The Screengrab : twin peaks

The Screengrab Library of Unproduced Screenplays: David Lynch and Mark Frost's "One Saliva Bubble"

Phil Nugent — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 18:00:00 GMT

Few movie artists who've emerged in the last thirty or so years excite so much curiosity about what they're working on--and about what they've worked on in the past and been forced to abandon--as David Lynch. And none are more vocal about their mixed feelings, or worse, about that kind of curiosity. Lynch, who famously abhors the inclusion of directors' commentaries and even chapter stops on DVDs, wants his work to be experienced only in its final, polished form, and he doesn't appreciate having cultists root around in the tangle of his false starts and wrong turns. When someone in the audience of a live Q & A asked Lynch about an early version of the script for Blue Velvet that he'd come across, which ended with Dorothy Vallens jumping off a roof, Lynch curtly responded that the question showed why all the copies of all the early drafts of anything ought to be burned. The true Lynch fanatic is likely to end up feeling a little like Max Brod wrestling with Kafka's instructions to him to destroy his letters and other unpublished writings, torn between wanting to respect the great man's wishes and the desire to know and share as much as possible about what been up to. Because Lynch is principally a movie director, that includes whatever traces we have of what he might have done if he'd had not just more time but all the funding opportunities in the world.

For Lynch freaks, the great white whale of unproduced Lynch projects is Ronnie Rocket, a script that goes back to the late 1970s. Described by Lynch as being "about a three-foot tall guy with red hair and physical problems, and about 60-cycle alternating current electricity", the project was originally intended as Lynch's follow-up to Eraserhead. When that didn't work out, it was going to be his follow-up to The Elephant Man, and then his follow-up to Blue Velvet. After Twin Peaks, he began to talk about it as a starring vehicle for Michael Anderson, the dwarf actor who played The Man from Another Place in that series and later appeared in Mulholland Drive. Lynch has rewritten and rewritten the script, and at that same Q & A, he told Elvis Mitchell that after every project he completes, he tries to get Ronnie Rocket a green light. Some people, though, think that the movie will never get made because Lynch is past the point of being able to make it. It might be one of those long-deferred dream projects that directors sometimes fuss over and fantasize about until it takes up permanent residence in some remote corner of their minds, from which it can never be successful dislodged. And some of us who used to anticipate what the director of Eraserhead and Blue Velvet's ultimate dream project might look like are less excited about the prospect of seeing it made now by the director of Inland Empire, the man who, in interviews, seems less interested in pushing the boundaries of the audio-visual possibilities of film than in embracing new technology that mainly offers him the pleasures of greater convenience.

Ronnie Rocket is Lynch at his most intensely personal. One Saliva Bubble, which was written in 1987, around the same time that Lynch was reportedly close to making Ronnie with a cast that would have included Dean Stockwell, Dennis Hopper, Brad Dourif, and Jack Nance--the Blue Velvet All-Stars--is a relic of a very different phase in Lynch's career, a period when he teamed up with Mark Frost, a writer best known for his work on Hill Street Blues and the 1987 horror movie The Believers, and tried to meet the mainstream halfway. Based on the results, the idea behind the partnership must have been something like this: the two of them would work bring their weird conceits to the table and decide on which ones they both liked, after which Frost would press them into some commercially viable form that might get the green light from a studio or network, after which Lynch would wrap them in Style. Before hitting pay dirt with Twin Peaks, Frost and Lynch worked on The Lemurians, a projected TV series with roots in a variant of the Atlantis myth that figured in the cosmos of Madame Blavatsky, and Goddess, a movie spun from the notion that Robert Kennedy had Marilyn Monroe rubbed out, but only One Saliva Bubble is known to have made it to the completed screenplay stage. At the point where it seemed likeliest that it might get beyond that, it had Steve Martin and Martin Short attached for the leads.

The script begins in "a top-secret, experimental, offensive/defensive military installation hidden away in the countryside outside Philadelphia, Pennsylvania." In the first scene, some scientists are exposing the innards of a computer system while a trio of security guards "who appear to be refugees from the Neolithic period" stand off to the side, exchanging crude jokes. The title refers to Frost and Lynch's version of the butterfly effect: one of the guards blows a raspberry, and in the process "jettisons a perfect saliva bubble" which floats "past the unknowing, refined, well-groomed Scientists and down into the microscopic copper wires, creating a tiny, seemingly insignificant electrical short circuit," which in turn causes some kind of satellite missile-defense system to emit a beam that strikes the small town of Newtonville, Kansas. The effect of the beam is to cause several citizens to trade bodies, or merge their personalities, or something like that with other citizens. A gang of rowdy, out-of-shape Texans swap places with a troupe of Chinese acrobats; a Britishy matron takes over the body of a black blues musician. And the hero, Wally, "a forty year old milquetoast salesman", trades places with Horton, a ferocious hit man. This is '80s high concept, Lynch style.

Part of what makes it Lynchian is that everybody in Newtonville, and outside it too, seems buggy and warped even before the transformation takes place. It's also marked by a strange mixture of sweetness and darkness. When Wally is trundling around in Horton's menacing form, his love life and overall place in the scheme if things improves, but--and this is probably the most winning idea in the whole script--the bloodthirsty Horton steps into Wally's life and discovers that he loves being a family man, especially since his wife and son love the new, scary version of their family provider. The warmest, and just about the wordiest, passage in the script comes when Horton has to deal with a bully who's been messing with junior. "I know what a hard life you've lived," he tells the kid, "what with your folks divorce and your father's alcoholism. It wasn't so long ago that I didn't know the meaning of a family either. Victor, I know about the loneliness, lying awake at night, feeling like no one in the world cares for you. I know what this can do to you; the rage and frustration. And I just want you to understand you've got a friend here and his name is Wally Newton. By the time he's finished, there isn't a dry eye in the schoolroom. Meanwhile, the military is discussing whether to cover the whole mess up by going with a plan to "reduce Newtonville to a smoking pile of ash, litter the area with sheep with their eyes sewn shut and blame it on UFO's."

One Saliva Bubble reads as if it must have been fun to write. It has an antic, anything-goes tone, "anything" including comical Chinese who say things like,"Herro, Gentremen, how may I herp you?", animated-cartoon tricks involving dogs freezing in the air in mid-pounce and doors that fling themselves open at the sight of the fearsome Horton, cute comic gangsters, broadly drawn cariactures of blustery generals that would strike Buck Turgidsen as a tad much, and an ending that is unintentionally summed up by the stage direction: "The crowd is totally bewildered." Humor has always been a major element in Lynch's work; certainly it had a lot to do with the success of Twin Peaks, especially in the first season, when it was easier to separate the intentionally funny from the other kind. There, the funny moments arose naturally out the characters and situations. But, trying to write a comedy, he seems less interested in story or character than in piling silliness upon silliness. And because Lynch can't seem to help himself from minting a strange, idiosyncratic world even when he populates it with silly accents and fart jokes, there's an abstract, weirdly cerebral feel to the whole thing, like seeing a star MIT student's experimental design for the world's greatest homemade beer bong. Although the film was never made, there may be a clue as to what it would have looked like in Lynch and Frost's follow-up TV series, the short-lived behind-the-scenes radio sitcom On the Air, where the farcical plot turns and slapstick pratfalls were so unfunny they were borderline creepy. The show played like charades night at the Black Lodge. (In turn, Saliva Bubble may provide hints of what might have been in store for us if Lynch had realized another of his ideas for a comedy: Dream of the Bovine, which would have starred Harry Dean Stanton as one of three cows who are reincarnated as people but still think of themselves as cattle.)

With the early, phenomenal success of Twin Peaks, Lynch and Frost proved that there was a mass audience for a crowd-pleasing serial entertainment served up with the kind of craft, visual imagination, and double-edged with that Lynch brought to the project. But they also wound up demonstrating the corrupting influence of mass success, a corruption that in their case was self-defeating. If they had fulfilled the expectations they'd set up and solved the mystery of Laura Palmer's murder in that first season, they might have been unable to lure their audience back for whatever they did next, but they could have gone out in glory; instead, by trying to extend the plotline beyond the breaking point, they wore out their welcome with the audience and betrayed their implicit pledge to keep Twin Peaks from turning into just another TV show, playing by the same nothing-ever-really-changes rules. After On the Air and the Twin Peaks movie Fire Walk with Me (on which Frost had an executive producer credit but no input on the script), they went their separate ways, and it would take Lynch a while to regain his bearings. In his collaborations with Frost and also in Wild at Heart, the movie that was released between the first and second seasons of Twin Peaks, he had begun showing the strain of trying to match up to the way the industry seemed to see him: not as a major artist trying to capture his own way of seeing on film, but as some guy standing by the side of the road holding up a hand-lettered sign reading, "WILL WRITE WEIRD SHIT FOR FOOD."

