The Screengrab : bill pullman

Catching Up with the Lynches, David and Jennifer

Phil Nugent — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 19:00:00 GMT

The Guardian recently sent two writers on different expeditions to track down David Lynch, currently camping out as Gaby Wood discovered, in "a steep, strange, snake of a street and sheer, straight steps is a set of concrete buildings clinging onto the side of the Hollywood Hills", and his daughter Jennifer, who's been busy clearing the ground for the U.K. release of her own second feature as a director, Surveillance. Wood's own feature is short on terrific new quotes from the great man, which probably reflects less on her journalistic abilities than on where Lynch's head is at these days: he's still deep in that "Film and me are quits!" space he's been promoting ever since he discovered digital video and made Inland Empire. Wood describes that work, accurately, as "a three-hour ode to impenetrability.") " 'I just love this camera,' Lynch says, in his nasal, deliberate, almost robotically enthusiastic voice. We are looking at a large chiaroscuro nude, which has been printed in two parts and hung on the wall, and Lynch is telling me about his Hasselblad digital. Unbelievable. Thirty-nine million pixels. The camera remembers something like 4,000 pieces of information per photograph. It is machine. It's a machine.' A look of delight passes across his face. 'It's just a glorious world,' he says.

It's nice to know that he's happy. Those who saw the documentary Lynch know that the director now spends a lot of time in his own "bunker", which includes offices and studios and recording equipment, piling up cigarette ashes while waiting for inspiration to hit. Word has apparently reached Lynch that he has nothing left to prove, and his attitude towards his future movie career seems to be that if he has a reason to make another film, he supposes he will. "Sometimes I get an idea for cinema. And when you get an idea that you fall in love with, this is a glorious day. That idea may just be 1a fragment, but it holds something. It might be a scene, or a part of a scene, or a character, or a way the character talks, a light or a feel ... You write that idea down. And thinking about that idea will bring other ideas in – there's a hook to it. And things start to emerge. And then you see, one day, a script. A script is just words to remind you of the ideas. And you follow that, but always staying on guard, in case other ideas come in, because a thing isn't finished till it's finished. And one day, it's finished." But if he never gets the money to make another movie, "I don't care. See, a painting is much cheaper than making a film. And photography is, you know, way cheap. So if I get an idea for a film, there are many ways to get it together and go realize that film. There's really nothing to be afraid of." In the meantime, he's returned to his first love, painting, and he also makes two-dimensional art works, and shoots photographs. He has a special fondness for nudes in factories--decaying factories, "factories [that] are defunct, celebrated for their decay and decomposition in a way that renders them organic," like the pencil factory in Eraserhead if it had spent a few decades under water.

Wood writes that "In the course of our interview Lynch had made (I felt) a series of didactic yet meaningless speeches of varying length, none of which lent itself to illustrating any particular point. But afterwards I found myself laughing, because I realised he was not so much unforthcoming as bordering on the Delphic. He is – unbudgingly, impenetrably, but nevertheless magnificently – a character of his own making. In his movies the characters who talk like this – a sort of scattershot guru-speak, in which sayings are either wise or total rubbish, depending on what sticks – are fortune-tellers, random ciphers or mysterious orchestrators of strange plots (the dancing dwarf in Twin Peaks, the Cowboy in Mulholland Drive, the witchy neighbour in Inland Empire). In other words, the most unnatural among the dramatis personae. But when you listen to Lynch you realise they are (in their delivery at least) the most natural, the most like him." It turns out that the Oracle of Missoula, Montana recently got married, for the fourth time. The new Missus Lynch is Emily Stofle, a 26-year-old actress who was in Inland Empire. (Before that, she played one of the victims of the title character in 2002's Ted Bundy.) Says Wood, "I'm not the first to wonder how someone who is so evangelically "blissed out" can live through the un-bliss of three divorces (he has a child from each marriage) and a well-publicised break up with Isabella Rossellini. To this Lynch will only say: 'We live in the field of relativity. Things change.' "

Visiting Jennifer Lynch, who's now 40, John Patterson failed to ask what she thinks of her new mommy. When Jennifer Lynch was 24, she was busy being raked over the coals for her ill-fated debut film, Boxing Helena. Bad as that movie was, it seems likely that the reaction to it would have been considerably less intense had its auteur's name been Ratskywatsky or something. "It had no chance to be seen through unbiased eyes. Did I know what I was doing? I knew what I was trying to do. And I think it's OK to fail at things. But it was the astonishing rage and, in particular, the suggestion that as a human being I didn't deserve to be loved ever again - something the National Organisation of Women actually said about me. Like, are you fucking kidding me? C'mon, even Hitler deserved to be loved - in fact a little love might have made him a way better guy. I had to retreat and wonder why the reaction to a movie could be so violent and so vitriolic. And there was hostility all over the world - there was no safe place. Whatever I got, I got in a personal way, directed right at me. I would have welcomed a serious discussion of the flaws and intentions of that film, but not a debate about whether I deserved to be alive."

