What Other Directors/Actors Think of Season 3

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Metamorphia
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Re: What Other Directors/Actors Think of Season 3

Post by Metamorphia »

Jim Jarmusch:

"But I think the masterpiece that took the last few years in American cinema is really Twin Peaks: The Return. Eighteen hours of incomprehensible T.V. It wasn’t easy for him, and, by the way, no one will finance David Lynch’s feature films — so, what the fuck, I don’t get it. That is a real work of incredible beauty because it is so incomprehensible. I just found it to be a masterwork."

https://consequenceofsound.net/2019/06/ ... -jarmusch/
LateReg
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Re: What Other Directors/Actors Think of Season 3

Post by LateReg »

Metamorphia wrote:Jim Jarmusch:

"But I think the masterpiece that took the last few years in American cinema is really Twin Peaks: The Return. Eighteen hours of incomprehensible T.V. It wasn’t easy for him, and, by the way, no one will finance David Lynch’s feature films — so, what the fuck, I don’t get it. That is a real work of incredible beauty because it is so incomprehensible. I just found it to be a masterwork."

https://consequenceofsound.net/2019/06/ ... -jarmusch/
I saw The Dead Don't Die and I was pretty sure that Jarmusch was paying homage to Twin Peaks thru Iggy Pop's zombie character. The way he says "coffeeeeee" over and over is, if not pure Dougie, then a possible reference to the weird way it's said in the Red Room in the original series. And then, yes, after seeing it I also saw that quote which pretty much sealed The Return as a partial influence.
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Re: What Other Directors/Actors Think of Season 3

Post by LateReg »

Jarmusch gave another interview to Vulture where he said something similar:

"Oh, the best of American cinema of the last decade, probably, for me, is Twin Peaks: The Return, an 18-hour film that is incomprehensible and dreamlike in the most beautiful, adventurous way. That is a masterpiece. Why can’t they just give David Lynch whatever money he needs? Why can’t you give Terry Gilliam? He needs money to make something; just give it to him! I don’t understand."

https://www.vulture.com/2019/06/jim-jar ... t-die.html
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Mr. Reindeer
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Re: What Other Directors/Actors Think of Season 3

Post by Mr. Reindeer »

Is Lynch really having trouble getting funding? I know Room to Dream went into this a bit with Antelope Don’t Run No More, with Lynch I think blaming the fact that there is no longer a “middle” between low-budget indie film and big-budget blockbuster. But surely plenty of recent films and filmmakers fall into that middle ground. I find it insane to believe that Lynch is unable to attract any interest, in Hollywood or Europe, based solely on his name, a brand so proven that his name has entered the cultural lexicon as an adjective! Is Studio Canal, who swooped up MD in an extreme gamble, unwilling to give him the budget he needs? I mean, he’s got a solid reputation for coming in within the allotted time and budget, even on an insane production like TP:TR. he has a proven critical track record. It seems to me more like no one wants to put up the rather large budget for ADRNM than there being a general shunning of Lynch in the industry.
Last edited by Mr. Reindeer on Wed Jun 19, 2019 1:57 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Trudy Chelgren
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Re: What Other Directors/Actors Think of Season 3

Post by Trudy Chelgren »

Its an obvious indie example, but if I were A24 I would kill to have a Lynch film on our roster. A24 art kid fans love Lynch. You'd think people would be seeking him out and asking for pitches after The Return. Unless his ideas are wildly unreasonable and stubborn, (which I imagine they definitely would be after his frustration at TR's fast production) they could certainly fund a smaller work from him.

