Gamebeast23456

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Everything posted by Gamebeast23456

  1. I think there's a strange culture of Lynch schadenfreude (that I also indulge in) that almost feels uncomfortable with the amount of weight Lynch has in counter-culture or just sort of niche culture because he's also very clearly a 70 year old Midwestern white guy who totally carries that background with him in his work, and often subverts it. I think there's a desire to catch him stumbling. I don't mean for this to sound like I feel Lynch is beleagured or misunderstood or needs to be protected, no one is above critique. But it often feels like people really want to jump the gun on him. To not deflect my point onto anyone else, I personally feel like, as much as I love his work, my personal opinions and points of discomfort often leave me considering his work in bad faith, and this is heightened with this new series which is very weird and not complete or total.
  2. I often come back to wondering how the specifics of the edit job we're seeing contribute to these problems. I have to imagine there's another, alt-universe cut of this show that re-orders things and gives more immediate payoff to the kid plotline. I'm almost certain that spinning plate is about to get sucked back into the gravity of the A plot, but the fact that this kid was killed weeks ago and we've gotten, what, three scenes? that even mention it is frustrating. The whole timeline of this season is super alienating, especially at the pace of the show and watching it week to week. When did Dougie and Ike The Spike face off and we originally saw the crazy local news story on it? Three or four real world weeks ago? Now we finally snap backwards in time to the casino guys who are just seeing this now. It feels like this show is quietly playing with time in a way that isn't fully considered, or, just as likely, we haven't seen the actual reasons yet. It seems like the Revival will be incredible fodder for re-cuts and fan timelines. The official version is so spaced out.
  3. This episode felt really scattershot and empty. It's setting stuff up, but the things it's setting up could be arrived at in half the time (though I guess that's not really what you ask for from this series). Standouts: -I thought everything with Dougie was super fun. Shredded Kyle MacLachlan is a good time for all, and I think the continued shading on Janey is really giving Naomi Watts room to be a real presence in this show, which I appreciate every time we see her. -I don't like Audrey Horne existing in a world with Richard one bit. I don't think Audrey's return is going to be very pleasent. However, I do appreciate in some sense Twin Peaks really dipping back into shitty teens. -I'm glad we got some more Log Lady, though her appearence in this episode is more expositional and less potent. -Rebekah Del Rio! She gave us one of the best scenes in film history in Mulholland Drive and it's nice to see her. If you put much weight in the interlocking universes of MD and TP this appearence might be fun. Rebekah came all the way from Silencio to the Roadhouse! Maybe Janey-E will be triggered into remembering her past lives through a shitty camera phone video of Rebekah's performance! -Every week I warm up to Tammy. Her and Cole chuckling over Albert was really nice, and the insecurities that feed into her over-the-top persona have been hinted at enough to make her more fun to watch careening around this show, saucily expositioning. -David Lynch video effects struck again!
  4. Yeah, I mean, the whole scene is Chad doing something they've expressly told him not to do multiple times, and then acting like they're in the wrong when they tell him to leave. I think it's normal for humans to get tired of people acting cartoonishly mean, especially in the workplace.
  5. There's a fun picture on Reddit of someone trying to visit the website on a 1997 computer.
  6. I thought he was good, and I think more of the scene the more I think about it. I just think the whole construction of the scene was off-putting in a way that made me not as able to connect with it. Maybe I was just a little too distracted this whole episode though. I think I should put most of my reaction to this particular episode on myself, not necessarily the quality of the episode. I was pretty distracted throughout, and I've never been invested enough in the lore of the series to be immediately grabbed by new information. I've seen some discussion of the lack of breathing room any of these new characters are getting, and I really sympathize with that frustration. I would've appreciated some more time with Bill Hastings before we got to this emotional peak. It just fell flat for me.
  7. I feel like Episodes 7-9 have created this trilogy of high highs and then just the lowest lows. I thought Episode 7 was really fun. All the threads were moving forward, and they were tied together by interesting scenes and good acting. Episode Eight was this cosmic detour that advanced the lore of the Twin Peaks universe in a direction I totally wasn't expecting, but it was made up of really amazing filmmaking, visual effects, music, and some great acting. This episode, while I'm sure is doing something for fans of the story both of this season and the series as a whole, was such a let down. Stuff happens, lore is dispersed, and except for a few really standout scenes I was bored the entire time. The highlight of the episode, for me, was Cooper's little awakening when he sees the flag. That was fun and an interesting way to keep feeding Cooper elements of his old personality. As someone who just isn't willing to keep up with all the threads of this mystery, this might be my least enjoyed episode of the season. Also, the whole interrogation of Bill Hastings was just not good. I do not understand why all the dynamic actors were put on the other side of the glass and we were forced to watch Matthew Lillard bounce off of Chrysta Bell.