Fortunately, Lynch--who Patterson describes as "rowdy, bawdy, sick-in-the-head funny and very fast with a quip"--was able to use the connection to her father to her benefit this time. "My father called me after he read the script a couple of years ago and he said, 'You're the sickest bitch I know!'" Thanks, Pop! But after Jennifer was unable to get funding for Surveillance, "he called ages later and said, 'What's happening with your movie?' and I said 'Zilch.' I told him I don't know if it's the material, if it's the 15 years raising a kid, if it's Boxing Helena, but nobody's interested. And he said, 'What if I put my name on it?' I'm like, 'C'mon Dad, you know how I feel about it.' Because, believe me, it's a big issue for me. But that day I typed: 'Executive producer: David Lynch', and within 48 hours I had more offers than I knew what to do with. I swear, any screenwriter wanting a little attention should just write 'Steven Spielberg' on their script. Who's checking?" The movie stars two veterans of her father's films, Bill Pullman and Julia Ormond, as investigators on the trail of a serial killer, and involves the viewpoint of an eight-year-old girl who picks up on things that the adults around her miss. "I wanted to play with the wisdom and clarity of a child's perception," says Lynch. "And also I like the idea of the serial killer movie in a way that's not just 'cut 'em up, kill all the sluts'. Although, God knows, I did some of that too. But I wanted terror in broad daylight, in a place that outwardly seems so safe...The second you start being brave about something that terrifies you and start really digging into it, confronting it head on, that's great; it's the cowards who say, 'Nah, not a problem.' And that's a real way in which - as bumper-stickerish as it sounds - art can save your fucking life. You need a place to put all that stuff."

Connery, Lazenby, Moore, Dalton, Brosnan, Craig, Obama...

Phil Nugent — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 19:00:00 GMT

We're used to seeing actors endorse political candidates, but not like this: in an interview with that distinguished cultural journal Parade, Daniel Craig sizes up the American candidates for president and decides which of them is best-suited to take his job. After asking Craig about which Hollywood "tough guy" he would most like to emulate (“The obvious choice for me would be Bogart. Not only because of that ease he had with his unique take on masculinity, but also—and this is much more important—because he got to sleep with Lauren Bacall.”), interviewer Kevin Sessums hits him with the big one: “Who do you think would be the better James Bond—Barack Obama or John McCain?” As Sessums reports, "Craig doesn’t hesitate. 'Obama would be the better Bond because—if he’s true to his word—he’d be willing to quite literally look the enemy in the eye and go toe-to-toe with them. McCain, because of his long service and experience, would probably be a better M,' he adds, mentioning Bond’s boss, played by Dame Judi Dench. 'There is, come to think of it, a kind of Judi Dench quality to McCain.'”

In other election season movie news, Reuters is reporting that a majority of people who responded to a Moviephone.com poll voted Harrison Ford's character in Air Force One as their favorite movie president, coming in ahead of Morgan Freeman in Deep Impact. Trying to explain this, Moviefone's Scott Robson says, "It seems everybody is looking for a commander-in-chief who can come in and take command. Our readers voted with their hearts at a time when you have the economy going down the tubes, but in an ideal world it would be great to have a president who can kick some ass." It will be remembered that presidents Ford and Freeman stood up to Gary Oldman in a Satanic goatee and a big fucking rock from space, respectively. Others who made it onto the top ten include Bill Pullman in Independence Day, Jack Nicholson in Mars Attacks!, and Jeff Bridges in The Contender, who, respectively and with varying results, stood up to alien attackers, more alien attackers, and Gary Oldman in an Antonin Scalia haircut. E. G. Marshall in Superman II finished out of the money entirely, proving that if you balance the budget but also kneel before invading Kryptonian supermen, one guess which act is the one that everyone remembers.

Fantastic Fest Review: "Surveillance"

Scott Von Doviak — Sat, 20 Sep 2008 21:00:00 GMT

Surveillance begins in typically Lynchian fashion, with the FBI arriving in a small town beset by violent tragedy. We're a long way from Twin Peaks, however, and this is no David Lynch film. It's the much belated follow-up to Boxing Helena by the Peaks auteur's daughter, Jennifer Lynch, and while it begins as a routine thriller, by the end it has turned into one long sick joke.

The Feds in this case are Sam Hallaway (Bill Pullman) and Elizabeth Anderson (Julia Ormond), taking over for local law enforcement in the investigation of a mass murder on a remote country road. The victims were passengers from three different vehicles: a family in a station wagon, two cops in a patrol car, and a couple of junkies fleeing from a drug deal gone awry. The survivors have all been assembled at the police station and are questioned separately, with Hallaway overseeing it all via surveillance cameras.

