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.

About Dry Grasses

                  
I highly recommend Nuri Bilge Ceylan's About Dry Grasses with the usual caveats about the Turkish director's work. The film is over three hours and very talky and deliberately slow. The camera rarely moves and views the characters remotely. The protagonist is unlikeable. Yet, I savored the film like a fine wine. Ceylan 's remote camera fits a story which is largely concerned with distance between individuals, an ongoing theme in his work. Neophyte directors like Zoë Kravitz in Blink Twice tend to overuse close-ups. In that film, when things get horrific, close-ups of terrorized victims don't have the impact they should because the previous surfeit of the effect ameliorates subsequent usage. Because Ceylan is sparing in his dynamic use of the camera, whips pans and close-ups, particularly one of a pistol, convey the emotional impact intended.

The use of long shots also fits the plight of the main character isolated in a remote village in the hinterlands of Eastern Anatolia. There, the protagonist of the film, Samet (Deniz Celiloğlu), teaches middle school. He is bitter about being stuck in such a Podunk burg and does not endear himself to his colleagues by constantly complaining about his plight. Of all his colleagues, Samet is closest to Kenan (Musab Ekici) with whom he shares a house. A comely teacher from a larger town nearby named Nuray (Merve Dizdar) enters into a triangular relationship with them that remains superficially pleasant, but underlying tensions simmer. Ceylan's long shots emphasize the beauty and the harshness of the locale. It is extremely difficult to get around in the Anatolian winter, especially for Samet who does not own an automobile. He is constantly bumming rides and sloshing slowly through the slush.

The film's main two plot threads concern sexual power dynamics. Nuray seems to prefer Kenan to Samet, but Samet is able to manipulate Nuray into a one night stand. Nuray is missing a leg from a terrorist attack in Ankara. She fears her attractiveness has diminished and Samet, though not in love with her, is able to manipulate her to his own ends. Samet and Kenan are also embroiled in a small scandal at school when they are charged with being too friendly with young female students. Certainly, what we see of Samet's relationship with his favorite, Sevim, while not overtly sexual, borders on grooming. On the other hand, Sevim is a bit of a minx who has her own subtle power. When Sevim incurs Samet's wrath, he lords his petty power over her. Still, at film's end, it is difficult to say which of the two has gained the upper hand.

This theme of sexual power plays is just one of the motifs in About Dry Grasses that has caused the film to be called Dostoyevskian. In the crazed Russian's fiction, even frustrated virgins and cripples have sexual magnetism and power. The servant often becomes the master when individuals are possessed by eros. Other Dostoyevskian themes here include exile, free will versus determinism, and the plight of animals as a metaphor for eternal suffering. As one character puts it, " How do you expect to care for dogs when no one cares about people." Like Fyodor's Russian, Ceylan's Turkey is a paranoid police state with the icons of power (Atatürk and Erdoğan) watching over. Perhaps the most Dostoyevskian aspect of the film is Samet himself. Samet, much like Ivan Karamazov, is ruled by reason. He sees life's ambiguities rather than its possibilities, hobbled by what Bob Dylan calls "useless and pointless knowledge." He lacks the saving grace of compassion. The only grace notes he strikes are in his photographic portraits, a skill he downplays but which betray traces of empathy and humanity. 

Merve Dizdar won most of the critical accolades for her performance as Nuray, and she is very good, but it is a Mother Courage type role of the sort that begs for awards. I was equally impressed by Deniz Celiloğlu who, as Samet, embodies the contradictions of his character. About Dry Grasses is an actor's feast, as Ceylan gives the cast long, digressive conversations usually, but not always, over tea. This is not everybody's ideal of cinema, much as Dostoyevsky is not everybody's ideal of literature (especially Nabokov who thought Fyodor should have written for the theater), but I'll take it over whatever CGI comic book movie you can think of. 

Quick Takes, January 2025

So This is Paris

Ernst Lubitsch's So This is Paris, from 1926, is the director's third and final silent film done while under contract for Warner Brothers. He went out with a bang. What starts as a typically droll bedroom farce concerning two married couples, one bourgeoise and one bohemian, erupts into a dance party sequence that sums up the mad hijinks of the era. For the "Artists Ball" sequence, the director whips up a freneticism in his work barely glimpsed since 1919's Die Puppe. Lubitsch employs superimpositions, kaleidoscopic effects, and, when his characters get tipsy, double exposures. A under sung masterpiece currently streaming in a gorgeous print on Max. 

