David Lynch - Classic or Dud

yeah, great little film. shows more than anything else that he's always been very attuned to sound and music in generating his effects.

technically his first film is "six men getting sick," but that was part of an installation so...

is it just me or does he seem to have descended back into self-parody for most of his endeavors since inland empire?

make a movie again ffs

I have a feeling Lynch won't ever make another feature length film.

He should make a feature length animation.

I have a feeling Lynch won't ever make another feature length film.

i have heard this speculation several times now. why do you think he's done w film? i expect at least one more feature from him.

he's pretty old and doesn't seem to be actively working on any film projects, he appears to be focusing his energy on different types of art

coffee iirc

no one knew he he had been working on INLAND for years until a few months before it was released.

well, not "no one", obviously. i'm sure the actors and crew knew.

that's not true. i heard reports about it many months before it came out.

not that long before it was released at any rate.

really? I remember reading about lynch making a movie w/ jeremy irons and some other folks in inland empire (before the film had that name) and then spending a while wondering when it would come out.

I recall that the copy of Lynch on Lynch that I have mentions something about him being at work on IE.

A revised edition was published by Farrar Straus & Giroux on March 16, 2005 (ISBN 0-571-22018-5)

btw, for the uninitiated, that book is def worth seeking out.

dunno if this has been posted elsewhere, but here's basically an hour of deleted/lost/etc scenes from Blue Velvet (!)

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

so, these are different from the deleted scenes that showed up on the new bluray release I take it?

Sounds like it is basically the same batch of stuff

Altogether, 50 minutes of never-before-seen footage have been re-edited – supervised by Lynch – into an extra on a new DVD celebrating the film's 25th anniversary (available early next year in the UK).

from this article: http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2011/nov/03/blue-velvet-flaming-nipple-deleted-scenes

On a B. K1te kick. Did this ever get linked upthread?

http://www.bfi.org.uk/news/remain-light-mulholland-dr-and-cosmogony-david-lynch

He’s singularly brave and direct in his approach to heightened emotion, which makes him a rare creature in a modern movie menagerie that generally prefers to peer into such areas through thickets of irony. His approach is stylised but not mocking, though his proclivity for searching for new tones through the contrast of disjunctive elements – say Deputy Andy’s crying fit on the discovery of Laura Palmer’s body in the Twin Peaks pilot (1990) – frequently lands somewhere hard to peg.

Well now I'm hungry

goin with the ears

friends made me a blue velvet cake for my birthday one year (with icing laura dern on top)

omg this was five years ago but it was still a VG halloween costume, i think:

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v369/colinohara/58206629_05e51b13b9.jpg

“It’s a very depressing picture. With alternative cinema—any sort of cinema that isn’t mainstream—you’re fresh out of luck in terms of getting theatre space and having people come to see it. Even if I had a big idea, the world is different now. Unfortunately, my ideas are not what you’d call commercial, and money really drives the boat these days. So I don’t know what my future is. I don’t have a clue what I’m going to be able to do in the world of cinema.”

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/features/waxing-lyrical-david-lynch-on-his-new-passion--and-why-he-may-never-make-another-movie-8665457.html

i've been on a huge lynch kick recently. i'm certainly not a pro (haven't even seen inland empire or lost highway yet), but i'm putting together a 2013 david lynch summer series where we watch almost ALL of his work, chronologically, across 13 weeks. gathering together the tangent ephemera - the angriest dog in the world comic strip, essays, the Morricone-esque song by early 70s prog group Tractor that features about 2/3 of the way through The Grandmother - has been a treat! i'm trying to identify the most lynchian drink possible to serve up each night - PBR? certainly not heineken, that would be a faux pas.

Coffee

http://www.counterpointcafe.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/david-lynch-coffee-021.jpg

coffee's a great call but it's going to be 8pm on a weekday for most of these screenings. and decaf is...unacceptable.

Awesome fan vid:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRFJNpAff_A&list=PLWL_UigKlz-nU4XObLsLNGK45wZrtaqup&index=1

PBR is prolly the way to go.

lol at the coffee commercial tribute.

if anyone else has links to anything lynch, post 'em here! before, in between, and after screenings i'm planning on showing things like commercials, music videos, etc.

I just read this Film Quarterly piece on The Straight Story and it, well, blew my mind. A completely different brilliant take...