Each survivor has something to hide, so nobody is telling the whole truth - except perhaps for the little girl from the station wagon. Bobbi Prescott (Pell James) isn't interested in discussing the drug dealer who expired in her presence, while Officer Bennett (Kent Harper, who co-wrote the screenplay) would prefer not to disclose the full nature of his unorthodox law enforcement methods.

Only those of us in the audience are privy to the whole truth, as the survivors' stories unfold in flashbacks that contradict the testimony being given. At about the halfway point, the movie goes off the deep end - at least it seems that way until the big finale arrives and you realize, "No, now it's really going off the deep end." There's no way to discuss it in depth without revealing some huge spoilers, but if the whole point of Surveillance is to get its viewers thinking, "Dude, this is fucked up!" - well, mission accomplished. If there's a larger point, I'm not sure I want to know what it is.

Related:
Vanishing Act: Jennifer Lynch
Welcoming Jennifer Lynch Back with Open Arms

The Rep Report (September 18--25)

Phil Nugent — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 21:30:00 GMT

AUSTIN, TEXAS: This year's Fantastic Fest, a hearty wallow in horror, sci-fi, martial arts, and other forms of genre mania, kicks off today and runs through the 28th. This year's line-up of feature films include Tokyo!, an omnibus film featuring segments directed by Michel Gondy, Bong Joon-Ho, and Leos Carax; boundary-pushing shockers ranging from the infamous Deadgirl (which tested the limits of the Toronto Film Festival's Midnight Madness venue) to the lovable Jack Brooks Monster Slayer, starring Robert Englund; Your Name Here, a sci-fi fantasy starring Bill Pullman as a fictionalized version of Philip K. Dick; and documentaries on gimmickmeister William Castle, the renegade roots of the Australian film scene, and the efforts of a 12-year-old filmmaker named Emily Hagins to craft her own zombie flick. Local coverage of the event kicks off in earnest with Austin Chronicle reporter Joe O'Connell's visit with the talent behind the homegrown Bigfoot movie Wild Man of the Navidad.

VICTORIA, BRITISH COLUMBIA: The 11th Annual Antimatter Film Festival kicks off tomorrow and runs through September 27. The aritstically ambitious festival has long been established as perhaps the biggest showcase for short films in North America; this year marks a sort of breakthrough for the degree to which they've stepped up their list of features, but a glance at the crowded schedule their dedication to the underappreciated world of short cinema remains heroically undiminished.

Yesterday's Hits: Independence Day (1996, Roland Emmerich)

Paul Clark — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 19:00:00 GMT

The more research I do into potential Yesterday’s Hits titles, the more I begin to think that true classics that were hugely popular in their time are an anomaly. This seems especially true of big, effects-driven summer blockbusters. When throwing tens- or even hundreds- of millions of dollars behind a movie, the studio is reluctant to take any unnecessary risks. Of course, there are still films that try to be unique and special, but they’re a risky proposition, since for every Back to the Future there’s a Hulk. More often than not, studios leave little to chance in order to make a splashy, inoffensive movie that appeals to as many people as possible. And while movies like this sometimes make a lot of money, they rarely linger in the public consciousness for very long. By way of example, and just in time for Independence Day, I offer up… well, Independence Day.

What made Independence Day a hit?: A few months ago, I spotlighted one of the biggest hits of the 1970s Irwin Allen disaster movie cycle, The Towering Inferno. The key to that movie’s success was the combination of big stars, state-of-the-art effects, and plenty of destruction to keep audiences entertained. When making Independence Day, the major inspiration of director/producer team Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin was to fuse the Irwin Allen formula with an alien-invasion plot a la War of the Worlds. And while Independence Day lacked the megastars of its 70s-era predecessors- its top-liners were Will Smith, then best-known to many from TV’s The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, a post-Jurassic Park Jeff Goldblum, and Bill “Not Paxton” Pullman- the relatively low-wattage cast only served to direct more attention to the effects-driven mayhem.

Realizing this, Emmerich, Devlin, and 20th Century Fox mounted a highly effective advertising campaign that played up the movie’s effects. Even today, the movie’s most iconic image contains no actors whatsoever, but simply shows an alien craft blowing up the White House. And despite the lack of box-office draws, the ads paid off magnificently, with the movie earning over $300 million in the United States alone, making it the highest-grossing movie of 1996. In addition, Independence Day propelled Smith to movie superstardom and launched his self-promoted reign as the king of July 4th releases.

What happened?: For a movie that enjoyed such popularity on its initial release, Independence Day enjoyed very little long-term love. The major reason for this was because there was very little about that movie that hadn’t been cribbed from earlier, better-loved blockbusters. The plot was formulaic, the characters were one-dimensional, and the aliens bore a strange resemblance to the extraterrestrial baddies from the Alien franchise. Even the movie’s major selling point- the effects- suffered in the long run. Independence Day was made to enjoyed in theatres, so inevitably the movie’s effects would suffer on the small screen, and as the years passed they became less impressive in light of more groundbreaking effects like those in Titanic and the Lord of the Rings trilogy. And really, without plot, characters, aliens and special effects, what’s left to Independence Day?

