Tag Archives: lynchdeepdive

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Song of the Day #6,145: ‘Black Tambourine’ – Beck

David Lynch’s final feature film was his most confounding.

After winning praise for delivering a conventional story in The Straight Story and earning the best reviews of his career with the sublime Mulholland Drive, he returned in 2006 with Inland Empire, a strange and unsettling experimental film.

This is a three-hour movie with no discernible plot. It was shot on standard definition video using a camera Lynch operated himself. He also handled editing duties and composed most of the music. It fulfilled his desire to strip filmmaking down to the basics and make a film in a way anybody with a camera and some willing actors could.

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Song of the Day #6,144: ‘Sixteen Reasons’ – Connie Stevens

Mulholland Drive (2001) is maybe the least likely bona fide masterpiece of all time. It’s certainly the only one that started as a television pilot, was cancelled by the network, and then reworked into a feature film with a wholly revised script and additional footage.

Under those circumstances, most filmmakers would be lucky to get a half-watchable direct-to-video release. David Lynch crafted a film that was voted the eighth best of all-time on Sight & Sound‘s critics poll and one that is often cited as the best of the current century so far.

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Song of the Day #6,143: ‘Laurens, Iowa’ – Angelo Badalamenti

In Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch, an art dealer played by Adrien Brody says this about an abstract artist:

“One way to tell if a modern artist actually knows what he’s doing is to get him to paint you a horse or a flower or a sinking battleship or something that’s actually supposed to look like the thing it’s actually supposed to look like. Can he do it?”

If you apply that theory to David Lynch, then 1999’s The Straight Story is the movie that proves — beneath all the arthouse trappings and freaky dream logic — he actually knows what he’s doing.

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Song of the Day #6,142: ‘I’m Deranged’ – David Bowie

After Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, David Lynch took his longest break between feature films. After a five-year pause, he released the neo-noir psychological horror film Lost Highway.

Partly inspired by the O.J. Simpson murder trial, the film is about a musician (Bill Pullman) who is convicted of murdering his wife (Patricia Arquette). While in prison, he suffers a breakdown and wakes up the next morning as a different person — a young mechanic played by Balthazar Getty. The confused authorities release the man, unsure of how we got there or what happened to the musician.

The movie then follows the mechanic as he gets entangled with a local gangster (Robert Loggia) and the man’s mistress (Arquette, again).

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Song of the Day #6,141: ‘Theme from Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me’ – Angelo Badalamenti

Continuing my appreciation of filmmaker David Lynch’s career, the next film up is 1992’s Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, a big-screen prequel to the hit TV show.

The movie was greenlit after Twin Peaks was cancelled, its second season having ended on a grisly cliffhanger. But rather than resolve that story, Fire Walk With Me is a prequel to the series that depicts the week before Laura Palmer was found dead.

The film was a commercial failure, not surprising given that it’s a spin-off of a TV show that was cancelled due to low viewership.

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