I’m making a point to watch Lynch’s work that I haven’t seen. About a month ago, I watched Wild at Heart and Lost Highway. This week, I’ve seen Dune and The Straight Story. I’m surprised to admit that the latter two have stolen my heart far more effectively than the first pair. The Straight Story is the perfect movie if you’re feeling lonely.
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I mean, you’ve got Gamer there, so like…all the other Neveldine/Taylor stuff (Cranks, the second Ghost Rider movie).
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I only recently watched The Straight Story and man did not expect it to hit as hard as it did. Real warmovis feels for at least a few scenes.
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my first David Lynch movie, mom brought it home from blockbuster thinking it was a family film…
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I mean, it is a family film, but.
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i think the first half of lynch’s dune is legit really really good and the second half is a complete mess but an entertaining one!
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Wild at Heart and Lost Highway for some reason have always lacked an emotional something for me to feel compelled by.
You might enjoy Elephant Man if you like those latter two. And I think it often gets overlooked in most convos about Lynch these days.
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man, i love The Straight Story. It’s one of those movies I somehow have multiple copies of because I keep thinking I don’t have it and want it. Two on VHS and one on DVD, d’oh. What did you think of Wild at Heart? I didn’t like it much at first, but I rewatched it last year and loved it. coincidentally, a co-worker just gave me the first book of the sailor/lula series, too!
also, are you on letterboxd? always like hearing what you think about movies
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I feel the same, especially with Lost Highway. It’s dual structure is interesting but I sense almost no heart it in it, like it’s more of a technical exercise.
Wild at Heart is related to Lost Highway through Barry Gifford. Wild at Heart definitely has a heart though. I picked up similar themes with how the two movies were thinking about women. I think these themes are explored better when the women are at the center like they are in Fire Walk With Me, but I still really liked the movie.
I really enjoyed the twisty journey through Oz. It felt a bit like a carnival ride with how it sitched together strange and flamboyant scenes. Dern and Cage are great and the whole ensemble on the edges is fantastic.
I’ve got a MintyJuffowup’s profile • Letterboxd but I never really use it. Maybe I should now that I’m basically out of grad school.
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the under-10 crowd thought this was ok
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aliens was fun i guess i was like aware this was a popular movie but it turns out this is one of those things that a lottt of game designers watched like idk the matrix or die hard
love analog production design this might be my fav james cameron thing bc of how like textured and designerly it is
proof that forklift certified girlies rule the world
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american fiction was excellent
2023 was actually a great year for movies, it’s just that 90% of them came out from sept-dec
I watched The Equalizer. Denzel Washington single handedly takes down the global Russian crime syndicate and the movie makes the interesting decision to never once place him in credible peril. Obviously John Wick isn’t really in any danger but he does get the shit kicked out of him all the time. In this movie Robert McCall dispatches all enemies without ever taking a hit. He does get shot twice but one time he pours boiling honey on it and it heals immediately, and the next time he heats up a doorknob with a blowtorch to seal it shut. Also both times be uses his blood trail to entrap a bad guy so who’s to say getting shot wasn’t actually his plan all along.
So instead of it being like your standard “one last job” movies he’s basically the Terminator and the only real conflict is whether he can give himself permission to kill a shitload of Russians because he promised his dead wife he would live a life of peace. The movie plays into the fact Denzel is an unstoppable killing machine though, and has a lot of fun scenes of Denzel staring like a dead eyed alien at Russian mercs choking to death because he just strung them up using barbed wire or whatever.
It really played up the gore more than I expected and I liked it a lot. The best scene is basically an extended horror movie sequence in which he takes out a Russian merc team one by one in a home depot, killing each one with a different item you can find there.
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Ya the Home Depot scene is one of the best moments in post-Taken boomer operator cinema. I still haven’t gotten around to watching the other two equalizer movies but I’m sure they’re just as… Whatever level of OK the first one is
I just think every actor of roughly that generation should get to do a bad ass dad-rage action movie if they want to. I mean if Odenkirk gets to do it then why not. I want to see Steve Buscemi impale a bunch of guys. Let Sharon Stone karate kick a guys head until it explodes for trying to kidnap her useless adult son. The possibilities are endless!!!
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On that note I’m pretty excited for the Beekeeper. Statham abandons his monastic life as a beekeeper to return to his roots as a “Beekeeper”, a secret society of operators who step in when the normal checks and balances have failed. It basically sounds like “what if the league of shadows from Batman Begins were the good guys…?”
I think based on the trailer he takes on the phone scammer industrial complex, and I saw the trailer literally 20 minutes after I figured out how I had just been phone scammed for $60. So I might be biased
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Yeah, the phone scammer angle feels pretty inspired.
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I loathe Statham as an action star though, his weird hunched bugbear look, his charmless jaw chewing through lines. His action scenes always sit at the intersection of too mannered to be realistic but too shackled to verisimilitude to sing. Glossy joyless meaninglessness. Hated him all the way back to the Transporter (which everyone else likes for some reason)
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I haven’t seen any of them except the first one either but youtube has put this in my recommends about 1000 times and it’s such a concentrated blast of “Denzel the Punisher” that I think it’s all I need to see
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I basically agree, he’s not one of my guys at all, and his flavor of extremely dour action movies don’t really ever work for me. But he forever has a place in my heart for helping get the Crank movies greenlit.
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