  8. The Idle Book Club 26: A Sight for Sore Eyes

    I just finished the book. For the most part, I really liked it. I'm angling to read Blood Meridian for the first time next, so I was hoping for something a bit lighter before I dive into that, but I enjoyed this book a lot anyway. It's a pretty grim read, but in a way that's so pulpy and gothic that it reminds me of the TV series Hannibal and that really eases the burden of some of the content in the novel. The biggest problem I had with the book is the cuteness or somewhat forced symmetry of the plot. I liked the way that all of this information is introduced and slowly tied together, but at the same time once the main course of the story was completed little details like the discovery of Jennifer's true killer and Agnes leaving the ring in the same way Eileen found it was just a little too tidy and unnecessarily cheeky for my taste. I'm excited to listen to the podcast now that I've finished the book!
  9. Yeah, this is the first time I've been told I know what I'm looking at. Anyway, here's a gallery of high-quality Episode Eight screengrabs from the Twin Peaks subreddit. I'm a decided screengrab fan. My biggest interest going for is Lynch keeping up a steady supply of interesting imagery and design, and worry about the implications of the lore much later.
  10. Sometimes I wonder what would've happened if Showtime called Lynch's bluff when he said he wasn't going to do the show and somehow got someone else to do it. This hypothetical is inherently strained because I doubt such a project would ever actually get done, and the cast and fan reaction would be horrible, but I also am not sure people uniformly knew what they were in for when Lynch got a big budget and double the time. As much as I want Lynch to be the guy who tells complex and nuanced interpersonal stories, that's probably not him. Mark Frost probably has input, and he probably worked with him trying to give this story volume, but deep characterization has never been Lynch's ballgame. I think a lot of trouble he gets into as a writer springs from his education and background, his emphasis on the power of symbol and image and sound. He's a cold director. I'm not really walking away upset from however this new series decides to twist and turn the original characterizations. This episode, and the opening episodes of the season, are absolutely what I'm here for. I want Lynch to run wild and build his big, ugly symbology, be as cold and inhumane as ever. It will probably weird me out and piss me off, but that's what I expect. The way he chooses to speak about humanity just doesn't usually come from dialogue or characterization, though he has his moments. Also, one last thought -- what are the odds on us getting a Stephen King in The Dark Tower situation, where Gordon Cole is actually very literally playing the role of David Lynch, the liason for the author. What if the actual story of this season is Gordon Cole going from "I don't know what the hell is going on" to lore master Gordon Cole. Laura Hudson still remains one of the few people able to match up with this show in terms of understanding how it tries to short circuit rewatch culture. Her write ups are so good.
  11. I'm not big on TP lore, but before this season I had always operated under the assumption that the beings in the Black Lodge were sort of at a remove from humanity, and that their motivations only occasionally intersected with what happened to human beings on earth. This assumption, when I think about it, isn't based on much be more than my read on how a lot of scenes in the Red Room and with The Giant are presented. Still, I'd be lying to say I feel absolutely nothing wrt my assumptions about that being dashed. The Black Lodge realm seems super invested in humans, maybe to a fault. This episode did seem to be a really tight pairing between Frost and Lynch in a way I really can get behind. I think we are right to label Frost the lore king of Twin Peaks, especially since Lynch always seems to be more mecurial and spur of the moment in his creative process. I thought it was an exquisite and bold exposition vehicle, with absolutely CLASSIC Lynch sound design. There's lots of bombastic sound in this episode, but my favorite might actually be the moody, droning tones that accompany the whole Mr. C resuscitation sequence. Really unnerving and understated. Regarding the existence of evil before the bomb, I'd argue the point of making the bomb the forking moment is the level of power humans have now harnassed. Obviously, WWI and II were no slouches on the weaponized destruction front, but the amount of potential destruction behind the bomb was unparalleled. The general evils of humanity now had the access to the most powerful weapon ever, one that crystalizes every abstract single threat into something huge. I really enjoy that the Question Mark Guy formally known as the Giant viewed the exact footage that the audience does on an old fashioned projector. Showtime should really just put up the episode we will miss next week online.
  12. I think it's somewhat strange that people have come to think art is not allowed to be manipulative. and I hope this series will give people some leeway back into actually pushing people in popular entertainment.
  13. It also seems somewhat possible that before the return of Good Coop Mr. C was more dynamic and able to incorporate elements of full Cooper's personality. Maybe he did meet with Diane but did not reveal the extent of his change in that meeting, outside of whatever horrible thing occurred, so now Bad Coop is much more obviously a fake to her. It would seem weird (to me) to hinge Diane's character on something original Cooper did incidentally 25 years ago, after all he's now been through, just in terms of economy of storytelling.