(also A24 seem to want to promote newer/younger voices, so doubtful they would want Lynch anyway)
LateReg
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Re: What Other Directors/Actors Think of Season 3

Post by LateReg »

Mr. Reindeer wrote:Is Lynch really having trouble getting funding? I know Room to Dream went into this a bit with Antelope Don’t Run No More, with Lynch I think blaming the fact that there is no longer a “middle” between low-budget indie film and big-budget blockbuster. But surely plenty of recent films and filmmakers fall into that middle ground. I find it insane to believe that Lynch is unable to attract any interest, in Hollywood or Europe, based solely on his name, a brand so proven that his name has entered the cultural lexicon as an adjective! Is Studio Canal, who swopped up MD in an extreme gamble, unwilling to give hom the budget he needs? I mean, he’s got a solid reputation for coming in within the allotted time and budget, even on an insane production like TP:TR. he has a proven critical track record. It seems to me more like no one wants to put up the rather large budget for ADRNM than there being a general shunning of Lynch in the industry.
Those are my thoughts, too. I simply can't believe that he couldn't get something funded. For the longest time post-IE he was saying this, and I wasn't sure whether to believe it was his lack of ideas or that he actually couldn't get funding. Or, more likely, a middle ground where Lynch didn't have the big idea to pursue that was worth the effort of dealing with the way that films are produced nowadays. I wasn't sure if he was always falling back on that "middle" has disappeared statement based on his observations of the industry, or if it was actually true in that he had attempted to get funding for films and couldn't. Because yes, there are still a lot of films being made in the middle right now, including Jarmusch's, and, slightly more mainstream, even Paul Thomas Anderson's, who has no trouble getting 30 to 40 mil to fund a relatively uncommercial picture that won't necessarily make that back. So what are we really talking about here, is my question?
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Re: What Other Directors/Actors Think of Season 3

Post by yaxomoxay »

LateReg wrote:
Mr. Reindeer wrote:Is Lynch really having trouble getting funding? I know Room to Dream went into this a bit with Antelope Don’t Run No More, with Lynch I think blaming the fact that there is no longer a “middle” between low-budget indie film and big-budget blockbuster. But surely plenty of recent films and filmmakers fall into that middle ground. I find it insane to believe that Lynch is unable to attract any interest, in Hollywood or Europe, based solely on his name, a brand so proven that his name has entered the cultural lexicon as an adjective! Is Studio Canal, who swopped up MD in an extreme gamble, unwilling to give hom the budget he needs? I mean, he’s got a solid reputation for coming in within the allotted time and budget, even on an insane production like TP:TR. he has a proven critical track record. It seems to me more like no one wants to put up the rather large budget for ADRNM than there being a general shunning of Lynch in the industry.
Those are my thoughts, too. I simply can't believe that he couldn't get something funded. For the longest time post-IE he was saying this, and I wasn't sure whether to believe it was his lack of ideas or that he actually couldn't get funding. Or, more likely, a middle ground where Lynch didn't have the big idea to pursue that was worth the effort of dealing with the way that films are produced nowadays. I wasn't sure if he was always falling back on that "middle" has disappeared statement based on his observations of the industry, or if it was actually true in that he had attempted to get funding for films and couldn't. Because yes, there are still a lot of films being made in the middle right now, including Jarmusch's, and, slightly more mainstream, even Paul Thomas Anderson's, who has no trouble getting 30 to 40 mil to fund a relatively uncommercial picture that won't necessarily make that back. So what are we really talking about here, is my question?
I wonder if part of the studio's reluctance is due to the fact that sometimes Lynch gets new ideas while filming, which could cause serious strain to the budgetary process.
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Re: What Other Directors/Actors Think of Season 3

Post by Cde. »

LateReg wrote:
Metamorphia wrote:Jim Jarmusch:

"But I think the masterpiece that took the last few years in American cinema is really Twin Peaks: The Return. Eighteen hours of incomprehensible T.V. It wasn’t easy for him, and, by the way, no one will finance David Lynch’s feature films — so, what the fuck, I don’t get it. That is a real work of incredible beauty because it is so incomprehensible. I just found it to be a masterwork."

https://consequenceofsound.net/2019/06/ ... -jarmusch/
I saw The Dead Don't Die and I was pretty sure that Jarmusch was paying homage to Twin Peaks thru Iggy Pop's zombie character. The way he says "coffeeeeee" over and over is, if not pure Dougie, then a possible reference to the weird way it's said in the Red Room in the original series. And then, yes, after seeing it I also saw that quote which pretty much sealed The Return as a partial influence.
A lot of things about it, particularly the way it's directed, were very Twin Peaks S3. The so-conventional they're creepy establishing shots ('Centerville Police Department'/'Centerville Motel' etc, sometimes accompanied by neon buzzing sound); the cutting between fragments of stories, which sometimes never intersect or 'go anywhere'; the pans across the trees. Jarmusch has always been one for deadpan comedy and long shots, but this feels different. He aims to generate an absurd tone through lingering on mundane details, like someone walking all the way to a door, opening it, then walking all the way out. Even Tom Waits hobo character resembled Jerry.
The new Twin Peaks strikes such a new and unusual tone, and I'd been wondering when we'd start to see work obviously inspired by it. Here it is.
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Re: What Other Directors/Actors Think of Season 3

Post by LateReg »

Cde. wrote: A lot of things about it, particularly the way it's directed, were very Twin Peaks S3. The so-conventional they're creepy establishing shots ('Centerville Police Department'/'Centerville Motel' etc, sometimes accompanied by neon buzzing sound); the cutting between fragments of stories, which sometimes never intersect or 'go anywhere'; the pans across the trees. Jarmusch has always been one for deadpan comedy and long shots, but this feels different. He aims to generate an absurd tone through lingering on mundane details, like someone walking all the way to a door, opening it, then walking all the way out. Even Tom Waits hobo character resembled Jerry.
The new Twin Peaks strikes such a new and unusual tone, and I'd been wondering when we'd start to see work obviously inspired by it. Here it is.
Great observations! Agreed.
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Re: What Other Directors/Actors Think of Season 3

Post by bosguy1981 »

Lynch responds to the praise from Jim Jarmusch:

"I love Jim. I never met him but I love his work," Lynch said. "He's got a singular voice. And to come out and compliment another director, it takes a pretty big guy to do that. But money won't do any good if you don't have the ideas. In fact it can just add pressure. So if I had ideas, then the money would be beautiful."

Always thought David Lynch would have loved his movie "Broken Flowers" from 2005. That's one of those movies that is just perfect, if you ask me.
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Re: What Other Directors/Actors Think of Season 3

Post by pinballmars »

John Waters is a fan, too.
https://www.dazeddigital.com/beauty/hea ... 106A2kjRMc
Oh, did you like Twin Peaks: The Return? I remember writing to you, like, ‘You’ve gotta watch it!’

John Waters: I loved it! Are you kidding? It was like the Ozzie and Harriet show. Every week that used to end with Ricky Nelson singing alone in the bar and [Twin Peaks: The Return] always ended with the bar every night. How [David Lynch] ever got that through the Hollywood system— I give him great respect. Imagine the executives watching that episode where you’re inside an explosion for twenty minutes.

Oh, sooo good. That was my favourite one. The girl with the bug in her mouth at the end. It was like his [Fassbinder’s fifteen hour epic] Berlin Alexanderplatz.

John Waters: Yes, it was [laughs].
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Re: What Other Directors/Actors Think of Season 3

Post by Rainwater »

I bet Jacques Rivette would've liked it. He loved FWWM.
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Re: What Other Directors/Actors Think of Season 3

Post by Mr. Reindeer »

Not a director/actor, but I just became aware of this year-old interview with legendary comic book writer/notorious curmudgeon Alan Moore. The interview is primarily about Moore’s love for the TV classic The Prisoner, but the interviewer takes him on a tangent about TP. While the always-opinionated Moore’s tone is rather shockingly tempered (for him), repeatedly admitting that it’s a matter of preference and that the problem may be more with him than Lynch, he is disappointingly dismissive of TP:TR and Lynch’s later work overall, sounding very much like he would be at home on the Profoundly Disappointed thread here. This is rather alarming, especially when he complains about the tangents with no perceived narrative significance (Dougie!!), considering that his own storytelling style has evolved rather similarly to Lynch’s, becoming increasingly loose and eccentric over the past couple of decades since From Hell.
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AXX°N N.
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Re: What Other Directors/Actors Think of Season 3

Post by AXX°N N. »

