Why can't all special features and spoofs look as nice as the ones David Lynch is involved with? I've watched a lot special features over the last few months and only the ones that feature Mr. Lynch have really looked good -- having depth and life in the midst of information -- whether we're talking the great smoke, coffee, and pie-laced chatter on the latest Twin Peaks set, or this clip above, which is part of the Inland Empire special edition.

In it, the filmmaker discusses seeing his long, epic, and delightfully strange film on a cell phone. Or rather, he completely chastises it, saying: "You will never, in a trillion years, experience the film. You'll think you have experienced it, but you'll be cheated." But that's just the soft, beginning punch from Lynch. You can tell the whole idea irks him a bit because he throws out some language by the end that shows just how much he thinks cell phone movie watching is crap. Enjoy!

Warning: Yes, I said "language," so this is NSFW if you don't want a certain piece of profanity coming from your computer speakers.

In the spirit of the season and goodwill and whatnot, I thought I'd forgo griping about the sorry state of things this week and instead send out some love to the downtrodden, the small films of 2007 that were somehow overlooked, underrated or outright ignored in some way. Let's start with the Russian film The Italian, released in January, which caused critics to dredge up the word "Dickensian" for the first time in a while. But for all that it was a surprising, deeply-felt story of an orphan who escapes the orphanage to find his birth-parents.

Kino released the documentary Romantico in January as well, and they're apparently counting it as a 2007 release. I wrote a few weeks back about the documentary format; there's certainly a place for journalism and reporting, but the very best documentaries, the ones that stand the test of time, are the ones that capture the details of life, like Crumb, Hoop Dreams and To Be and to Have. Romantico is one of those. It tells the story of a mariachi illegally based in San Francisco who decides to go back to Mexico to see his family, even though he risks never being able to return (of course, his income in the States is much higher than in Mexico). Romantico will most certainly be overlooked in any discussion of 2007's documentaries, but it's worth seeking out on DVD.

Well, it's official. The Writers Guild of America is going on strike tomorrow. Here's hoping the strike ends quickly and that all parties come away happy. And writers? Use this time off to study my choices for the seven best screenplays of the 2000's:

The 40 Year Old Virgin by Judd Apatow & Steve Carell

The blending of improvisation and the written word gives Apatow's two classic comedies -- Knocked Up would be the other -- a feeling of authenticity that is all too rare in today's film world. Apatow takes the strategy of writing for specific performers and their strengths, and it really pays off. Scoff if you want at a sex comedy making the list, but for a movie to be this incredibly funny -- while keeping an oddly touching romance and a spot-on character study afloat -- the screenwriters deserve high praise.

About Schmidt by Alexander Payne & Jim Taylor

One of the saddest comedies ever made, and one of the most truthful and painful portraits of old age. Payne and Taylor specialize in scripts about people on the verge of cracking, depressed souls who tend to find the smallest redemption possible. Payne/Taylor characters never go from Point A to Point B over the course of the screenplay, they go from Point A to Point A.1. The small, gradual changes in their characters are reflective of the way actual humans (as opposed to movie humans) work. Warren Schmidt's personal growth is so minor that it is confined to the last thirty seconds of the film, but when it comes it's an emotional punch in the gut.

Stephen King divided up the realm of horror into three categories in his indispensable book of essays Danse Macabre. There is terror -- the large sense of the universe never being the same again after the events told in the story, of inescapable personal threat as the aim of the story: nameless dread finally has a name. There is horror: a more removed sense of sympathy and pity for some victim of supernatural violence. And, as King concluded, if you can't get either one, there's always the good old reliable gross-out. Well, the gross-out is king in current horror. It's a lever is pumped 'till the handle breaks, and no one ever tires of it. The jack in the box pop-up followed by the explosion in the strawberry jam factory ... not that I'm complaining, mind you, but a more rarefied sense of terror is what floats my boat. Using some examples from America's first horror master Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-64) I'd like to try to describe easy ways to get it ...

Beyond the toques, hockey, and those ever-rampant igloos, Canada houses a veritable smorgasbord of media talent. Unfortunately, much of it migrates to the States and becomes part of the "They're Canadian!?" contingent -- including game show host Alex Trebek, and actors from Michael J. Fox to Fay Wray. Heck, even Jack Warner, co-founder of Warner Brothers, was born in London, Ontario. Yet on the northern side of the 49th parallel, a lot of talent still thrives. This is the inaugural post of Northern Exposures, a monthly column that will highlight great Canadian films you should check out, and the wider-recognized work they are similar to.

Film: The Saddest Music in the World
Director: Guy Maddin
Year: 2003
Comparable to: David Lynch

The Saddest Music in the World might not be the most accessible film to throw at wide-release audiences, being a grainy, 8mm black and white film blown up for the big screen, but being the indie side of Cinematical, I can't help but start off with my favorite Canadian film. Before he wowed audiences with Brand Upon the Brain!, Guy Maddin concocted the movie he'd been waiting years to make – one with recognizable, real movie stars and a $3.5 million budget. While it sounds like dreary fare, Saddest Music is actually a quirky, almost fantastical satire about love, greed, pain, and the undeniable allure of show.

David Lynch is one of my favorite film makers, and there's a terrific profile of him over at The Age. The best part of the piece is when the interviewer casually asks Lynch about all the rumors circulating about him. Specifically, is it true that he keeps a bottled uterus on his desk? "I don't have a uterus on my desk, " Lynch answers, shaking his head vigorously. The interviewer presses him -- maybe you've got one somewhere else? Lynch's response: "Yes, I have a bottle with a uterus in it. It was never on my desk, it's somewhere in the house. That belonged to Raffaella de Laurentiis, Dino's daughter. She had it removed. I didn't ask her for it. She thought I might appreciate it, and she had the doctor package it and send it for me." Just...wow. I think the funniest part is that he's not at all fazed by the uterus question, only that somebody would have the balls to think that he keeps it on his desk. That's what I love about David Lynch -- you think Ron Howard ever gets bottled uterus questions?