  14. Re: the sweeping scene, that felt like a semi-rare case of Lynch going with an extremely explicit visual metaphor. "We spent a lot of time throwing a bunch of seemingly disparate plot dust around, and no we are piling it all up for you." There was something about the straightforwardness of it that, had it occured in a film, would be on the fast track to explaining visual-thematic metaphors in Intro To Film courses, right next to Hitchcock and trains. Little did we know, actually this is vaporized garmonbosia and the Renault's have been visiting the Black Lodge for centuries and are the true key to the mysteries of Twin Peaks.
  15. I think excusing or contextualizing gratuitousness by it's basis in reality is usually a losing game. Yes, women are raped and assaulted in other major and minor ways every day, but David Lynch and co. are not documentarians setting up cameras to see what slices of life they can catch. There's a long writing, directing and editing process that goes into something popping onto your TV set or a theater projector, and it's inherently important/notable/interpretable that decisions are made to show women being assaulted and abused as opposed to women being shown as cashiers at grocery stores or having problems in the health industry, which are also very common occurrences for women in America. Many things occur in life that have not appeared on the screen.
  16. Bad Coop just leaving a trail of abused women feels like it is exactly where we are going, and it really gets frustrating. The one way that I think this Revival is really doing a disservice is how much worse it treats female bodies. The original object of the first run is an abused, desecrated body and the specific circumstances of how it ended up in this state are given gravity. In this show, women get stabbed by little people three times in a scene that is bisected by a weird physical comedy gag, female characters are introduced solely to show how bad a male character is, it's all so heavily overplaying a theme that was originally so central and specific. Like, yes, we understand that in this world men are abusive, but you are choosing how these characters act, David. If Diane is talking about being raped or physically assaulted in some way, it will again be Lynch just wantonly throwing his toys around again in an approximation of something that he once delivered powefully. But, at the same time, Lynch is not the sort of reflective writer who gets tired of his favorite tropes, and it seems like he's really dialing down on this one, without much to back it up.
  17. I actually think Andy might have his most professional seeming moments in this episode. Like, yeah, agreeing to go meet a suspect in the woods when he's right in front of you is goofy, but it also kind of plays into the problems of being a cop in a small town that got gutted by industry and then restocked by randos and drug dealers. Back in the day, a sensitive investigation in the small lumber town of Twin Peaks might allow for questionable, weirdly unassertive meeting planning. Andy is only really mistaken in thinking that time is still going. There's something that struck me as really sad in those scenes, but I can't put my finger on it, beyond the surface "bygone era" thing. The morgue scene, especially the hallway hobo, was great, although the mortician didn't get any sick quips. CQC Coop snapping back in was marvelous. I did not expect we would get this much time with Janey and Dougie, but I'm weirdly getting settled in this domestic/workplace drama. Even though I obviously want Coop back. I think the original mystique of Bad Coop has gotten burned off through inaction, I'm ready to see what ill shit he's up to next. I can't tell if the version of this story where Bad Coop is literally just all the bad in old Coop is worse than the one where it's just BOB. I think the question of Leland Vs. Demonic possession was more powerful for the specificity of a single act, where Bad Coop seems to be raping and killing everyone to an absurd degree.
  18. It seems like this new Twin Peaks is, like lots of Lynch's non televised work, much more willing to embrace the unreal. I think a lot of the original series, as wacky as it got, Lynch himself seemed to mostly cage off different layers of reality very cleanly for the audience. This is the Red Room and it's tied to dreaming, but you have (mostly) clean breaks between the "real" (if weird) world and the deeper layers at play. The whole setup of Dougie is a huge, blinking neon sign advertising the unreality of modern life, and the emotional distance between people. Only now can you get scenes of Carl watching yellow spirits drift into the sky as part of "reality".I Ihink this season is Lynch knowing the audience is much more comfortable with floundering around in different layers or versions of reality, after films like Mulholland Drive really hit it off.
  19. It seems to me that I am just fundementally seeing a different emotional premise for this scene than some people are, which is fine. I see it as basically going: disheveled, older man is introduced, he talks about his own mortality and the feeling that his time is running out and how those feelings manifest in visiting the town every week, he sits on a park bench and is entranced by the earliest stages of a new life, there are few things as pure as a parent playing with their child and it heartens him in some way to see the possibility in a new life, but then it's dashed. I think this scene only works, in my particular reading, if it's a young victim because it reinforces the fears of the character whose perspective we implicitly follow. Death comes here as sudden, if this innocent child can be randomly killed with no context, there's no saying what could happen to an old man. It's pretty rough to see violent death without context, but that's not unheard of in real life. Yes, it's crass and brutal and Lynch does not build to it at all, but I feel like that's the point. It moved me considerably. In the context of a TV series that is concerned with plot progression and all that, I can see why these scenes might seem superfluous or just confusing, but that's just not how I'm viewing most of this show. I'm content to watch a new hour of new Lynch filmmaking every week and just see what hits me.
