David Lynch's Three Men and a Baby

First there was Lynch's version of Return of the Jedi. Now we have the chilling tale of Three Men and a Baby.

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David Lynch's Interview Project

David Lynch has started a project to interview people and post a video every three days for a year.

Jess was our first interview. We found him sitting on the side of the road during the middle of the day. He told us he was waiting for his trailer to be repaired so he could go live alone in the desert. Although hesitant at first, Jess agreed to spare a bit of his time and talk to us. His rugged delivery and appearance soon gave way to a gentle man who was just looking for some peace in his life. After leaving Jess we headed further east into Arizona to look for our next interview.

Check out the first episode.

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Classic Scene - Wild at Heart

Back before he became a characature of himself Nicolas Cage was a cool actor. Watch him in David Lynch's classic, Wild at Heart.

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Grant Morrison talks about Batman And Robin

Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely's new comic book series, Batman And Robin, looks like it will be great.

The debut of the series follows the events of Batman R.I.P., Final Crisis, and Battle for the Cowl in which the original Batman, Bruce Wayne, apparently died at the hands of DC Comics villain Darkseid and features the winner of the Battle for the Cowl as the new Batman. The conclusion to Battle of the Cowl shows Dick Grayson becoming the new Batman, while Damian Wayne becomes the new Robin.

I love both the creators involved and now that Dick Grayson (Robin, Nightwing) has now taken on the mantle of the Batman we should see some cool wisecracking action.

io9 have some more news on the feel of the series. Grant Morrison describes it below.

The only way I can explain the tone is that I had this idea of recapitulating the television show in a certain way... I was thinking of what other aspects of Batman are completely out of favor - that people tend to hate and don't seem to work anymore. The Batman 60s TV show was one of those. Obviously it was camp and a product of its time. But when I was a kid I thought it was really serious. [laughs] So I wanted to take some of that bizarre, psychedelic feel. I wanted to take the idea of very short, punchy stories that just kind of existed on their own terms. Rather than Batman RIP, which was a big, epic story that had a lot of secret subtext and hidden meanings and stuff, these are just crazy stories that are pretty upfront.

It was taking that aspect of the Batman TV show and then trying it in with David Lynch and Twin Peaks. [laughs] And creepy European cartoons and marionettes and stuff like that. That bad dreamlike feeling of a Marilyn Manson video in the '90s, or like Chris Cunningham's video for 'Windowlicker'. [laughs] Again, it was about trying to fuse those two things together into a bad trip, Lewis Carroll kind of world.

Morrison details that the tone of the series will be a "reverse" of the normal dynamic between Batman and Robin, with, "a more light-hearted and spontaneous Batman and a scowling, bad ass Robin." Morrison also divulges that this is a continuation of his previous work on the Batman character, although this is a different title than what he wrote previously. "This is the next book in what will be a 5-volume series beginning [with] Batman & Son, but it can be read on its own too. Batman and Robin welcomes new readers!" Morrison also said that even though the series deals with familiar identities, the series features all new villains and situations, but also revealed that some villains were glimpsed in Batman #666.

When asked if the series would deal with the new Batman being unable to fill Bruce Wayne's proverbial shoes, Morrison answered, "When I started out I had that in mind, and I thought we'd finally prove that nobody else could be Batman. But I do believe certain aspects of RIP were about how nobody but this guy could be Batman. I think with this, it's fun to start by seeing what happens when someone else tries. Sometimes it goes wrong, and sometimes it goes really well. Some of the things these guys do are things that Bruce Wayne would never have thought to do". In regards to using Frank Quitely as the artist, Morrison described the difference between this particular collaboration with previous ones, specifically on JLA Earth-2 and All Star Superman. For instance, Morrison asked Quitely to choreograph the flow of the action in his own way, rather than through Morrison's normally heavily detailed scripts.

Morrison said, "I've asked [Quitely] to re-introduce the much-maligned sound effects to superhero comics, but in a way that integrates them more closely with the art." He also described Batman and Robin as, "a shorter, pacier collaboration so we've tried to keep it looser and more open than All Star Superman.

When given the question about a possible appearance by the Joker, Morrison said, "I think we'd all love to see [Quitely's] take on the Joker, so yeah, I'd like to think I can make that happen in some way."

What do you think about that? Will you be reading it?

The comic is due out next week.

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Star Wars: Return of the Jedi by David Lynch

George Lucas approached David Lynch to direct the third Star Wars film. He of course, turned it down. What if he hadn't?

Source: Topless Robot

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The Soul Detective starring David Lynch

A detective enters a train car were he finds different manifestations of a force that haunts the place. Using his telepathic powers he tries to enter the mind of a recently deceased man before all his memories vanish.

