David Lynch almost directed Return of the Jedi and I'm so glad he didn't. At that stage of his career,he could never match the charm, color and epic weirdness of the finished film. You can tell he regretted passing on it by making Dune, which is heavily inspired by Star Wars 1-3. And it really doesn't work (although its well-directed). It just sucks seeing a great experimental director doing commercial work only for the money or to copy.

Interestingly, Twin Peaks: The Return (my favorite show of 2017) felt like Lynch finally doing a convincing job of commercial Hollywood style from the modern era. The original Twin Peaks and Blue Velvet are excellent but they work best as 1950s realism (much like Lucas' work is always reminiscent of 1960s realism). Lynch has explored lots of different eras and localized American cultures and tried to showcase all of it in a TV series. It was a fantastic experience, feeling galactic and making the smallness of life seem so alien and mystical.

Its bizarre that people seem to see Lynch & Lucas as being so different. I think David is just a small town guy and Lucas always thought big. Now its kinda like they've developed the same style, just in different genres and arenas. One commercial and the other still indie/TV.

*And the latest Star Wars has Lynch stars Laura Dern & Justin Theroux???? Weird stuff.

And Lynch has basically preached the same mystical Eastern religious theories of oneness in Twin Peaks as Lucas has in Star Wars. Is Lucas the secret rival inspiration for Lynch's commercial career?

Alien vs Predator 2004 / Liebestraum 1991 / The World's Greatest Sinner 1962 / Ichi The Killer - The Animation 2002

Alien Vs Predator impressed me. I expected something way more militaristic, rightwing, white sausage fest, but actually got a thoughtful, shadowy, ambitious and well-integrated adaptation of a classic cross-franchise comic book. It also succeeds as semi-sequels to both of the franchises' films which is transcendent. Seriously, the entire film is luxuriously paced, intricately lit and directed with some real modesty and sweetness. So much of this is the perfect casting of Sanaa Lathan who while representing a new kind of racial representation in not just this genre but ALL GENRES, she fits the type expertly. She merges the dainty heroine presence of the 1950s actresses with a broader command of herself. The film has a few unintentional laughs (and many intentional ones) and I thought it was perhaps too much fluffy spectacle and not enough character, but this didn't receive the major push and care that Prometheus or even Alien Resurrection did. Yet... I think AVP is better than both of those sequels and I'm sure it trumps the new Predator movies.

The actual message of the film is hazy and so my opinion on it is still out. The film's mythology casts the warring alien races as related to South American & African tribal cultures. In ass backwards fashion, AVP tries to sell some kind of apology or meditation on the savagery of slavery and the monstrosity of the slavemasters... by letting the slavemasters win and driving home the perceived beast nature of the "lower" alien race. Its offensive to me as a black person, as an animal lover and as a universal consciousness. The film is written by the director Paul W.S. Anderson who brings his usual Gothic visual panache & by the original Alien screenwriter Dan O'Bannon (an early collaborator with Carpenter and directed Return of the Living Dead). This lends the film a detailed sci-fi logic and all of the popcorn cues desired and it is progressive and enlightened in many ways, but it is also a bit meat-headed, warped and a tad trashy. Sanaa Lathan is the best part and gets decent support and I will definitely watch this again, but its not a great movie. But still important to analyze and refer to.

Liebestraum came out in 1991 - the height of David Lynch mania - and you can tell. Its made in the mode of Twin Peaks meets 1989's Sex Lies and Videotape. Its a jazz meets industrial erotic thriller in a film noir vein (or "vain").

I found the film to be quite a relaxing and pleasant experience. Its engaging intellectually as a demonstration of Freudian constructs of sex, neurosis & dreams, totally in keeping with Lynch and Hitchcock. Director Mike Figgis even casts Kim Novak as the archetypal mother. The acting is measured and textured, the naturalistic lighting is fresh and the subtexts are emotional and important enough. Except for a few brief glimpses, the film doesn't bowl you over. I mean once the mystery is unraveled, will you rewatch it for the aesthetics and will the themes ring louder? Doubtful.

The film practices the Early Remodernism I think Amos Poe originally intended. Its beholden to pre-postmodernism, the art and social ideals of pre-WW2 western thought. Its embracing enough of black music and highly critical of capitalism, yet still annoyingly, dogmatically conservative and its "retro" is an overwhelmingly artificial stylistic choice that undercuts the drama, not building it. Modern American cinema is steeped in this kind of indie filmmaking - sexually frustrated, European cinema-mimicking, nostalgic infantilized ego trips. Hitchcock, De Palma and David Lynch have sort of mastered this ethos and deconstructed it, so the remaining films in this genre are really just boring and predictable now, but Liebestraum does deserve a concentrated watch for unconscious reasons.

