david lynch Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Slow-mo and dreamy sounds make Return of the Jedi trailer spot on. It also helps knowing that Lynch almost directed the film. Tommy Jarvis' flashbacks and hallucinations set against Douglas-firs and a halfway house are perfect for a Friday the 13th: A New Beginning re-cut. A Goofy Movie's edits are pretty clever and a screaming baby is a lot less strange than a rambling Steve Guttenberg in the Three Men and a Baby trailer.

Equally as fun are the re-cuts for Dirty Dancing (where spaghetti arms doubles as garmonbozia), Vacation (Chevy Chase as a Frank Booth and Adam Kesher hybrid?) and a segue to television with House (this might actually make the show more enjoyable for me).

You can check out the trailers after the jump and indulge in some of that familiar Lynchian twang.

Although hearing isn't the sense that moves quickest and deepest into our emotional memory, a favorite movie soundtrack can definitely dash almost as quickly to the center of your brain as a smell when it comes to recalling a certain scene, the memory of listening to it driving in the car, or smooching in the theater. A lot of the time, these are actual compilations of songs - Pump Up the Volume and Pretty in Pink are the first that spring to mind for me - but sometimes they're scores from an iconic composer.

David Lynch movies like Blue Velvet or Wild at Heart would still, for better or for worse, be David Lynch movies without Angelo Badalamenti's scores, but they'd be absolutely lacking, whether we knew it or not. Ennio Morricone is another unmistakable composer, most famously perhaps for his work on Sergio Leone's spaghetti westerns - who doesn't feel like they're about to do battle in a gun duel to the death when they hear the theme from The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly? And I'm proud to say I was a bridesmaid at a wedding where the newlyweds entered to the Imperial March.

One of my absolute favorite scores to listen to while I work is the soundtrack to Amélie by Yann Tiersen. I spent about a month churning out 50,000+ words for National Novel Writing Month listening to the dancey accordions in "La Valse d'Amélie" and "La Valse Des Monstres," the old-timey songs with record static like "Guilty" and "Si tu n'étais pas là," the gypsy-flavored "Le Banquet," the purely joyous "La Redecouverte" and all the rest that made me feel like drinking espressos with a perfect, tiny spoon. (Which I probably was, since I had to write an entire novel in a month.) I don't know why I picked up the CD, but I'm so glad I did. It just makes me happy. I also really enjoy the score to MirrorMask by Iain Ballamy.

Do you enjoy listening to movie scores? Who are your favorites?

To say David Lynch is a fascinating man is like saying saying the people on MTV's Jersey Shore are insipid. The words are starting descriptors but their subjects go far beyond such simple terms. But I'll settle for fascinating, as I'm not quite sure I could ever summon a single world to encapsulate the director of Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, Mulholland Dr. and so many others. In case his films don't make it clear, Lynch is a hard intellect to pin down, although the below video should help give some insights into the artist's creative process.

Don't be startled off by its nearly two-hour long run time. Lynch's solo portion starts around the seven-minute mark and runs for about half an hour before quantum physicist John Hagelin takes the podium. While Lynch has the stage to himself, though, he fields all manner of questions concerning Consciousness, Creativity and the Brain (the name of the UC Berkley presentation from which this video was taken). So if you've ever wondered why Lynch is a devotee of Transcendental Meditation and how it effects his artistic process, you'll get plenty of answers here.

If you're interested in more pragmatic questions, such as what inspired some Lynch's earlier films (his response to The Grandmother is particularly interesting) or what is the role of coincidence in his process (the origin of Bob in Twin Peaks is his favorite "happy accident"), he fields just as many questions on the film front as he does the existential side of things. Plus, I just find it hilarious that someone in the audience actually said to David Lynch, "I'm a little confused. I don't know what consciousness really is..."

Let's face it: The only reason most of us are actually watching the Superbowl this Sunday is because of the commercials. Unless you live in Indianapolis or New Orleans, and/or you're a die hard fan of one of those teams, you could honestly care less about the outcome of the actual football game. Instead, we're more interested in who is spending millions of dollars in an effort to sell us on their product in under a minute.