Does Independence Day still work?: Surprisingly, yes. Of course, for the movie to work it requires some willful suspension of disbelief. And by “some,” I mean “a whole truckload.” To put it bluntly, Independence Day is pretty kind of stupid, and the more one thinks about the plot the dumber it gets. Even more than most alien-centric thrillers, the logic behind the invasion just doesn’t hold water. Similarly, the human race’s eventual solution to the threat is so harebrained that one could hardly be blamed for rolling one’s eyes.

Likewise, most of the characters are pretty standard-issue. Each is assigned a quirk and a conflict and set loose within the story, and their separate character trajectories all proceed more or less as we expect them to. Some of the actors do a better job than others at making them work- Smith has an easy charm and Goldblum’s nebbish routine is almost always fun, but Pullman is clearly keeping his more eccentric impulses in check to play the President. In addition, the film’s most entertaining supporting character (Brent Spiner’s endearingly daffy alien expert Dr. Okun) isn’t around nearly long enough, while the most irritating (Judd Hirsch as Goldblum’s perpetually kvetching dad) has far too much screen time. Of all the characters in the movie, he survives?

Yet the movie does more or less what it sets out to do- that is, to entertain the audience by blowing stuff up real good. Emmerich and Devlin’s hearts might not be in Independence Day’s story or characters, but they’re certainly in the explosions, and they definitely deliver in this area. I think it’s telling that many of the effects in the movie were accomplished at least in part by using detailed models, as the filmmakers were so excited to set the world ablaze onscreen that they actually constructed the models to be blown up rather than simply using all-CGI effects like many other movies of the period. As a fan of old-school analog effects, I appreciated the extra effort that went into doing this.

Listen, by any rational standards Independence Day is not a very good movie. It’s formulaic, and I’m pretty sure I killed some brain cells just by watching it again. But deep within the heart of many a moviegoer there’s a part that can’t resist movies that are loud and dumb and willfully cheesy with plenty of explosions, to say nothing of Will Smith talking about “whupping E.T.’s ass.” To ask for intelligence from Independence Day is like reading Strindberg for the jokes- that’s not the point, so why bother looking? As Pope John Paul II once said of another potential Yesterday’s Hits entry, “it is what it is,” and for what it is, it gets the job done. Sometimes, that’s enough.

Cannes Rundown, Day 9: Shoot, coward. You're only going to kill a man.

Paul Clark — Fri, 23 May 2008 04:11:00 GMT

Steven Soderbergh’s mammoth two-part epic Che may not be the most universally loved film in competition this year, but it’s certainly become the most talked-about so far. Here’s a small smattering of reactions to the film, which stars Benicio Del Toro.

Glenn Kenny- “for better or worse… in terms of pop iconography, nothing says "overthrowing the system" better than the iconic image of Che. Good thing then, as far as my opinion is concerned, that Soderbergh doesn't have a rabble-rousing bone in his body. Che benefits greatly from certain Soderberghian qualities that don't always serve his other films well, e.g., detachment, formalism, and intellectual curiosity.”

Variety’s Todd McCarthy- ““Che” is too big a roll of the dice to pass off as an experiment, as it’s got to meet high standards both commercially and artistically. The demanding running time also forces comparison to such rare works as “Lawrence of Arabia,” “Reds” and other biohistorical epics. Unfortunately, “Che” doesn’t feel epic -- just long.”

Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian- “The Cannes film festival now has a serious contender for the Palme d'or. Steven Soderbergh's four-and-a-half hour epic Che, about the revolutionary Ernesto "Che" Guevara, was virile, muscular film-making, with an effortlessly charismatic performance by Benicio del Toro in the lead role. Perhaps it will even come to be seen as this director's flawed masterpiece: enthralling but structurally fractured - the second half is much clearer and more sure-footed than the first - and at times frustratingly reticent, unwilling to attempt any insight into Che's interior world. We see only Che the public man, the legendary comandante, defiant to the last.”

Believe it or not, there were actually other films at Cannes along with Che. We begin with Atom Egoyan’s Adoration. Screen Daily’s Howard Feinstein- “Following the failed effort to cross over into conventional, commercially viable film-making with Where The Truth Lies (2005), Canadian auteur Egoyan returns to his signature style with Adoration… Unfortunately, the stories here are thin, unnecessarily complicated and glibly cryptic; some sections are difficult to follow, even annoying in their self-consciousness.”

Also in competition, Philippe Garrel’s Frontier of Dawn. Here’s Karina Longworth of SpoutBlog- “There are shots in this film’s second half that are scarier than anything I’ve seen in a horror film in recent years––without the aid of any effect more special than a basic optical print––and simultaneously, incredibly moving in their invocation of a love that won’t die. Or, at the very least, refuses to abide by traditional boundaries of love and death.”

