Recommendations for Watching While Waiting for Season 3

[baxter]

I've been watching the fifth and final season of Big Love recently. Grace Zabriskie is also amazing in that (and indeed in each of the other series). I think most Peaks fans would enjoy the series if they've never seen it (the first series in particular has a combination of sinister and light-hearted that sits somewhere near Peaks territory).

I saw Celine and Julie Go Boating the other night. I ended up really liking it, though I was not mesmerised from the first frame as some seem to be. I think it gathers momentum once it comes into focus and gets more coherent, even if the atmosphere throughout is lovable. It also made me discover the outstanding blog of LostInTheMovies- stellar work!

I also got round to watching series 1 of The Fall. Great stuff. Very BBC, but gripping and it left me wanting a lot more. I can't imagine what it must have been like to wait for series 2 instead of simply popping the next disc in the drawer.

[QueerStreet]

For a unique, gorgeous looking film, that covers dream logic and philosophical themes such as existentialism, without too much emphasis on narrative, check out
Waking Life by Richard Linklater. One of my favorites of all time.

Thanks, I'll check Waking Life - I loved Slacker. Borgman is probably the better of the two, in terms of entertainment/accessibility. Hors Satan is slow, demanding
and dull at times but it raises similar themes and questions as Borgman e.g. Who is this man, why does he do these things - is he a force for good or evil or totally
beyond such notions .. the kinds of delicious ambiguities we see in Lodge residents. Carax's Pola X is an incredible film - very dark, strange and tragic with hints
of Spoorloos, Gaspar Noe & Von Trier.

[Soolsma]

Ah, Waking Life is like Slacker 2.0. I think it's something Linklater felt needed to be done from a very young age, and that he touched upon in Slacker. You'll like it.

[QueerStreet]

Ah, Waking Life is like Slacker 2.0.

As soon as it started I realised I saw this years ago and really dug it so I'm watching it again .. ah, sweet freedom!
Did you see this animated short addressing similar issues:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cS4Th36zN_g

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cCeeTfsm8bk

[Rainwater]

The first episode of Taboo was pretty good.

[djerdap]

The first episode of Taboo was pretty good.

I concur.

[Rainwater]

From my home country, I reccomend most movies made by Alex van Warmerdam. Especially his movie Borgman (2013) is pretty dang Lynchian.

I watched Borgman last night and enjoyed it a lot, thanks for the recommendation. I'm checking out his other work right now.

[Rainwater]

The first episode of Taboo was pretty good.

I concur.

It got better with the second one, which is always a good sign.
Has anyone noticed the ghost appearances? It seems we can expect at least one in every episode.

[John Justice Wheeler]

Just a few suggestions and some recommendations I haven't seen mentioned so far. I had to break this list up because otherwise it wouldn't post, so this is Part 1.

Some Call It Loving, a 1973 film starring Zalman King, is a fascinating riff on the Sleeping Beauty legend and features a few links to Lost Highway, including Richard Pryor's presence and a jazz musician lead character who is frustrated by his ultimate inability to control the female figures in his life. King's own ventures into often fantastic melodrama in his own later directorial efforts seem to have much of their origin here.

Alan Rudolph is perhaps best known for his stylish and off beat romantic comedies, pitched at a very particular and distinctive level. Many of his films are truly great and I would say that at least Trouble in Mind and Equinox evoke Lynch not just in terms of style but also thematically and in the rich way Rudolph interweaves his comedy and drama laced through with the surreal or fantastical.

Jonathan Glazer's recent Under the Skin is considered by many to be cinema of the highest order but its particular derangement of the sense in conveying the skewed vision of an alien on earth is like both Lynch and Nicolas Roeg.

Craig Macneill's The Boy is not a film that has garnered much attention but it should have as it deeply disturbs on both a psychological and visceral level in its explorations of the early origins of psychopathology.

Carter Smith is a very fine filmmaker whose work remains under known and under appreciated. His early short Bugcrush is disturbing but also genuinely profound in its speculative fiction horror scenario that recalls Cronenberg as well as Lynch but has an unsettling airless quality all its own. His later Jamie Marks Is Dead seems almost like a feature film length development upon the aesthetics and ideas inherent in that short. Both films are brilliant and deserve to be far more well known.

Beth B was and is an experimental NYC based filmmaker and her adaptation of Neal Bell's masterful play Two Small Bodies remains for me her crowning accomplishment. It's a two character intense drama that dislocates notions of fixed identity and slides in and out of surrealism while having Peaks level "real world" resonance.

Philip Ridley's The Reflecting Skin is among the greatest films ever made as far as I'm concerned and very worthy to be positioned next to Lynch's greatest work. It may be obviously influenced by Lynch but if so it is among the few films of that sort that can be said to measure up to its inspiration. Having said that, Ridley's style and aesthetic are very much his own and come from his own particular background in painting. Horrifying and beautiful at the same time. The new UK Blu is the best this film has ever looked. Ridley pursued his themes and developed them further in his equally under seen follow ups, The Passion of Darkly Noon and Heartless both of which are excellent modern day fairy tales.

