok, further additions in the 3-hr fan-cut version: water rites and duelling in seitch tabr, thufir hawat's death scene

that's kind of it -- except for the scene w/mapes and jessica maybe the best bits were genuinely all present in the original: the sietch tabr stuff helps a little with pacing and scene-setting perhaps, but none of it is remarkable (also the acting in it is p dull and one-note)

IIRC the issue with Paul isn't so much in the acting as the script, which barely even sketches out the most interesting thing with the character in the book - the constant awareness that events and his 'narrative' are leading inescapably towards galactic fanaticism and slaughter. Without that he's just a plucky youth who suddenly becomes a superbeing beyond our comprehension or interest.

The weirding gizmos are dumb imho - if you're gonna punt the supernatural/ESP stuff, do it consistently. Feels like the original concept of Wolverine as a guy with claws in his gloves, so anybody who gets the gloves would be Wolverine. Silly.

saw this pic today and it blew my mind:

https://68.media.tumblr.com/312a31ec6f5365a31750d73bcbf423a8/tumblr_om0ekxnf3Z1vy747uo1_500.jpg

can't believe it's taken me this long to realize the baliset is really a modded Chapman Stick

there's a scene with gurney playing it in the extended version and it sounds like a steve hackett instrumental

... but other than him picking that name, no.

oh fair enough, i will look out for the callback

in the meantime:
https://us.v-cdn.net/6030345/uploads/editor/on/z9dpy6c2lk3r.jpg

god i love this tremendously goofy movie

it has nearly no momentum at all (every exciting scene broken up by three difft ppl whispering at themselves)

In that respect it is true to life.

[chapman stick solo]

a thousand chapman stick solos are not enough for levin

lol jessica actually says this line (re yueh) exactly as they reach safety with the signet ring and the stillsuits

seems a bit ungrateful!

(in the book it's like a children's song after paul becomes emperor, quoted in one of irulan's histories)

a million publications are not enough for princess irulan

callback klaxon: the second moon is again discussed (in whispers)

stillsuit noseplug fremen are like
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/6f/The_Wizard_of_Oz_Bert_Lahr_1939.jpg/220px-The_Wizard_of_Oz_Bert_Lahr_1939.jpg

i think this may have the highest exposition-action ratio of any film made

fremen will literally expound the narrative instead of going to therapy

shaddam iv: "bring in the floating fat man -- the duke!"
not quite sure why this^^^ description needed qualifying, but i guess it does suggest quite what dopes the padishah emperor has surrounded himself by

― mark s, Saturday, 17 September 2016 10:29 (five years ago) bookmarkflaglink

fremen will literally expound the narrative instead of going to therapy

BREAK!!!!!!!!

Yes please. Like, immediately.

https://nerdist.com/article/oral-history-of-david-lynch-dune-masterpiece-in-disarray-max-evry/

would read

"In our modern era of cookie cutter blockbusters, Dune stands as a glorious oddity worthy of reconsideration."

No it doesn't, fuck you.

True, it's simply a classic film that should be studied and used as the basis for an exciting new era of Lynchian sci-fi blockbusters.

I suddenly have the feeling I have lived too long.

to be clear, i hate the movie but i would absolutely read about the making of it

"Ridley's out. Who else we got?"

there are some amazing, memorable bits from it

I don’t think the producers gave Lynch the support he needed, having not tackled anything of that scale, and it shows. but the visuals, casting, and scenes that work are cool

And just an update that the oral history is now out and my copy arrived today, looks amazing. Direct order link:

https://www.1984publishing.com/bookstore/a-masterpiece-in-disarray-david-lynchs-dune-an-oral-history

!

https://www.wired.com/story/david-lynch-dune-sequel-script-unearthed/

"bring in the floating fat man -- the duke! "

Yes yes but this story I've linked.

Coming back to theaters!

https://www.fathomevents.com/events/dune-40th-anniversary/

Enjoy Sting's jockstrap in full!

New sales guy at my office is named Feyd-Rautha Rabinowitz, so I know what you mean

― mick signals, Tuesday, 14 August 2018 02:55 (five years ago) link

i am wondering how feyd-rautha rabinowitz is currently doing

oh, i see, that post was a jape following a post about the shadout mapes

"Japin' With The Mapes"

just a little shadout to all my mapes in tha house

Did not know this!

Frank Herbert was literally there in 1984 https://t.co/01okcAKwdP pic.twitter.com/7bweOzzoxH

— Motion Picture Potion Mixer (@mopipomixer) March 17, 2024

the servant waits while the shadout mapes