Twitch have this to say about it: This ten minute short is the final entry in a web series called simply The Think Tank, an interview series with a variety of film makers but doing a straight up talking-head piece just wouldn’t suit either Pinheiro or Lynch, and so they’ve come up with something entirely different - a short that uses Lynch’s words as the launching point for a surreal, stream of consciousness

Director: Davi de Oliveira Pinheiro

The Soul Detective from Think Tank on Vimeo.

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Surveillance, 2008 - Review and Trailer for film by Jennifer Lynch (That's David Lynch's daughter don't you know)

Director: Jennifer Lynch
Starring: Julia Ormond, Bill Pullman, Michael Ironside, Pell James, Ryan Simpkins
Running Time: 98 minutes
Score: 7 / 10

This review by Bob Doto over on Quiet Earth. I'm a big fan of all things Lynchian so here is a bit more on his daughter's latest.

Two FBI agents come to town to investigate a handful of gruesome murders by some eerily masked villains, and interview three recent witnesses to their most recent blood fest. Each person has a vastly different version of the story to tell.

Every five minutes while watching Surveillance, my appreciation of the film shifted. My first thought after having seen roughly 15-20 super low-budget shorts over the course of a weekend, was “Oh. This is a ‘real movie’ with a budget.” Then I thought “But, it’s kind of got a low-budget feel to it. I like that.” Then I’m thinking to myself “Why is Bill Pullman acting like he’s got to go to the bathroom all the time?” Then I was like, “This movie is soooooo dramatic.” After which I thought, “Why are they making it so obvious that I’m not supposed to see certain key clues in the story? That’s annoying.” Then of course, “God. Did you have to show me all that violence in such detail?” And finally as the ending started to unfold, “Ooooooh. Now I get it. You got me. Now I like it.” What a frickin’ rollercoaster.

What’s amazing about writer/director Jennifer Chambers Lynch (Boxing Helena, daughter of David and Peggy Lynch) and writer Kent Harper is not that they convinced me to loath every single character in their film (including that practically mute and supposed to be likable pig-tailed wunderkind), but that I actually stayed around to see what became of their fates. Frankly, when you’ve seen as many films as I have at this year’s NYHFF, you just don’t get off that easy. If your story revolves around the lives of absolutely despicable and heinous beat cops, a heartless lying junky and her equally stellar boyfriend, and a family of oblivious yuppies you’ve got to give me something besides beautiful Southwestern desert to keep me from bailing.

How did they do it?

Well, A. I’m a sucker for the way this film is shot: nice and wide, naturalistic, scenically understated. B. The characters were so awful to one another that I almost couldn’t leave without seeing if what I was in fact seeing was true. C. Bill Pullman’s twitchy mouth. Weird! And D. I just wasn’t sure if what I was watching was an example of dramatic genius or totally ignorant as to what makes character relations believable. I THINK it leans closer to dramatic genius, but it is held back by its overt occultation of information.

And what, may you ask, is “overt occultation of information?” That is the annoyance of a movie that doesn’t show you what the little girl in the interrogation room drew with crayons when everyone else in the film sees it and practically craps their pants. It’s also when the same little girl whispers into someone’s ear something really profound, but you don’t get to hear it because we’re obeying the laws of third-person semi-omniscience (but only when it’s convenient). It’s a ten-cent trick suitable only for the worst of television drama.

So, what’s to think about this film? I can’t give it more than seven, because it exemplifies the worst of manipulative dramatic cinema, but I can give it a solid seven because the film is rather stunning to watch and the story will definitely catch you off guard.

How do you like the sound of that? Will you see it when it eventually gets released?

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The Forbidden Door (Pintu Terlarang) Trailer

Pintu Terlarang (Forbidden Door) trailer

"A successful sculptor whose life run by domineering wife and mother discovers a secret organization in which members can watch the lives of most dysfunctional, depraved families in the town which are fed from hidden cameras. When he stumbles upon a channel showing a little boy who’s being viciously abused by his parents, he tries to find the kid to save him. But his quest leads him back to a secret door in his own house that could be the answer to many puzzles."
This is directed by Indonesian writer / directorJoko Anwar and looks dark and disturbing in a David Lynch kind of way.
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New Yorker Film Festival: The 5 Scariest Movies Ever?

This from Boing Boing:

Ben Greenman of the New Yorker presents his list of the five scariest movies of all time. They are:

1. “Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” Tobe Hooper (1974)

2. “The Silence of the Lambs,” Jonathan Demme (1991)

3. “The Body Snatcher,” Robert Wise (1945)

4. “Night of the Hunter,” Charles Laughton (1955)

5. “Mulholland Drive,” David Lynch (2001)

David Lynch is the master of the eerie, which has also been called the uncanny, and his strongest films successfully deliver shock-horror at the conclusion of scenes that are either comically mundane or traditionally suspenseful. The film’s signal moment comes in the Winkie’s scene, which uses a highly traditional location (a diner) and traditional suspense tricks (P.O.V. shots, menacing background music) as prelude to one horrible moment. One respondent to the in-office survey put it this way:

I have seen the movie many times, and every time my chest tightens up and it occurs to me that I might actually die.