In Other Blogs: 100% Watchmen-Free Edition

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 16:30:00 GMT

It’s enough already! I blame myself for piling on, but surely we can find some intriguing blog entries out there on subjects other than the movie that rhymes with Blotchmen. For instance, Arbogast on Film is looking back at an apocalyptic fantasy from the olden days. “Maybe the world did come to an end in 1988. I don't want to be glib but I'm hard pressed to think of anything that has surfaced in the interim that really is something to tap dance about. There was an electricity back then, a crackle in the air that's missing now, the void filled by buzz, which isn't the same thing. None of us knew the backstory of MIRACLE MILE (1988) at the time of its release; we didn't know that the property had been kicked around Hollywood for the better part of a decade or that its author, Steve DeJarnatt, had written the script for Warners but had bound himself to the project as a director, which queered the deal. We didn't know DeJarnatt (well, we didn't know DeJarnatt) had bought the script back from the studio for $25,000 and that Hemdale stepped in with an offer to produce for just under $4 million, which got the ball rolling. Nope. All of this happened while we were sleeping, and when we woke up MIRACLE MILE had happened.”

At Hollywood Elsewhere, Jeffrey Wells speculates on rumors that Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life will feature…dinosaurs? “Some 18 years ago I over-wrote a very long piece about Malick, a where-is-he? thing called Malick Aforethought…I remember researching and describing an ambitious film that Malick wanted to film in the wake of the 1978 release of Days of Heaven, called Q. (A title later appropriated by Larry Cohen when he made Q, The Winged Serpent.) And I remember a passage about a dinosaur sleeping and dreaming in a sea of magma -- I remember that much. The story spanned millenia. We all know there's a 20th Century portion in which Pitt (I think) plays Penn's dad in flashbacks. I realize this all sounds a little vague.”

If you’re attending SXSW without a film badge, Slackerwood offers some tips. “Movies shot in Austin or with Austin ties may fill up quickly. Sometimes cast and crew members and their families are invited and a number of seats are reserved. On the other hand, these are the movies that often draw more ticketholders than badgeholders, because the audience is full of locals wanting to see their neighbor or coworker's movie. So if you get there early, you might be okay.”

At The House Next Door, Jeremiah Kipp talks to Daniel Bird about Central European New Wave Cinema. “In Poland I am a cultural outsider. I try to read films in cultural context, but my response is, ultimately, personal. I am English, after all. But I have been living in Warsaw on and off since 2002. Yes, there are culturally specific aspects to many of the films I write about. Sometimes an understanding helps the appreciation of these films, but not always. Zulawski's Diabel makes a lot more sense if you know something about the Warsaw student riots in March 1968. But what attracts me to a particular film is its bizarre quality. I guess you could say such films seem bizarre to a cultural outsider. But then I think the only person in the world who finds Diabel 'normal' is Zulawski himself.”

Finally in List-o-Mania, the AV Club offers 24 graphic novels besides, uh, you-know-what that they’d like to see made into movies. Like all right-thinking people, they’d love to see David Lynch adapt Daniel Clowes’ A Velvet Glove Cast in Iron. “Seeing the two work together on this eerie, unhinged story, which blends elements of Twin Peaks and the Manson family’s worst nightmares, would be a rare treat—or a total disaster. Luckily, Clowes has already anticipated the latter possibility; in the pages of Eightball, where Velvet Glove first appeared, he wrote a hilarious what-if story of its Hollywood adaptation, complete with happy ending, product placement, and cheesy classic-rock soundtrack.”

Catching Up with the Lynches, David and Jennifer

Phil Nugent — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 19:00:00 GMT

The Guardian recently sent two writers on different expeditions to track down David Lynch, currently camping out as Gaby Wood discovered, in "a steep, strange, snake of a street and sheer, straight steps is a set of concrete buildings clinging onto the side of the Hollywood Hills", and his daughter Jennifer, who's been busy clearing the ground for the U.K. release of her own second feature as a director, Surveillance. Wood's own feature is short on terrific new quotes from the great man, which probably reflects less on her journalistic abilities than on where Lynch's head is at these days: he's still deep in that "Film and me are quits!" space he's been promoting ever since he discovered digital video and made Inland Empire. Wood describes that work, accurately, as "a three-hour ode to impenetrability.") " 'I just love this camera,' Lynch says, in his nasal, deliberate, almost robotically enthusiastic voice. We are looking at a large chiaroscuro nude, which has been printed in two parts and hung on the wall, and Lynch is telling me about his Hasselblad digital. Unbelievable. Thirty-nine million pixels. The camera remembers something like 4,000 pieces of information per photograph. It is machine. It's a machine.' A look of delight passes across his face. 'It's just a glorious world,' he says.

It's nice to know that he's happy. Those who saw the documentary Lynch know that the director now spends a lot of time in his own "bunker", which includes offices and studios and recording equipment, piling up cigarette ashes while waiting for inspiration to hit. Word has apparently reached Lynch that he has nothing left to prove, and his attitude towards his future movie career seems to be that if he has a reason to make another film, he supposes he will. "Sometimes I get an idea for cinema. And when you get an idea that you fall in love with, this is a glorious day. That idea may just be 1a fragment, but it holds something. It might be a scene, or a part of a scene, or a character, or a way the character talks, a light or a feel ... You write that idea down. And thinking about that idea will bring other ideas in – there's a hook to it. And things start to emerge. And then you see, one day, a script. A script is just words to remind you of the ideas. And you follow that, but always staying on guard, in case other ideas come in, because a thing isn't finished till it's finished. And one day, it's finished." But if he never gets the money to make another movie, "I don't care. See, a painting is much cheaper than making a film. And photography is, you know, way cheap. So if I get an idea for a film, there are many ways to get it together and go realize that film. There's really nothing to be afraid of." In the meantime, he's returned to his first love, painting, and he also makes two-dimensional art works, and shoots photographs. He has a special fondness for nudes in factories--decaying factories, "factories [that] are defunct, celebrated for their decay and decomposition in a way that renders them organic," like the pencil factory in Eraserhead if it had spent a few decades under water.

Wood writes that "In the course of our interview Lynch had made (I felt) a series of didactic yet meaningless speeches of varying length, none of which lent itself to illustrating any particular point. But afterwards I found myself laughing, because I realised he was not so much unforthcoming as bordering on the Delphic. He is – unbudgingly, impenetrably, but nevertheless magnificently – a character of his own making. In his movies the characters who talk like this – a sort of scattershot guru-speak, in which sayings are either wise or total rubbish, depending on what sticks – are fortune-tellers, random ciphers or mysterious orchestrators of strange plots (the dancing dwarf in Twin Peaks, the Cowboy in Mulholland Drive, the witchy neighbour in Inland Empire). In other words, the most unnatural among the dramatis personae. But when you listen to Lynch you realise they are (in their delivery at least) the most natural, the most like him." It turns out that the Oracle of Missoula, Montana recently got married, for the fourth time. The new Missus Lynch is Emily Stofle, a 26-year-old actress who was in Inland Empire. (Before that, she played one of the victims of the title character in 2002's Ted Bundy.) Says Wood, "I'm not the first to wonder how someone who is so evangelically "blissed out" can live through the un-bliss of three divorces (he has a child from each marriage) and a well-publicised break up with Isabella Rossellini. To this Lynch will only say: 'We live in the field of relativity. Things change.' "

Visiting Jennifer Lynch, who's now 40, John Patterson failed to ask what she thinks of her new mommy. When Jennifer Lynch was 24, she was busy being raked over the coals for her ill-fated debut film, Boxing Helena. Bad as that movie was, it seems likely that the reaction to it would have been considerably less intense had its auteur's name been Ratskywatsky or something. "It had no chance to be seen through unbiased eyes. Did I know what I was doing? I knew what I was trying to do. And I think it's OK to fail at things. But it was the astonishing rage and, in particular, the suggestion that as a human being I didn't deserve to be loved ever again - something the National Organisation of Women actually said about me. Like, are you fucking kidding me? C'mon, even Hitler deserved to be loved - in fact a little love might have made him a way better guy. I had to retreat and wonder why the reaction to a movie could be so violent and so vitriolic. And there was hostility all over the world - there was no safe place. Whatever I got, I got in a personal way, directed right at me. I would have welcomed a serious discussion of the flaws and intentions of that film, but not a debate about whether I deserved to be alive."

Fortunately, Lynch--who Patterson describes as "rowdy, bawdy, sick-in-the-head funny and very fast with a quip"--was able to use the connection to her father to her benefit this time. "My father called me after he read the script a couple of years ago and he said, 'You're the sickest bitch I know!'" Thanks, Pop! But after Jennifer was unable to get funding for Surveillance, "he called ages later and said, 'What's happening with your movie?' and I said 'Zilch.' I told him I don't know if it's the material, if it's the 15 years raising a kid, if it's Boxing Helena, but nobody's interested. And he said, 'What if I put my name on it?' I'm like, 'C'mon Dad, you know how I feel about it.' Because, believe me, it's a big issue for me. But that day I typed: 'Executive producer: David Lynch', and within 48 hours I had more offers than I knew what to do with. I swear, any screenwriter wanting a little attention should just write 'Steven Spielberg' on their script. Who's checking?" The movie stars two veterans of her father's films, Bill Pullman and Julia Ormond, as investigators on the trail of a serial killer, and involves the viewpoint of an eight-year-old girl who picks up on things that the adults around her miss. "I wanted to play with the wisdom and clarity of a child's perception," says Lynch. "And also I like the idea of the serial killer movie in a way that's not just 'cut 'em up, kill all the sluts'. Although, God knows, I did some of that too. But I wanted terror in broad daylight, in a place that outwardly seems so safe...The second you start being brave about something that terrifies you and start really digging into it, confronting it head on, that's great; it's the cowards who say, 'Nah, not a problem.' And that's a real way in which - as bumper-stickerish as it sounds - art can save your fucking life. You need a place to put all that stuff."