AO Scott on the out-of-competition film Delta- ““Delta,” as much as any so-so Hollywood romantic comedy, seems content to live inside the bubble of its limited ambitions. It is hard to imagine an audience for this film except in places like Cannes. That is not necessarily because the outside public is incurious or unsophisticated, but rather because “Delta” makes no particular effort to reach beyond the international coterie of critics and programmers who see it out of duty and devotion.”

On Johnny Mad Dog, here’s Jonathan Romney of Screen Daily- “Sauvaire gives us some of the most terrifying and feral militia forces ever seen on film. The young soldiers rarely speak beneath a furious yell, terrifying their victims and barking out slogans and morale-boosting chants apparently culled from Vietnam movies. There's a certain Lord Of The Flies horror in the suggestion that these are still children at play in the most murderous way, their battle garb suggestive of a nightmarish carnival.”

Finally, since many of you seem concerned with the whereabouts of Jennifer Chambers Lynch, here’s Time’s Richard Corliss on her new film Surveillance- “it's an authentic, systematically annoying weirdie about the investigation of a roadside homicide. Five were brutally killed by a couple of maniacs in leatherface masks. Now the three shaken survivors are being questioned in a police station by two outside agents (Bill Pullman and Julia Ormond) who are skeptical of the variations in the stories they hear. Think Rashomon meets The Texas Chainsaw Massacre in Twin Peaks, and give lots of leeway for the gooniest improv overacting, and you may get on the warped wavelength of this semi-comic parable of social anarchy.”

Welcoming Jennifer Lynch Back with Open Arms

Phil Nugent — Thu, 22 May 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Mention the name "Jennifer Lynch" to most people, and you expect a certain reaction — a mixture of respect, admiration, and pride. That lasts for about ten seconds, before they realize that they're thinking of that army soldier who was rescued from an Iraqi hospital. That was Jessica Lynch. Jennifer Lynch, as we keep reminding you, is the daughter of David Lynch whose own debut effort as a writer-director was, Dennis Lim writes in the Los Angeles Times "much-derided", which is actually kind of like saying that maiden voyage of the Titanic drew "mixed reviews." Lim, who's had his own career problems of late, got together with Lynch for an interview that might easily have turned out a little like the scene in Jaws where the guys compare each other's scars. The occasion was Lynch's emergence, perhaps from federal protection or her dad's garage, to promote her second feature, Surveillance, which is premiered last night at the Cannes Film Festival. "It feels kind of miraculous being here," she told Lim, "and kind of surreal." Hey, as Keith Richards likes to say, it probably feels kind of miraculous being anywhere! Thenkyewverymuch.

Seriously, Lynch describes herself as "a different person" from the one who made Helena, and not just because she's 40 now instead of 24 — not that that's not a big part of it. But in the time between her two movies, she also raised a twelve-year-old daughter, conquered alcohol abuse, which she describes as "an ongoing process", and recovered, over the course of three surgeries, from major injuries sustained in a car accident. ("The fact that I get to walk down the red carpet tonight and hold my daughter's hand," she says, "is a big deal — they didn't even know if I'd walk at one point.") On the subject of family, Lynch will always have to deal with the fact that people who care about movies may never be able to separate her from the knowledge that she's her father's daughter. Boxing Helena got more attention than many a first-time director's work does because of that, and people may have been primed to pounce. Surveillance, which stars Bill Pullman and Julia Ormond as FBI agents investigating a case in Nebraska, sounds as if she shares her father's interest in voyeurism and small-town rot: "Originally," she says of the script by Kent Harper, "it was about witches. But what I gravitated to were the elements of desolation and the idea of people watching each other. I also liked the idea of a thriller that right from the get-go lets you in on the fact that all these people are lying." Speaking of both her father and her mother, the painter Peggy Reavey, Lynch says that "If there's one gift I've been given from both my parents it's the idea that you make the work you want to make — the joy is in the making. Once it's done, you let it go, and you move on." Which is great. Of course, there are some people who saw Boxing Helena who will never let it go — and Lynch knows that, too. "I'd be lying if I told you it all didn't really mess my head up," she says of the reaction to her first film. "I still can't Google myself today."

Vanishing Act: Jennifer Lynch

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Most of us first became aware of David Lynch’s daughter Jennifer when she authored The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer, a Twin Peaks tie-in book that could have been nothing more than a cheap gimmick. Instead, as Entertainment Weekly noted at the time, The Secret Diary is “gratifyingly faithful to the spirit of Peaks, and is therefore full of unorthodox sex, illegal drugs, casual blasphemy, and a generally negative attitude… Lynch has taken her father's conception of a good girl gone bad and run with it.” (Fewer Peaks fans remember the worthy follow-up, Scott Frost’s hilarious and astute The Autobiography of Special Agent Dale Cooper: My Life, My Tapes; you can read it in its entirety here.)

