The Best of David Lynch

1946 - 2025

              Sex is a doorway to something so powerful and mystical, but movies depict it in a

              completely flat way.  

                1)     Twin Peaks                                                            1990-2017

                2)     Mulholland Drive                                                      2001

                3)     The Elephant Man                                                    1980

                4)     Blue Velvet                                                                1986

                5)     Inland Empire                                                           2006

                6)     The Straight Story                                                    1999

                7)     Eraserhead                                                                1977

                8)     Wild at Heart                                                             1990  

                9)     Dune                                                                           1984

               10)    Lost Highway                                                            1997

Bifurcated from the start, he veered from Americana to dislocations of time and space, Lynch became one of the most successful surrealists in the history of the cinema. Whatever Mel Brooks, producer of The Elephant Man, saw in the the wall scraping textures of Eraserhead, his prescience resulted in a singular career in Hollywood. Despite his love for coffee, pie, and Bob's Big Boy burgers, Lynch was too abstract and rarified to craft blockbusters, but has done more than any other director of his generation to expand Hollywood's artistic horizons. 

                       

John Waters, David Lynch and friend.

                         

               

                   

Juror #2

Nicholas Hoult

Juror #2 shows off the unfussy craftsmanship that has been Clint Eastwood's hallmark as a director since High Plains Drifter. The expert tongue and groove style disguises some of the improbabilities of Jonathan Abrams' flashback laden script, but brings out with full force the portrayal of a justice system compromised by the financial iniquities of American society. The 12 Angry Men type jury deliberations are the weakest moments in the film. Abrams capture the vocalese of his own generation, but the elder and youthful jurors are given very silly lines of dialogue.  I did like the portrayal of the collegiality between opposing lawyers Toni Collette and Chris Messina, an aspect of the legal profession that has not been fully explored by the American cinema. 

Though reportedly a wolf in his personal life, Eastwood has always made an effort in his films to show his support and empathy for strong women. It is significant that he casts one of his daughters as the victim in the homicide case that is at the center of this film. The character is not a weak victim, but one who stands up for herself and talks back to her man. Furthermore, if their is a hero in the film it is Toni Collette's prosecutor, who has enough backbone to admit she may have tried the wrong man. Eastwood's mise-en scene has always been more at the service of his plots then in the service of expressing personal themes. There are exceptions, like the strip mining scene in Pale Rider, but, like most actors turned directors, he is more interested in giving his players space than in controlling every detail within the frame. In Juror #2, this gives us one of the best ensemble casts of the past year. Besides Ms. Colette and Mr. Messina, the film has indelible performances from lead Nicholas Hoult, Zoey Deutch, Gabriel Basso, Francesca Eastwood, Kiefer Sutherland, Leslie Bibb, Cedric Yarborough, and J.K. Simmons, the Walter Brennan of his generation.

Juror #2 is one of the few recent mainstream American films that seems to be aimed at adults. This perhaps explains why it was deep sixed by Warner Brothers. Nevertheless, it further demonstrates what a solid and consistent film craftsman Eastwood is. If this is his final film, it is a worthy send off.   

Les Favoris de la lune

Fetching a price in Les Favoris de la lune

Otar Iosseliani, a Georgian filmmaker who died just a year ago, has gone largely unheralded in the English speaking world. Les Favoris de la lune, his first feature after emigrating to France in 1982, won a jury prize in Venice, but, like most of his films, failed to make much of an impact outside continental Europe. Most of the English or American reviews of it I could dig up, like those by Neil Young and Vincent Canby, gave it the back of their hand, but I found the film to be spritely and enormously entertaining.

This 1984 film follows the lives of twenty or so characters, from the haute bourgeoisie to beggars, in then present day Paris. The films also leapfrogs across time as it follows the modern provenance of a 19th century painting and some 18th century crockery. The interlacing stories has brought comparisons to the films of Robert Altman and I noted some traces of Blake Edwards in how Iosseliani and co-scenarist Gérard Brach, most famous for his scripts for Roman Polanski, inject tart observations on sexism, racism, and classism within the framework of an absurdist farce. Les Favoris de la lune focuses on the exchange of commerce between people by both accepted and nefarious means. Everyone is on the make for financial and sexual gain. The matter of fact portrayal of sex workers tips us that the director's sympathy is with the dispossessed. The film is not dissimilar to Robert Bresson's 1983 masterpiece L'Argent, if Bresson had had a sense of humor. Some have criticized the director for being more interested in objects than people, but that misses the point. Iosseliani bluntly described the film as "...an attack on those who seek to fill the void around them with a false culture of objects and possessions."

I feel that the most obvious comparison of this film is to the work of Luis Buñuel, a point seized upon by Vincent Canby in his 1985 New York Times pan of the film. Certainly Iosseliani wants to takes pokes at the European bourgeoisie just like the Spanish master, but there are also other areas of intersection: Surrealism, Marxism, terrorism, voyeurism, and, avoiding the isms for a sec, carnivorous plants. Iosseliani also slips in portents of the surveillance state which was unforeseen in Bunuel's ouevre. Canby was perhaps partially right in that Les Favoris... is not quite as strong as Belle du Jour or The Discrete Charm of the Bourgeoisie, but what films are? I prefer Les Favoris de la lune to such late Buñuel efforts as Tristana, The Phantom of Liberty, and even That Obscure Object of Desire.

Iosseliani works wonders with his cast of figures who, mostly, only had periphereal film careers. The sole castmate who was sprinkled with stardust is the young Mathieu Amalric who plays a neophyte hoodlum. However, this is a film that stresses ensemble playing over star turns. The essence of this anarchic film is best summed up by Shakespearean quote from Henry IV  Part 1 which inspired Les Favoris de la lune's title and which is cited within the film.

                        Diana's foresters, gentlemen of the shade, minions of the moon,

                        and let men say we be men of good government, being governed,

                        as the sea is, by our noble and chaste mistress of the moon, under

                        whose countenance we steal.

Falstaff's tribute to his criminal cohorts sums up the unruly energies governing Iosseliani's film.