David Lynch - Classic or Dud

DFW essay is great. Also responsible for convincing me to reconsider the implications of the final shot of Blue Velvet.

Yeah do you mean loggia?

I was lukewarm on LH at the time but it'll be of interest longer than most movies from 1997. Seeing it projected on a huge screen took it to another level for me.

no, Blake as Mystery Man with his damn face paint.

Is like frank booth how

it's still not really remotely frank boothish imo, blake's performance is much more an otherworldly evil intruding on our universe kind of thing

No offense intended, but I don't understand arguments like "of interest longer than most moves from 1997" or "even the worst Lynch is better than the majority of extant things" when I can think of 10 superior movies released in 1997. It's an argument I hear in music discussion too tbh ("Even bad X is better than most Y.").

more of a composed faustian bob xp

Is like frank booth how

― shhh / let peaceful like things (wins)

Creepy Evil, albeit in LH Lynch smooshed Hopper's character and Dean Stockwell's.

No offense intended, but I don't understand arguments like "of interest longer than most moves from 1997" or "even the worst Lynch is better than the majority of extant things" when I can think of 10 superior movies released in 1997. It's an argument I hear in music discussion too tbh ("Even bad X is better than most Y.").

Hyperbole, though I myself use it in cases like Kiarostami, whose Taste of Cherry is one of those 1997 films in question.

Less an argument than an opinion. Like (by way of wholly arbitrary example) I'd rather rewatch Lost Highway than say the majority of films that have been nominated for Academy Awards. Others, I'm sure, feel differently.

Creepy Evil

If that’s all it is then a few dozen Lynch actors are “doing frank booth” (some of them are even similar to frank booth)

The seams show when it's done ineptly.

anyway even though i'm making these arguments i haven't seen lost highway in ten years lol. at one point i preferred it to mulholland dr. but i'm guessing this was a consequence of building it up so much in my head when it was out of print and all i had was the soundtrack

Mystery man is an early version of the cowboy from Mulholland dr and zabriskie in inland empire

oh I have several friends who agreed with your stance a decade ago too.

xpost

More legit Booth analogues would be (as noted) Loggia in LH, Red in The Return, Bobby Peru.

Uncanny confrontational interlocutor

Mystery man is an early version of the cowboy from Mulholland dr and zabriskie in inland empire

― shhh / let peaceful like things (wins), Wednesday, June 26, 2019 11:32 AM (thirty-two seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Was about to follow up with pretty much exactly this.

Booth isn’t spooky, he’s just a psycho

I can think of 10 superior movies released in 1997.

was curious about this and looked up American films released in '97 and there's a lot of garbage but also:

Starship Troopers
Boogie Nights
Deconstructing Harry
Jackie Brown

and while that's not 10, those are some heavy hitters that are all better than LH imo (I'm sure others here would throw in Amistad or Fifth Element or Good Will Hunting or a handful of others)

xp

Mystery man is an early version of the cowboy from Mulholland dr and zabriskie in inland empire

I agree

1997:

The Sweet Hereafter (Atom Egoyan)
Irma Vep (Olivier Assayas)
The Apostle (Robert Duvall)
Happy Together (Wong Kar-wai)
Jackie Brown (Quentin Tarantino)
Taste of Cherry (Abbas Kiarostami)
Grosse Pointe Blank (George Armitage)
The Wings of the Dove (Iain Softley)
The River (Tsai Ming-Liang)
Nil by Mouth (Gary Oldman)

HONORABLE MENTIONS: Boogie Nights (Paul Thomas Anderson), Hard Eight (Paul Thomas Anderson), L.A. Confidential (Curtis Hanson), The Daytrippers (Greg Mottola).

not a bad year by any stretch

and I'll throw in Deconstructing Harry and Starship Troopers too

don't forget Radiohead - OK Computer

lol, you trumped any smartass retort I might've made (was mulling over a Leprechaun in Space ref).

My larger point was that Lost Highway and Good Burger are literally the only two 1997 movies anyone cares about nowadays.

In the reverse order you listed them, but yes.

brb gonna watch Tony Leung and Leslie Cheung have sex again

1997 was a great year for flicks. Starship Troopers should have won best picture but for some reason it wasn't even nominated, i think maybe the screeners got lost in the mail.