[N. Needleman]

I believe Craig Macneill also directed the whole of SyFy's Candle Cove, which Harley Peyton wrote for. Great stuff.

[Hurley]

I loved 'Under the Skin'. It is its own beast, but reminiscent at times of Eraserhead, Liquid Sky, and The Man who Fell to Earth. Best watched alone on a moonless night.

[Hurley]

In terms of recentish TV, I can recommend the following (to varying degrees):
- Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency
- The OA
- Fargo S1 & S2
- Stranger Things
- Westworld
- 11.22.63
- The Leftovers S1 & S2

Of these my favourites are probably Westworld and Fargo S2 and The Leftovers.

[baxter]

My brother has been raving about Under the Skin for ages. Is that the one filmed in Glasgow? He was living there til recently, so it was extra special for him. Will have to check it out.

I've been watching Veronica Mars recently based on the recommendations above. It took me a while to click with it, since it really is much more "teeny" than I was expecting, and coming to it straight from True Detective was very jarring to start with. I had forgotten what yoof TV looks like, with a different pop song playing every 20 seconds, and everyone being amazingly good looking (and shot in a sexy manner). Once I got over feeling impossibly old, I'm really enjoying it and I can see why it got raves. I'm only on episode 6, but it really starting to build in a satisfying way, and I love the central characters.

[John Justice Wheeler]

Novelist Paul Auster has actually also directed a few films and one in particular, Lulu on the Bridge, may be of great interest to Lynch fans. The film deals with Auster's usual subjects of post-modern inquiry and skepticism as to the nature of ostensible reality, here played out via a film within the film (and for once fascinating deleted scenes from this on the DVD).

Elias Merhige is another restlessly experimental filmmaker who many may know best from his Shadow of the Vampire but his most distinctive work is likely his very avant garde and experimental Begotten, which is also a deeply unnerving elemental parable (one critic once called it a snuff film found on Mars). It's weird and unsettling but never gratuitously so. His later short, Din of Celestial Birds, continues the fixations found here.

Anything by the great Russian filmmaker Alexander Sokurov is well worth seeking out but here specifically I would recommend the recent box set that includes his rare features Whispering Pages and Stone, both of which resonate with Lynch like tones of discordance and oblique remove. They are also staggeringly beautiful works of art about art.

The master miniaturists and puppeteers the Quay Brothers exemplify much Lynch like strangeness too and actually also much commonality with Sokurov, drawing as they consistently do on Eastern European sources. Their new BFI Blu-ray is a great place to start as it collects most of their work and it's all essential. Their excellent live action feature films are available separately.

Another Quay (not a relative), Michelange Quay, is responsible for the fascinating oddity Eat, For This is My Body. A film ostensibly about the impact and effects of colonialism, it uses a register of heightened strangeness with a rarefied pace and technique to draw one into a meditation upon its themes that is hypnotic and far from conventional. The closest parallel here is probably Matthew Barney whose own long form art works just happen to take the form of films. Barney is renowned as a fine artist of the very experimental variety and his films, particularly the justifiably famous Cremaster Cycle, are utterly compelling art objects. The first film in the cycle is available on YouTube as are most of the rest. His later Drawing Restraint 9 is also available as is the trailer for his most recent, the epic River of Fundament.

[John Justice Wheeler]

Anything by Abel Ferrara is usually also well worth watching and his 90's classics New Rose Hotel, The Blackout and Dangerous Game all resonate with Lynchian tropes, themes and aesthetic flourishes.

Nina Menkes, yet another experimental artist, has made a career of off beat feminist leaning cinema. Her Phantom Love is a great example of that as is The Bloody Child which draws together both fables and contemporary social reality.

Nicolas Refn's early film (and first English language feature) Fear X remains among hs best and certainly most Lynchian. Strange and stilted and suspended in an airless environment as usual with Refn's artful treatment. What unsettles here again goes deep.

Ryan Gosling's obviously Lynch (and Refn) influenced Lost River was condemned and dismissed upon its initial release but this was unfair as the film is actually an exceptional , very heady and atmospheric trip, well worth seeking out and taking seriously.

Beyond the Black Rainbow is an 80's throwback picture in the best possible way. Incredibly vibrant and inspired, it's another film that displays influences on its sleeve (Cronenberg again along with Lynch) but draws upon them to deliver its own exceptional vision.

I think someone here mentioned Atom Egoyan's work and I'm a bigger defender of it than many these days but specifically, in terms of its Lynch like weirdness shot through with unique profundity and loss, I must mention his early film, The Adjuster. Actually his earliest films are among his best and I couldn't recommend them more highly.