Unwatchable #54: “Meatballs 4”

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 18:00:00 GMT

Our fearless – and quite possibly senseless – movie janitor is watching every movie on the IMDb Bottom 100 list. Join us now for another installment of Unwatchable.

Note to aspiring filmmakers: if the success of your movie is dependent on the audience perceiving a character played by Corey Feldman as “the cool guy,” you have already failed.

There’s a sort of reverse Darwinism at work in the Meatballs series when it comes to the cool guy; the original 1979 Meatballs may not be a comedy classic for the ages, but it does feature Bill Murray as the cool guy, and I think we can all accept that. I’ve never seen 1984’s Meatballs, Part II, but as far as I can tell, its cool guy is John Mengatti as Armand “Flash” Carducci. Mengatti also played Salami’s cousin Nick Vitaglia on The White Shadow. I don’t remember the character or the actor, but for the sake of argument, let’s say John Mengatti is slightly less cool than Bill Murray. Next up is Meatballs III: Summer Job, also unseen by me, which doesn’t seem to have a cool guy at all. It does have Patrick Dempsey, and I know today he’s TV’s heartthrob McDreamy, but believe me, in 1986 no one on this planet thought he was cool.

This brings us to Meatballs 4 and the aforementioned Feldman, who plays Ricky Wade, the super cool activities director for the Lakeside Water Ski Camp. Ricky has recently been lured from Twin Oaks, the rival camp across the lake, by Lakeside owner Neil Peterson (Jack Nance, the poor bastard). Lakeside is facing bankruptcy, which is hard for me to understand, since most of its enrolled campers are apparently vacationing Hooters waitresses with clothing allergies. Call me a skeptic, but I don’t think camps like this actually exist. If they do, please send me a brochure.

Anyway, it’s up to Rick to whip all the campers into shape – including the shy fat guy – for the big waterskiing showdown with Twin Oaks. Feldman brings not only a smarmy low-grade sarcasm to the role (it would not surprise me to learn that he rewrote much of his own part, tailoring it to his perceived strengths), but also his faux-Michael Jackson dance moves. I didn’t think much of the supporting cast’s acting chops until I saw them successfully pretending to be impressed by this crap.

There’s not much more to say about Meatballs 4 itself, so let me tell you a couple of behind-the-scenes stories. You may have read the first one, which concerns poor Jack Nance, in the late, occasionally lamented Premiere magazine. Nance, best known as Eraserhead himself and Pete “She’s wrapped in plastic!” Martell from Twin Peaks, was married to Kelly Jean Van Dyke, daughter of Jerry “Coach” Van Dyke at the time of the Meatballs 4 shoot. Kelly Jean had a severe substance abuse problem and had begun working in porn and Nance was beginning to think the marriage was probably not going to work out. He explained this to her over the phone, she freaked out and said she’d kill herself if he hung up on her, and at that moment “the storm that had been raging outside killed the phone line.” And Kelly Jean did, in fact, kill herself. It was all downhill for Nance from there, and he died under mysterious circumstances in 1996. I’m not saying Meatballs 4 is entirely to blame, but facts is facts.

On a somewhat lighter note: When I first moved to Los Angeles in 1990, my first job in the movie biz was working an unpaid production assistant on a straight-to-cable Debbie Harry thriller called Intimate Stranger. Making her feature debut was an attractive young actress named Paige French. As the on-set scuttlebutt went, Ms. French was hired for the role with the understanding that nudity would be required at some point during the production. However, when the time of the nudity arrived, there was a prolonged delay as a result of a heated dispute over the veracity of this required nudity clause. At some point a compromise was reached involving sexy lingerie, but Ms. French’s wares remained under wraps.

Why am I telling you this? Only because now, 18 years later, I have finally seen Paige French’s boobies. She wouldn’t do it for a piece of crap like Intimate Stranger, but Meatballs 4…now that’s a whole other story! All kidding aside, it’s a bit depressing to see that Meatballs 4 was effectively the end of her brief movie career (though she did have a role on the short-lived George Carlin Show). She’s one of the few people in the movie to actually bear some resemblance to a genuine human being. And yet the Feldman persists.

Previously on Unwatchable:
55. A*P*E
56. Araf
57. Phat Girlz
58. Ed
59. Don’t Go in the Woods…Alone!

Your Thursday Afternoon “Twilight” Roundup

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 20:00:00 GMT

You may have noticed that we at the Screengrab have more or less completely ignored Twilight. We are aware that it’s a cultural phenomenon, and that the movie is out in theaters tomorrow, and that it’s predicted to be one of the biggest hits of the year. It’s just that none of us are teenage girls. Believe me, there are some among us who wish they were teenage girls, not that I’m naming any names. (See if you can PIERCE the veil of that cryptic comment, as if you were an arrow from the bow of Ted NUGENT!) But I digress. In the interest of fairness – and page views from the teenage girls who normally avoid the Screengrab like the plague – here is a handy roundup of the latest the Web has to offer in Twilight-mania.

The first reviews are in! Entertainment Weekly gives Twilight a B; critic Owen Gleiberman oozes over Robert Pattinson’s “dreamy, sculpted hunk of a teenage vampire,” who he describes as “Romeo, Heathcliff, James Dean, and Brad Pitt all rolled into one: a scruffy-gorgeous bloodsucker pinup who is really an angelic protector.’ Get a room, Owen! Slate’s Dana Stevens calls it “flawed yet transfixing,” reserving special praise for costume designer Wendy Chuck, who “manages to make weatherproof parkas look Goth.” Claudia Puig of USA Today dissents, citing “questionable casting, wooden acting, laughable dialogue and truly awful makeup.”

The LA Times reports that the Twilight setting of Forks, Washington is getting all the tourist business that used to go to Snoqualmie (aka “the real Twin Peaks”). “Forks High School is often besieged with Twilighters, who pose for pictures in front of the Spartans sign or scan the parking lot for Edward's car, a silver Volvo sedan. Some have even wandered inside to seek out the fictional characters. Still others have requested to be transferred to the school.” That’s okay, I still have my Twin Peaks Phys-Ed Dept. t-shirt somewhere.

Movie Retriever offers Six Excuses Grown-Ups Can Use for Going to See Twilight This Weekend. “Forget about the kid-vampire stuff. You're just a big fan of Twilight's director Catherine Hardwicke, ranging back to her days as a production designer - she designed Tapeheads, I'm Gonna Get You Sucka, and Tombstone! - to her more-recent career as a big-time director, helming movies like Thirteen and Lords of Dogtown.”

Of course, there’s the inevitable face-off between Twilight and True Blood: BuddyTV asks “Who's the Better Vampire Boyfriend?”

At Rotten Tomatoes, dreamy Robert Pattinson dishes on his five favorite movies. One of them is Corky Romano. How’s that crush doing now, Owen?

Is the Internet Ready for David Lynch?

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 15:15:00 GMT

Recently, the ever-charming auteur David Lynch urged cinephiles who might seek to take advantage of new technologies to "get real" and not even consider watching movies on "a fucking phone". I can dig it, David -- a telephone is not my ideal medium for taking in a movie, either. But then again, neither is a computer, and yet, here you are, announcing that your next big project will be a web series.

That's right: Wired is reporting that, for the first time since Twin Peaks, Lynch is making a regular return to episodic network programming. Only this time out, the network in question is the On Network, a company that specializes in internet broadcasting, and the episodes will be of a new web-only series to be based on his quasi-self-help book, Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness and Creativity. Goodness knows whether compelling television can be made of a book that advises following the teachings of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in order to access your creative side, but if anyone is up to it, I suppose it's Lynch.

In fact, this really won't be Lynch's first foray into web programming. Hardcore fans will no doubt remember Dumbland, his series of crude online short films, and the even more bizarre web-only pseudo-sitcom Rabbits. And, given that the other major directors who have dipped into the world of online video include the likes of Black Snake Moan's Craig Brewer and McG of Charlie's Angels fame, maybe this is a step up for the medium instead of a step down for David Lynch.

David Lynch Calling

The Screengrab 24-Hour Stephen King Marathon (Part Two)

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Introduction

Part One

6 a.m. – 8 a.m. CHILDREN OF THE CORN (1984)

Some would say I’m crazy for undertaking this 24-hour marathon, but I do have my limits. For example, I had briefly considered doing a marathon of every Children of the Corn movie instead. As you may or may not know, there are seven total Corn movies, of which the final five were released straight to video. I find this odd for many reasons, not least of which is that corn isn’t generally considered to be scary. (Creamed corn, on the other hand…terrifying.) Fortunately I came to my senses, so you’ll only find this one Children of the Corn here. Based on another Night Shift short story, the film begins with a tried-and-true King set-up, as bickering couple Burt (Peter Horton) and Vicky (Linda Hamilton) drive across country via some scenic back roads. While passing through Nebraska (hey, it’s not like Children of the Corn was going to take place in New Jersey), they hit a young boy with their car. But it turns out the kid was already dead, a sacrifice by the children of Gatlin to He Who Walks Behind the Rows. These brats have already killed off all the adults in town under the leadership of Isaac, another one of King’s patented Creepy Kids. Can Burt and Vicky escape Gatlin without being sacrificed to the corn demon? I’ll be honest, I think I nodded off for a few minutes near the end of this one. I do have a vague memory of Linda Hamilton tied to a cornstalk crucifix, but that’s about it.