Good news is at least Fox doesn't have the Superbowl this year, so we won't have to spend four hours staring at that stupid robot football player dancing on the left side of the screen. But we still need to deal with the same old game coverage, and wouldn't it be nice if for just this one day (and game), some of Hollywood's most prolific filmmakers could get behind the camera? The folks over at SlateV imagined just that -- and they've put together a pretty hilarious video showing us what the Superbowl would look like if Quentin Tarantino, David Lynch, Wes Anderson, Jean-Luc Godard and Werner Herzog directed it. The only thing that's missing is a nod to Michael Bay, though something tells me they couldn't find enough Superbowl video with helicopters, explosions and half naked drugged-up dancers.

Check out the video after the jump, then let us know which famous directors you'd like to see helm the Superbowl.

David Lynch is a filmmaker known for the strange and endearing worlds and characters that he creates, but he's not only a master of fantasy, he's also a master at blending sound and image. A lot of it is due to his work with Angelo Badalamenti, and how a simple conversation between the two can lead to a haunting and iconic theme. But the filmmaker also has an eye for musical talent. Julee Cruise quickly became an essential part of Twin Peaks' universe (her music even inspired Lynch to create an Industrial Symphony), he helped usher in a renaissance for talented jazz singer Jimmy Scott, and now he's promoting the music of singer Ariana Delawari.

DLF.TV (David Lynch Foundation TV) has shared a promo reel for the artist, where Delawari sings small segments of her music for Lynch's camera. While some of it stretches the boundaries of the Lynchian music we've grown accustomed to, his classic style is there in full as the singer croons into a microphone in front of a red curtain, with background music bringing to mind the old days of Badalamenti and Cruise. (Delawari recorded the album -- Lion of Panjshir -- in Afghanistan and LA, with Lynch mixing the tunes and producing the track "Suspend Me.")

It's quite beautiful music, which should come to no surprise for any Lynch fans -- the man's got a great ear. Check out the video after the jump (plus embeds of Cruise and Scott) and head to the DLF link above to grab the album for yourself.

[via dugpa]

David Lynch's Mulholland Drive earned some more love as the best film of the decade (2000-2009) this week as Film Comment published the results of a poll of critics, film enthusiasts and filmmakers the world over. This choice matches the results of the recent IndieWire poll, the Los Angeles Film Critics Association and the French film magazine Cahiers du Cinema. Lynch's film was released in 2001 and received a single Oscar nomination, for Best Director. Lynch lost to Ron Howard, whose A Beautiful Mind, incidentally, has not turned up anywhere on any of these polls.

In a surprising twist, LAFCA -- or Los Angeles Film Critics Society -- has named David Lynch's Mulholland Drive as the best film of the decade, followed in order by: There Will Be Blood, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Brokeback Mountain, No Country for Old Men (tied with Zodiac), Yi Yi, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, The Lord of the Rings Trilogy, Spirited Away, United 93, Y Tu Mama Tambien, and Sideways.

As someone who has been intrigued by the film since it was released, I'm wildly pleased about the decision. Mulholland Drive has always been this rather unique piece of the cinematic landscape. It should have been a television show, but was morphed into a film that actually worked. To some, it might seem like a misshapen mess of clips -- no more than the product of Lynch's original TV intent. Instead, however, it's this wonderfully postmodern yin and yang that works on a myriad of levels.

This week finally sees the release of Youth in Revolt, the film version of C.D. Payne's 1993 novel. Considering the book's length (about 500 pages), director Miguel Arteta and screenwriter Gustin Nash faced the unenviable task of deciding what should remain and what should be excised. How do you make a 90-minute film that pleases the novel's legion of fans while remaining accessible to a larger audience that has never read it?