I love Lost Highway, think it's underrated, although it would benefit from shaving some of the endless scenes of him stumbling around long hallways near the end. Replaying that whole sequence along with the Rammstein tune is a bit much.

I didn't like it as much second time but I still prefer it to all those listed films that I've seen so far (even though Irma Vep may be better). The Bowie/road credit scenes completely knocked my socks off first time I seen it, even though not much is happening.

I love Robert Blake in this, especially the way he says "ask me". Booth is good, but I'd actually like to be Blake's character. Who wants to be Booth except guys who endlessly quote tough guy assholes in movies?
Has anyone here read Blake's autobiography Tales Of A Rascal: What I Did For Love? I've heard it's brilliant and quite dark itself.

I once read someone complain that Booth is simply a rehash of an earlier Hopper character.

Hopper once claimed that Booth is what Billy The Kid from Easy Rider would have become in the '80s had he not been (SPOILER) killed.

I know he got off on an acquittal but I can't enjoy LH anymore knowing Blake (or one of his goons) knocked off his wife.

I'd actually like to be Blake's character

really

My favorite 1997 film is the relatively obscure Too Many Ways to Be No. 1, an early Milkyway joint. Probably the most echt-90s film I can think of too - Kieslowski/Tykwer-style alternate timelines, camerawork that wants to out-Doyle Chris Doyle, direct lifts from Takeshi Kitano (hey wasn't Fireworks also 1997?).

Second fave is Boogie Nights. Favorite from Alfred's main list is Grosse Point Blank: sneakily subversive take on the hitman genre. Probably the only Tarantino wannabe that was bearable.

I remember my friend and I were soooo psyched to see Lost Highway at the time, my friend doubly so since he absolutely adored Reznor and Manson, and after we watched it, we just sat there, deflated: "Um, that's it?".

As for Wild at Heart, I haven't seen the deleted scenes, but I read the script and there was more of the random peripheral violence/accidents that you get just a taste of in the final film. The script made it feel like Lynch and Gifford were trying to make their own version of Godard's Weekend, except with a central couple in love rather than falling apart.

Speaking of Weekend, has any other Lynch film been so heavy-handed in its references? The Wizard of Oz, Sherilyn Fenn looking for her handbag seemed to come from Weekend, the dog with the severed hand from Yojimbo. I don't remember Lynch typically being so obvious, usually it's more along the lines of the bird in Blue Velvet maybe being a Kuchar reference or something obscure like that.

Checking the festivals of 1997, it's also the year that Hana-bi won the Golden Lion. That's a good one as well.

I just checked, Paul M Sammon claimed that the character and even certain scenes in Blue Velvet are very similar to Out Of The Blue. But he was also complaining that Lynch was selling out and was becoming too crassly pornographic (this was 1992), most of arguments points weren't very convincing.

Οὖτις- in the same way I want to Count Orlok or the creep in Khanate's "Skin Coat".

want to be

oh well that all makes sense then

I haven't seen LH in a long time, I should rewatch it. But one of the biggest problems with it is that it's so dark, meaning, the lighting in it is just dark, that it doesn't translate well to my TV which is 10 years old (and the last time I actually watched it was on VHS on a tube TV which was terrible looking). It looked good in a theater. I'd guess that a blu-ray on a better TV would look great. If Lynch was holding out for Criterion that's too bad.

haven't seen it since it was released but on the They Shoot Pictures website Lost Highway is still the highest ranking film from 1997, even above Happy Together and Taste of Cherry

Tim Lucas offers up his blocked Lost Highway commentary: https://videowatchdog.blogspot.com/2019/07/hear-my-lost-lost-highway-audio.html

(sorry, who is Tim Lucas?)

film critic, publisher of Video Watchdog, author of Throat Sprockets, Bava biographer, professional DVD commentary track guy whose commentary was blocked by Lynch from the Lost Highway blu-ray discussed extensively in this thread evive

yeah i have to imagine that Criterion wants to put out all the Lynch films they can and he's just waiting out until they're able to (at least a year considering they just put out Blue Velvet). I'd prefer an Inland Empire reissue, not because it needs to be 'restored,' it's just very hard to find these days. the region 1 dvd has been out of print for years.

Henry Rollins talking about Lynch's working process on Lost Highway, and hanging out with him off-set, on a 2017 podcast episode

(there's five minutes of chit-chat between Rollins and his long-time office manager / co-host at the beginning)

This is good stuff