The 5 Scariest Movies Ever?

Here's the Mulholland Drive scene mentioned above and I must agree it cranks up the creeping horror as it moves on.

What do you think of the selection? What's the scene from any movie that creeps you out the most?

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Just some cool pictures I spotted on my rounds

David Lynch

The Joker

FAIL

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7 Cut Moments in Cult Film

In Hollywoodland, that missing scene can make the difference between PG13 and R. Between classic and hysteric...

Article by Martin Anderson @ Den of Geeks.

Having reviewed the excellent new Wings Of Desire special edition yesterday, I was shocked to find that Wim Wenders’ classic and esoteric tale of angels in Berlin was at one point set to end with a pie fight. All the footage – and I mean the footage from all four cameras covering the slapstick fight between Bruno Ganz, Otto Sander and Solveig Donmartin – is included in the 30 minutes of deleted scenes, and Wenders himself is offering a prize to whoever can edit it back into the film on Final Cut Pro (or whatever) most effectively.

Thank God, he recognises it was a mad end-of-shoot idea, and constitutes more the beginning of the wrap party for Wings Of Desire than the end of principal photography, but...blimey, he was close there, for a while.

It set me thinking of the other near-misses from cult film…

7: HOURS of incomprehensible shit - Fire Walks With Me (1992)
As a lover of Eraserhead, The Elephant Man and Dune, and a big respecter of Wild At Heart, Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks, I have to date the release of FWwM as the point where the last of David Lynch’s very useful anti-psychotics left his system. I hear that drugs can be stored in body fat and release their effects in later years, when the fat becomes metabolised for sustenance; therefore a rigorous diet must have kept ‘Out To Lunch’ Lynch balanced enough to make the delightful The Straight Story (1999), before getting utterly lost again in Mulholland Drive (1992).

Anyway, this is a director who makes legendarily lengthy cuts of his movies (see Dune below), and FWwM/Peaks fans are still clamouring for the missing three hours of Lynch’s cinematic outing for his Twin Peaks retinue. ?yhW

Maybe it’s an Alien 3 deal, where the restoration of essential footage will suddenly make sense of the whole thing. But if it takes three hours extra for that to happen, it does suggest a certain want of narrative economy.

6: Jessica and Logan pose for ice-sculpture – Logan’s Run (1976) My motives for wanting to see this, though not the purest, are mixed up with annoyance at how close this scene came to being in the movie. After Roscoe Lee Brown’s robot guardian ‘Box’ has welcomed our heroes to his ice-cave, but before he lets slip the fact that he has flash-frozen all the other ‘runners’ who came there looking for Sanctuary, the eccentric cyborg asks the stunning couple if they will pose nude for an ice-sculpture. Being good guests, they agree…

That scene was refused as too provocative for the rating that Logan’s Run was going for, but annoyingly it is rendered in the Marvel comics adaptation! Arghhh. So close.

Since I can’t really put Logan’s Run in twice, I’ll have to also mention the other legendarily missing scene, which is the bawdier original cut of Michael York and Jenny Agutter’s slightly-hilarious slow-motion escape from Rihcard Jordan through the ‘Love Shop’, which is basically a cross between Starbucks and a 70s orgy. Michael Anderson’s racier edit also fell victim to the MGM blue pencil, and the director admits on the commentary that the bowdlerised version familiar to audiences is only a shadow of it.

5: Kurt Russell gets the all-clear – The Thing (1982)
John Carpenter makes clear in the extras on The Thing (R1 release) DVD that Universal wanted coverage of a happier ending to his nihilistic cult shocker. Being a practical man and not committed to using it, Carpenter quickly threw together a set-up at the end of shooting where Kurt Russell is in a hospital, having been recovered from the arctic pyrotechnics that now close the movie, and being given a test that proves he is not infected. Russell gives a sigh of relief and that’s it.

I don’t know if the test given is the rather dramatic ‘hot metal’ one that proved a hallmark of the film, but Carpenter’s decision not to include this scene in the otherwise very comprehensive extras on the laserdisc/DVD Thing was the right one, in my opinion. This was not something I needed to see, and it was never part of the reality of the film. Apparently the scene was cut into the movie at certain test screenings; since it proved to have no discernible effect on general audience reaction, Carpenter was allowed to keep the finale bleak and bereft of comfort.

