New Lynch movie coming out
JimC
I like Lynch, but the Coens have done avant-garde better and more
consistently. In 100 years, Lynch will be remembered, but the Coens
will be better remembered.
Print it!
Joe Blevins
"JimC" <jimco...@juno.com> wrote in message
news:1165418965.0...@f1g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...
Well, Lynch has his strengths and weaknesses, but on balance I've very much
enjoyed his films. I'm a fan, though not a completist. (Haven't and won't
see "Dune," for instance.) When I was a teenager, I read about Lynch and
his movies in books like "Cult Movies" (by Danny Peary) and "Midnight
Movies" (Hoberman & Rosenbaum) before I ever actually saw any of his work.
The books certainly whetted my appetite. "Midnight Movies," in particular,
had a cover which featured that famous still of Jack Nance as Henry with the
electro-shocked hair and wild-eyed gaze. That photo was what made me buy
the book, and the book in turn introduced me not only to Lynch but to a
whole world of movies that were new to me. Unfortunately, my timing was
bad. This was the late 1980s/early 1990s -- long after the heyday of
midnight movies but long before the DVD revolution, so my only option was to
find "Eraserhead" on VHS -- not an easy task in suburban mid-Michigan, but I
did it. (Thanks to the wonderful and now defunct Michigan Video, which even
rented laserdiscs.) When I finally saw the movie, it was every bit as
artily weird as I was hoping it would be. I was always a big fan of the
weird and grotesque growing up, but you don't get much of that in the
mainstream entertainment that was available to a kid like me, growing up in
the Midwest. You just get tantalizing hints of weirdness in old cartoons
(especially ones by Walter Lantz, who was a closet surrealist IMHO) and
sci-fi/horror movies (the old Universal "Frankenstein"). But now, here it
was -- the Holy Grail -- a movie that was nothing BUT the weird and
grotesque! And since no one I knew had even heard of it and it was so hard
to find, it felt like I'd found a "secret" movie that was made just for me.
Well, then, I started seeking out his other movies, which thankfully were
easier to track down. I even reviewed the video version of "Blue Velvet"
for my high school paper! I've followed his career pretty closely since
then, though curiously I never was much into "Twin Peaks," arguably his most
visible, well-known work. Other than "Fire Walk With Me," none of his films
have left me disappointed. Several of them ("Eraserhead," "Blue Velvet,"
"Elephant Man," "Wild at Heart," "Mulholland Dr.") are in my DVD collection
today... and whenever I need to get my weird/kinky Lynch fix, I pop one in.
They've held up nicely, and I can even feel a slight tinge of nostalgia
while watching something like "Blue Velvet."
As for whose films will be better remembered, I think the Coens have the
advantage of making movies which are more comprehensible and simply more
enjoyable to watch and re-watch. The pictures are impeccably made and get
better with multiple viewings, and it really helps to revisit them a few
years after they're released. In several cases -- "Barton Fink,"
"Hudsucker," "Lebowski" -- I didn't really "get" them the first time
through, but now I love them. I don't rewatch Lynch's films nearly as
often. Somehow, the Coen filmography is like a good short story collection
that you can dip into over and over again, while the Lynch films seem like
museum pieces -- beautiful, strange, fascinating, easy to admire, but
difficult to "love."
That said, I'm looking forward to Lynch's "Inland Empire." Right now, the
reviews have been split right down the middle -- which is pretty much how it
should be for a Lynch film. That's one thing I do like about his movies:
their divisive nature. They seem designed to split the audience and cause
arguments. That was something that struck me in Danny Peary's essay about
"Eraserhead." He said at the end of the screening he attended, one man
hissed while another declared he had seen a masterpiece!