King’s cameo: He doesn’t appear in person, but there’s a paperback copy of Night Shift on Burt’s dashboard.

8 a.m. – 10 a.m. DESPERATION (2006)

Am I still watching Children of the Corn? For a minute there, I thought I was looking at Peter Horton driving through the middle of nowhere again, but it turned out to be Steven Weber. Weber, of course, starred as Jack Torrance in the “Why would you do this?” TV miniseries of The Shining. That misbegotten enterprise, as well as the epic TV version of The Stand and many other King things, was directed by Mick Garris, who must have photos of the author with an underage goat. Garris also directed Desperation for TV, but managed to confine this one to a single night. We’ve got another town at the ass-end of nowhere – in this case, Desperation, Nevada – where all the inhabitants are dead. Everyone who happens to be passing through gets pulled over by Sheriff Collie Entragian (Ron Perlman), who finds some pretext to arrest them, lock them up, and, at his leisure, kill them. This is because Entragian is possessed by a demon unearthed from the local strip-mine. One of his detainees is another Creepy Kid, David, who has suddenly gotten religion after being locked in a jail cell by a scary sheriff possessed by a demon. It’s as good a time as any, I suppose. The theology of Desperation is a little murky, but the movie did give me some insight into King’s creative process. I imagine it goes a little like this: King is pulled over for speeding in some shitty little town. Surly cop gives him a ticket. King thinks, “You know what would make this suck even harder? If this cop was possessed by a demon!” Presto, another 600-page novel is born. This ESPN spot would appear to back up my theory:

10 a.m. – Noon SLEEPWALKERS (1992)

Hey, it’s Mick Garris again! And Ron Perlman as another surly lawman, although this one doesn’t appear to be possessed. He does get his arm ripped off, though. Sleepwalkers is actually Garris’s first collaboration with Stephen King, based on the author’s first original screenplay (that is, not adapted from a previously extant novel or short story). Madchen Amick, the most underrated of the Twin Peaks girls, falls for the new boy in town, handsome, vapid Charles Brady (Brian Krause). Little does she know Charles has an incestuous relationship with his hot mom Mary (Alice Krige). But that’s not all! Charles and Mary are both shape-shifting cat people who feed on virgins – possibly the last of their race. Oddly enough, the only thing that can stop them is an attack by an actual cat. It’s a dilemma for poor Charlie; he kinda likes Madchen Amick, but he kinda has to feed her to his hot mom. High school is hard! In the movie’s highlight, Mary kills a cop by impaling him with an ear of corn. OK, so I was wrong. Corn is scary.

King’s cameo: He’s the cemetery caretaker who doesn’t want to be blamed for the mutilated corpses found there.

Part Three

Fantastic Fest Review: "Surveillance"

Scott Von Doviak — Sat, 20 Sep 2008 21:00:00 GMT

Surveillance begins in typically Lynchian fashion, with the FBI arriving in a small town beset by violent tragedy. We're a long way from Twin Peaks, however, and this is no David Lynch film. It's the much belated follow-up to Boxing Helena by the Peaks auteur's daughter, Jennifer Lynch, and while it begins as a routine thriller, by the end it has turned into one long sick joke.

The Feds in this case are Sam Hallaway (Bill Pullman) and Elizabeth Anderson (Julia Ormond), taking over for local law enforcement in the investigation of a mass murder on a remote country road. The victims were passengers from three different vehicles: a family in a station wagon, two cops in a patrol car, and a couple of junkies fleeing from a drug deal gone awry. The survivors have all been assembled at the police station and are questioned separately, with Hallaway overseeing it all via surveillance cameras.

Each survivor has something to hide, so nobody is telling the whole truth - except perhaps for the little girl from the station wagon. Bobbi Prescott (Pell James) isn't interested in discussing the drug dealer who expired in her presence, while Officer Bennett (Kent Harper, who co-wrote the screenplay) would prefer not to disclose the full nature of his unorthodox law enforcement methods.

Only those of us in the audience are privy to the whole truth, as the survivors' stories unfold in flashbacks that contradict the testimony being given. At about the halfway point, the movie goes off the deep end - at least it seems that way until the big finale arrives and you realize, "No, now it's really going off the deep end." There's no way to discuss it in depth without revealing some huge spoilers, but if the whole point of Surveillance is to get its viewers thinking, "Dude, this is fucked up!" - well, mission accomplished. If there's a larger point, I'm not sure I want to know what it is.

Related:
Vanishing Act: Jennifer Lynch
Welcoming Jennifer Lynch Back with Open Arms

In Other Blogs: The Top 25 L.A. Movies

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 17:00:00 GMT

The L.A. Times recently published their list of the 25 Best L.A. Films of the Past 25 Years. Naturally, some of the choices proved controversial (a lot of folks have trouble with the selection of Jackie Brown over Pulp Fiction, for instance), but Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule thinks it’s a decent list. “There were only eight, perhaps nine instances where I felt like the choices could have been replaced, by another film in the director’s filmography, or by another similarly themed film, or just by another movie to replace one that just shouldn't be there at all. For example, I can certainly understand why Boogie Nights is on the list, but it’s ultimately too diffuse and far more conventional than its electric style would suggest. I much prefer P.T. Anderson’s Magnolia (1999), a high-wire act in which Anderson gets more directly in touch with his inner Altman and dashes all concerns over whether anyone’s having a good time or not, planting Old Testament visual clues that subliminally lay the groundwork for that shocking rain of frogs. (And speaking of Altman, while I'm not the biggest fan of The Player, I was far happier to see it representing the great director here rather than the dour and sour Short Cuts.)”

The Toronto International Film Festival kicked off yesterday, and Spoutblog has the scoop on the film Paris Hilton doesn’t want you to see. “Paris Hilton and her team have successfully pressured the Toronto International Film Festival into canceling all but one screening of Adria Petty’s Paris, Not France, a documentary about the celebrity heiress which ‘attempts to explore the Paris phenomenon and how it defines this moment in culture’ and is also ‘modeled after the 1960s it-girl film Darling.’ Though the film’s TIFF info page still lists three public screenings, TIFF documentary programmer Thom Powers confirmed to me that Paris will screen only once at the festival. ‘From my standpoint, of course, I wish we could do additional screenings,’ Powers told me in an email. ‘But this is certainly a better option than not showing the film at all.’… As Steven Zeitchik joked when he first blogged about this, ‘the mind dances at what kind of footage can be seen so newly shameful to Paris Hilton, the enfant teribles whose entire reputation is based on shamelesness.’”

Cinematical is also on the scene in Toronto, and they’ve had a look at The Brothers Bloom. “Long awaited in the wake of his 2005 debut Brick, Rian Johnson's The Brothers Bloom is a magic trick of a film; the second it's over, you want to see it again so you can try to catch how you were tricked, but you also want to see it again so you can return to the joy and wonder of being wrapped up in the nimble, deck-shuffling hands of a born showman. Watching it at first, some of The Brothers Bloom's creative and thematic elements seem like they're on loan from Paul Thomas Anderson (opening narration by Ricky Jay, pop-whiz-bang camera work, the troubled-but-tender relationship between the two brothers) while others feel as if they've been cribbed from Wes Anderson (deadpan confessions, whimsical set design, a parallel-universe setting where people still travel to Europe by steamship). The truth is, as much as The Brothers Bloom may feel like it's cribbing from other films at first, this is Rian Johnson's movie, and even if my more dreary and discerning critical faculties told me the final act goes on, perhaps, a beat too long, my inner moviegoer was sitting bolt upright, smiling, bright-eyed and carried away.”

At Some Came Running, Glenn Kenny makes an interesting connection between Road House and a David Lynch movie. No, not that Road House. “The terrifying physical contrast between the behemoth and a very delicate woman brought to mind a scene from David Lynch's under-appreciated (to my mind, at least) 1992 Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. This scene, too, is set in a roadhouse of sorts—the back room of the Bang Bang Bar, which actually, if one line of dialogue is to be believed, is located on the Canadian side of the Canada/U.S. border the structure sits on. As it happens, the road house of Negulsco's film is located near the Canadian border; this turns into a significant plot point once Lily and Pete are trying to escape from the psychotic Jefty, played by Richard Widmark with his then-trademark tetchy intensity… I wonder if Lynch had ever seen Negulsco's film. Some shards of it, it seems, lodged their way into the world of Twin Peaks. The road house as portrayed in the '48 picture is a piece of bygone mid-century Americana that I've always found fascinating—it looks way fun. It's got a bar, a restaurant, a sporting-goods store, and a bowling alley!”