Question two -- Did Lynch ever dissect a cat? "For sure. Now here is the deal. Is this a sickness? Nooooah! In school, many classes will dissect a frog or salamander, maybe a fish. How many chefs are working with fish? It was important for me for many reasons to check out some real organic material. I called the vet. He asked me some questions to ascertain whether I was a nutcake. He determined that I was serious, but said at the present time he had no cat for me. Five minutes later, a cat had just come in, and he called me." Here's the cherry on top: "It was just a learning experience."

Remember that 700 hours of behind-the-scenes footage of Inland Empire that Chris Ullrich posted about last month? All of that was going to be whittled down into "the most current perspective on one of cinema's greatest directors and will bring to life his creative process and joy for living life to its fullest potential." The material has now been molded into a documentary called Lynch, which David Lynch is shopping around himself. Unfortunately, this time he is sans cow.

The director is shopping the doc to international buyers at Cannes -- all areas but North America, which likely means that he will take on the distributing task once again. Interestingly enough, whoever directed the film is a mystery. The person is credited as "blackANDwhite," and is said to be someone who lived and worked in Lynch's home, hoping "to present to the world the unique experience of being with David Lynch for a prolonged period of time, watching him as he creates on a day-to-day basis." According to Eric Bassett of Lynch's Absurda -- it is not Lynch himself who directed the documentary.

I wonder if that means it could be a family member, since it's pretty revealing to let someone come in to film you 24-7. That being said, Lynch must be prepared for the revealing aspects of such a shoot, since Bassett says that it "shows some rough stuff that I'm pretty shocked David let out. There are a lot of problems on the set. David admits he has no idea what he's doing sometimes." I'm wondering if these are Huckabees-level problems, or just general chaos? It'll probably be eons before we can see this, but in the meantime, a half hour of footage called Lynch 2 will be included on the Inland Empire DVD, which comes out on August 14. As for the other hundreds of hours of footage -- I wouldn't be surprised if bits get released here and there, on Lynch's site or his future DVDs.

Director David Lynch is one of those filmmakers you either love or hate. From the wildly entertaining and disturbing Blue Velvet to his take on Frank Herbert's epic novel Dune through his more recent projects like Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive, he's shown his flair for creating unusual, unsettling and deeply complex stories. From his work and the fact that he sometimes shys away from press for his projects, some may assume he's some sort of socially inept hermit who's only source of expression is through his films.

Fortunately, the director has given us a few glimpses into his life, especially through his own website where he's rumored to appear in the forums from time to time, ready to discuss the good and bad about any of his films or the merits of a good cup of coffee. And now, according to Twitch Film, we'll be getting even more insight into the man known as David Lynch. How, you may ask? By watching an upcoming documentary about the director -- a teaser for which is already up at the Twitch Film site. According to the sight, the documentary has been shooting for over two years during the time Lynch was making his latest project, Inland Empire.

The documentary filmmakers have amassed over 700 hours of footage and when the documentary is completed it "will give the most current perspective on one of cinema's greatest directors and will bring to life his creative process and joy for living life to its fullest potential." As I'm a huge fan of the man and his films, I'll be very interested to see this documentary once its released. Lynch is a very talented and sometimes misunderstood genius who deserves to have his story told. Besides, any man who eats at Bob's Big Boy every day for eight years is alright in my book.

One of my personal heroes is the writer James Agee (1909-1955), who worked as a film critic for Time Magazine and The Nation between 1942 and 1948. He went on to write a new kind of fictional non-fiction book, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, as well as a novel, A Death in the Family, that was published after his death, and which won him a posthumous Pulitzer Prize. He wrote the screenplays for The African Queen (1952) and The Night of the Hunter (1955) as well as numerous other articles, stories and scripts. But it's his film criticism that I most admire. I re-read it every year or so, and it always re-charges my batteries.

Agee could pry apart a movie and lay bare its inner workings in an astonishingly tiny amount of space and with an extraordinary use of language. Best of all, when reading the book Agee on Film in order, you get a sense of the movie critic's beat, and all the time spent watching, thinking about and writing about bad movies. It reminds us that the majority of movies have always been bad, and even when the present moment seems like it probably contains the worst lot of movies ever produced by man, it probably doesn't.

Considering the lengths that David Lynch has gone to while promoting his latest film Inland Empire; a simple announcement about a screening almost seems like a letdown. The Carolina Theater in Greensboro, North Carolina announced the screening of Lynch's latest film on March 16th as part of their Cinematique Series. The 79-year-old vaudeville house turned performing arts center seems a fitting location for Lynch's fun house of a movie. Tickets are going for the modest price of $7 or $5 for students and seniors, and the website promises the cryptic running time as "7:00PM until ...", so you never know what the organizers might have planned -- this is the same film that used a cow as a marketing device after all.

The film stars Laura Dern, Jeremy Irons, and Justin Theroux; but even after repeated viewings of the first and second trailers, I really couldn't tell you what it was about. Although, Ryan's review does a better job of explaining the plot than I ever could, so I'll just leave it at that. The film premiered at the San Francisco Indiefest and was one of the more high profile selections at the festival, Inland Empire is slowly working it's way through the US, so I guess if you are a fan, you are just going to have to be patient and hope the film makes it's way to you.

[via Huliq.com]