So it wasn’t too surprising that Lynch the younger got her own director’s chair, nor was it a shock that the subject matter of her debut was a bit off the beaten path. As originally announced, Boxing Helena would star Kim Basinger as a woman who has both arms and legs amputated by an obsessed stalker. At some point Basinger decided that this perhaps was not the best direction for her career and dropped out of the project. (Lynch and her producers sued Basinger for breach of contract and were awarded over $8 million, although the verdict was later overturned.) The part of Helena was recast with Peaks beauty Sherilyn Fenn, and Julian Sands took on the role of the creepy suitor.

“I see it as a love story," said Lynch in 1992, "not a horror film. The image of Venus de Milo is so powerful. Obsessive love is like a series of amputations as you steal from one another. It's inviting, exciting, animalistic. I've been there; I've been drawn to it." But few others were drawn to Boxing Helena when it was released in 1993. “This film has all the psychological depth of a wading pool,” wrote Robert Faires in the Austin Chronicle. “Anything you've imagined without seeing the movie is likely more interesting than what's here.”

Most reviews were as bad or worse. As Lynch told the New York Times last year, the criticism stung. “I was so completely dumbfounded. Not that any creative medium isn’t important, but how was it possible for people to write that I didn’t deserve to be loved, or that I was a misogynist? It’s a movie, folks. It’s not like you walk into a museum and see a painter you don’t like and say: ‘You know what? That guy doesn’t deserve to be loved anymore. He’s a bad person.’ ”

Lynch endured some personal struggles as well, including recurring back pain from a long-ago traffic accident and struggles with the bottle. Now clean and sober, Lynch has returned to that director’s chair for the first time in 15 years with Surveillance, a serial killer thriller starring Bill Pullman (Lost Highway) and Julia Ormond (Inland Empire). It’s due later this year; take a look at the trailer, which features more than a trace of her father’s trademark imagery.

Look Back in Analog: VHS Nostalgia

Phil Nugent — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 18:00:00 GMT

VHS cassettes are clunky, fragile, easily damaged and easy to accidentally tape over. When VHS was still new, and later, when it was a staple of everyday life, moviemakers tended to use it as a symbol of lonely alienation, as in sex, lies, and videotape or David Cronenberg's Videodrome (where the cable-TV huckster played by James Woods, his mind twisted into Silly Putty shapes by exposure to sinister cathode rays, is controlled by his minders via fleshy cassettes that are inserted into a slit he grows in his stomach), or as a chilly modern form of trespass, as in David Lynch's Lost Highway, where someone leaves tapes on Bill Pullman and Patricia Arquette's doorstep, recording ever-closer invasions of their privacy. Introduced in 1976, VHS would somehow defeat Beta in the marketplace and have no trouble dominating laser disc, even though those rival forms offered superior picture quality, but when DVD appeared, offering superior quality and various bells and whistles in a durable, easily portable format, it was as if home video had suddenly caught up with compact disc technology, except that nobody has ever made the claims for VHS that many audiophiles still make for vinyl records as a "warmer", superior recording medium. The last movie released on VHS was A History of Violence in 2005, which means that VHS's commercial life stopped just short of twenty years. But, as 8-track enthusiasts have demonstrated, it's possible to feel nostalgic for anything, and Dennis Lim sees a growing wave of nostalgia for VHS represented in such forthcoming films as Be Kind Rewind and Son of Rambow, as well as such cult objects as the song "Videotape" on the new Radiohead album and "the deliberately lo-fi video" look of the Snoop Dogg video "Sensual Seduction".

Lim points out that "The generation that came of age in the ’80s, as the VCR was becoming a staple, is especially prone to VHS nostalgia," and this really isn't surprising. For those who grew up during the first stages of the home entertainment revolution, VHS will always be like the first car you ever drove. It was the means by which consumers redefined their relationship to movies; suddenly, we were no longer at the mercy of theater and TV programmers, but could dig through film history or take the latest blockbuster home in a little box and watch and re-watch it until we were barking sick of the damn thing. It's hard not to feel some lingering affection for a liberating force like that even after you've been made all too aware of its flaws, and I suspect that I'm not the only movie geek in the world who doesn't continue to hoard a little collection of VHS editions of movies and random oddities that haven't been released on DVD. Lim also reports on a "rarer and geekier phenomenon of VCR nostalgia" represented by Andy Hain, "a software engineer in Brighton, England, [who] maintains the Web site and 'virtual museum' Total Rewind, which scrupulously charts the evolution of VCRs from prehistory to obsolescence. Pride of place is given to the 70-plus vintage video players and cameras in the collection that Mr. Hain has been building since 1993. 'It was mainly the technology that appealed to me,' he wrote in an e-mail message. 'The more I discovered, the more strange and unlikely machines I came across, and I wanted to get hold of them and tinker with them. I also liked the design aspect. The early machines were very expensive and would have been proudly displayed in living rooms. They were styled like top-end hi-fi components, or in some cases like the bridge of the starship Enterprise.'” As for the director of Be Kind Rewind, Michel Gondry, he probably speaks for many in describing one of the natural impulses that makes it harder to let go and ride the wave: “Today new product comes so fast that sometimes the human brain doesn’t have the capacity to adapt.”