--Joe--
JimC
> That said, I'm looking forward to Lynch's "Inland Empire." Right now, the
> reviews have been split right down the middle -- which is pretty much how it
> should be for a Lynch film. That's one thing I do like about his movies:
> their divisive nature. They seem designed to split the audience and cause
> arguments. That was something that struck me in Danny Peary's essay about
> "Eraserhead." He said at the end of the screening he attended, one man
> hissed while another declared he had seen a masterpiece!
I'm with the second guy -- Eraserhead is a masterpiece. Sometimes I
think Lynch derails, as in Mulholland Drive, and the
imcomprehensibility of his films shields him from criticism.
But I like Lynch, and I make the Coens comparison deliberately. Like
him, their films are informed by the surreal -- in fact, I watched
Raising Arizona last night, and the sequence where Nicolas Cage is on
the lam running through houses and grocery stores is absolutely
surreal, even though it's also hilarious and action packed.
gr
Joe Blevins
> Joe Blevins wrote:
>> That said, I'm looking forward to Lynch's "Inland Empire." Right now,
>> the
>> reviews have been split right down the middle -- which is pretty much how
>> it
>> should be for a Lynch film. That's one thing I do like about his movies:
>> their divisive nature. They seem designed to split the audience and
>> cause
>> arguments. That was something that struck me in Danny Peary's essay
>> about
>> "Eraserhead." He said at the end of the screening he attended, one man
>> hissed while another declared he had seen a masterpiece!
>
> I'm with the second guy -- Eraserhead is a masterpiece. Sometimes I
> think Lynch derails, as in Mulholland Drive, and the
> imcomprehensibility of his films shields him from criticism.
The best criticism I've read of Lynch -- and it explains most of his
movies -- is that his movies are like jigsaw puzzles in which we're either
being given too many pieces or not enough pieces. "Mulholland" is
definitely a jigsaw puzzle movie. I can sympathize with people who were
frustrated by its incomprehensibility... and, yeah, it *is* kind of a shield
against critics. But with "Mulholland" and "Lost Highway," I just
concentrated on the component parts -- certain scenes, certain
performances -- and tried not to concentrate on the fact that the movies
didn't really add up to a cohesive whole. In "Mulholland," for instance,
there's a hilarious scene with an accident-prone hitman who just encounters
one damned thing after another while trying to rub out some creep. (His
bullet goes through a wall and hits a fat lady in the ass. He shoots a
vacuum cleaner, which causes the fire alarm to go off. And on and on.)
It's a brilliant, dark comic sequence and would have been right at home in a
Coen picture. And there's a great audition scene with Chad Everett and
Naomi Watts which could stand on its own as a mini-movie-within-a-movie.
"Muholland" -- like "Lost Highway" -- has a lot of neat little scenes,
lines, characters, performances, etc. scattered through it.
(SIDE NOTE: there's a downloadable commentary track at
http://www.flakmag.com/film/commentary/mulholland.html which really helped
me make sense of "Mulholland Dr." It doesn't explain away everything, but
it helps.)
"Eraserhead" is one of the Lynch pictures in which the jigsaw puzzle pieces
*do* add up to a coherent, cohesive whole. Underneath the surface weirdness
you'll find very human anxieties and problems. To me, it's a movie about a
guy who inadvertantly becomes a father and REALLY isn't ready for it. Lynch
can be a "cold" director , but this is one of his most empathetic,
compassionate films. ("Straight Story" and "Elephant Man" are others.)
>
> But I like Lynch, and I make the Coens comparison deliberately. Like
> him, their films are informed by the surreal -- in fact, I watched
> Raising Arizona last night, and the sequence where Nicolas Cage is on
> the lam running through houses and grocery stores is absolutely
> surreal, even though it's also hilarious and action packed.
One of the Coens' great sequences of all time. "Arizona" is the first of
their movies I saw, and it blew my adolescent mind. It was vastly different
from every other movie playing. I saw a book recently called something like
"The Mind of the Modern Moviemaker." It's a collection of interviews with
hot young directors, and it's amazing how many of them list that movie as an
influence.
Thanks,
Joe