Recent posts tagged Postscript + film, for your weekend viewing:
ERASERHEAD (Lynch, 1977), streaming via Criterion Channel
PREY (Trachtenberg, 2022), streaming via Hulu
IN A LONELY PLACE (Ray, 1950), streaming via Criterion Channel
THAT THING YOU DO! (Hanks, 1996), streaming via Hulu
BAY OF ANGELS (Demy, 1963), streaming via Criterion Channel
In addition to the completion of my ‘73-’74 O’Neil SHADOW series, this issue of the pulp magazine also arrived:
This is the one where Gibson revealed The Shadow’s true identity, and began the whole Allard / Cranston mythology. A very, VERY cool addition - the killer George Rozen cover makes it that much more so.
30+ years after picking up my first issue (issue seven, with the Hunchback), I’ve realized a longtime goal: the entire run of Denny O’Neil’s 1973-74 THE SHADOW series from DC, my gateway drug to the character, is finally mine.
(Written and directed by David Lynch; starring Jack Nance, Charlotte Stewart, Judith Anna Roberts, Laurel Near, Allen Joseph, Jeanne Bates, and Jack Fisk. Released 19 March 1977; watched 2023w19 via Criterion Channel )
That I'm as much of a David Lynch devotee as I am and have been for years (even when he climbs too far, as Quentin Tarantino said, up his own ass – though I did buy the 4k Criterion release of INLAND EMPIRE, which I'm nonetheless looking forward to seeing again), that I hadn't seen ERASERHEAD until now is (yet another) of my cinematic crimes in an otherwise solid record.
Hopefully subsequent viewings will let me see this marvel on its own two feet – it is, after all, Stanley Kubrick's favorite film – instead of taking it in as a reverse summation of Lynch's 40-year career but I can't deny my surprise and elation at how much of everthing – character, idea, trope, etc – Lynch has done/explored since can be traced to ERASERHEAD: The Lady in the Radiator = Lil in TWIN PEAKS: FIRE WALK WITH ME (and The Lady's plaster cheeks returning in the plaster mask of Mrs. Chalfont's grandson in FIRE); the "beautiful neighbor"= Isabella Rossellini in BLUE VELVET; Mary X's mom = Sarah Palmer; the tree in dirt and the baby (oh, that baby) became the Man From Another Place's latest incarnation in TWIN PEAKS: THE RETURN; the floor in Henry's apartment lobby (nevermind the curtains) is the floor in the Black Lodge; and nevermind that the whole film should have prepared everyone for the divine madness of TWIN PEAKS: THE RETURN's eighth episode (got a light?); and Jack Nance's Charlie Chaplin industrial channeling as Henry is revisited as his Charlie Chaplin channeling Pete Martell in the woods and environs of TWIN PEAKS (I miss Jack Nance so very, very much - should be mentioned in the same breath as Cazale, IMO; what a treasure)
Normally, if a creator was doing that, I'd say they're trying to refine and hone what they did in their earliest work: it's been said that we all do one work and everything is an attempt to make it better. Maybe that's true, but given that this is Lynch, it feels less like he's trying to improve with time and more like he's trying to return to this freedom, this time before success, when he was closer to being a painter than a filmmaker. He's called it his most spiritual film – and probably considers it his best. It was when he didn't know what he was doing and just doing - when he was most in his beginner's mind: if this is what beginner's mind brings, sign me up. Love it.
Good mail day.
(Directed by Dan Trachtenberg from a script by Patrick Aison; starring Amber Midthunder, Dakota Beavers, Dane DiLiegro, Michelle Thrush, Stormee Kipp, Julian Black Antelope, and Bennet Taylor. Released 05 August 2022; watched: 2023w19 via Hulu )
Betraying my status as PREDATOR-mythos ignoramus, here's my logline for PREY: It's THE INVISIBLE MAN meets MOST DANGEROUS GAME if the hunter in DANGEROUS GAME wasn't some bored rich guy but was an invisible / cloaking enabled Wolverine in full-feral (yet coldly calculating) berserker mode against one of the best protagonists in the period survival movie / thriller / horror genre (Amber Midthunder's Naru rocks) that is absolutely holy-fucking-shit-brilliant.
Now that I've finally seen this gem (tight, taut 100-minute films FTW – though PREY did take a bit too long to get rolling – not much, just a little bit to find its rhythm), I want to rewatch the original films – think I've only seen the first two, haven't seen any of the newer ones – to see the connections that I've read were there but that I clearly missed (see PREDATOR-mythos ignoramus of paragraph one) even though I didn't need to know any of it to enjoy a damn fine movie.
Listening to fellow Berklee alum Sarah Schachner's soundtrack as I write this: it's that rare soundtrack that can both propel the story along AND stand on its own.
Such a great time: just what I needed.
New whimsical (a rare occasion to use that word – and I use it in the best, carnivalistic (carnivally? carnival-esque?) way possible) experimental pop earworms from the inimitable superpolar Taïps label:
