Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992)
As I mentioned in an earlier article, I had up until recently assumed that they never did solve the mystery of “Who Killed Laura Palmer”” in the original two-season run of Twin Peaks. I further assumed that this movie, which was made just after the original series was cancelled, solved the mystery. Obviously, I was wrong. They catch Laura Palmer’s killer in the middle of season two and move on to a different mystery from there. That mystery does not get resolved at the end of Season Two, and in fact, it ends on a stunning cliffhanger. You would think that the movie would resolve that cliffhanger. But you would be wrong. David Lynch is not that kind of director.
Buy Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (Criterion Collection) Blu-rayInstead, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me details the last few days of Laura Palmer’s life. That’s a weird thing to do. It is a very weird movie. A lot of weird shit happens. But it seems especially weird to give us a sort of prequel to the first season of the original series. We know what happens to Laura Palmer (she dies), we know who killed her (I won’t spoil that). Why show us the lead-up to that murder?
If the tag line to the original series was “Who Killed Laura Palmer?” then the tag line for this movie might be “Who Was Laura Palmer?” When the original series begins, Laura is already dead. Our concern isn’t who she is, but what happened to her, and who did it. People talk about her life. At first, her friends and family talked about her like she were a saint. But as the investigation continues, we learn she smoked, she drank, she did drugs, and was sexually promiscuous. The series never victim-blames her; it never tries to blame her murder on these sins. But it does allow them to taint her image. We no longer see her as the good girl, but as a very bad girl indeed.
What the movie does is invert that. We get to know Laura as a human. We see that her life was full of trauma and abuse. The drugs and the sex weren’t a good girl behaving badly, but a young woman who had been systematically abused for most of her life, just trying to find ways to cope with unrelenting tragedy.
It is an astonishing film. Also, a difficult one. Lynch pulls us deep into the mire. He shoves our face into Laura’s trauma, making us complicit in enjoying what we perceived as a fun little murder mystery. In reality, it was a girl trapped in horrifying abuse. Sheryl Lee gives an incredible performance as Laura. As an audience, we know Laura’s fate, but Lee makes us believe that Laura knew it too. In the film, she seems to know there is only one way out. The ending, which I won’t spoil, does allow for a little hope. And it is beautiful.
I See a Dark Stranger (1946)
Bridie Quilty (Deborah Kerr) grew up in a small Irish village listening every day to stories about the oppressive English and how her father fought against them during the Irish Revolution. She hates the English. So much so that when she turns 21, she travels to Dublin and attempts to enlist with the Irish Republican Army with one of her father’s old revolutionary pals. She is dispirited when she learns that her father’s friend has accepted the peace terms Ireland entered into with England, and is happy to allow more peaceful political machinations to continue the fight.
Buy I See A Dark Stranger DVDEnter J. Miller (Raymond Huntley), a Nazi spy searching for new recruits in England. He slyly convinces Bridie that the enemy of her enemy is her friend. The film does take some pains to note that Birdie’s home life was fairly sheltered from the outside world. She only knows that England is at war with Germany and that Ireland had, up until that point, remained neutral. There is no indication she understands the depths of depravity the Nazis were getting up to. Still, it is an interesting bit of plotting for a British film to make the hero of a film made in 1946 a Nazi sympathizer.
One of her assignments is to distract Lieutenant David Baynes (Trevor Howard), a British Naval Officer, while Miller busts out an imprisoned soldier. Naturally, she falls in love with Baynes and turns from her anti-British ways, but the journey up to that pat ending is wonderful. I love World War II-era British films. They have so much more weight to them and character than similar films from America.
Bob Dylan Covers the Pogues “Rainy Night in Soho”
The Outlaw Music Festival, a concert series featuring Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson, Billy Strings, and others, opened last night in Phoenix, AZ. I’m a huge Dylan fan, so I tend to follow his tours, and this opener did some interesting things. A few songs were played for the first time in years, which is always exciting. He also played an obscure blues song called “Axe and the Wind” by someone called George “Wild Child” Butler. You gotta love it when Bob throws something out so obscure it befuddles everyone. But the big news is that he covered the Pogues’ classic “Rainy Night in Soho.”
That’s a great freaking song, and from the clips Bob did it justice. Unfortunately, the only clips I could find were just that, clips. So far, no full recording of the song has surfaced, but it is still incredibly cool. I absolutely love it when Bob comes out with a new cover of something completely out of left field. No doubt full recordings of the entire show will surface soon. I can’t wait.
