Mulholland Drive - theories please.

i'm watching those madmen eps with this guy and he is great in them

his schtick is so weird i don't know how he gets these parts but he's great in them

ya great screen presence

Attended NYU Tisch School of the Arts, trained at Circle in the Square and graduated in 1992.

Founded and is co-artistic director of the Neurotic Young Urbanites, a Los Angeles theater group created by NYU graduates to give young actors a working environment to continue developing their skills. In addition to appearing in many of their productions, he has co-directed musical productions.

one of the great that guys of the 2000s imo

funny he made such an impression on me in his short scene in MD that when he showed up in LOST i was like.. THAT GUY

he little speech in MD is really delivered so amazing. the little smirks, the fear, the cadence...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NM2t2wqaOsM

samwisediggory (3 days ago)
best scene in the whole movie, love it.

redandjonny (1 month ago)
favorite scene Lynch has ever filmed.

Cmdsouza (1 month ago)
Terrible but the movie is interesting.

iAMcooooooool (2 weeks ago)
Quite the opposite: the movie is terrible and this is the only interesting part of it.

Quite the opposite

noted film scholar iAMcoooooooooooooool

what's crazy is that his dad owns Patrick's Roadhouse in Santa Monica and named the restaurant after him 36 years ago!

Also crazy: Patrick's is on the verge of collapse, they were given their 30 day eviction notice last month and things look bleak.

ya great screen presence

He's fine in that scene, but I didn't remember the eyebrows or that he was in Ghost World.

i mean, the food was average and the drinks sucked but it's a huge landmark for folks who spent time between Malibu and SanMo back in the day.

you could definitely say that about him

o i didn't see the first post.

also no joke the cowboy + andy scene (well, any andy scene really but this one most so) is stone-dead wonderful. but everything about it is self-knowingly wonderful. it's there AS a classic scene AND an experience-within-film. does this make sense? it's just mannered in such a way that is redolent of 'classic hollywood' (the conversational dynamic, the light), but its placement within the fractal narrative is, while seemingly incidental, essential to the narrative's dare I say kaleidoscopic (meant in the true, mirrored-chaos-becoming-idealism way) nature.

it's like "the pictures" have come and ganged up on diane's and our consciousnesses - their faraway, hyperreal quality taunts and thrills. film as raison d'etre and executioner

Jesus is that Rolf from Muppet Babies?

of course the fact this was meant for TV may scupper my pondering

no i dont think so louis, this is a movie about hollywood and delusion and dreams gone really effing wrong, i think that's a fair read

in the movie theater while watching this for the first time, the cowboy scene really put a huge smile on my face.

the cowboy is like john turturro's character in the big lebowski except there's actually a purpose for him to exist, and a genuine mystique created by his slightly ungraspable, oblique hardman wisdom...the spirit of old america, brought to caricature by film, but played for terror rather than comfort

and hey i got no problems with the big lebowski but terror is a way more interesting way to play it...not uncle sam but someone who kills without mercy - the mystique of the cattle drive - what determines a man as alluded to and then spat away by someone who has no time for smartassery - the idea that andy has fucked up on a mortal and profound level, but is allowed to continue directing films...

To what extent is this film about the fractal nature of film?

i don't know if lynch would use the word fractal, but yeah i think the answer is "to a large extent." i'd say something more vague and holistic like, it's about how movies work -- which encompasses everything from the technical to the diegetic. the way something "real" -- real enough to convey emotion and to affect the viewer -- is constructed out of raw materials all built on artifice and make believe. the two thesis statements are the watts audition scene and the nightclub scene, but a lot of the movie either explicitly or implicitly draws on those ideas.

and like i said above LJ - at the points where the movie really seems to rupture, emotionally, the film itself literally breaks and goes off the gate... which kind of sez it all

the nightclub scene is like a magician's grand reveal - a tear was forming in my eye at exactly the moment the singer falls to the floor - it is timed and shot devastatingly, almost preternaturally well. and i didn't see it coming, but of course when it happens the whole thing is blown wide open and you've been there at the silencio too and you've understood a fundamental truth about cinema which lynch has put better than most

oh is this such a scene? it is isn't it

(needless to say, when the singer falls, it becomes twice as affecting, for a reason i can't fully pin down, but involves one's relationship to the cinema within one's own life)

(and needless to say, the PERFORMANCE of the song, aided by the shots of our two leads, is convincingly tearjerking, in the same way that watts' performance with everett is convincingly earth-shattering. and it's NOT smoke and mirrors. at least, it doesn't seem it, even if it is. in this way, the film is miraculous, in that it pulls such performances out when it has to, because the brilliance of those performances lends the film meaning. do we feel them to be more brilliant than they are for this reason? however presmptuous the film is, it pulls it off)

we need to believe that empathy is real in order to survive

we need to believe in roy orbison

Hey pretty girl - time to wake up

funny he made such an impression on me in his short scene in MD that when he showed up in LOST i was like.. THAT GUY

i did that when i saw him in Idiocracy!

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2090/2117420816_ee98d8467f.jpg
http://i423.photobucket.com/albums/pp314/pauly_cy/rolf20muppet.jpg

In muppet babies there is a closet to the door of imagination so maybe this is some weird lynchian shoutout to his muppet homies.

relationship between weird mystic madwoman 'louise' and alley monster: DISCUSS

in this way, the film is miraculous, in that it pulls such performances out when it has to

otm. if the movie itself wasn't great art, its commentary on the construction of art would just be self-indulgent and even self-defeating -- a mediocre magician giving away tricks he can't actually perform. but because it shows rather than tells (or shows even as it tells), it leaves you with the marvel that i think is lynch's own sort of sense of wonder at how it all works.

"it" being the human experience moreso than just cinema

aye. cinema as metaphor/workshop for the construction of meaning.

:D yeah exactly! exactly what i was thinking, but given breath.

film crit is fun!

the magician guy saying 'eet eez a tape recorder' could so easily be kitsch and silly but he's actually terrifying, riveting and realistic. again, not sure how lynch does this, or whether we're only too happy to succumb, but it's one of the film's many interventions onto our own consciousness, and it perfects the 'show and tell' thing you describe

Do you guys believe Lynch when he says he writes all his movies by just meditating and writing down ideas on 3x5 cards when he gets them, then assembling them when he amasses a certain amount?
Because it seems inappropriate in that case to ascribe to him the sort of overt/conscious statements such as "cinema as metaphor/workshop for the construction of meaning" rather than "his POV as a filmmaker appears to have shaped his subconscious daydreams"

Is Lynch lying to us about his process?

this ^^^ makes me question how many lynch movies have you seen?

you are lying to yourself about the way meaning is constructed

i think in all art-making there is a certain extent to which ppl r just winging it and seeing where shit sticks, even in the processes of ppl who seemingly have really refined sensibilities

s1ocki otm

also how is this: Do you guys believe Lynch when he says he writes all his movies by just meditating and writing down ideas on 3x5 cards when he gets them, then assembling them when he amasses a certain amount? really that different from any other creative writing process. "I sit there until I get ideas, then I write them down, and when it feels finished its done" = every writer ever.

like, i think relying on the director to validate the explanation is a bit of a dead end on some levels

Lynch is particularly forthcoming about erasing any conscious intent from his approach, which I think distinguishes him from most other films.

He isn't a film

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

You guys are operating on the idea that Lynch's film is particularly an expression of Lynch, right?

no