With nearly a century of hindsight, Walter Ruttmann's Berlin: Symphony of a Great City, from 1927, seems more successful in its documentary evocation of a bygone metropolis than in its attempts at constructivist poetry. Certainly, Ruttmann's celebration of industrial and  technological might seems dated. What does not is the fabulous cinematography of Karl Freund and his cohorts.

Quentin Dupieux has crafted an amazing number of short and peculiar features with soupçons of surrealism since I came upon his films starting with Rubber almost a decade and a half ago. Yannick, a one act coup de théâtre set entirely in a jewel like Paris playhouse clocks in at only 67 minutes, but is his most accessible and successful film. Raphaël Quenard plays the titular parking lot attendant who pulls a gun and disrupts a numbingly routine boulevard comedy entitled The Cuckold. The cultural conflict between populism and elitism that currently grips the West is enacted by a uniformly excellent cast. Quenard, already a César award winner delivers a titanically amusing performance that finds him balancing charisma with sociopathy. Funny and unsettling.

Despite its title, Román Viñoly Barreto's El Vampiro Negro is not a horror film, but a remake of Fritz Lang's M. The expressionism of Lang's film is very much in evidence, but this 1953 Argentinian film adds a dollop of feminism to the mix. Barreto's misanthropic regard of his character rivals that of Lang and Joseph Losey, director of the 1951 American redo. Barreto's marshalling of memorable and disturbing images marks him as a distinctive original.

Damian Mc Carthy's Oddity has been marketed as a horror film, but I would describe it as a slow burn revenge thriller with supernatural elements. The film represents an incremental advancement rather than a great leap forward for Mr. Mc Carthy after the promising Caveat. This time he has written some actual characters and devised a much more complex plot, but his cast is subpar. I did enjoy the performances of Carolyn Bracken, Tadhg Murphy, and Steve Wall, though.

Molly Manning Walker's How to Have Sex is a coming of age film in which three young British females travel to a cheesy resort in Crete. The usual hijinks ensue in a film not all that dissimilar to Where the Boys Are. Lead Mia McKenna-Bruce, who emanates a star's talent and charisma, provides rueful notes that ground a film teetering on the brink of insubstantiality.

Zoë Kravitz's feature debut as a director, Blink Twice, shows promise. The film is slick, maybe too slick. However, the script ends up regurgitating White Lotus and Knives Out with Channing Tatum starring as Jeffrey Epstein. I did like the supporting cast, especially Alia Shawkat, Christian Slater, Geena Davis, Simon Rex, and Adria Arjona.  

Joker: Folie a Deux

Lady Gaga and Joaquin Phoenix

Before I give the back of my hand to Todd Phillips' Joker: Folie à Deux, I will admit that I have a tiny more respect for it than its widely praised predecessor. Like Gremlins 2 and Raimi's Spider-Man 3, this sequel is an auto-critique from a filmmaker who is, at best, ambivalent about his previous success. Pairing the tortured larynx of Joaquin Phoenix with Lady Gaga in musical numbers seems like an attempt to alienate Joker's incel fanboy base. Mission accomplished.

I kind of liked the goofily burlesque musical numbers. Maybe Phillips learned something when he made that Phish documentary. The rest of the film, though, is a disaster. Gaga has no character to play, so no real sense of folie or amour develops between her and Phoenix, just performative energy. Speaking of which, Phoenix is electric. I could rewatch the film just to savor his smoking, he is the Paganini of puffs, but won't because of the vacuousness that surrounds him. Phillips and his-co-writers base the script's structure around Joker's trial, so they can beat us over the head with the theme that Amerika is a cruel, infotainment based junk culture. A beaten and dead horse as far as I am concerned since Kazan's A Face in the Crowd in 1957. Witnessing the trial means we see a tiresome rehash of the first film with no new insights. It also strands an undynamic director visually within a rigid and static mise en scene. Even the car bombing of the courthouse is dull. I did like the performances of Brendon Gleeson and Steve Coogan and Mark Friedberg's production design. However, Joker 2 confirms that Phillips is not cut out to wrestle with weighty themes. He works best exposing the comic idiocies of the American male in his most entertaining films: The Hangover, Starsky and Hutch, Old School, and, Joker's evil twin, Hated: GG Allin and the Murder Junkies. 

