Little Shop/Suddenly Last Summer Mashup

I'd pay to see a buddy comedy starring the Venus flytrap from Suddenly Last Summer and Audrey II from Little Shop of Horrors as an odd coupling of hard-boiled cops with a taste for raw human flesh.

I'd pay to see that shit in IMAX, even!

Copyright 2019 by William D. Tucker. All rights reserved. 

Rashomon 2

Persistent dream of an unauthorized sequel to Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon

No attempt to replicate the plot or characters,
just a cameramind stalking the forest
in glorious black and white
cameramind compulsively keeps looking up into the sun
a Bolero-esque score drives the action
maybe this cameramind wants to burn out its brain
whatever that may consist of
relentless sense of motion
make the trees and bushes and grass and rocks and dirt go faster
keep cutting to the blazing sun
camermind's doing its own montage
free of all narrative, perfect arrangement of sensations
fades and wipes and zooms and pans
and there's a passage where it slows down,
you expect it to be a slasher-stalker routine
but this is just about the speed, the texture, the mood

I used to think of this as a kind of fanfilm or homage knitting itself together within my subconscious.
But I think it's a freeform cinema virus,
replicating and altering the other memories associated with my viewings of the Kurosawa film over the years,
seeking to refine itself
into purest expression
of itself
a complex of sensations
cutting itself free from the movie that birthed it
and this is mostly how I remember the original
now
as this refined thing,
both less and more than what it existed as originally.

Lately,
I dream of copyright police trying to get a warrant to break into my mind,
to shut down my unauthorized derivative fan work,
'cause there's gotta be some kind of plot, right?
Too many hacky screenwriting how-to books and YouTube videos trying to impose order upon my dream life.

Copyright 2019 by William D. Tucker. All rights reserved. 

INLAND EMPIRE/The Naked Gun fanfic mashup

I kept seeing Leslie Nielsen invading David Lynch's 2006 digital video epic Inland Empire.

He's in-character as Frank Drebin from The Naked Gun.

Drebin kicks down the door leading into the room with the rabbit-head people,
and he fires and fires and fires his .38 service revolver into the rabbit-head people.

Those rabbit-head masks are magnificently squibbed-up, blasting fake blood, and fake cerebro-spinal fluid, and chunks of hamburger all over the place.

Later,
Drebin's chief is interrogating him about the motivation for shooting the rabbit-people to death,

"It is not this department's policy to condone careless use of force in the line of duty."

Drebin says, "When I see three rabbit-headed weirdos tormenting a kidnapped Polish girl trapped inside a Purgatory Hotel outside of our space-time continuum, I shoot the bastards, that's my policy!"

I tried to get this fan-film made for 8 years.

Just thought I'd share.

The Lynch Meditations 23: Inland Empire (2006)

MAJOR FUCKING SPOILERS, PEOPLE.

OR MAYBE NOT.
WHEN IT COMES TO SUCH A BIZARRE MOVIE AS INLAND EMPIRE, I ACTUALLY DON'T REALLY KNOW IF I UNDERSTAND IT PROPERLY. 

I THINK I DO.

I'LL PROCEED WITH CONFIDENCE I DON'T ACTUALLY POSSESS.
THAT USUALLY WORKS.

You know what?

I blame the Phantom.
For everything.
It's his manipulations of people's minds that create all the chaos and displacement and contortions of space/time inside this cinematic nightmare. He's like the Robert Blake character from Lost Highway. The difference is that here, the Phantom seems to have less godlike control over people's fates, and ultimately he is vanquished. The guy even seems relieved when Laura Dern dumps a clip in him at the climax. The Phantom's death is presented as a relief. The gunfire manifests as flashes of liberating light. And then his face distorts and ruptures into a frightening underwater bloodmouthed clown. And all is right with the world. The women trapped in Hotel Purgatory run free. Even Laura Dern's psycho hubby gets to go back home to Poland and be the working class father he was meant to be, as opposed to the wealthy Hollywood power spouse. All ascend to Heaven-which is a ballroom filled with beautiful women dancing and lip-synching to Nina Simone's Sinnerman, by the way.

Why not?

The nightmare becomes a dream.

Laura Dern's Nikki Grace-somehow-manages to remember she's in a dream which seemingly gives her access to the symbolic power-represented in the handgun-to see through the Phantom's lies-which have even seemingly ensnared him-and blast her way out of the nightmare labyrinth. I like that the villain seems to have forgotten his own identity. In his death, he remembers himself, and awakes into his own crazy clown time hell.

This is all great.

My only criticism is that I would've liked Nikki to shoot the creepy rabbit-head people,too.
She opens the door into their TV show world.
Why not sort them out, too?
Wasn't one of the rabbits also the heartless auditor who an alternate version of Nikki endlessly confessed to throughout the movie?
Fuck those creeps.

Not bad.
It's a hella decent film.

After this movie, David Lynch didn't do much. He supervised the official releases of deleted footage from Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. I think he directed an expensive viral ad for some perfume company.

And then came 2017. And the third season of Twin Peaks. Also called Twin Peaks: The Return.
One more journey into the Black Lodge.
Another reboot, another excavation of pop culture past-you could almost call it a remake.
Just what we need, right?
It's probably gonna suck.

The Lynch Meditations -23

Inland Empire was the second-and, to date, last-David Lynch movie I saw in an actual theater, on a decent sized screen, albeit with digital projection, which wasn't exactly the greatest back in 2007. I think they just set up a consumer-grade digital projector-the kind that many aspiring filmmakers and film buffs buy to stage their screenings anywhere they please. (At the same venue, this was better than a screening of an actual film print of Argento's Suspiria, which was so fucked-up that much of the film looked like it had been invaded by obnoxious demon fireflies.) The movie was murky. You had to squint. You needed a full night's rest and an empty bladder to make it through its shadowy 179 minutes. This is pre-HD, we're talking, but maybe this murkiness was intended to add to the atmosphere of mystery. My circa 2007 DVD copy of the movie actually looks pretty good playing on a Blu-Ray player hooked up to a decent-sized modern LED TV. It's murky, but in all the right places. The lo-fi video look is actually quite slick. And some moments really jump out at you in contrast to the SD-nightmare shadows. So, I guess that's a plug for the DVD release. No, I'm not on the David Lynch payroll.

My theatrical experience was at the Plaza Theater in Atlanta, GA. They had a table set up with some fun feelies: Inland Empire bumper stickers, promotional cards for David Lynch's brand of all-organic coffee beans, and lobby cards with the title of the movie printed on them. The Plaza Theater is quite a nice space. At the time-I don't know what the Plaza looks like now-it had the look of an old-fashioned theater, with curtains and balconies-kinda like the movie theater you see late in the film itself when the Laura Dern character starts to become aware that she-or some part of her-is living inside a movie. 

Inland Empire was dense, impenetrable, and atmospheric. It had the heaviest mood of being absolutely lost in a confusing nightmare space of conflicting cinematic realities that have been fused and sutured together by sinister forces-using eldritch means-into a labyrinth of oppression. It seemed to be another extended meditation upon the corrupting, crazy-making experiences of trying to make movies in Hollywood in the vein of Mulholland Dr., but with an extra forty minutes on the running time, and fewer minutes overall devoted to clever dialogue exchanges and quirky moments of comic relief. Much time is spent stalking hallways and corridors and going up staircases and magically teleporting between the studios and sidewalks of Los Angeles, California and the snowy streets and well-appointed old-world interiors of  Lodz, Poland. 

Laura Dern seems to be playing a few different versions of herself: successful Hollywood actress Nikki Grace; the character she's playing in a movie called On High in Blue Tomorrows; and a kind of grim and gritty real life version of the character in the movie. Dern warps from one shard of fractured reality to another, guided only by the surreal nightmare logic of an allegedly cursed screenplay that seems to absorb and torment anyone who tries to produce it. Dern's Nikki Grace is also oppressed by a psycho jealous stalker of a husband who may or may not be possessed by a supernatural hypnotist known as the Phantom-who is sort of like a 1960s Marvel Comics villain-think the Miracle Man or the Ringmaster-imported into a Lynch movie. 