Anthony Lane of The New Yorker dismissed The Straight Story as a "comic coda to Lost Highway." Although the film is clearly not comic at its heart, it does, like its predecessor, use one story to mask another, more sinister, one. Lost Highway's protagonist Fred represses all memory of having murdered his wife in a jealous rage; he only glimpses himself howling over her dismembered corpse on grainy videotape, and, in the film's second half, re-imagines his story as a pulpy film noir with himself as the unwitting dupe of his wife (reincarnated as a femme fatale)--instead of as the villain he truly is. (As he tells two detectives in the film's first half, "I like to remember things my own way.") Similarly, Alvin Straight never brings himself to tell the straight story of his own past; he tells, instead, incomplete and disguised versions of it to the strangers he meets, hears echoes of it in the stories they tell him, and sees distorted reenactments of it in one scene after another.

The real story of The Straight Story turns out not to be very straightforward at all, but involuted and hidden--buried, as in Lost Highway, within the ostensible narrative like a repressed memory. This movie is about how a mean drunk named Alvin Straight lost his daughter's children to the state because he let one of them get burned in a fire. This is the only way the film makes sense as a unified whole, as anything other than the meandering picaresque most reviewers thought it was. Alvin Straight is riding his mower with its wagon all those hundreds of miles along highway shoulders not on an errand of forgiveness, but as an ordeal of atonement. There is darkness here beneath the bright autumn colors, and evil concealed in Alvin's heart. There is the history of a family destroyed by alcoholism and abuse. There is fire and death.

Is this all really unexpected? The Straight Story is a David Lynch film, after all.

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

His great sitcom Rabbits, as seen in Inland Empire is a good choice.

love that FQ piece, alex. it's been so long since i saw the straight story (during its theatrical run) that i can't now remember whether or not that reading occurred to me. either way, it's fascinating and makes me want to watch the film again.

sorry, alex elvis

I haven't seen Rabbits yet (or Inland Empire!), but it's on my viewing schedule for night #11, along with Dumbland, Boat, Lady Blue Shanghai and I Touch a Red Button.

and thanks for the link to that Straight Story review E T! i've only seen it once, in high school in some lazy May afternoon class when the students no longer want to learn and the teacher no longer wants to teach. i had no idea who david lynch was and thought it was some nauseating family friendly disney shit. definitely can't wait to watch it again with a new angle.

love the one minute film Lynch made with a restored Lumiere camera

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

^ yeah, i remember that being the standout piece. just watched it again, still astounding. one shot!

Yeah wow

that's "Premonitions Following an Evil Deed", right?

i remember how pissed off i was at the greenaway one in that series, he used all sorts of cuts and post effects and stuff

Going to watch Straight Story again this week.

yeah that's definitely an interesting take and has made me keen to see it again. cheers for the link.

You definitely need to show his early animations. "Six People Getting Sick" and "The Alphabet". This is a good source:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Short_Films_of_David_Lynch

Plus "The Cowboy and the Frenchman" is on it, which I remember was pretty funny.

I have my full list of viewings in a text file at home (god, i just realized i'm getting old because a teenager probably would have put it on google drive or something. my flesh...is decaying...my face...the wrinkles widen...*close-up of flame*), but the first night is going to be Six People Getting Sick, The Alphabet, The Grandmother, the Amputee, and then Eraserhead. I'm trying to straight-up chronological, as much as I can. Once it gets into the 90s and 2000s I'm going to have to be a little bit more selective, though. It's already at 13 nights, 2+ hours each, and that's with leaving out some things.

My main dilemma is whether to show the pilot ep. of Twin Peaks (American version), pilot episode (Intl. version that has the weird grafted on "ending"), or Fire Walk with Me.

I'm already planning on showing a few related clips (the coffee commercials, maybe the SNL sketch with Kyle MacLachlan and Phil Hartman doing a hilarious Leland), so showing both the pilot episode + Fire Walk with me would be overkill.

but but but you gotta! both the pilot and fwwm are essential documents, much more so than the related ephemera.

i don't know why i'm worrying about it anyway, by the 7th night of the series it's just going to be me, alone

I'm kinda leaning toward the Pilot only, and maybe just the American version. The thing is, both Fire Walk with Me and the intl. version of the pilot would reveal the Bob/Leland connection, and that might the entire show for people who haven't seen it yet.