4: James Remar as Hicks – Aliens (1986) Yup, Dexter’s dead dad shot a full two weeks on James Cameron’s sci-fi horror classic as Ripley’s squeeze before being replaced by stalwart Cameronite Michael Biehn. Reports at the time cited a family emergency, though Remar is said to have since admitted that it was due to his excessive drug-use at the time. In the same period Cameron was forced to replace an obstreperous director of photography, and was as plagued by British working practises as LV426 was by xenomorphs, legendarily having to stop work every three minutes for a round of bad sandwiches and greasy tea.

One shot of Remar’s work as Hicks remains in Aliens – as the camera pans down from the alien-encrusted walls to the marines approaching the reactor core, the Hicks walking away from shot is Remar. This was an early SFX shot using a hanging miniature that had just been trashed, and would have been prohibitively expensive to re-shoot. Luckily Remar looks away from camera as soon as it lights on him, and there’s really no telling anyway who is who with all that grungy military get-up.

3: Ripley slapped by Lambert – Alien (1979)
This minor deep-space cat-fight has actually surfaced in recent years, but was quite a curiosity until the Quadrilogy edition; the more so because, as with the Logan’s Run ‘box sculpture’ (see above), the scene was removed after the film had been turned into a graphic novel. So again, this was one that I got to see only in comic form.

Outraged that cool-as-ice Ripley wouldn’t let Dallas and her back on board with the infected Kane (a pretty fucking wise move foiled by the traitormatic Ash), Veronica Cartwright’s character lays into Ripley as soon as she arrives at the infirmary to see how Kane is getting on, but Parker (Yaphet Kotto) quickly intervenes.

Ridley Scott recounts on one of his several commentaries for various versions of Alien that he wasn’t getting the energy and conviction out of the conflict, and told Cartwright to really ‘go for it’ with the slap. Used to the feints, Weaver burst into tears when taking the full force of the blow and remonstrated with herself – so she recounts in Quadrilogy – because Ripley ‘would never have cried’.

Since I can’t mention Alien twice, I will also add that I would love to see more of John Finch’s takes as Kane, before John Hurt was called in to replace the very ill actor, who was subsequently diagnosed with diabetes. That said, the one shot of Finch in the role on the bridge of the Nostromo, which is available on the Quadrilogy edition, finds the actor clearly on the point of passing out. As this was one of his first shots for the film, there may be no more of Finch to see in the role.

2: The ‘star child’ blows up Earth’s nuclear arsenal – 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) The evolved Dave Bowman (Keir Dullea) was originally to not merely go into orbit and gaze fawn-like at the camera but detonate the entire arsenal of Earth’s nuclear weapons. It would have been a ‘nuking from orbit’ that predated Aliens by nearly twenty years, and Kubrick is said to have avoided the idea ultimately because of its similarity to the conclusion of Doctor Strangelove. Since such an aggressive act would possibly mean the end of all life on Earth, this alternate ending paints 2001 in a shockingly different light…

Having spent millions of years growing a civilised race from a bunch of vegetarian monkeys, why punish the very war-like behaviour that you instilled in them yourself with your big black monoliths at the dawn of time? All the space-borne remnants of the human race were clearly dependent on Earth and a long way from any real colonisation, so in effect it would have been kaput for mankind. Perhaps the Star Child was intending to jettison Earth and its people like a second-stage rocket, and continue a new and better race via parthenogenesis?

Apparently special effects for the nuclear wipe-out were actually done – though not finished – by Douglas Trumbull. Again, as with Kurt’s miraculous escape in The Thing (see above), I’m not sure I ever want to really see it…

1: The ‘Little maker’ – Dune (1984) This was for a long time a mystery to all but those who watched the ‘Alan Smithee’ version on network TV in the 1980s, which – in a typical ‘network-cut’ deal with the devil – traded off censorious snips for extended and non-controversial footage that never made it into the cinematic version. One of those cut scenes was an elaborate ritual where the Fremen show Paul how spice is extracted from the baby worms. It’s pretty disgusting, actually, and is found or found absent in various of the five known versions of Dune, but the Smithee abomination – a bloat-out at 177 minutes – definitely has it, and that has been released on DVD after many years of curiosity by fans.

In a side-note, an early script treatment of the adaptation, by Rudolph Wurlitzer (a writer on Sam Peckinpah´s Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid) would have had the fugitive Paul Atreides and his Bene Gesserit mum, the Lady Jessica, in an incestuous tryst after the death of husband/father Duke Leto. Ridley Scott was behind the idea during his involvement on the project before David Lynch was invited to the helm, and the oedipal strand was then firmly nixed. Ten years later, Lynch would probably have done it…

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