It's a challenge familiar to sci-fi fans. We've probably all experienced that moment of utter disbelief that a favorite story or novel has been twisted and mangled beyond recognition. But when the filmmakers get it right, honoring the spirit and creating a work that lives apart from its inspiration, it's magical. Regrettably, I don't read as many novels nowadays as in my earlier years, so I've never read the source material for some of my favorite science fiction films (e.g. Children of Men, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Planet of the Apes). Still, it was difficult to narrow my choices down to just ten. Here's what I ended up with: a list of my ten favorite sci-fi adaptations. What are yours?

1. Slaughterhouse-Five
Screenwriter Stephen Geller took on a near-impossible job, adapting Kurt Vonnegut's wondrous novel, which was inspired by Vonnegut's real-life experiences during World War II. Oddly enough, George Roy Hill's direction is as sprightly as you'd expect from the man whose previous film was Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Yet Hill's jaunty approach was exactly the right way to capture the spirit, the basic trajectory, and much of the flavor of the novel, producing a picture that feels both tied to the year in which it was released (1972) and transcendent of time and place.

Read the rest over at SciFi Squad

Even the thought of directing Wookies gave him a migraine headache. Still, out of respect, David Lynch met with George Lucas in the early 1980s to talk about directing the second sequel to his landmark blockbuster, eventually titled Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi. Lynch recalls Lucas telling him about Wookies and "a lot of other animals," having lunch at a restaurant where only salad was served -- "not that I have anything against salad" -- and developing a migraine headache so severe that he snuck off to call his agent and beg not to make the movie. Lynch's conversation at the Hudson Union Society was captured by FORA.tv and is embedded after the jump.

In hindsight, knowing that Lynch would go on to make Blue Velvet, Wild at Heart, Lost Highway, and Mulholland Dr., it sounds like an insane idea, as in "What Was George Smoking?" At the time, however, it must have made much more sense. Sure, Lynch's weird and wild Eraserhead was already a midnight classic, but The Elephant Man, released in 1980, was stylish, dramatic, and triumphantly bittersweet, all qualities that would have served Return of the Jedi well. (Plus, the whole elephant thing might have made George think Lynch liked working with animal-like characters. And that whole 'mask hiding a disfigured face' thing...) Nominated for two Academy Awards, Lynch was a hot property. He could have been lured to the dark side.

Instead, Lynch ended up directing another science fiction movie: Dune. Would he have been better off directing Jedi? As he acknowledges in the video, his bank account would definitely have been fatter.

Watch David Lynch explain why he turned down Return of the Jedi -- after the jump!

Werner Herzog's latest madman to illuminate the screen obviously doesn't star his infamous collaborator, the late Klaus Kinski, or even the relatively more sedate Bad Lieutenant Nicolas Cage. Instead, Herzog's star is Michael Shannon, the Oscar nominee whose performance as a man recently released from a mental institution was the best thing about Revolutionary Road. In Revolutionary Road, Shannon's character John Givings tells Frank (Leonardo DiCaprio), "Plenty of people are on to the emptiness, but it takes real guts to see the hopelessness."

It's a familiar trope, using the mentally ill to "see" things that other characters are blind to, but in My Son Shannon's Brad McCullum grows more and more out of touch with reality until he believes God lives in his house, in a package of oatmeal.

My Son begins near the end. Two detectives (Willem Dafoe and Michael Peña) are on their way to a crime scene in a drowsy neighborhood of San Diego. On their way in, Detective Hank Havenhurst (Dafoe) is stopped by a neighbor holding a coffee cup, who amiably mumbles, "Razzle dazzle them. Razzle dazzle them," takes a sip from his cup (which reads "Razzle Dazzle"), and walks quietly away.

When they arrive, they find a dead body, the murder weapon nearby, and, strangely enough, the two witnesses still sitting in the chairs they were in when the murder occurred. They learn the suspect was the gangly neighbor with the coffee cup, and indeed, one of the witnesses says, "Brad McCullum. He did it. He stabbed her. Ever since he came back from from Peru, he's been strange. Well, not so much strange, as... different."