Movie Review: Inside Out (2015)

by Tony Dayoub


There are Pixar films for kids, and there are Pixar films for grown-ups. Inside Out is definitely one for adults, and that grants it a kind of longevity. See, movies like Monsters, Inc., Cars, and even Toy Story have to depend on cutesy characters and sequels to extend their shelf life because, fun as they are, once you've seen them there isn't much there to revisit. Their concerns are those of children: finding what you're good at, fitting in among new friends, coping with a loss of popularity, etc. Movies like The Incredibles, Wall-E, and Up may still have cute characters but they have a more mature focus: adjusting to middle-age and familial responsibility, overcoming our consumerist tendencies, remembering you're only as young as you feel, and so forth. Inside Out definitely falls into the latter camp.

Lynch’s Affinity for Laura Palmer

by Tony Dayoub

This is the fourth post in a four-part series. Catch up on parts one, two, and three.

Joel,

David Lynch hasn’t released a full-length theatrical feature since 2006’s Inland Empire. This offers us some perspective on his filmography and Fire Walk with Me’s place in it. It’s but the first of a series of films depicting a woman whose dual nature is a signal of internal dissonance. What most intrigues me is how jarring it feels compared with his work up until then, a considerable achievement given the almost mischievous disdain Lynch has for traditional narratives. Even though he started his career with Eraserhead, a stubbornly surreal work, his next two films–The Elephant Man and Dune–both strike me as stabs at legitimacy, a director bringing his unique vision to projects which might allow him mainstream success. Blue Velvet, which looks at the frighteningly dark underbelly of shiny, wholesome small-town America, is the first work that truly feels Lynchian. Then comes TV’s Twin Peaks, which continues along those lines. And right before Fire Walk with Me, Lynch directs Wild at Heart, a noir romance that hints at Lynch’s penchant for the surreal intruding on reality, this time in the form of characters from the movie The Wizard of Oz.

The Back Door to the Black Lodge

by Joel Bocko

This is the third post in a four-part series. Catch up on parts one and two.

Tony,

Entering the world of Fire Walk With Me for the first time, I was thrilled by its air of uncertainty. Lynch's rhythms and images provoked and perplexed me: the static-filled TV set where we would expect the show’s opening theme song; the plastic-wrapped corpse of Teresa Banks floating downstream, unclaimed and unloved; the FBI meeting in a skimpy Oregon airfield, sour-faced Lil (Kimberly Ann Cole) offering coded information via a wiggle, stitch, and blue flower. And then we were off to Deer Meadow, to investigate Teresa's murder. You've already described the Bizarro World qualities of Twin Peaks' doppelganger town, but perhaps even more unsettling than what Lynch shows us there is how he introduces us to it.

CLICK HERE FOR THE FULL POST AT LOST IN THE MOVIES

Poetry Becomes Prose in Fire Walk with Me

by Tony Dayoub

This is the second post in a four-part series. Catch up on part one here.

Joel,

I was not one of those fans who felt that the show quickly “descended into camp,” as you put it, with the resolution of who killed Laura Palmer. Like Special Agent Dale B. Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan), I was so in love with the town and its denizens that I relished any tangent from the relatively straight line David Lynch and Mark Frost had so far led us along. Remember, Lynch and Frost had never meant to resolve the mystery, hoping instead to use it as a backdrop for spinning off other storylines, like a traditional soap. Sometimes, these tangents went nowhere, or at least nowhere of interest–most notoriously in the very noirish storyline where James Hurley (James Marshall) is seduced by a femme fatale and set up for her husband’s murder. Other times, I was as delighted as the show intended viewers to be, no matter how silly the subplot (yes, I admit that I adored the inane romance between Lana and Mayor Milford). Staunch supporter that I was, I enjoyed how sprawling and diffuse the show’s mythology had grown–Black and White Lodges, Bookhouses, dwarves, giants, owls and all.

Twin Peaks Is Dead, Long Live Laura Palmer

by Joel Bocko

This is the first in a four-part series between Joel Bocko and Tony Dayoub. Joel has the first post.