Biff Favorite Pop Music Releases of 2024

                         

 1) Where's My Utopia?                                      Yard Act

 2) Hit Me Hard and Soft                                     Billie Eilish

 3) GNX                                                                 Kendrick Lamar

 4) Hummingbird                                                 Carly Pearce

 5) Ehhthang Ehhthang                                      GloRilla

 6) Cloudward                                                      Mary Halvorson

 7) North American Adonis                                 Buck 65, Doseone & Jel    

 8) Cowboy Carter                                               Beyoncé  

 9) Blackgrass                                                     Swamp Dogg

 10) The Collective                                              Kim Gordon

    

I also enjoyed A Dancefloor in Ndola and albums by Charles Lloyd, Old 97s, X,

Jack White, Hurray for the Riff Raff, Jon Langford, Doechii, Sprints, Mdou Moctar,

Adrianne Lenker, Dua Lipa, Waxahatchee, Tierra Whack, The Paranoid Style, 

Vampire Weekend, Miranda Lambert, Megan Moroney, Jamila Woods, Shaboozey, Chappell Roan, Jamie XX, The Linda Lindas, Sleater-Kinney, Kali Uchis and Schoolboy Q.

             

Biff's Best Books Read in 2024

   

 1) Harlem Shuffle by Colson Whitehead

I've enjoyed Whitehead's prose since his days as a reporter for The Village Voice and have looked forward to each of his novels since the release of The Intuitionist in 2000. I waited a bit to read Harlem Shuffle because of the praise it received and because I anticipated that a book about New York City in the 1970s would give Whitehead a chance to show off his reportorial skills on a city he loves. I was not disappointed and thoroughly savored the book. He belongs to the American realist tradition: Crane, James, Dreiser, Hemingway, and Mailer. Perhaps the preeminent American writer after the death of Cormac McCarthy.

 2) Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk

This 2009 novel by the Polish Nobel laureate is a ferocious thriller. Recent events in Europe has only made this work more timely.

 3) The Mad and the Bad by Jean-Pierre Manchette

The best novel by the French writer who in the 1970s combined pulp and philosophy. A book at once delirious and, yet, tightly focused.

 4) They Don't Shoot Cowards by John Henry Rees

A wryly amusing Western genre tale from 1973 set in a mining boom town. I sought out this author because he wrote a novel entitled The Looters which provided the basis for one of my favorite films, Don Siegel's Charley Varrick. They Don't Shoot Cowards is a memorable rebuke to Western machismo. I'll be scouring the bargain bins of Portland's book shops for more of Reese's work. 

 5) You Dreamed of Empires by Álvaro Enrigue

A gory, phantasmagoric, and funny novel about Cortez and Montezuma from the Mexican writer. Enrigue's novel about Caravaggio, Sudden Death, is one of the great novels of the current century. You Dreamed of Empires is almost as good. 

 6) Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin

 I never expected to enjoy a novel about game programmers, but I was enthralled by this book which contains interesting ruminations on love, friendship, technology, and Macbeth. 

 7) Low Life by Lucy Sante

The only non-fiction book on this list unless you count King Jesus. Sante's book is a portrait of the demimonde of 19th century New York in all its seamy glory. History can be fun!

 8) Normal People by Sally Rooney

 I give.

 9) The Maniac by Benjamin Labatut

 I never expected to enjoy a novel about physicists, but the Chilean's novel entertained and educated me. 

10) King Jesus by Robert Graves

 A historical novel that gives an alternate history to the Lion of Judah. Cracked, but brilliant.

I also enjoyed:

Avid Reader by Robert Gottlieb

Holding My Own in No Man's Land by Molly Haskell

Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner

The Invincible by Stanislaw Lem

I'm Glad My Mom's Dead by Jennette McCurdy

Mortals by Geoffrey Rush

Crook Manifesto by Colson Whitehead