And in List-o-Mania this week, Geekdad weighs in with 10 Movies Needing a Muppet Remake. This guy has put way too much thought into this. “Casablanca - The initial temptation is to cast Kermit as Rick, but I think Kermit is better as the utterly noble Victor Laszlo, with Miss Piggy as Ilsa by his side. Gonzo is much better as Rick, with his internal, and external, conflict between love, revenge, and the right thing to do. Rowlf is Sam, for who else could be? Captain Renault is a tough part to play, but I think Fozzie has the right cavalier attitude for the role.”

Don S. Davis, 1942--2008

Phil Nugent — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 22:52:00 GMT

The character actor Don S. Davis has died at 65 of a heart attack. Born in Aurora, Missouri, Davis spent served three terms of active duty in the U.S. Army, rising to the rank of Captain, before pursuing a degree in theater and spending a decade working as a teacher at the University of British Columbia. He was forty when he began to get work acting in film and television. Squat, burly and bald, he was a natural for authoritarian figures and played many a dad, judge, doctor, prison guard, and befuddled bystander in such movies as Stakeout, A League of Their Own, Hero, and Con Air. But it was his role in Twin Peaks that earned him a permanent place in pop culture history and made him a cult character god. As Major Briggs, father to barking malcontent Bobby Briggs, he first came across as the dad of fifties nightmares, a stuffy, repressive hardass who seemed to have been born in a military uniform. But as with so much in David Lynch's world, Major Briggs's blandly domineering surface turned out to be camouflage, and in a key scene with his troubled son, the Major revealed a warmer, soulful side that nicely set off his can-do attitude and mysterious inside knowledge of the UFO phenomenon. he would go on to reprise the role in Lynch's movie Fire Walk with Me, but the real impact of Twin Peaks on his career was that his association with it seemed to make him a prize catch among casting directors working on TV shows that aspired to hipness, such as Profit, where he could be seen in the pilot episode as the local sheriff shaking his head in wonder at the sorry upbringing of the sociopathic title character. Certainly his background playing Major Briggs seemed to inform his two other best-known roles: Major General George Hammond on the cable TV series Stargate SGI, which ran for ten years starting in 1997, and Captain William Scully, father to FBI agent Dana Scully, in the great The X-Files episode "Beyond the Sea." His big scene there, sitting in a chair and speaking inaudibly to the daughter who hasn't yet received the news that he's just died, is the best David Lynch sequence in TV history that wasn't directed by David Lynch.

Unwatchable #81: “Levottomat 3 (Soccer Dog: The Movie)”

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 17:00:00 GMT

Our fearless – and quite possibly senseless – movie janitor is watching every movie on the IMDb Bottom 100 list. Join us now for another installment of Unwatchable.

This entry requires a bit of an explanation. As I’ve mentioned before, the IMDb Bottom 100 list is a fluid entity. There is no single version of this list because you, the loyal bad movie viewer, alter it every time you cast your vote. I am working from a version I downloaded two months ago when I began this project, and although that list may have many crapulescent movies in common with the current version, they may rank higher or lower on the list – and of course, many entries have since been supplanted by fresh, steaming piles from the cineplex.

So why am I telling you this? Well, for the first time since I began the Unwatchable project, a Bottom 100 entry has defeated me. I don’t mean I couldn’t get through the movie – that would be antithetical to everything I stand for – I mean I couldn’t find the movie at all. Number 81 on my list is Levottomat 3, a 2005 Finnish film that, as far as I can tell, has received no U.S. release at all. Believe me, I tried to find it – after all, this is a movie featuring such IMDb keywords as Sex, Sexuality, Sexual Promiscuity, Sex Addiction, Sex in Public, Sex Maniac, Sexual Fantasy, Rough Sex, Casual Sex and even Sex in Bathroom. How bad could it be? Alas, my efforts failed. I was, however, able to track down the trailer, so let’s watch it together, shall we?

So that was fun, but I still owe you good people an installment of Unwatchable. Here’s the solution I came up with: I went to the current version of the Bottom IMDb list and, starting at the bottom, searched until I came across the first entry that did not also appear on the version of the list I’m working from. That movie turned out to be Soccer Dog: The Movie, a 1999 family film that is probably as close to the exact opposite of Levottomat 3 as you can get.

James Marshall, best known as limp noodle James Hurley from Twin Peaks, and Olivia d’Abo, whose nude prancing in Unwatchable # 97 Bolero is forever singed into my cerebral cortex, are a young couple who adopt Clay, a boy who has spent his life in an orphanage. Marshall pushes Clay to join the soccer team, but the lad pretty much stinks at the whole kicking the ball thing. After Clay adopts Lincoln, a mutt who has escaped from the dog pound (see – they’re both orphans!), he is further humiliated to learn the dog possesses much more skill at the soccer arts than he does. In fact, the dog becomes the star of the team and Clay becomes a surly little punk. Tragedy strikes when the evil dog catcher snatches Lincoln, and everyone bonds over his disappearance and vows to get him back.

Soccer Dog obviously isn’t my idea of a good time, but one of the 100 worst movies of all time? Come on. There’s a million family flicks like this – in fact, there’s a whole subgenre of “dogs playing sports” movies like Air Bud and its sequels, and even a Soccer Dog sequel, European Cup. (There’s also the baseball-playing monkey movie Ed, but I have a feeling we’ll be getting to that eventually.) It’s bland, processed entertainment, but it does feature reliable comic actor Sam McMurray as the soccer coach, as well as a dead-on R. Lee Ermey impression by Franklin Dennis Jones as his arch-rival. Granted, I’m not entirely certain why the producers felt the need to append “The Movie” to the title – were they worried audiences would confuse it with Soccer Dog: The Energy Drink? – but that’s a small matter. True, I would have rather been watching the Finnish movie with all the sex maniacs, but I can’t bring myself to give Soccer Dog more than two Maurys.

Previously on Unwatchable:
82. American Soldiers
83. First Sunday
84. It’s Pat
85. Battlefield Earth
86. Hobgoblins

Cannes Rundown, Day 9: Shoot, coward. You're only going to kill a man.

Paul Clark — Fri, 23 May 2008 04:11:00 GMT

Steven Soderbergh’s mammoth two-part epic Che may not be the most universally loved film in competition this year, but it’s certainly become the most talked-about so far. Here’s a small smattering of reactions to the film, which stars Benicio Del Toro.

Glenn Kenny- “for better or worse… in terms of pop iconography, nothing says "overthrowing the system" better than the iconic image of Che. Good thing then, as far as my opinion is concerned, that Soderbergh doesn't have a rabble-rousing bone in his body. Che benefits greatly from certain Soderberghian qualities that don't always serve his other films well, e.g., detachment, formalism, and intellectual curiosity.”

Variety’s Todd McCarthy- ““Che” is too big a roll of the dice to pass off as an experiment, as it’s got to meet high standards both commercially and artistically. The demanding running time also forces comparison to such rare works as “Lawrence of Arabia,” “Reds” and other biohistorical epics. Unfortunately, “Che” doesn’t feel epic -- just long.”

Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian- “The Cannes film festival now has a serious contender for the Palme d'or. Steven Soderbergh's four-and-a-half hour epic Che, about the revolutionary Ernesto "Che" Guevara, was virile, muscular film-making, with an effortlessly charismatic performance by Benicio del Toro in the lead role. Perhaps it will even come to be seen as this director's flawed masterpiece: enthralling but structurally fractured - the second half is much clearer and more sure-footed than the first - and at times frustratingly reticent, unwilling to attempt any insight into Che's interior world. We see only Che the public man, the legendary comandante, defiant to the last.”

Believe it or not, there were actually other films at Cannes along with Che. We begin with Atom Egoyan’s Adoration. Screen Daily’s Howard Feinstein- “Following the failed effort to cross over into conventional, commercially viable film-making with Where The Truth Lies (2005), Canadian auteur Egoyan returns to his signature style with Adoration… Unfortunately, the stories here are thin, unnecessarily complicated and glibly cryptic; some sections are difficult to follow, even annoying in their self-consciousness.”

Also in competition, Philippe Garrel’s Frontier of Dawn. Here’s Karina Longworth of SpoutBlog- “There are shots in this film’s second half that are scarier than anything I’ve seen in a horror film in recent years––without the aid of any effect more special than a basic optical print––and simultaneously, incredibly moving in their invocation of a love that won’t die. Or, at the very least, refuses to abide by traditional boundaries of love and death.”

AO Scott on the out-of-competition film Delta- ““Delta,” as much as any so-so Hollywood romantic comedy, seems content to live inside the bubble of its limited ambitions. It is hard to imagine an audience for this film except in places like Cannes. That is not necessarily because the outside public is incurious or unsophisticated, but rather because “Delta” makes no particular effort to reach beyond the international coterie of critics and programmers who see it out of duty and devotion.”

On Johnny Mad Dog, here’s Jonathan Romney of Screen Daily- “Sauvaire gives us some of the most terrifying and feral militia forces ever seen on film. The young soldiers rarely speak beneath a furious yell, terrifying their victims and barking out slogans and morale-boosting chants apparently culled from Vietnam movies. There's a certain Lord Of The Flies horror in the suggestion that these are still children at play in the most murderous way, their battle garb suggestive of a nightmarish carnival.”