Why you should really watch the film is the curious amount of ideas borrowed by Lynch in subsequent films. The look, the sound design, the cast, even direct story arcs are taken. Lynch has used Alicia Witt, would cast Pamela Gidley in FWWM and Bill Pullman in the almost-remake Lost Highway. It demystifies and lowers Lynch in my eyes as he goes out of his way to rarely reveal influences and I didn't know he was copying contemporaries. Lost Highway is Lynchian and a more powerful experience, but essentially its the same script and production design as Liebestraum. Noticeably its the most hip and unusual style Lynch has attempted and you have to now give that credit to Liebestraum.

Besides that historical revelation, it is a competent low budget art film for its time and it holds up extremely well to today's predictable and even more gratuitously derivative crime/pulp/thriller/mysteries on TV and in theaters. Again, its a little too impersonal, leisurely and basic (which Lost Highway improves on), but maybe more authentic because of these limitations. Its not regressive but definitely old fashioned.

Its been over-exaggerated by a tiny minority of film fans, but The World's Greatest Sinner is a unique and bold touchstone in the history of early American indie filmmaking. It was directed, produced and written by the eternally struggling brute-characterized actor Timothy Carey as a kind of angry, perverted, manic, egotistical study of itself.

Carey plays an insurance agent who drops out of society, forms an atheist rock band, renames himself "God", runs for office and then has a moral breakdown about his own Atheism and quest to free mankind from God. Its a blunter version of Kane's study of populists, fascists, egoists and Western society's tools to produce them. But this is a much more cartoon and ignorant version. It still holds up as a mirror to people like Donald Trump and Adolph Hitler, but this was designed to bash Jerry Lee Lewis and Hollywood hipsters and not reveal the artist's own apparent shortcomings.

Like Welles, Carey wanted to prove that he was more than the big dumb oafs he played. Now the film is not great technically or morally. Its flatly a conservative Christian "scare film" that is anti-black music, anti-communist, anti-atheist, anti-Satan and anti-JFK. Carey comes off like the 60s' Alex Jones: paranoid, ignorant, childish and really disturbed in his self-worship. So its poetic that that is what he's showcasing. In many ways you can compare it to the self-destructive ego on display in Citizen Kane, The Room or Dennis Hopper's films. These guys made personally revealing, audacious "art films" but ruined their careers in the process. Carey is on the bottom of the list but he's still an early example.

Ichi The Killer - The Animation Ep.0 was the best watch of the night. It breaks from the original film's medium, tone, structure and messages, yet it achieves the same effect by building subtext for the first story.
Now the original film is a darkly funny study of the psychotic, sadomasochistic relationship Japanese men have to white supremacy and thus to each other. This is the underlying point that is really only revealed in the climax and lightly woven between key instances of each scene of a massive, campy pulp plot. With that revelation already in the Japanese fans' minds, the anime focuses on a harder boiled story with an even more surrealistic "ordinary" reality within the original manga universe that inspired the films. And it can also shave off the ornament, the aesthetic and the censored.

This film is allowed to explore the more extreme and horrific suggestions made by the original Ichi.
And at the same time, because it is done in a vibrantly expressionistic "limited animation" style (almost the virtual experience of reading a manga), this film is allowed to work on a deeper dream level. Its so unreal that it can say scarier things about reality or "realism".

Overall, you will love this if you love the first Ichi film. Its a proper, respectful and separate part of the mythos that opens up the parameters of the original and cleverly opens up possibility of more parameters to seek and not just in cheap carbon copy sequels.

Venus In Furs 1969 (2nd review)

Writing reviews this year has opened up my appreciation of cinema and I've learned a lot. Much of that credit belongs to Jess Franco, the obscure Spanish surrealist/grindhouse director I covered for the first half of 2017. Studying his work properly introduced me to tons of concepts & artistic grammar that I was only fuzzy about. Postmodernism, Dada, Existentialism. These themes perfectly reflect the dark crises Earth is handling now. I'm a totally different viewer after this harsh year and my outlook has widened tremendously.

I can admit I'm now embarrassed by one of my early reviews. Rewatching "Venus in Furs" last night, the film was a richer, more clear experience and it deserves a new review. But I will not erase my initial, less informed opinion. We should all give things an educated perspective.

https://hollyweedbabylon.blogspot.com/2017/01/venus-in-furs.html

Now Venus is a case like Blade Runner or Night of the Demons where a young ambitious artist made a deeply existential work of art and producers interfered to make it more commercial, thus losing a lot of the intended power. Funny how all 3 of these films revolve around the concept of perception, an essential component of cinema but maybe the least understood or examined.

I wrote off Venus as a clunky, sexy supernatural slasher like Franco's later work because thats what it is on the surface. Even on first viewing I could tell the film was heavily inspired by Vertigo, Carnival of Souls & Dr. Caligari, as its a dream narrative with dream logic and heavy political symbolism. Franco's film is a uniquely Spanish work examining themes of chauvinism/feminism, racism/colorism, sadism, schizophrenia, memory and probably LSD. The sex & supernatural is only a hook for audiences, but the producers re-edited the narrative to highlight these elements at the expense of any meaning. The film can seem convoluted if you aren't keenly aware of the lyrical storytelling that is mostly intact.

