USA

This is a series of shorts that Lynch made after Mulholland Drive, using the actors from that film.

A story of a group of humanoid rabbits and their depressive, daily life. The plot includes Jane ironing, Suzie sitting on a couch, Jack walking in and out of the apartment, and the occasional solo singing number by Suzie or Jane. At one point the rabbits also make contact with their “leader”. A really Lynch-esque series of episodes.

A slow, stylish, eerie and extremely interesting story set “in a city deluged by constant rain where three rabbits live with a constant mystery”. Mr Lynch has a great talent for establishing atmosphere and this series is soaked with his trademark (weird) mood. When I watched the first episode I was not sure whether to laugh or be baffled at what I was seeing. 3 Rabbits talk out of sequence, an unseen audience claps whenever one of them enters the room and laughs (not because something funny is said, but at the misery of the rabbits), a candle burns in the corner, a demon face chants something undecipherable (reminds me of the litanies of Satan, the camera seems to be disturbed in the beginning of the 7 out of 8 episodes by something I can only guess to be a spirit.Read More »

Essentially a prequel to David Lynch and Mark Frost’s earlier TV series “Twin Peaks”. The first half-hour or so concerns the investigation by FBI Agent Chet Desmond (Chris Isaak) and his partner Sam Stanley (Kiefer Sutherland) into the murder of night-shift waitress Teresa Banks in the small Washington state town of Deer Meadow. When Desmond finds a mysterious clue to the murder, he inexplicably disappears. The film then cuts to one year later in the nearby town of Twin Peaks and follows the events during the last week in the life of Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee) a troubled teenage girl with two boyfriends; the hot-tempered rebel Bobby Briggs (Dana Ashbrook) and quiet biker James Hurley (James Marshall), her drug addiction, and her relationship with her difficult (and possible schizophrenic) father Leland (Ray Wise), a story in which her violent murder was later to motivate much of the TV series. Contains a considerable amount of sex, drugs, violence, very loud music and inexplicable imagery. Written by Douglas BaptieRead More »

*** This comment may contain spoilers ***

The Short Films of David Lynch is just the thing for all those who have enjoyed his other work. Ranging from his first, art installation Six Men Getting Sick, over the deep and visually wonderful The Grandmother, to The Cowboy and the Frenchman and Lumière and Company, this collection gives a deep insight in and nicely rounds off Lynch’s oeuvre.

Six Men Getting Sick, a one-minute ‘scene’ originally presented in an infinite loop, and The Alphabeth clearly mirror Lynch’s background as a painter and give an idea of the visuality as well as the structural and colour quality of his art.

Some of the unique, disturbing and fascinating elements of his later films and television series Twin Peaks are foreshadowed in his ambiguous and highly aesthetic Grandmother, his third attempt at using moving images. Be it the rapid and sometimes unsettling, disorienting cuts, the dropping of frames, dark, under-lit interiors, associative combination of images and scenes, characters moving and uttering themselves in animalic ways – Lynch succeeds in telling a story that, far from being realistically filmed, moves, rings true, refrains from offering clear answers and positions, and that is extremely close to its protagonists.Read More »

The lives of several people spanning from 1936 to 1993 are chronicled during their overnight stay at a New York City hotel room. The hotel room undergoes minor changes through the century, but the employees of the hotel remain unchanged, never aging.Read More »

“A thinking man’s futuristic sci-fi flick that picks up on Orwell’s Big Brother theme.”

Reviewed by Dennis Schwartz

A thinking man’s futuristic sci-fi flick that picks up on Orwell’s Big Brother theme that has the potential to become a cult fave for those who crave Midnight movies and listening to their music at full-blast. Justin Hennard is the young creative whiz behind this project, who was influenced by Kenneth Patchen’s 1941 novel “The Journal of Albion Moonlight.” It makes use of Patchen’s theme that ‘Humans are always having conversations with people who are not present.’