  20. Not to excuse Lynch, but I was recently perusing his book Catching The Big Fish and I was again struck by the degree to which Lynch sees his work as almost entirely internal and about only itself. He wants us to think that these characters can only be representative of their own situations, and is therefore heavily predisposed, in my estimation, to be wanton about this sort of thing at times. I mean, look at the body count in this episode alone. Of course, this internality cannot literally be true - but I don't think being a father would ever have anything to do with how he would choose to use the symbology of children in his work. He thrives on seperation between the pain he inflicts on characters and real life pain. He did make Eraserhead after all.
  21. I really love how this season is a rumination on aging as a result of its' own historical context. There's been so many great scenes about the effects of time - from the log lady's appearance to Cooper's reaction to Sonny Jim and the whole FBI subplot. I thought the scenes with the trailer park owner really worked as a self-contained short film about aging and loss (coincidentally, I've been enjoying this season of Twin Peaks the most when it feels like a series of short films and tone pieces). Personally, I was really moved by the car accident, even granting that it is totally melodramatic. The buildup to it is just so good. It's all about Carl Rodd externally reckoning with mortality. The conclusion had it's own strange power to it, where Carl is the only person who isn't spellbound by the visceral horror of it and is able to empathize totally with the feeling of sudden loss. I think there are definitely some icky underpinnings to get us there, but there's just something that really moved me about it. Also, on the subject of aging and mortality, I thought Cooper contemplating the connection between Dougie's boss's boxing promotional poster and the guy in front of him was also super powerful and understated. The theme of aging also really hits me every time we see Albert (especially with the meta-textual fact that Miguel Ferrer passed before the show aired). It's really crushing to see what this character has already been willing to do to try and save his friend. I think the spiritualist/deeply moral side of Albert was slightly cobbled together and loose fitting in the original run, and I'm really glad we get to spend some more time with him. His path has truly been a strange and difficult one.
  22. Some quick thoughts - Happy to see Jeremy Davies reprise his role as Dicky Bennet from Justified - I think this is the first musical outro that moved me at all. What is the name of the band? This song is really good shoegaze/dreampop -I really enjoyed the ruminations on aging in this episode: Harry Dean Andersons whole little arc is beautiful and heartbreaking, especially in the context of Good Coop slowly coming back to life and realizing how much time he lost. -Naomi Watts' is always so good. I wish she was in stuff more often. -Laura Dern in a Mulholland Drive blonde wig is the totality of all looks -The whole chain of events that leads Hawke to those notes just had me constantly groaning. I hope we get past his heritage eventually -Fuck Chad -Using a dwarf actor for this character is really setting off my "David Lynch equating deformity to evil/deviance" angst. This show is really unafraid to be as problematic as possible right when I'm really into it.
  23. It feels like there two to three axes of discussion in these forums and it's great! Personally, I prefer talking themes and the more interprative side, but it's also interesting to hear from people who are interested in talking about the plot/lore. To be honest, I wish I had that kind d of focus, it seems like there's some fun detective work going on. Also, because these threads are my Lynch discussion platform of choice, I really need to shamelessly plug my summer project, Fox Vs. Lynch, where I watch (or re-watch) every DL feature chronologically and explore ways that they are about real human emotions and stuff: https://foxvslynch.tumblr.com/
  24. As a director and a visual artist before that, it makes sense that Lynch is fixated on the specifics of an image, and a particular image that has gotten him into trouble with SJWs like me is that of beautiful (almost always white) young women. However, I do tend to agree that his ideas on representing women have evolved, at least depending on how important to his story it is. I mean, it's hard for me to watch Mulholland Drive and not think that this writer is not being thoughtless about the images he constructs and knows we are also going to think about them. He's certainly not above sexism in any way, and his tendencies never disappeared, but his relationship to female characters (really most social issues) is, perhaps, fittingly confusing.
  25. I always come back to annoyance at David Lynch and women because he seems both able to write good female characters with consistent voices that he empathises with, but also, if he estimates a female character to not be that important he's way more likely to just shit out underbaked, stereotyped shit. He's a very thoughtful writer that seems to always short circuit himself in the exact same ways. It just feels like it reveals something worse in his character that he so regiments his interest. In fact, a strong point in this episode, in my opinion, is Lynch demonstrating lots of different scenarios where men feel emboldened to harass or take advantage of women (the bar scene, Shelly's (daughter?) and knockoff Steve Buscemi, the dude hitting on the bathroom lady, etc) but then Lynch's conception of how women might mistreat men is just like - nagging them?