Review: 'Lost Highway' Blu-ray

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me was such a tremendous (and underserved) critical and commercial flop that former golden boy David Lynch had a hard time following it up. Waiting for inspiration, he read a single line in a novel by Wild at Heart-scribe Barry Gifford that finally set off that old lightbulb above his quiff, and he knew he wanted to make a movie called Lost Highway and he wanted Gifford to co-write it. 

Watch New Edit of David Lynch's "Rabbits"

A few weeks after releasing the haunting short film "Fire (Pozar)", David Lynch's You Tube channel continues to host interesting content. Today, Lynch has unveiled a new edit of his bizarre-even-for-Lynch Internet series "Rabbits". 

"Rabbits" originally appeared on the long-defunct website DavidLynch.com. Each episode consists of Mulholland Dr. stars Naomi Watts, Laura Harring, and Scott Coffey having non-sequitur conversations to the delight of a sitcom laugh track. Plus, they were dressed like giant, feature-less rabbits.

"Rabbits" found a more formal and permanent home scattered among the disturbing debris in Lynch's most recent feature film (assuming you don't subscribe to the theory that Twin Peaks: The Return is an 18-hour film), 2006's INLAND EMPIRE. This latest edit is titled "Rabbits 1", which implies that additional installments will follow. Watch it here:

6/26/20 Update: Part 2 is now up:

New Computer Game Based on Films of David Lynch

We all crave a new toy in our stockings at this time of the year, so many thanks to Caveware Digital for delivering one down the chimneys of those who prefer backwards talking demons in red rooms to ho-ho-ho-ing beardos in red suits. 

David Lynch fans may enjoy Ghost Dance: An Unauthorized David Lynch Adventure, a nineties style computer game that involves roaming through environments based on the Red Room from Twin Peaks, Winkie's Diner from Mulholland Dr., the rabbits' abode from INLAND EMPIRE, and a dark corridor occupied by the Mystery Man from Lost Highway in order to collect pieces of Lynch's paintings to help him "rebuild his world." 

The game is low tech, low action, and a little difficult to get working (helpful tip: when you see that spinning cube with the Lynch's face on the the black screen, you have to use the up arrow on your keyboard walk toward it and click in order to get the game started), but it is completely free of charge, so stop your belly aching, drink full, and descend. 

You can download Ghost Dance for Windows, Linux, or macOS here. 

You can also watch a walk through video for the game here:

366 Days at the Drive-In: Day 234

The Date: May 21

The Movie: Mulholland Dr. (2001)

What Is It?: David Lynch salvages a rejected TV pilot and makes the greatest film of the 2000s as cute starlet Naomi Watts and car-crash victim Laura Harring prove to be otherwise in a creepy Hollywood dream world. Beware the dumpster behind Winkie’s!

Why Today?: Today is the first day of the Gemini star sign—the perfect day to revel in doublings and shifting personalities!

Review: 'Mulholland Dr.' on Blu-ray

Getting into “Twin Peaks” in the nineties hipped me to the idea that television could be cinematic, experimental, genuinely scary, and uncomfortably challenging. I tried to sate my yen for such shows with things like “Northern Exposure” and “The X-Files”, but nothing came close to recapturing that air of dreamy creepiness and creeping dreaminess unique to “Twin Peaks”. So when I read that David Lynch would finally be returning to the little screen with a new show called “Mulholland Dr.” for ABC in 1999, I was thrilled. Unfortunately, after seeing Lynch’s pilot, the confounded ninnies at the network passed on it in favor of contemporary classics like “Oh, Grow Up” and “Odd Man Out”. Though heartbroken, Lynch has never been a guy who allows a good idea to go to waste. He reclaimed his 90-minute pilot, shot a new ending for it, and released it theatrically in 2001, thus cobbling together the best feature film of a decade that had barely begun.

(Spoilers Ahead, so you may want to skip to the next bolded heading.)

Criterion's 'Mulholland Dr.' Blu-ray Has Finally Been Announced for October!

Fans of the Criterion Collection tend to look forward to the company's mid-month new-release announcements with crazed anticipation, and perhaps no long-rumored Criterion release has been more crazily anticipated than David Lynch's Mulholland Dr. Well, today Criterion announced its October 2015 roster, and I'm thrilled to announce that the release of Lynch's magnificent mind-bender is finally official. On October 27, we'll get a 4K digital transfer of Mulholland Dr. with vintage and brand new bonus interviews with David Lynch, stars Naomi Watts and Laura Harring, soundtrack composer Angelo Badalamenti, and casting director Johanna Ray. Some of the bonus features details are a tad sketchy at this moment (Criterion's site simply says "More!"), but I'm sure many fans are hoping that the unaired "Mulholland Dr." TV pilot might be included. In any event, this is one of the most important Blu-ray releases of 2015. It will be a tough one to top, though Criterion also has some other great titles--including Japanese horror portmanteau Kwaidan and David Cronenberg's The Brood--in store for October.

