Last Movie You Saw, Name & Review Movie • Page 220

The Elephant Man is top 3 Lynch, imo. Dune is campy fun, especially when playing a drinking game where you took a sip every time they said "spice" or "worms" (we had to watch it over 2 nights for that reason). would definitely love to see a proper cut from Lynch, but unless Universal approves it and apologizes to him, i'm not sure he'd be on board. will try to grab Arrow's 4K release in the future. intrigued to hear your thoughts on the back half of his filmography.

 

I think I read they spoke to him in 2022 about a directors cut but he isn’t interested? I enjoyed blue velvet when I saw it in college. Right now I say eraserhead > dune > the elephant man.

 

i take it you haven't watched Twin Peaks? if not, watch everything but that (& its companion film(s)) first & save it for last (S1, S2, FWWM, The Missing Pieces, & S3 in that order)

 

but yes, that's correct. the experience soured him on the idea of doing a new cut.

 

the money men cut out 35 minutes from Dune. that’s not to say he really liked or even really understood the material so much but it being entirely incoherent is far from only his fault

 

I watched twin peaks up until they found Laura Palmer’s killer and then maybe an episode after. That was way back in college though.

 

I still refuse to watch it

 

The Return is his best work imo

 

definitely go back and finish it. S3 might be the best thing he's ever done aside from Mulholland Dr

 

If you know the source material it’s not incoherent but if you don’t it’s very much so

 

yeah I’m going to restart it from the beginning once I finish Friday night lights.

 

Twin Peaks: The Return is his best work. It is a tragedy that it is the only thing he has done in almost 20 years.

 

all i have left in Lynch's filmography is The Straight Story, but i'm waiting for Criterion to put out their UHD for it. excluding that, i'd rank everything as follows:

TP (all 3 seasons, FWWM, and The Missing Pieces as a whole)
Mulholland Dr
Inland Empire
The Elephant Man
Blue Velvet
Eraserhead
Wild at Heart
Lost Highway
Dune

if i separated out everything in TP, S3>FWWM>S1>S2>TMP (since it's all deleted scenes), with S3 equal with or right behind Mulholland Dr (can't really place the others, although FWWM by itself would probably be near the lower half)

 

It has been a bit of a struggle to get through the original Twin Peaks. I like it enough, I guess, but I can't crack the beginning of S2. I know the payoff of the Return is apparently worth it, but I lack motivation to stick with it

 

Some of the plotlines in season two go nowhere and never come up again, but the last few episodes and Fire Walk With Me are the basis for the newest season.

 

Seeing someone like Dune more than The Elephant Man is wild lol. Season two of Twin Peaks can definitely be tough. I still need to see The Return, and rewatch Firewalk With Me.

As not a major Lynch head, my ranking (of what I've seen) would be:

The Elephant Man
Blue Velvet
The Lost Highway
Eraserhead
Twin Peaks (first two seasons)
Mulholland Drive
Dune
Fire Walk With Me
Inland Empire

There's a decent drop-off between Twin Peaks and Mulholland for me, which I definitely enjoyed more on second watch, but I tend to think he's up his own ass as often as he is brilliant. Inland Empire was a struggle to get through.

 

Inland Empire is definitely hard to get through (beyond its 3 hour runtime), but subsequent viewings (and some speculation about its meaning) make me appreciate it even more. plus i'll take as much Laura Dern as i can get.

 

The elephant man is a perfectly fine film that I have no desire to come back to and I liked that with Dune he took a huge swing and I could see myself watching it again for fun.

 

Mulholland Drive
Fire Walk With Me
Lost Highway
Blue Velvet
Eraserhead
The Return
Twin Peaks
Wild at Heart
Inland Empire
The Elephant Man
The Straight Story
Dune

Dune is the only one I don't love. He's one of the best to ever do it and I hope he gets to make more wonderful things.

 

Trap - 5.5/10

this worked for a lot of people here and I’m genuinely glad it did but I’m sorry to say it didn’t really work at all for me. I guess it’s a little bit better than Old tho, so that’s something.

 

The Elephant Man is incredible. A born formal experimenter deciding he wanted to play it straight once to see if he can and nailing it.

 

this

 

A lot like how people now think of Scorsese as the gangster movie guy even though he really only did one gangster film until Goodfellas, Lynch has always been more diverse than the dark and terrifying underworld films we associate him with. The Elephant Man was his second film and Dune was his third, so technically at that point in his career something like Eraserhead was the outlier. You probably see a very different career trajectory for Lynch if Dune was a success and wasn't tampered with. George Lucas didn't ask him to do Return of the Jedi for nothing.

 

Singin’ in the Rain (1952, Stanley Donen, Gene Kelly)

"She's so refined, I think I'll kill myself."

One of the biggest blind spots possible here. There's more where this came from, but maybe not that many left as big as this (but absolutely unequivocally, some!).

A lovely ode to a specific moment of film history, the transition between silent and sound, and the change in what is needed to be a star. It's also briefly a lovely tribute to stunt people, which feels fitting, as watching the physicality of the tap dancers and performers is like watching a Jackie Chan film, you just can't help but smile through the whole thing, at the sheer kinetic energy of it, and the inventiveness of the movements.

The film is beautiful to look at too, a great usage of technicolor, and the ability to switch between black and white and the most vibrant colour you could imagine. It's fantastical and dream like in way that musicals can be, where we know we're watching elevated reality, but it's just so magical that there's very little suspension of disbelief needed.

On top of that, it's written like a Billy Wilder film, with rapid superbly crafted one liners, that are simultaneously extremely stupid and extremely cutting.

An absolute joy.

 

Blue Velvet is such a magnificent film, one of my very favorites. None of his other stuff that I’ve seen has hit me like that. I do like Twin Peaks though.