Finally, since many of you seem concerned with the whereabouts of Jennifer Chambers Lynch, here’s Time’s Richard Corliss on her new film Surveillance- “it's an authentic, systematically annoying weirdie about the investigation of a roadside homicide. Five were brutally killed by a couple of maniacs in leatherface masks. Now the three shaken survivors are being questioned in a police station by two outside agents (Bill Pullman and Julia Ormond) who are skeptical of the variations in the stories they hear. Think Rashomon meets The Texas Chainsaw Massacre in Twin Peaks, and give lots of leeway for the gooniest improv overacting, and you may get on the warped wavelength of this semi-comic parable of social anarchy.”

The 12 Greatest Movies Based on TV Shows, Part II

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 08 May 2008 20:30:00 GMT

THE FUGITIVE (1993)

The Fugitive might not have been the first TV series remade for the big screen, but it was almost certainly the one that proved how bankable- and even respectable- such adaptations could be. The film took as its inspiration one of the most influential series of its day, a four-season cat-and-mouse story of an escaped, convicted killer out to clear his name. While The Fugitive remains true to the spirit of the series, director Andrew Davis and his screenwriters do so in a way that reconfigures the formula for the big screen, beginning with a famous, still-impressive bus crash. The film also benefits from placing nearly equal emphasis on the pursued Dr. Richard Kimble (Harrison Ford) as it does on pursuer, U.S. Marshal Samuel Gerrard (Tommy Lee Jones, who in a rare display of Academy affection for a genre performance won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar). The Fugitive also has a sense of place that’s rare for a big-budget thriller, utilizing Chicago so perfectly that the story becomes unimaginable in any other setting. But the best scenes in the film are the ones that remain truest to their television inspirations, specifically the near-miss suspense sequences in which Kimble barely manages to evade capture through a combination of luck and formidable intelligence. Of all the TV adaptations up to that time, it was The Fugitive that showed that films of this kind, when done right, could be much more than a simple grab for nostalgia-driven box office, and in doing so became more or less the standard by which big-budget TV-to-film translations are judged.

MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE (1996)

Yes, really. A huge hit on its original release, Mission: Impossible was mostly dismissed by critics as a dopey Tom Cruise action movie, while being criticized by many viewers for having too much plot, not enough stuff blowing up. But a second look at the film reveals what a gripping suspense movie it really is, translating the formula of the TV series- gadgets, undercover missions, realistic masks, and the like- into the form of a summer tentpole release. Mission: Impossible contains at least three or four wonderfully tense scenes- the opening operation gone fatally wrong, the tête-à-tête at Prague’s Akvarium, that awesome Rififi-esque break-in at Langley- more than most Hollywood thrillers can claim. In addition, the film represents the most successful attempt by director Brian DePalma to fuse the silky-smooth cinema-saturated style of his most characteristic work with a big-budget blockbuster, and in the process becomes a surprisingly lean and satisfying thriller. If nothing else, Mission: Impossible deserves respect as the only film in the series to date that’s remained true to the team-centric nature of the show, with subsequent efforts becoming increasingly focused on Tom Cruise saving the world. Supporting players like Jon Voight, Vanessa Redgrave and Henry Czerny make such a strong impression here that it’s a shame that Cruise has become so intent on hogging the spotlight in later films in the franchise.

THE BLUES BROTHERS (1980)

Netflix, video stores and pay cable movie channels are littered with the toxic waste spew of that very special category of cinematic detritus: the SNL movie. Sure, the never-as-funny-as-it-should-be/ never-as-bad-as-its-rep Saturday Night Live has produced more than its share of legitimate comedy stars and second bananas over the years, from Chevy Chase and Bill Murray to Amy Poehler and Tina Fey. But one-dimensional SNL characters, barely tolerable in five minute doses, can be downright unbearable in full-length features (i.e., It’s Pat, A Night At the Roxbury, Coneheads, etc.). Wayne’s World is one notable exception, but to my way of thinking, The Blues Brothers is far and away the best of the SNL films (and, for the purposes of this list, one of my favorite TV-to-movie adaptations), transforming a recurring, ego-driven musical duo (whose routine and appeal I never really understood) into iconic figures in a John Landis/John Belushi/Dan Akroyd phantasmagoria that bends over backwards in its efforts to entertain: car crashes! cast-of-thousands musical numbers! more car crashes! Illinois Nazis! country and western! rhythm and blues! John Candy! Aretha Franklin! Carrie Fisher with a machine gun! (And did I mention the car crashes?) I mean, fuck! The endless, mind-boggling demolition-derby pile-up of police cars in the climactic car chase alone is worth the price of admission (take that, CGI!), but the musical numbers (by Franklin, Ray Charles, James Brown, Cab Calloway, John Lee Hooker, et. al.) are even better, and introduced me and countless other white people to a whole bunch of talented black people we’d never fully appreciated before. And if all that weren’t enough, The Blues Brothers is endlessly quotable (“We’re on a mission from God,” “Three orange whips,” etc.) and spawned a pretty damn tasty jambalaya at the late-lamented Cambridge House of Blues...and how many movies can you say that about? True, The Blues Brothers also spawned the execrable Blues Brothers 2000...but the original, indispensable 1980 version will forever stand as the Cadillac Ranch of movies, a bizarre, fascinating, coke-fueled white elephant at the crossroads of cracked genius and howling oblivion.

HEAD (1968)

It was 1968 and the studio chiefs were very confused. There was something called “youth culture” or “the counterculture” or whatever – you know, dirty smelly hippies who wanted to see weird shit at the movies! Hopelessly out of touch, these suits had to turn to the scruffy people for help. The kids seemed to like that TV show The Monkees, so Columbia Pictures hired the show’s producer Bob Rafelson, and he teamed with that really weird Jack Nicholson dude from the Corman pictures, and they smoked a bunch of weed and they came up with Head. Surreal, satirical, self-referential, psychedelic and pretty much plotless, the movie bore little resemblance to the kiddie show that spawned it and failed at the box office. In retrospect, it never had a chance; the heads wouldn’t be caught dead seeing a Monkees movie and the young fans of the show wouldn’t be able to make heads or tails of it. But there’s enough inspired weirdness, bizarre cameos (Annette Funicello, Frank Zappa, Victor Mature and Sonny Liston) and good music (notably the Michael Nesmith-composed “Circle Sky”) to make it a worthy cult object, if not a great movie.

THE NAKED GUN: FROM THE FILES OF POLICE SQUAD! (1988)

The Naked Gun has very little competition as the least likely TV-to-movie transition of all time. It’s derived from a series that only yours truly and four other people watched, one that lasted six episodes and went off the air six years before the movie reached theaters. But Police Squad! had a pedigree; the Airplane! team of Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker created it, star Leslie Nielsen was nominated for an Emmy for his deadpan turn as Lt. Frank Drebin, and the show became a cult favorite through reruns and home video. Even so, The Naked Gun was an unexpected smash hit, spawning two lousy sequels and an entire craptacular genre of Leslie Nielsen parodies. Don’t hold those sins against it, though. The Naked Gun is a well-oiled laugh machine – from the slapstick stylings of the always hilarious O.J. Simpson to the climactic baseball game honored in an earlier Screengrab list, it’s like a MAD magazine come to life, complete with blink-and-you’ll-miss-it marginalia crammed into every corner of the screen. It’s really the last time Nielsen was ever funny, and that goes triple for the ZAZ triumvirate, who have separately and together foisted the likes of Brain Donors, Rat Race and Scary Movie 4 on their once loyal fans.

TWIN PEAKS: FIRE WALK WITH ME (1992)

The second and final season of Twin Peaks ended in a flurry of bizarre cliffhangers, so when rumors of a movie began to circulate, those few of us who were still watching shared a brief moment of hope that at least some resolution would be forthcoming. Then we heard that Fire Walk with Me would be a prequel covering the last seven days of Laura Palmer’s life and, well, so much for that idea. Presumably the reasoning was that a reboot of the story would draw in a larger audience than a continuation, or at least that’s how we imagine David Lynch explained it to the suits at New Line. It’s a safe bet that 99% of any potential new audience fled the theater within the movie’s first 30 minutes, set in a deliberately alienating bizarro Twin Peaks called Deer Meadow, where the cops are unfriendly, the waitresses are hags and the FBI is represented by Chris Isaak as a pale echo of Kyle MacLachlan’s Special Agent Dale Cooper. (MacLachlan makes only fleeting appearances in the movie, unaware that his career is Showgirls-bound.) But those who left early missed out on one of Lynch’s most intense and emotionally charged fever dreams. Stripped of the quirky humor that had soured into tiresome shtick long before the series ended, Fire Walk with Me unwraps Laura Palmer from her plastic for a one-of-a-kind descent into hell. Sheryl Lee burns through the screen in a shoulda-been star-making performance and Lynch cooks up some of his most indelible set pieces, most notably the subtitled “Pink Room” sequence set in what appears to be Satan’s roadhouse. Just don’t ask us about the David Bowie cameo.