Platoon
I’ve been revisiting a lot of the films I loved in my youth this year. Some of them, like Tombstone, which I talked about last time, are films that I saw decades ago and didn’t like that much. I enjoy revisiting that type of film to see if my opinion has changed. Others, like Platoon, are films that I absolutely loved back in the day but for one reason or another haven’t watched again in a very long time.
Buy Platoon Blu-rayPlatoon is a film I owned on VHS tape. It is weird to remember those days before streaming video when you either watched what was on TV or you threw on a tape. I often threw on a tape, and while I had a decent collection, it was still limited. So I used to watch some of the same movies over and over again. I probably saw Platoon a dozen times back then, and then I just stopped. It has probably been 20 years or more since I watched it.
It still holds up, but in different ways than I had imagined. Based on director Oliver Stone’s actual experiences as an Army grunt in the Vietnam War, the film follows Chris Taylor (Charlie Sheen), an affluent college dropout who joined the war effort because he didn’t feel it was right for it to just be poor kids fighting in the jungle. He starts the film completely green and inexperienced, but by the time the credits roll, he is a seasoned soldier completely disillusioned by war.
As a younger man, I was always enthralled with the personal conflict at the center of the film. The platoon finds itself in a village where they find a cache of weapons and enough food to feed three times as many people currently living there. The villagers say that the NVA forced them to store those weapons and keep the extra food, but Staff Sgt. Barnes (Tom Berenger) isn’t having it. When things get out of control and one of the villagers is shot dead, Sgt. Elias (Willem Defoe) intervenes. Then he makes a report about it, proclaiming Barnes murdered the villager. Tensions ensue.
But this viewing, while that stuff made for good drama, I was entranced by the actual war, the absolute horror of it. Humping it through the jungle all day long, getting very little sleep and what sleep there is to be found is lying in full gear on the hard ground in suffocating heat or pouring rain. Being bitten by ants, having little food. And oh, yeah, constantly living in fear of being shot dead in a terrible firefight. I can’t even begin to imagine what that is like, but Stone really puts you in the middle of it.
They Might Be Giants
Sherlock Holmes is probably the most famous fictional detective in the world. The stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle have sold millions of copies and have been translated into nearly every language in the world. They have been adapted into television and film so many times that the Guinness World Records people awarded him the most portrayed literary human character in film & TV award in 2012.
Buy They Might Be Giants Blu-rayIf I’m being honest, I have to admit Holmes is not my favorite detective. I much prefer the hard-boiled gumshoes from writers like Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. I’ve read several of the stories, but they’ve never done much for me. They always feel like puzzle boxes, specifically designed to be solved by Holmes’ style of detection instead of fleshed-out mysteries with interesting characters.
But I do like a lot of the movies based on his stories, and that TV series starring Benedict Cumberbatch was good. They Might Be Giants (and yes, the quirky band from New York did name themselves after this movie, sort of) takes an interesting angle on the Sherlock Holmes mythos. George C. Scott plays Justin Playfair, a former judge who has retreated into fantasy after the death of his wife. He believes himself to be Sherlock Holmes. His brother, looking to get power of attorney and thus control of the purse strings of Justin’s rather large estate, wants to have him committed. But before Dr. Mildred Watson (Joanne Woodward) will sign off on that, she demands to spend some time with him.
One thing leads to another, and before you know it, they are both running around the city trying to catch Moriarty. The film hits that perfect balance between serious and silly, never taking itself too seriously but steering itself away from ridiculousness. Scott is wonderful as Holmes (or a guy believing he’s Holmes), and Woodward shines as Dr. Watson. It isn’t a great film by any means, but it is a lot of fun.
Honey, Don’t!
The Coen Brothers are two of my favorite filmmakers. Their unique blend of dark drama and pitch black humor is right up my alley. In 2019, they announced, well, not a breakup exactly, but a break apart from each other (for now, they keep saying they will eventually make more films together). Ethan wanted to spend more time on his theater work, so Joel directed The Tragedy of Macbeth all by himself. Then, in 2022, Ethan directed Drive Away Dolls, which was co-written by his wife, Tricia Cooke.
Buy Drive Away Dolls Blu-rayJoel’s film was an austere, completely serious take on Shakespeare’s most famous play. Drive Away Dolls is a rollicking road film filled with violence, more sex than the entirety of the brothers’ filmography, and a suitcase full of dildos. This prompted one critic to proclaim, “Ethan was the horny brother.”
The trailer for Ethan’s follow-up film (which they are calling the second part of a planned lesbian B-movie trilogy) has just dropped, and it looks like a lot of fun.