It’s a work of great craftmanship, especially for a low-budget film, shot in a marvelously effective glowing black and white; the David Baker landscape drawings were very effective in creating the dreamy mood of a space flight, while Anthony Locastro’s art settings are imaginative in a goofy way. The other plus is that the ensemble cast all get into this crazy story and embody their characters in a believable though bizarre way.Read More »

New York Portrait

Hutton’s sketchbook of mid-1970s New York, edited in three parts over twelve years, is a chronicle of indelible impressions and an act of urban archeology. The artist evokes the city’s delicate rhythms, tonal contrasts, and shifts of scale—scrims of white mist and black smoke, of gauze, cloud, and fluttering pennant; the shadowy geometries of tenements and water towers; palimpsests of graffiti, skywriting, and painted signs; ecstatic sunlight glinting off the wings of homing pigeons as they traverse a pillowy sky; the slight rustle of a homeless man’s shirt; the flowery patterns of rainwater draining from a flooded street; a blimp’s lazy progress between two buildings whose balconies resemble film sprockets; and a winter fog rolling over the sandy rivulets of Coney Island, making of it a lunar park, removed from time.
Part I
1978–79.
Part II
1980–81.
Part III
1990.Read More »

Zabriskie Point, director Michelangelo Antonioni’s only American film, is an unusual, visually stunning examination of youthful rebellion against the Establishment. The film, initially presented in quasi-documentary style, presents a group of college activists discussing key issues of their political agenda. Mark (Mark Frechette) steals an airplane and flies over a desert where he meets Daria (Daria Halprin). She is the pot-smoking secretary to businessman Lee Allen (Rod Taylor), while he is a rebel searching for a worthy cause. In the midst of the arid surroundings, Mark and Daria fall in love. Antonioni’s nonrealistic approach to American counterculture myths, his loose and sluggish narrative, and the dialogue (credited to Fred Gardner, Sam Shepard, Tonino Guerra, Clare Peploe, and Antonioni) caused Zabriskie Point to be poorly received when it was first released. The score features songs from Pink Floyd, The Grateful Dead, Kaleidoscope, The Rolling Stones, John Fahey, The Youngbloods and Patti Page.Read More »

Quote:
If something characterizes Reichardt’s work, it’s that it always finds its characters downhill. And if that vivid decadence, that pain of not being anymore that transmit the characters in River of Glass, Old Joy and Wendy and Lucy, her three features, already causes anguish, those great moments of pain captured by the director intensify, through condensation, in each of her short subjects. Death is lord and master in the shorts Then, a Year and Travis, and also in Ode, the only mid-length film by this daughter of cops (him, scientific; her, narcotics). Then, a Year combines, without attempting any kind of narrative, Reichardt in her adoptive Portland with a pastiche that mixes statements from different shows about crimes of passion. This idea is resumed in Travis, video-installation where that focus that never reaches the image, sensed as violent close-ups of a fixed photograph, is centered in politics: Reichardt infinitely loops fragments from the interview with a mother that has lost her son Travis in Iraq, and who, in every little confession, leaves a piece of her heart. Lastly, in Ode, the director shows the courage for loving of two young Baptists, capturing, for three quarters of an hour, the story of a love that could never be between Billy Joe and Bobbie Lee, and its tragic outcome. And the inevitable one, because there’s no place for the humbled joy of those poor old hearts in the oppressive world of the religious deep America.Read More »

David Cornelius wrote:
“Nine years after helping define the heist movie with the 1955 masterpiece “Rififi,” director Jules Dassin took another go at the genre, this time with a comedy. “Topkapi” is a lighter, breezier affair than Dassin’s earlier picture, but it’s in no way weaker or less memorable. In fact, it’s this movie that served as the inspiration for the classic TV series “Mission: Impossible,” and yes, it’s this film’s most memorable sequence that was, um, “borrowed” for the most memorable sequence of the 1996 “Impossible” movie.Read More »