Twin Peaks: Classic or Dud?

"you like pornos, kid?"

i re-watched lost highway a few months ago (on 35mm!) and although yeah it has plenty of problems (no film with marilyn manson involvement can be all good), it's still pretty exhilarating. just the audacity and elegance of its narrative construction.

I like the structure, first section, and ending sequence of LH very much, but it's hard not to see it as a dry run for Mulholland Dr.

The way Rammstein is deployed in LH is actually pretty great, yeah. Will grant it that.

The road rage scene felt like it was made by some sub-Tarantino hack.

When the riffs kicked through the theater speakers it was legitimately pretty exhilarating.

i hate lost highway, love wild at heart and fwwm is one of the best movies ever made.

"on the air" is where it's at

lol "On the Air" best described as a comedy made by people who don't understand comedy

haha I need to see that, lynch & frost are both good with the lols imo but yeah maybe not in a way that translates to sitcom gold

I'm def a stan/apologist lol, I rate pretty much everything (which feels wrong even to me). I did fall asleep during dune though

i like lynch's anti-humor, probably best seen in "the cowboy and the frenchman"

"On the Air" is not without its merits but being legit funny is not one of them

i went into On the Air with an enormous amount of sympathy for lynch and an expectation that it would not funny in anything approaching the normal sense of the word.

and i could barely sit through it

I remember liking Lost Highway well enough at the time but i was a much bigger fanboy then, and tellingly I've rarely if ever felt like rewatching it, unlike Mulholland Drive which I rank up there with TP and Blue Velvet as his best work ever. Same with the Straight Story.

On the Air was pretty dumb.

Hotel Room: Blackout is great though. I saw an uncut version of this introduced by Gifford many many years ago.

^^

yall crazy OTA is amazing and hilarious. the first episode only but damn it is a masterpiece.

i saw LH in a theater recently... The road rage scene is funny!

I think that scene awful. He couldn't have made MD if he hadn't made LH and in most other art forms artists are allowed to fail in one work in order to develop the themes in a subsequent work. Having said that I don't even think LH is a failure - the sense of dread in the first section is singular and powerful and worth the perceived failures.

i don't know why, but i have more affection for L.H. than M.D., maybe because the former was kind of overlooked/condescended to while the latter was immediately embraced as a masterpiece.

obviously M.D. is much more emotionally accessible in a lot of ways. i've heard L.H. described as "anti-humanist" and that isn't entirely wrong.

On The Air is some weird shit. It feels more like a bad trip than any other Lynch thing imo.

Can't remember a road rage scene.

Lynch's humour falls flat for me 70% of the time.

I've never seen Lynch's humor as particularly "funny". It's more like a dog that's suddenly gained the power of speech and tries to tell a joke. More uncanny and surreal than LOL.

http://i.imgur.com/oy5i0k7.jpg

The problem is I usually find it tedious. I think Inland Empire (my favourite) would be far better without a sense of humour.

Funniest Lynch thing for me is maybe the woman giving clues at the start of Fire Walk With Me.

Funniest Lynch scene is probably the hitman scene in Mulholland Drive. That one had me actually laughing out loud.

It's good but it feels surprisingly like Coen brothers did it.

I have the same opinion.

well "Have you ever done this before?" "I don't know" is a p good amnesia joke in Mulholland Dr.

eraserhead probably the most consistently funny lynch feature, no?

fremen yelling 'breeeeaaaaak!' at the stone in dune is a good laugh.

xp yeah, first half of eraserhead is funny as hell, if bleak. and i remember finding blue velvet pretty droll, but it's been quite a while, so i dunno. single funniest lynch moment is gurney clutching a battle pug as he charges off to meet his maker in dune

surprised by the amount of fwwm love in this thread, but maybe amateurist is right about its having been reevaluated? it's always seemed unfocused to me, though still quite entertaining. and lost highway is awesome. the first half is awesomer, yeah, but the whole thing still rules, and the ending is amazing.

in the context of Twin Peaks, FWWM can seem like it's just retreading stuff from the show (oh, Leland's the killer? U DON'T SAY)

but I think its individual parts work p well, lot of good scenes in it

FWWM is a complete ret-con of the TV show, making the implicit explicit

also it just seems pretty consistently inventive in its editing/soundtrack/staging/etc. that scene where laura and leland are accosted by the one-armed man on the road!

I love that scene

Wild At Heart was the first Lynch I saw, FWWM was the second and the one that made a fan out of me.

I love that scene

― Robert Adam Gilmour, Friday, April 29, 2016 4:36 PM (42 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

it gets really loud in the theater. i remember being utterly terrified.

i saw Mulholland Drive in the theater when it came out and was laughing through the first half hour or so. everything was so hilarious, the awkward nonsensical dialog, the scene transitions, that ridiculous swing montage from out of nowhere, etc.

i find Lynch's work to have a cosmic and deep sense of humor that is genuinely exciting and thrilling in a way that makes most humor seem lazy and rote. but i totally see why people don't think he's funny, you have to be willing to get to a very particular mindspace.

i find myself laughing at the sheer audacity and unexpectedness of some of his stuff

laughing appreciatively, of course

otm

Yes, absolutely. The bank scene in the final episode of TP totally gets me on that level.

So I rewatched FWWM after the sincere adoration it's gotten here and... my opinion remains unchanged. Just feels so plodding and uninspired. Lynch going through the motions. Never captures the ecstatic melodramatic heights or creeping terror in the best moments of the series. Suffers from the classic prequel problem of giving you information that's way more compelling in the imagination. Laura Palmer is better as a corpse. You spend the majority of the time with her and she's not very interesting.

"it just seems pretty consistently inventive in its editing/soundtrack/staging/etc."

This is such a weird opinion to me! It easily feels like his LEAST inventive film in those departments.

Wish I could see it through different eyes. Remains lower tier Lynch for me.

"Laura Palmer is better as a corpse"

no!

one thing that I liked about it is that Laura was actually quite different in FWWM than I'd pictured her from the series. She was much more multidimensional.

fwwm is one of the most harrowing depictions of domestic abuse on film

FWWM is a complete ret-con of the TV show, making the implicit explicit

― wizzz! (amateurist), Friday, April 29, 2016 9:42 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yep. The fact that it's telling you things you already know is the point! The uninspired, obvious thing to do would have been to make a film that followed cooper and the townspeople, wrapping up all the cliffhangers from the end of the series. I think that's what people were expecting. Instead, lynch gives us a sour parody of twin peaks for half an hour before spending the rest of the film rubbing our faces in everything the series shrinks back from after lynch leaves (the disappearing of ronette and maddy as mentioned above, the glossing over of leland's actions). It completely ignores sheriff truman et al in favour of really delving into the effects of years of systematic rape and incest in a way that the series never does even at its most disturbing. You don't have to like it, but "we already know who the killer is!" is a seriously dumb criticism imo

Feel like I saw a completely different movie.

I'll take the early 90s view. Wild at Heart winning the Palme, FWWM getting gutted.