Review: ‘Authorship and the Films of David Lynch’

Throughout 2006, there was no film I anticipated more than INLAND EMPIRE. This was not because of the mixed early notices it received or its vague tagline “A Woman in Trouble.” I looked forward to INLAND EMPIRE because it was “A Film by David Lynch” and I am a David Lynch junkie. So when I finally settled down to see it, and was struck by how crude the digital photography looked and how disjointed the plot was, disappointment started tugging at me. By the end of the film, I’d witnessed enough creepiness and absurd humor that I didn’t declare it a wash out, but it still failed to knock me out of my seat as Mulholland Dr. had. Nevertheless, one week later I was back at the IFC Film Center, having paid my twelve bucks (lousy overpriced NYC theaters!), primed to give INLAND EMPIRE another shot.

With each subsequent viewing, I got more out of the movie. I grew to appreciate its murky aesthetic and unconventional—even by Lynch standards—storytelling. I gave INLAND EMPIRE the full benefit of the doubt and was rewarded for the effort. Would I have worked so hard had INLAND EMPIRE been made by, say, Uwe Boll? Probably not (hell, I probably wouldn’t have even seen it). Would I have watched Dune over and over until I was able to convince myself it wasn’t a total inept mess if it wasn’t also directed by Lynch? No again. As a David Lynch fan, I expect brilliance, and when that brilliance isn’t immediately evident, I assume the problem is mine, not his.

This is something Anthony Todd refers to as the “horizon of expectation” in his new book Authorship and the Films of David Lynch. Todd takes an interesting tack in studying Lynch’s role as an auteur, revealing how the Lynch persona has powerfully affected interpretations of and reactions to his work. A more traditional study of auteurism would trace the level of collaboration in a particular filmmaker’s work. Filmmaking is always a collaborative process, but if there is one major filmmaker who doesn't really need an entire book to convince us he's an auteur, it is David Lynch. He not only directs, but often writes and produces, sometimes acts in, personally promotes, and creates music and sound effects for his films. A David Lynch film cannot be mistaken for any other filmmaker’s work.

Although Todd does discuss how collaboration altered such works as Dune, “Twin Peaks”, and Mulholland Dr., his chief focus is on how the very fact that David Lynch’s films were made by David Lynch has altered our perceptions of them. Todd intriguingly points out how reactions to Wild at Heart and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me depended on whether the critics were non-fan journalists or biographers who had a greater stake in Lynch appreciation and understanding. He also illuminates how these particular films were criticized in the early ‘90s for the very same reasons Lost Highway and Mulholland Dr. were later praised because of Lynch’s personal standing at the time.

Readers less inclined toward the excessively scholarly (such as myself) will have to wade through quite a bit of thesis-speak to get to the meat of Todd’s analysis, which is overall lucid, enlightening, and downright engrossing. I may not have toughed it out had this book been about anyone other than David Lynch, but that’s the horizon of expectations for you.

The Horrorfication of David Lynch

Sometimes I question the amount of space I devote to David Lynch on a site that’s half devoted to Horror Movies, because though several of Lynch’s films are among the most unsettling— and even scary— you’re likely to see (Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, Lost Highway, Mulholland Dr., and Inland Empire being some prime examples), he’s not exactly a horror filmmaker. I’ve always particularly taken issue with the designation of Eraserhead as a horror movie and am flat-out baffled by how The Elephant Man has made its way into numerous discussions of the genre. The only way I can feature that is the argument that some of the film’s so-called “normal” people—Merrick’s cruel “owner” Bytes, the exploitative night porter, the posh douche bags who gawk at Merrick in disgust— are the film’s monsters.

Yet I continue to write about David Lynch because I love the guy: love his films, love his charmingly inarticulate manner of expressing himself, love his art, love his renaissance man excursions into television, transcendental meditation promotion, book authoring, and coffee production. But do he and his work really belong on this site? Short answer: yes; long answer: yes, because I says so for one thing, and for another thing, I’m not the only kook who has attempted to cram his avant garde output into the horror cubicle. Not only has the American horror channel Chiller TV aired “Twin Peaks” (which, after all, features such horrory elements as serial-killing demons, creepy owls, hellish otherworlds, and soul-trapping pull knobs), but the Horror Channel in the UK has also taken to running Lynch’s output.