Twin Peaks: Classic or Dud?

there's some good stuff in FWWM but on the whole I don't enjoy it - I think he hit a trough after Twin Peaks that he didn't really start to climb out of until Lost Highway. Like he was transitioning to a new set of themes/ideas/methods and Twin Peaks is the start of that (what with its obsessions about dualities, intersecting realities, twins, etc. that would carry through the rest of his work) but he didn't really figure out how to get them to all work together until the end of the 90s.

that's sort of a weird thing to say, since he didn't make a feature between TP:FWWM and LOST HIGHWAY. WILD AT HEART is def. his worst feature, it's the only one where he sometimes seems to be working down at the level of an Oliver Stone or John Waters.

there's a way in which TP:FWWM is both a carry-over from and a corrective to WILD AT HEART (both continuing and critiquing the heavy-breathing taboo-breaking sexuality of the earlier film). I think it's an improvement.

LOST HIGHWAY has the very conceptually satisfying puzzle structure, but I think it lacks for grace notes and it's certainly less humane than FWWM. though I still think it's been unfairly overshadowed by MULLHOLLAND DR.

I was referring to Twin Peaks the tv series there. Like it set some things rolling in his head but he didn't know what to do with them - he let the series get out of hand, made Wild at Heart (which I really don't like), tried to cobble together FWWM, and then wandered in the wilderness for a few years. LH is a tentative stab at what would later culminate in more fully realized works (sorry Tuomas).

i think that's too simplistic and doesn't account for the strangeness of how MULHOLLAND DRIVE, in particular, came to happen

Jacques Rivette said this fwiw:

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (David Lynch, 1992)

I don’t own a television, which is why I couldn’t share Serge Daney’s passion for TV series. And I took a long time to appreciate Lynch. In fact, I didn’t really start until Blue Velvet (1986). With Isabella Rossellini’s apartment, Lynch succeeded in creating the creepiest set in the history of cinema. And Twin Peaks, the Film is the craziest film in the history of cinema. I have no idea what happened, I have no idea what I saw, all I know is that I left the theater floating six feet above the ground. Only the first part of Lost Highway (1996) is as great. After which you get the idea, and by the last section I was one step ahead of the film, although it remained a powerful experience right up to the end.

FWIW FWWM

I don’t own a television,

Area Man Constantly Mentioning He Doesn't Own A Television

Area Man has not made as many boring films as Rivette

big fan of twin peeks over here. that log lady is such a kook! how about that second season though - talk about a drop off in quality!

just my $0.02

lol

good post

no one's brought up Richard Beymer at all. think he'll make a return?

This was on at the laundromat where I play pinball sometimes, and the TV was set to that horrible eely motion-smoothing setting where all movements are rendered uncannily fluid and gross. It was also saturated and resharpened or something, kinda blasting out the shot-on-video look. All this made it look a hell of a lot like a contemporary soap opera, which should be a winner for Twin Peaks but it just felt totally wrong and awful, and not the kind of wrong and awful that Lynch was trading in. I realize this is sorta true of almost anything you watch in that TV mode, but man, Leland's dancing just looked soooooooo bad.

This was on at the laundromat where I play pinball sometimes

My grandmother somehow set her TV to that mode and nobody can figure out how to change it back and watching TV with her is horrible.

My grandmother somehow set her TV to that mode and nobody can figure out how to change it back and watching TV with her is horrible.

Ah, I think I can help with this, if it's a Samsung TV at least. When I got my new one it was set to that mode by default and it drove me demented for a while, trying to find the right setting to turn it off, or how to describe it for Googling the problem.

Samsung calls it "Auto Motion Plus" and it's basically interpolating an extra frame, to give a pseudo-HFR look.

It's actually kind of fascinating to turn it on if you want sets to instantly look like sets – like getting a sneaky behind-the-scenes look at the film. Particularly weird with really old films.

People do call it the Soap Opera Effect (http://www.cnet.com/news/what-is-the-soap-opera-effect/)

I didn't go see The Hobbit in real HFR, so not sure how it compares, but audience reports suggest it has a similar effect.

why does anyone like this and why does it exist?

for a second i thought you were referring to twin peaks. very crude trolling, must do better

The laundromat is effectively a pinball arcade, they have maybe a dozen tables...I favor Theatre of Magic tho.

why does anyone like this and why does it exist?