"When you told your secret name, I burst in flames, and burned..."
-"Floating", written by David Lynch, 1989

Tony,

Let's talk about the final day of Laura Palmer's life. Not the night with its cocaine binges, woodland orgies, and bloody murders, but the morning before, as depicted in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me. Remember that soggy bowl of cereal, abandoned by the trembling teenager while her father tries to cheer her up? Or Laura's jittery mother steeling herself with a cigarette, her blank, exhausted inner state almost as ugly and jagged as her daughter's raw wound? And who can forget the ferocious hatred in Laura's eyes, years in the making, as she growls at her astonished father in her bedroom: "Stay...away from me..."? By the time we are submerged in Laura's woozy afternoon at high school, her disorientation overpowers us. Swooningly subjective dips and pans, time-lapsed clocks intercut with blurry crowds, high-angled perspectives pinning Laura to a ground that is sliding away beneath her feet–if these are not the most adventurous techniques David Lynch has ever employed, they are among his most compassionate. We've burrowed deeply into Laura's consciousness, losing ourselves on a death trip that few were willing to take.

CLICK HERE FOR THE FULL POST AT LOST IN THE MOVIES

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me

by Tony Dayoub

Almost 25 years ago (if you don't count its festival debut), Twin Peaks premiered on ABC and changed the TV landscape forever. Just over 2 years later, David Lynch's theatrical follow-up, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, was a crushing failure at the box office. How did a property so popular that it got Lynch on the cover of Time Magazine fall so precipitously in the interim? It's just one of the topics we'll be discussing when Lost in the Movies' Joel Bocko and I get together.

Joel kicks off the conversation next week. Laura Palmer is getting ready to visit. Why don't you?

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me at 20

by Tony Dayoub

Months before Twin Peaks' national TV premiere on ABC, its pilot debuted at the Miami Film Festival, where one reviewer correctly predicted its ultimate fate:

...the series may lay an egg on television because of its drawn-out and deliberate pacing, brutality, sex with violence and a hint of something else... something deadly, yet unseen and probably repulsive.

True enough in the long term. But short term, its first 6-episode season—in which FBI Special Agent Dale B. Cooper (Kyle Maclachlan) comes to town to investigate the murder of homecoming queen Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee)—managed to enthrall the nation. The season finale, a cliffhanger in which Cooper is shot in the chest at point blank range by an unseen assailant, was sufficiently newsworthy to prompt Saturday Night Live to invite Maclachlan to host the show's 16th season premiere and propel the show's co-creator, David Lynch, onto the cover of Time magazine in anticipation of Peaks' 2nd season premiere. What are the chances either of those occurrences might ever happen again?

Now It’s Dark

From prose to poetry: the Blue Velvet: 25th Anniversary Edition Blu-ray

by Tony Dayoub

The first thing that comes to mind when I think of Blue Velvet, surely one of the most significant films of the last 25 years, is something rather ordinary for a movie with so many shocking and memorable images. It is the opening shot. Not the saturated opening shot of the red roses against the white picket fence of the film proper, mind you. I mean the fade up into the image of blue velvet flapping as if being blown by some mysterious wind. Composer Angelo Badalamenti’s timpanists roll right into the plaintive violins of his main theme, paving the way for a solitary clarinet repeating their melody. Initially, the clarinet’s crisp intrusion into the lushness of the violins is as transgressive as that of the film’s main character, Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan) into the nightmarish beauty of his sleepy hometown, Lumberton. But eventually, the clarinet blends in with the violins, achieving a harmonic unity not unlike the one the naïve Jeffrey does when he gets simpatico with the twisted underbelly of his innocent-looking small town and its frightening denizens.

UPDATED: Blue Velvet 25th Anniversary Blu-ray Giveaway

by Tony Dayoub

One of my all-time favorite films, Blue Velvet, is now available for the first time ever on Blu-ray. A week from today, I should have a review up at my other outlet, Nomad Editions: Wide Screen, where I'll focus on the 50 minutes of lost footage that appears on the disc as a bonus feature.

To celebrate this release, I am happy to give away a free copy of the new 25th Anniversary Blu-ray (courtesy of Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios, Inc.) to each of the first FIVE people who can correctly answer a question related to the bonus footage (hint: if you go back through some of my recent tweets you can easily find the answer). But first, the rules: