David Lynch

[Simon]

Not sure if this was mentioned here previously, but you can get a free DVD featuring David Lynch. Probably an expanded infomercial, but it's free with no shipping, and the tech demo actually sounds interesting.

[Solaris]

Another recut trailer, this one for Dune. Didn't work on my slow computer, but those crazy kids on IMDb claim it is quite funny.

[godardslave]

apparently, theres going to be a season 3 of Twin Peaks. on HBO, starting in 2007.

[THIS WAS AN APRIL FOOL'S JOKE!!].

[obloquy]

Any more info available? If you don't want to say the source, can you say it's reliable?

[godardslave]

the source is highly reliable. thats all i can say, for now.

[justeleblanc]

apparently, theres going to be a season 3 of Twin Peaks. on HBO, starting in 2007.

That's great.... but Bob died. And I think someone else did too.

[Schkura]

That didn't stop them from making 2/3 of Season 2 (though perhaps it should have...).

[justeleblanc]

That didn't stop them from making 2/3 of Season 2 (though perhaps it should have...).

No no no, I mean the actor playing Bob.... he died in 1995.

Unless Bowie's the new Bob. The would be awesome.

[Schkura]

Just: Sorry about the misunderstanding. Not to split hairs, but I thought Bowie's character was not a spirit like BOB is, but a person that stumbled into his meeting place. Bowie's return (from wherever the hell he went) would, indeed, be awesome though. As would, BTW, the return of one of my favorite TV characters, Don Davis as Major Briggs-- and maybe even Chris Isaac (if he returns from wherever the hell he went) as Chester Desmond.

Godard: Not to pump you for info, but this Season three wouldn't happen to take place 25 years later would it?

[Jean-Luc Garbo]

That recut Dune trailer is amusing enough. It's a bunch of college kids re-enacting scenes from the movie accompanied by a funky reaarangement of one of the main themes. They use some clips from the movie and one of the other themes from the score. I liked it enough.

[Solaris]

The Dune trailer is quite amusing, but drags on a bit. I found Something Blue to be the funniest trailer since Shining.

[Fletch F. Fletch]

Lynch In Person for 20th Anniversary Blue Velvet Screening in Los Angeles on Thursday, June 29th. They will be screening a brand new print for this event. Tickets are only $10.

[Jeff]

Starz FilmCenter in Denver is running the new print of Blue Velvet July 28 -- August 3. Throughout July they are doing a weekend series called Naked Lynch, showing 35mm prints of Wild at Heart, Lost Highway, and Mulholland Drive. Eraserhead was projected from the DVD, as Lynch apparently doesn't make prints available.

[Fletch F. Fletch]

Blue Velvet is playing in Los Angeles and all the periodicals there are running articles on the film:

L.A. CityBeat

L.A. Weekly interview with Lynch done back in 1986

L.A. Weekly review of the film from 1986

L.A. Weekly recent review/retrospective piece

In Lynch's 'Velvet,' the real is unreal

By Carina Chocano, L.A. Times

When "Blue Velvet" was first released 20 years ago, the reviews were split and heated. Sides were taken over the question of authorial intent. Did David Lynch mean for audiences to laugh at his square-jawed, perky teenagers Jeffrey and Sandy, played by Kyle MacLachlan and Laura Dern? Or were the scales supposed to fall from our eyes along with theirs as they unearthed the unspeakable horrors lurking beneath the surface of their placid, all-American town? Considering that its horrors were so utterly horrifying, why should the Arcadian innocence of Lumberton seem so corny and funny and out of touch? And what did it mean that Dennis Hopper's sadistic, drug-addled Frank was funny too? Did Lynch have a point, or was he just trying to pass off a fancy visual style as substance?

Alighting on screens somewhere between "Back to the Future" and "Peggy Sue Got Married," "Blue Velvet" reflected — or, rather, refracted — the cloying, claustrophobic nostalgia for the 1950s that had overtaken the popular culture at the time, a nostalgia that would seem to stand for an impossible desire to go home again. But since his beginnings as a painter, Lynch has fixated on the idea of home as a dangerously fraught and vulnerable place. "The home," he has said, "is a place where things can go wrong." Thanks to the release of a 35-millimeter print that will be shown at Landmark's Nuart Theater for one week beginning today, we can take another good look at how, exactly.

In hindsight, since "Blue Velvet," Lynch has consistently returned to the same theme: In the postmodern era, reality and normality and truth have been supplanted by the pastiche of pop images and ideas that have come to stand for them. No wonder the kitschy picket fences, the technicolor lawns, the eugenically perfect roses, the impossibly corny fireman waving to the impossibly corny kids that kick off "Blue Velvet" ring so disturbingly false. They're anachronistic idealizations (the movie is set in the '80s, after all, despite its allusions to movie representations of the '50s). But the same thing goes for the flip side. The gleefully sadistic (and psychologically mysterious) gangsters and corrupt cops that swarm Lumberton's underbelly are no easier to peg than the benevolent aunts and mechanical robins that populate the town's surface. They do, however, raise a good question: The movies have entertained us with violence and degradation since their inception. Are we supposed to keep pretending that we only watch for the moral lessons?

A modest commercial hit, "Blue Velvet" nevertheless broke one of the basic conventions of Hollywood narrative: It pitted innocence against nightmarish corruption and refrained from telling us how to feel about it. (Jeffrey never sounds more laughably naive than when he tells the possibly corrupt detective, "Frank Booth is a sick and dangerous man," even though he's right.) And Lynch himself was no help. When, in an interview with Cineaste, he was asked if "everything in art has to have a meaning, a reason for being," the director replied, "I don't know what a lot of things mean." There are a lot of "things" in "Blue Velvet," and it's not easy to glean the meaning of all these memes when they're jumbled together. But two decades, five films, a seminal TV series and many Internet shorts later, it seems clear — or clearer, anyway — that Lynch's response was slightly less evasive than it sounds. The only reality that interests Lynch is subjective reality, and our tenuous grasp of it. Whether something is good, happy and pure, or dark, rotten and bad, depends entirely on who's doing the looking; how willing one is to cross illusory protective boundaries.

The fact is, Jeffrey's reality is too fake to be grounding and too fragile to be safe. (The perfect lawn is roiling with gruesome insects.) Nor is there a lesson to be extracted from his eventual walk on the wild side, since what happens there mirrors his basest, scariest desires. A dualistic battle of the B-genres, "Blue Velvet" pits the aggressive Cold War optimism of teeny-bopper fantasies against the postwar pessimism of film noir, challenging the ever-popular notion that things were good once, until they went to pot.

What's interesting about watching "Blue Velvet" 20 years after it was made is not that it finds us wallowing in the swampy nihilism of Frank Booth-land but that it finds us clinging to the fantasies of home, hearth and wholesomeness. We may be soaking in another reversion to idealistic conservatism, Hollywood-inspired political posturing and empty mass-culture referentiality, but it's hard not to notice how postmodern, how pliable and un-curious, our inner Jeffrey has become. Two decades ago, Lynch upended the meaning of the emerald lawn and the white picket fence and made them seem scary. Today, the same imagery Lynch used to trigger existential freakouts has hardened, elsewhere, into a weary and wearying cliché — a cue to go ahead and feel smug about whatever. (Is it ironic that the same network that dared run — and then Aristotelically destroyed — "Twin Peaks" is now home to "Desperate Housewives"?) Pastiche and genre parody are big business, and therefore ubiquitous. What's not so easy to find these days is a weird kid in the closet as our stand-in, peering through the slats like "a detective or a pervert," and concluding, with lantern-jawed, non-relativistic certainty, that "it's a strange world."

[miless]

Lost Highway just aired on IFC and man did it look great. Letterboxed, it was the first time I've ever seen the 'whole' movie as the only other time I had seen it was over 6 years ago on a crappy VHS. It was my introduction to the world of Lynch (other than Dune as a child) and has remained my favorite. I'm glad I caught it... it'll have to hold me over for a while until the DVD comes out in America.

[Fletch F. Fletch]

Lost Highway just aired on IFC and man did it look great. Letterboxed, it was the first time I've ever seen the 'whole' movie as the only other time I had seen it was over 6 years ago on a crappy VHS.

Yeah, forget about even trying to watch Lynch's films pan and scanned -- it totally destroyed the meticulous composition of each and every one of his frames. He uses the widescreen format so effectively -- esp. in Blue Velvet. I think about those scenes at Ben's, when he has all those characters in the same frame together and awful it looks when cropped as some are cut out! blech.

[Jason]

Nothing like a cup of David to get you going in the morning...

[godardslave]

oh god he just sold-out.
someone hug me.

[miless]

well... um... okay. it's not like he's selling it through starbucks... if anything he's going against the establishment in providing an alternative brew... plus, it just adds to his eccentric image (and people would probably want to know what David thinks a 'damn fine cup of coffee' is)

[Fletch F. Fletch]

I agree. Hell, I'm intrigued. Plus, if all (or even some) of the money goes to financing his next film a la Inland Empire (wasn't it partly financed through his website endeavors?) I'm all for that.

[rumz]

Having had some of David Lynch's signature coffee, I can say it's best black as midnight on a moonless night.

"Pre-tty Black."

[Galen Young]

Just a heads up for David Lynch fans in Seattle: he's going to be reading/signing his new book, Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity, at Town Hallon January 16th at 7:30 pm, tickets are five bucks down at Elliot Bay Books -- they expect it to sell out... Check this site for other cities on his short book tour. He's even released an audio CD of the book, read by himself. Check out the brief audio clip on the publisher's website -- if one person might get me to try meditation, it would be David Lynch. I just love hearing him speak -- it should be great fun!

[Cobalt60]

When I first read about this, in Entertainment Weekly of all places, I rolled my eyes and shrugged that he was selling out. However, he is selling it through his site so its not like hes in league with the almighty Starbucks bean cartel. I find the fact that the packaging will contain images from his films, namely Eraserhead, a little unsettling. I just hate to see a film like that merchandised (I am pissed that he put the damn baby on a T-shirt).

[Fletch F. Fletch]

Here's an odd one, The Hollywood Reporter's Stephen Galloway hosted a recent roundtable discussion with directors Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, Guillermo del Toro, Emilio Estevez, David Lynch and Nancy Meyers. Check it out.

[brownbunny]

i don't know if anyone is hip to this yet, but lynch is touring with "yellow-fucking-mellow" donovon. ???