One of my favorite writers of the film blog era, Jeremy Richey of "Moon in the Gutter", detailed a connection between Franco's Venus and Lynch's Lost Highway. I originally thought he was off-base but now the similarities are glaring. The way Franco uses surreal photographic techniques and jazz scoring to highlight the dreaminess and artificiality of certain plot points. Franco gives clues and absurdist touches the way Lynch would after him. There's also the shared sensibility in ghostly, unreal femme fatales, unholy affluent boules and a confused, jazz playing spectator to all of the violent insanity who is oblivious to his role in everything. Franco & Lynch both imply that the world's depravity is at the heart of our sick culture, not a byproduct or separate fringe entity. You have to seriously ask if David Lynch, a monolithic American artist of our times, is a fan of this totally ignored cult director.

Its a hard argument for those uninitiated to Franco because Lynch is so quiet about his influences, unlike Franco in his day. Also Lynch fans are a bit dogmatic in praising Lynch's originality and genius. How can that great unique savant be compared to an inconsistent director of lesbian vampire pornos? As I've tried to argue in the past, Franco was a true auteur and genius and I'm sure his infamy is well-known to enormous film fans WITHIN the directing field. Jess Franco's films predicted so much because they were so structuralist and eventually post-structuralist. By "Venus", every shot is a reversal of the expected. Its a totally fresh experience despite its debts to other films. Because Franco, a super movie buff, was combining all of the radical ideas of his contemporaries (Godard, Antonioni, Bunuel, Welles, Fellini) and boiling them down to a level Spanish & American teenagers could even understand. Following these postmodern directors, it could be argued Franco was the original major post-postmodern & remodernist director like De Palma, Tarantino, Rodriguez and so many later.

I see now how seminal this film is to Franco's oeuvre, even if it wasn't the career gateway he wanted. It really summarizes his aesthetic well and explains the frustrated vision of his later, cheaper work. Many times he tried to execute the misunderstood mysticism of Venus in different terms. Some more mature (Other Side of the Mirror), some more juvenile (Virgin Among the Living Dead). I think Venus is more successful and watchable. But maybe Franco's best and most original take on this type of film poetry was "Succubus". But Venus is right next to it as Franco's attempt at a Roger Corman-esque drive-in mindblower. And to be honest, its a perfect hybrid of Corman's LSD and Gothic horror films, but better than both.

Mulholland Drive 1999

My first experience with Mulholland Drive was seminal. It so totally confused and moved me that I was haunted for years and it remained in my head like a dream and a movie I shouldn't weaken with too many views. Over a decade later and I'm so well-read on David Lynch's career that revisiting Mullholland was just a smooth and easy joy.

The film has attained a kind of mythic stature even in the realm of other Lynch projects, as the first great film of the modern era and having an almost universal love from critics, casual moviegoers and Lynch fans. Its pretty straightforward Lynch, with surrealism and code dialed way back, but it still resonates so much. I think its because MD is the film where Lynch's aesthetic clicked for most fans. "Oh, he's talking about loss, madness, delusion, coming-of-age, heartache, idealism and metaphysics in ALL of his work". Its funny to think there was a time where this film was considered impossible to decipher and wildly obtuse. More than Twin Peaks, Blue Velvet and Eraserhead, Mulholland has influenced its generation and kind of capped off the era that came before it.

Needless to say, the film has aged nicely. The flat and bright look of the film came from a small budget, but now it gives it this wonderful fairytale, TV world vibe contrasted with our uber-gritty, super stylized HD modernism. The film is loaded with totally unrealistic sound effects which have to be intentional on Lynch's part, giving it a surreal cartoon quality. These little details escaped me when the film was new. Its so thoroughly modern in its tricks and moods, but this is doesn't seem as personal to Lynch as any other film. This and works like Blue Velvet are more love letters to the fans and America than any dark confession from Lynch, while still being quite brutally honest and even frightening.

Maybe the thing that elevates this one to immortality is the performance by Naomi Watts. She is the quintessential Lynch actress. The duality. The irony. The tragedy. The incredible beauty. The unmistakable reality of herself within the character. And she is supported by a role that really says it all about every Lynch protagonist and Lynch himself. The tragic fall that she takes from happy go lucky, smalltown bewilderment to crushing, horrified, demoralized self-reflective defeat is the major arc in Lynch's life, as he has hinted and played out in his professional life. Watts and Lynch are perfect collaborators with her knowing every tearful detail of his life and him nurturing all of the power and potential within her. This film made an A-lister out of her and cemented Lynch as the greatest director not officially on the A-list. He deserves an Oscar for this film, as does she.

Now its a great intro to Lynch's world as it has all the major themes and stylistic touches, coated in a very basic and easy veneer. In that way, it best captures his overarching obsession with surfaces and what they contain. Its his always amazing view on life wrapped in its prettiest bow.