- Paul Clark, Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak

READ PART I

Aronofsky Takes Up Residence In Riverview Towers

Andrew Osborne — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 19:00:00 GMT

If Lost is too straightforward and predictable for your television palette, take heart: The Hollywood Reporter reported last week that indie film darling Darren Aronofsky is currently developing a series for AMC, the network that's recently out-HBO-ed HBO with edgy, critically-acclaimed new shows like Mad Men and Breaking Bad.

The psychological thriller (originally an HBO project, as it happens) is being scripted by John J. McLaughlin (screenwriter of Aronofsky’s upcoming film, Black Swan) and unfolds within the titular Riverview Towers apartment complex, presumably located somewhere south of Colorado’s Overlook Hotel and Twin Peaks’ Great Northern, east of The Kingdom hospital and within shrieking distance of Zuul's old haunts, Room 1408 of the Dolphin Hotel and the building where Rosemary had her baby.

As a fan of Aronofsky’s Pi, a foe of the humorless, overrated Requiem For a Dream and an unashamed defender of The Fountain, I’m curious to see whether Riverview Towers plays to the director’s edgy, imaginative strengths or disappears up its own psychological abyss like David Milch’s recent disaster of self-indulgence, John From Cincinnati. Here's hoping for the former, although I suppose the latter could be equally entertaining in its own way.

Vanishing Act: Jennifer Lynch

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Most of us first became aware of David Lynch’s daughter Jennifer when she authored The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer, a Twin Peaks tie-in book that could have been nothing more than a cheap gimmick. Instead, as Entertainment Weekly noted at the time, The Secret Diary is “gratifyingly faithful to the spirit of Peaks, and is therefore full of unorthodox sex, illegal drugs, casual blasphemy, and a generally negative attitude… Lynch has taken her father's conception of a good girl gone bad and run with it.” (Fewer Peaks fans remember the worthy follow-up, Scott Frost’s hilarious and astute The Autobiography of Special Agent Dale Cooper: My Life, My Tapes; you can read it in its entirety here.)

So it wasn’t too surprising that Lynch the younger got her own director’s chair, nor was it a shock that the subject matter of her debut was a bit off the beaten path. As originally announced, Boxing Helena would star Kim Basinger as a woman who has both arms and legs amputated by an obsessed stalker. At some point Basinger decided that this perhaps was not the best direction for her career and dropped out of the project. (Lynch and her producers sued Basinger for breach of contract and were awarded over $8 million, although the verdict was later overturned.) The part of Helena was recast with Peaks beauty Sherilyn Fenn, and Julian Sands took on the role of the creepy suitor.

“I see it as a love story," said Lynch in 1992, "not a horror film. The image of Venus de Milo is so powerful. Obsessive love is like a series of amputations as you steal from one another. It's inviting, exciting, animalistic. I've been there; I've been drawn to it." But few others were drawn to Boxing Helena when it was released in 1993. “This film has all the psychological depth of a wading pool,” wrote Robert Faires in the Austin Chronicle. “Anything you've imagined without seeing the movie is likely more interesting than what's here.”

Most reviews were as bad or worse. As Lynch told the New York Times last year, the criticism stung. “I was so completely dumbfounded. Not that any creative medium isn’t important, but how was it possible for people to write that I didn’t deserve to be loved, or that I was a misogynist? It’s a movie, folks. It’s not like you walk into a museum and see a painter you don’t like and say: ‘You know what? That guy doesn’t deserve to be loved anymore. He’s a bad person.’ ”

Lynch endured some personal struggles as well, including recurring back pain from a long-ago traffic accident and struggles with the bottle. Now clean and sober, Lynch has returned to that director’s chair for the first time in 15 years with Surveillance, a serial killer thriller starring Bill Pullman (Lost Highway) and Julia Ormond (Inland Empire). It’s due later this year; take a look at the trailer, which features more than a trace of her father’s trademark imagery.

Home Video Is Where the Heart Is

Phil Nugent — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 19:00:00 GMT

2007 was a pretty good year for moviegoing, but it may have been an even better one for DVDs. Even the acrimonious racket over the format battles couldn't obscure the almost steady flood of eye-catching product issued on shiny steel discs. For starters, a number of the most exciting new movies of the last twelve months were released in especially fine, often two-disc editions, including Pan's Labyrinth, Children of Men, The Host, and Knocked Up in its "unrated, expanded" form. But there's also been a treasure trove of oldies and oddities of every kind, sure to be of interest to anyone who was lucky enough to score a gift certificate or two over the holidays.

CAREER RETROSPECTIVES: While boxes devoted to stars have become a popular scam designed to lump together various heapings scooped from the bottom of the barrel (the "Marlon Brando Collection" is a five-disc set dominated by such least-loved Brando films Teahouse of the August Moon, The Formula, and the 1962 Mutiny on the Bounty), a number of director-themed boxes make it possible to have an affordable, one-stop film festival at home. The smartly chosen Viva Pedro--The Almodovar Collection skips past the auteur's tickling juvenelia to the full-blown operatic dementia of his most accomplished '80s work (Matador, Law of Desire, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown), then bypasses his confused mid-career slump to rejoin him at the mature pitch represented by Live Flesh and All About My Mother. The Documentaries of Louis Malle, a six-disc set released by Criterion through its Eclipse division, is an invaluable compilation of nonfiction films, including his multi-part Phantom India series, by a great director whose reputation may be imperilled by his confounding versatility. In theatrical releases, 2007 was the year that Charles Burnett's legendary Killer of Sheep finally breathed pure air, and New Yorker Video/ Milestone is to be congratulated for rising to the occasion and constructing an instant and invaluable box by combining Sheep with Burnett's short films and second feature, My Brother's Wedding, to create Killer of Sheep: The Charles Burnett Collection. The second volume of The Films of Kenneth Anger captures the cream of Anger's trend-setting experimental shorts, from the 1964 Scorpio Rising to 1981'a Lucifer Rising. For those who crave that kind of transgressive trippiness unpolluted by talent or taste, The Films of Alejandro Jodorowsky is definitely one of the archeological finds of the year, finally making El Topo and its runtier cousins safe for home viewing. Personally, I kind of think that Jodorowsky was always a con man who hogged the magic mushrooms at the buffet table, but maybe that's why nobody ever invited me to do the midnight programming at the Elgin.

ANIMATION: Is there any pleasure more sublimely twenty-first geeky than trancing out in front of the home entertainment system watching classic 'toons? This year saw the release of a much appreciated fifth volume of Looney Tunes--Golden Collection, but the real shocker may be Popeye the Sailor, 1933-1938: Vol. 1, which rescued a trove of the Fleischer brothers' best from years of rights problems and cheapo videotapes. Then there's Tex Avery's Droopy--The Complete Theatrical Collection, which if anything may be a bit too complete; it contains seven cartoons that Avery purists will shun because they were made by other hands, but they all star the dog who, from the looks of it, spent his screen career stoically suffering for his art. Animated Soviet Propaganda: From the October Revolution to Perestroika is a four-disc set that will make a perfect May Day present for your old Socialist friend from college who still hasn't gotten over it. Last but not least, there's The Three Stooges Collection, Vol. One: 1934-1936. Technically, the Three Stooges weren't really cartoon characters, but the films are a lot easier to watch if you pretend that they were.

TELEVISION: Yes, you can still watch TV on your TV, and thanks to a few hardy corporations you can even pay for the privilege. Twin Peaks: The Definitive Gold Box Edition performs a notable feat by finally getting the first season (AKA "the good one"), including the feature-length pilot, and the second season (AKA "the not-so-much one") season of David Lynch and Mark Frost's prime time phenom in print and available at the same point in history. Clare Danes fans will be almost as grateful for My So-Called Life: The Complete Series, though some of us would trade all its extras for one bonus scene of the heroine seeing through that smarmy little nimrod Jordan Catalano and leaving him carless in the park stripped to his underwear. That wouldn't have come as any more of a shock than the timely arrival in stores of Saturday Night Live--The Second Season, AKA "Bill Murray: The Pre-Wes Anderson Years, Volume 1." Yes, Virginia, they do still make new TV shows, and of the current series now on DVD, 30 Rock--Season 1 seems particularly well shaped to reward repeat viewings. As show biz self-satire goes, it's not as great as The Larry Sanders Show, but as a DVD it may be less infuriating an artifact than Not Just the Best of the Larry Sanders Show. Here's a series that fully deserves the every-episode-plus-ephemera Twin Peaks treatment, but instead, what do we get? Four discs, consisting of 23 episodes, some of which are already available on the first-season DVD that was first issued back in 2001 and is still in print, plus eight hours of extras that are sort of interesting the first time you watch them and then automatically turn into space that could have been taken up by close to thirty additional episodes. Garry Shandling, if you're reading this, or David Duchovny, if you're reading this and you still have Garry's naumber and can give him a message: It's not right, man. It's just not right. Do you really care this much less about your career legacy than Popeye does!?