Maybe it's part of an industry-wide push to get our brains used to HFR.

this feature is widespread and completely unnecessary. I nearly had a heart attack when I bought a new tv and all my favorite films looked completely horrible and cheap. Any tv owner's manual should have a section called "how to stop making things look terrible". I have to imagine this has been a problem for many, many people, and that there are plenty that never figured out how to fix this.

I don't even know if it is good or bad that there is a motion smoothing feature available on new tvs, but it definitely shouldn't be cranked up by default

I think the first time I consciously saw it was at a different laundromat, where The Dark Knight was showing and I was convinced the TV station was actually showing the film slightly fast in order to squeeze in more commercials.

I once bought a Logik CD player that put pauses between tracks(as far as I knew you couldn't change it), ever since I've been scared I'll buy another music player that does the same. It's a terrible idea so I don't know why somebody would specifically design it that way.

That CD player feature you didn't like is going to come back in style.

embrace the pause. use those 2 seconds to rebalance, center yourself, and listen inward. 2 seconds is an eternity compared to the infinitely small. a series of 2 second pauses leads to a collective pause that is infinitely larger than the collective pause of a series of 1.99 second pauses. the eternal pause, infinities on top of infinities. only now you are ready to listen to the next Wilson Phillips song.

Seriously? This is genuinely upsetting me. I'm gonna need an iPod or mp3 player soon and I'm scared there will be pauses.

Or when my CD player breaks, which will hopefully be at least 10 years from now.

Hope they still make CD players in 10 years

Tune in tomorrow
for
Invitation to Love

hfr smoothing makes cgi movies look rly rly strange: like offhand wedding videos of dragons and talking animals. recommended, and now playing at yr nearest big-box electronics section. as the default setting on every television yeah it is a plague. first encountered it on a new tv of my parents' and it made me feel insane because they couldn't see it.

It's kinda how people think insane EQ and 'stereo surround' makes music sound better. It's just different. Not better.

why does anyone like this and why does it exist?

if you're watching HD sports on a giant LCD screen, it improves the experience a lot.

Just realized that 9 episodes is basically the length of TP Season 1...was thinking it sounded short but it'll be even longer than that with no commercials, and that first season covered a lot of ground and was incredibly engrossing.

why does anyone like this and why does it exist?

if you're watching HD sports on a giant LCD screen, it improves the experience a lot.

Or anything with little things flying across the screen, like "The Hobbit.'

I have to disagree there. The first dvd I played on the new tv was Return of the King, which I chose because I thought that a modern, visually exciting movie would be a good way to test out the HD and get it set up correctly, but it looked every bit as horrible and cheap as anything else. At first, I thought I just didn't remember what the film was like or maybe the tv was broken, until I finally figured out that I needed to turn off the smoothing.

This feature shouldn't be used for any feature films, it only makes them worse. The only thing I'd ever consider using it for is sports, and even there the results aren't great. Yes, in sporting events, without the smoothing, you do tend to see some pixelation with quick camera moves, but I've come around to preferring that over the weird unreality of the smoothing feature.

Movies should be watched as their creators intended!

pumped directly into your visual cortex by implanted electrodes

Yes! Thank you!

Avant-pop abuse of smoothing feature in 10... 9... 8...

Now there's this too

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/twin-peaks-creator-reveal-characters-741319

If Lynch is even half as enthusiastic about all this as Frost seems to be, I'll be happy.

Frost wrote the Dale Cooper book which was pretty good, so looking forward to this.

When Twin Peaks first aired, I thought of Mark Frost as this old TV veteran (Hill Street Blues! That seemed like TV history) but actually HSB only finished three years before Twin Peaks started and Frost is still only 60. I guess I was young then.

Wikipedia says Autobio of Dale Cooper was written by Mark's brother, Scott Frost.

that's obviously wrong since it was written by special agent dale cooper

like Dennis Perrin i am getting a distinct "X-Files movies" vibe

oops

like Dennis Perrin i am getting a distinct "X-Files movies" vibe

1) from what?
2) have you seen the X-Files movies?*
3) have you seen The X-Files?

* there were X-Files movies?

I've been rewatching twin peaks. I never realized bryan cranston was the actor who played hank until just now. I feel so dumb.