Attack of the Half-Assed Hollywood Remakes of Asian Horror Movies

Phil Nugent — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 21:00:00 GMT

With the new Hollywood remake of the Pang brothers' The Eye arriving in theaters this coming Friday — and with the new Hollywood remake of Takashi Miike's One Missed Call hustling out to make room for it — Terrence Rafferty ponders this thing called the glut of American remakes of recent Asian horror pictures. (Not everything gets a pithy term around here.) The success of Gore Verbinski's The Ring (based on the Japanese film Ringu, and Takashi Shimizu’s The Grudge, the director's English-language remake of his own Ju-On, guaranteed that there will many more films of this kind, even though, whether taken individually or as a singular continental phenomenon, adapting Asian horror movies for the Hollywood assembly line is a precarious business. Not that there aren't worse ways to go about it: as Rafferty notes, back in "the Stone Age of exploitation-movie history, shrewd Hollywood producers would simply have done what they did with the Japanese monster movies of that era: chop them up, hastily dub them into English and — if the repackagers were feeling particularly frisky — shoot a few minutes of new footage with a minor, familiar and presumably desperate American actor. Say what you will about remakes, they seem, all in all, a better option than Raymond Burr in Godzilla."

What neither remaking or recutting can easily finesse is the special mood — a haunting, eerie gloominess that seems to link a familiarity with ghosts to a lack of faith in any long-term future on this earth — that permeates so many of the original films. When Takashi Shimizu agreed to go through the chore of making Ju-On again — a task that he must have found to be a congenial one, since he's also made sequels to both the Japanese and American versions and is about to bring forth The Grudge 3 — he was canny enough to have Sarah Michelle Gellar, Bill Pullman, Clea DuVall and William Mapother come to Japan, rather than risk trying to make the story's underpinnings take root in, say, Boston. (Rafferty singles out Dark Water starring Jennifer Connelly and directed by Walter Salles, as a rare example of an uprooted Asian ghost story that works rather well in its new setting — a damp, crumbling fortress of an apartment complex on Roosevelt Island.) Then there are the special idiosyncrasies of some of the filmmakers who have been drawn to this material. There has to be an easier way to make a living than trying to render a Takashi Miike screenplay clear and understandable to a mass audience — didn't it ever occur to Eric Valete, the director of the American version of One Missed Call, that he might be happier walking through open fields in Eastern Europe, to see if there were still active land mines in the area? Nor is there any need to translate the remarkable work of the Japanese director Kiyoshi Kurosawa, who is less a formulaic genre filmmaker than a nightmare poet (and a disciple of Val Lewton) working out his own fantasies of isolation and apocalyptic loneliness, into incoherent junk like the recent Pulse, with Kristen Bell.

As for The Eye, Rafferty detects "a half-detectable increase in optimism" in the new version, which means that the haunted quality that makes the original so hard to shake off may have been lost in translation: "That stranger-in-a-strange-land feeling might be induced by, say, the production values of the American version of The Eye, which, in their relative luxuriousness, suggest a happier, more hopeful view of the world than the starker sets of the Pang brothers do; or by the casting of sunny-looking Jessica Alba as the heroine, played in the original by the beautiful but grim-faced Lee Sin-je. The role is essentially the same: A young blind woman has her vision restored by cornea transplants and begins to see, along with the ordinary sights of everyday life, disturbing, unaccountable visions of shadowy afterlives. Ms. Alba looks unpleasantly surprised; Ms. Lee looks shaken to her core (though somehow less surprised)."

Top Thirteen Greatest Fictional Movie Presidents, Part 2

Peter Smith — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 22:00:00 GMT

Sandy McCallum as Mr. President/David Carradine as President Frankenstein, DEATH RACE 2000 (1975)

In many ways, Sandy McCallum's "Mr. President" in the sci-fi satire Death Race 2000 was a political leader far ahead of his time. He was a charismatic evangelical in tune with the religious right (he began all his presidential addresses with the line "My children, whom I love"); he remained sequestered in his vacation home even in times of crisis (what is Mr. President's fabled Winter Palace in Beijing but a slightly more grandiose version of the big ranch in Crawford?), and most importantly, he struck home with the American people by isolating and identifying the sole cause of all our national woes, foreign and domestic: the hated French! Still, every great leader's time must eventually pass, and when Mr. President finally lost his life in a freak automotive accident, his successor (likewise ahead of the curve: a popular athlete who parlayed his celebrity status into a career in politics), the wonderfully named President Frankenstein, took over. At first, America was worried — the new president, with his outspoken First Lady and his program of progressive reform, seemed like he might be some sort of bleeding-heart liberal — but our minds were eased when his first official act in office was to run over pesky news media personality Junior Bruce with his car. America loves you, President Frankenstein!