SMORGASBORD: Many companies have taken to vaccuuming up odds and ends of film history and boxing them according to genre and sub-genre and even attitude, with results that are fun to contemplate even if you'd rather not shell out something in the high two figures to have them on the shelf. Treasures III: Social Issues in American Film, 1900-1934, the latest, four-disc set in the series compiled from the American Archives, is a remarkable collection of topical studies, including Cecil B. DeMille's 1928 feature The Godless Girl. Now on its fourth box set, the Film Noir Classic Collection has gone from showcasing movies you'd seen already to movies you'd read about to movies you dimly remember not bothering to stay up to watch after you read about them in the late-night TV listings. As such, it is a veritable overstuffed closet of discoveries waiting to be made, a place to see such actors as Robert Ryan, Edward G. Robinson, Sterling Hayden, and Ricardo Montalban strut their stuff, and to listen to the commentary tracks and give such cool-headed enthusiasts as James Ellroy, Eddie Muller, and Richard Schickel a chance to convince you why you should be watching this stuff. The Cult Camp Classics series slaps together everything from early Sergio Leone (The Colossus of Rhodes) and very late Joan Crawford (Trog), complete with mostly excellent commentary tracks, across four multi-disc boxes divided into such categories as "Women in Peril" and "Terrorized Travelers." The Welcome to the Grindhouse series of double-bill single discs are the most attractive of several packaging jobs that use the supposedly magical word "grindhouse" to offer an excuse to watch movies that Trog crosses the street to avoid be seen with in public.

CRITERION: Still the bestest with the mostest. This year they graced the shelves with dreamy new editions of Breathless, Mala Noche, Two-Lane Blacktop, Days of Heaven, and Berlin Alexanderplatz.

DRAGON DYNASTY: Specialists, and the new kid on the block. For years, Harvey Weinstein stormed the festivals, greedily buying up rights to Asian action films, and then lost them in the back of the freezer. This new label, started by the Weinstein Company in association with Genius Products, looks to make amends by issuing such pictures as Jackie Chan's Police Story films, John Woo's Hard-Boiled, the Infernal Affairs trilogy, and other action classics including the beyond-canonical 36th Chamber of Shaolin on DVD in deluxe packages far superior to any treatment they've received in the West before now. Indeed, the DVDs are so beautiful that only a churl could think to point out that it's about damn time. It's about damn time.

Today in the Nerve Film Lounge: The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, The Savages, Chronicle of an Escape

Peter Smith — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 17:00:00 GMT

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly: "It's the real-life story, not the artistry involved in its telling, that does all the heavy lifting here."

The Savages: "The Savages boasts plenty of keenly observed moments, but it's also the kind of film in which someone says 'He won't marry me, but he cries when I make him eggs,' and two scenes later, sure enough, there the guy is choking back tears at the breakfast table."

Chronicle of an Escape: "Chronicle of an Escape feels scrupulously, nauseatingly accurate in its unstinting depiction of deprivation and torture, but it also seems to have no other purpose; the film belongs to that large, undistinguished subset of historical dramas that achieve little more than informing viewers that the events onscreen did in fact take place."

Q&A: Tamara Jenkins: "I definitely wasn't interested in a sentimental portrait [of death] or a sanctimonious portrait or a maudlin portrait."

Still Crazy After All These Years: "Generally, cinematic controversies seem less relevant as the years go by. But for Pier Paolo Pasolini, the rule does not apply."

Twin Peaks: Definitive Gold Box Edition: "Remastered, and still a masterpiece."

The Rep Report (November 20 - December 6)

Peter Smith — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 21:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK: For two days, the Brooklyn Academy of Music offers a smartly selected tribute to the late Ingmar Bergman. On November 20, Bibi Andersson will be on hand to introduce a film that boasts one of her most astonishing performances, the 1967 Persona; that will be followed by a too-rare screening of one of Bergman's greatest and most seldom-seen features, the richly textured anti-war lament Shame, introduced by the novelist Jonathan Lethem. On November 21, you can spend Thanksgiving Eve, appropriately enough, sinking deep into the epic family drama Fanny and Alexander.

BOSTON: From November 23 through December 6, the Brattle hosts Watching the Detectives, described as a chance "to fully explore the lighter or more colorful film that also feature some of the world's greatest detectives." I'm not sure what's so light about Klute, and "colorful" isn't the first word it brings to mind either, but part of the charm of the program is its random-mix quality. The first week is heavy on movies based on "classic" literary detectives, including double bills featuring William Powell as Nick Charles (The Thin Man) and as Philo Vance (The Kennel Murder Case) and Margaret Rutherford as Agatha Christie's Mrs. Marple (Murder She Says and Murder Most Foul), as well as Albert Finney as Hercule Poirot in Murder on the Orient Express and Alec Guinness as Father Brown in The Detective. There's also a rare chance to see a new 35 mm print of Stephen Frears' 1972 debut film, Gumshoe, starring Finney as an amateur sleuth with a midlife crisis and a Bogart fixation. And on December 3, celebrate David Lynch Day in Cambridge with Blue Velvet and the American broadcast version of the Twin Peaks pilot.

PORTLAND: The Clinton Street Theater's Fifth Annual Thanksgiving Kung Fu Marathon on November 22 offers twelve hours of martial arts flicks with all the trimmings for five dollars. Sounds like a public service to us.

— Phil Nugent

Exclusive Clip: Twin Peaks Gold Box Edition

Peter Smith — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 20:00:00 GMT

We're pleased to have an exclusive clip from the new Twin Peaks "Gold Box Edition" DVD set, which finally supplants a couple of incomplete older releases. The old Season 1 box didn't even feature the pilot, a ridiculous omission that this set corrects with both the U.S. and European versions. It's also got a ton of bonus stuff (including, I'm delighted to report, Kyle MacLachlan's Twin Peaks sketch on SNL), assembled by DVD maestro Charles de Lauzirika, who produced the spectacular Alien Quadrilogy box and whose new Blade Runner set I am itching to get my hands on. In any case, it's good news, and you will surely relish this clip from the bonus features, of the costume contest at the "Return to Twin Peaks" fan convention. (That guy really looks like MacLachlan, no?) — Peter Smith

That Guy!: Miguel Ferrer

Peter Smith — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 20:00:00 GMT

Miguel Ferrer had some big shoes to fill before he was even old enough to walk. His father was the Oscar-winning actor José Ferrer; his mother was recording star Rosemary Clooney. His oldest childhood friend is Carrie Fisher, his sister-in-law is Debbie Boone, and his cousin is George Clooney. With expectations that high, it’s probably no surprise that he shied away from the intense pressures of film work and found his niche as a television actor; he’s just signed on to a recurring role in the Bionic Woman remake, but he’s also turned in memorable TV roles in Miami Vice, Twin Peaks, Tales from the Crypt, Crossing Jordan and LateLine (as well as, er, less grand projects like Kung Fu: The Next Generation). He’s also won acclaim as a voiceover actor, doing everything from Disney (he was a featured actor in Mulan) to superheroes (a lifelong comics buff, he’s been in several Superman animated episodes and will play a prominent role in the upcoming New Frontier Justice League cartoon) to video games (he plays the lead in BioShock, one of the moodiest, most dramatic, and immersively cinematic games in history). Ferrer didn’t initially want to be an actor at all; turned off by the hyper-competitive nature of the film industry, he was originally a respected studio drummer (playing alongside the legendary Keith Moon in one memorable session) and took his first acting job only because childhood friend — and current bandmate, in the Jenerators — Billy Mumy talked him into it. Twenty-five years later, Ferrer, whose reputation for playing short-tempered, hotheaded jerks belies his abilities as an extremely versatile actor who can handle as much emotional range as he’s given, has become one of an elite group of television actors whose very appearance in the credits is good enough cause to give a show a chance. But despite his infrequent big-screen appearances, he’s still done enough with his few and far-between movie roles to make him a That Guy! favorite.

Where to see Miguel Ferrer at his best:

ROBOCOP (1987)

If it weren’t for the presence of Kurtwood Smith (with whom he’d co-starred three years earlier in the deeply weird JFK assassination caper Flashpoint), Miguel Ferrer would have entirely stolen this highly subversive, hugely entertaining Paul Verhoeven satire right out from under leads Peter Weller and Nancy Allen. As corporate sleazeball Bob Morton, he gets off some of the movie’s best lines before being outflanked by Ronny Cox, who’s an even bigger corporate sleazeball than he is.

TWIN PEAKS: FIRE WALK WITH ME (1992)

Cursed with a convoluted production history, a number of studio compromises, and a difficult continuity, David Lynch’s big-screen prequel to his classic cult TV show is worthwhile if for no other reason than it gives Miguel Ferrer to reprise his finest role, as the intolerant and exacting FBI forensics specialist Albert Rosenfield. Ferrer doesn’t get as much screen time here as he did in the series, but every second of it is enjoyable as he plays this watchable combination of righteousness and insufferability to the hilt.

TRAFFIC (2000)

Not surprisingly, given its sprawling multiple storylines, Steven Soderbergh’s sweeping drama about the repercussions of the international drug trade features plenty of juicy roles for character actors (including a terrific turn from previous That Guy! Luis Guzmán). Miguel Ferrer puts in an excellent performance as the cynical drug trafficker Eduardo Ruiz, who engages in a memorable battle of wills with Guzmán’s drug agent Raul Castro, and makes the pithy observation that "In Mexico, law enforcement is an entrepreneurial activity."

— Leonard Pierce