Moore's take is disappointingly superficial to me. I consider myself far left, and this to me reads as another example of what I see as leftists being overly eager to dismiss art that, even passingly, seems at odds with their politics, as a first order importance. A lot of the time, as seems the case here, a lot of it originates outside of the work itself, too often solely glossed from the insular media landscape, or things other people have said but only partially understood. For instance, it seems to me a rudimentary at best assessment to say Lynch is "bizarro-republican," as if Moore saw him talk about Reagan once, or heard that he talked about Reagan once, and immediately categorized Lynch in the "dismissed" pile. There doesn't seem to be much first-order familiarity with Lynch as a person, as if Moore is approaching the work sideways.

But the worst part to me, and this is again something I've seen elsewhere, is the idea that evil in Lynch's mythos originates, or is shown to originate, in the underclass. The fact that hobo or drifter-type archetypes are used for ominous effect is thought-terminating to some viewers, who seem more ready to jail an artist mentally than extend an olive branch and see the greater context; for instance, the fact that the greatest evil in the show appears to be an atom bomb, not a tool one can say was manned by anyone lower than an elite, the ominous room of machines in the swanky Fireman's palace, or the fact that, far from basic hobos, the woodsmen seem drenched in what is either oil or mine-shaft soot, both materials pointing to broader economical basis of what exactly is going on. But despite this, the idea that Lynch employs hobos as a purely bourgeois exploitative device, and is a key to understanding his supposed low view of the lower class, is a popular (mis)reading and one I can't disagree with more, to the point that certain objections within the work itself are so obvious I feel I can point a finger at them and have them speak for themselves: Big Ed & James Hurley, Carl Rodd, & Shelly, all underclass, shown sympathetically and humanely, sometimes herioically so. Not to mention Jacoby's rants, the Rancho Rosa properties indicative of the housing market crash (per Frost), or the fact that much of the Dougie plotline (which Moore casually dismisses) can be read, and seems to nudge the viewer to read it as, somewhat sceptical of the materialism it portrays as a fabricated ideal.
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Re: What Other Directors/Actors Think of Season 3

Post by LateReg »

AXX°N N. wrote:But the worst part to me, and this is again something I've seen elsewhere, is the idea that evil in Lynch's mythos originates, or is shown to originate, in the underclass. The fact that hobo or drifter-type archetypes are used for ominous effect is thought-terminating to some viewers, who seem more ready to jail an artist mentally than extend an olive branch and see the greater context; for instance, the fact that the greatest evil in the show appears to be an atom bomb, not a tool one can say was manned by anyone lower than an elite, the ominous room of machines in the swanky Fireman's palace, or the fact that, far from basic hobos, the woodsmen seem drenched in what is either oil or mine-shaft soot, both materials pointing to broader economical basis of what exactly is going on. But despite this, the idea that Lynch employs hobos as a purely bourgeois exploitative device, and is a key to understanding his supposed low view of the lower class, is a popular (mis)reading and one I can't disagree with more, to the point that certain objections within the work itself are so obvious I feel I can point a finger at them and have them speak for themselves: Big Ed & James Hurley, Carl Rodd, & Shelly, all underclass, shown sympathetically and humanely, sometimes herioically so. Not to mention Jacoby's rants, the Rancho Rosa properties indicative of the housing market crash (per Frost), or the fact that much of the Dougie plotline (which Moore casually dismisses) can be read, and seems to nudge the viewer to read it as, somewhat sceptical of the materialism it portrays as a fabricated ideal.
Excellent post!!!

Like Reindeer pointed out, Moore is both highly dismissive as well as somewhat gentle in his critique, twice revealing that he understands Season 3's reputation but that he just doesn't share in the love. Moore is clearly a sophisticated dude and a smarter man than I am, but what I found most strange was his dismissal of Dougie specifically as not tying into the central themes of The Return. One can argue there's too much Dougie, or even that they don't like Dougie, but it really doesn't take all that much in-depth thought to see just how integral the very idea of Dougie is to the series' core themes. But he dismisses the character altogether as essentially meaningless slapstick, and that seems the product of not thinking twice about it.
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