Jeff Bridges as President Jackson Evans, THE CONTENDER (2000)

President Evans is a supporting character in this dull message movie about the trouble his female vice-presidential nominee (Joan Allen) has in getting approved, but he's also the movie's wild card, a slick charmer who isn't actively opposed to doing the right thing whenever possible but mostly seems interested in winning with a minimum of confrontational hassle. His hobby is torturing the staff of the White House kitchen by testing their ability to serve him anything he asks for at any hour of the day; at one point he's spotted wandering the halls and ignoring the person talking to him while munching his latest snack and muttering, "Shark steak. Fuckin' shark steak sandwich. . ."

Henry Fonda as The President, FAIL-SAFE (1964)

This grim melodrama, in which American bombers nuke Moscow because of a technical error, opened some ten months after Dr. Strangelove, an unusual case of the straight version of a story coming after the parody. Actually, this version is fairly funny if you watch it now in the wrong spirit. The nameless president winds up averting World War III by ordering a nuclear strike on New York City to make it up to the Russians, even though the First Lady happens to be in the Big Apple. The movie also came out the same year as The Best Man, in which Fonda played a presidential candidate too pure in heart to develop the killer instinct needed for the job. Fifteen years later he would play the U.S. president again, this time in the disaster movie Meteor. (And let's not forget that one of his early roles was as Young Abe Lincoln in the John Ford classic.) Maybe the real question posed by Fail-Safe is, if Hollywood is such a bastion of liberal bias, then how come every time Fonda, the movie star known as the embodiment of liberal humanism, got cast as the leader of the free world, half the planet wound up in danger of obliteration?

Franchot Tone as The President, ADVISE AND CONSENT (1962)

When Otto Preminger's Washington melodrama opened, New York Times reviewer Bosley Crowther glowered at it through his lorgnette and wrote that the filmmakers' "intense and deliberate projection of a cynical attitude toward the actions of politicians extends right up to the President of the United States, whom they frankly portray in this fiction as a man of peculiar principles. He is made (in a tasteless portrayal of a sick, testy man by Franchot Tone) to be tolerant of cheap conniving and the telling of lies under oath." Translated into English, this means that Tone's character is one of the few movie presidents one can imagine actually running the country, a tough, hard-bitten old son of a bitch who knows how to play the game. Unfortunately, we all have our bad days, and he comes to grief after he makes the mistake of trying to appoint — it's him again! — Henry Fonda as Secretary of State. Tone's president, worn out from political machinations and Fonda's high-minded dithering, ultimately succumbs to a heart attack, leaving the country in the hands of his vice-president, Lew Ayres, who makes Hank Fonda look like Solomon crossed with Sean Connery.

Bill Pullman as President Thomas J. Whitmore, INDEPENDENCE DAY (1996) and Gene Hackman as President Alan Richmond, ABSOLUTE POWER (1997)

Taken together, these two films, originally released a little more than six months apart, go a long way towards summing up the Clinton presidency as it was filtered through different fantasy lenses in the popular culture of its time. Pullman's president is, like President Bartlett on The West Wing, a fantasy of an improved Bill Clinton, the Clinton that some disappointed observers wanted him to be: a sensitive liberal-minded family man, but with a record of military heroism (in the first Gulf War) and the ability to keep his dick in his pants. When the movie opens, he's struggling to keep his job as the media and his political enemies paint him as spineless and ineffectual, but the extraterrestrial invasion gives him the chance to show what he's made of: he dusts off his flight suit and kicks a little alien butt, albeit only after the destruction of the White House and the death of his First Lady. (She's played by Mary McDonnell, who wound up getting her own TV presidency after robots took their turn trying to wipe out the human race on Battlestar Galactica.) President Richmond represents Clinton the defiler, the rampaging amoral deviant unfit for polite society, let alone high office; the film's director-star, Clint Eastwood, has to take matters into his own hands and bring about justice after he's seen Richmond's Secret Service bodyguards kill a woman who was trying to defend herself from a violent sexual assault at POTUS's hands. The cover-up is handled by the president's evil, female chief of staff (Judy Davis), a Hillary even he couldn't bring himself to marry. Oddly enough, Absolute Power also laid the seeds for a future TV presidency: one of Richmond's murderous goons is played by Dennis Haysbert, who later became the martyred President David Palmer on 24.

— Paul Clark, Bilge Ebiri, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce, Vadim Rizov

Check back tomorrow for Part 3!