At some point during her wander of the nightmare labyrinth, Dern's Nikki morphs into a dystopian version of the melodramatic Southern Lady she plays in the movie, and she ascends a series of staircases inside a derelict building, only to find herself seated before an emotionally depressed, passive-aggressive man-hunched, bespectacled, and puffy-cheeked-in a shabby suit seated behind a desk who comes across as a cursed bureaucrat straight out of Kafka. This version of Nikki proceeds to give a deposition in which she expresses her rage at being poor and a lifelong victim of rape and sexual harassment by an endless succession of men in a miserable, polluted industrial town. This expression of rage is broken up into several sequences throughout the movie, and it seems to represent another part of the fractured reality that Nikki wanders through. The character is just this side of over-the-top. At first, the community theater American South accent draws attention to itself, and we seem to be back in the grotesque caricature of Wild at Heart; but as this nightmare deposition continues, the authentic emotions of rage and despair elevate the character and performance into an almost unbearably raw level of intensity. The Kafkaesque auditor, after listening to Dern for some time with almost no expression on his face-except a vague, oily contempt-asks her if she cheated on the husband who beat and raped her repeatedly, the implication being that she deserved the sadism inflicted upon her. This is a nightmare realm of misogynistic cruelty without compassion, mercy, or justice. 

Nikki is sometimes an active force in the narrative, as she stalks the mad maze, and at other times she becomes a bewildered observer of other people's personal hells. It reminded me of Martin Sheen's assassin-traveler in Apocalypse Now. Dern has an almost impossible task as an actor: endless variations of bewilderment, terror, confusion, and cataclysmic rage as she is confronted by a series of incomprehensibly weird dislocations and alienations from her identity, memory, and the space/time continuum itself. 

Oh, and it's a kinda/sorta musical. 

And there's a sitcom starring people in giant rabbit-head masks that a kidnapped girl imprisoned within a purgatorial hotel in Poland is forced to watch. This does not alleviate her suffering. 

Dern and her psycho-husband morph into alternate, working poor versions of themselves, which seems to embody some kind of rich white people's terror at the thought of losing their comfortable, privileged lives, and becoming consumed with the minutiae of daily budgeting for food and bills and toilet paper. 

There's a lot going on here. I'm not sure it all works. I'm not crazy about this Lynch trope of a brutal man being possessed by an evil spirit and, therefore, is not truly responsible for his actions. The Phantom is a variation on Killer Bob. Did we need all 179 of those minutes? Can this clusterfuck of space/time identity confusions and disruptions be so directly resolved by discharging a symbolic firearm into a comic book villain master manipulator? I mean . . . if it's all in a dream, right?

Maybe this is the inevitable outcome of playing with dream logic to the extent that David Lynch does in this movie. You do find yourself asking, What's the fucking point if it's all a dream or a hallucination or whatever? 

But aren't so many movies unlikely fantasies that pander to our desire for everything to be okay in the end? Comic book movies. Space operas. Rom-coms. Hyper-simplified biodramas. Pandering Oscar bait flicks. A lot of these kinds of movies strike me as more absurd and fucked-up than Lynch's idiosyncratic nightmares. At least, with a Lynch movie, there's a name on the front you can blame or praise. There's an author. I guess that goes far with me.

I haven't watched Inland Empire in awhile. 

Will I be able to make the epic sit? 

Diving in . . . 

The Lynch Meditations 22: Mulholland Dr. (2001)

"You ever done this before?"

"I don't know."

We see swing dancers overlapping each other against a purple background.
A blonde beauty queen gets a crown.
Flashing lights.
Remember those corny swing-dancing GAP ads?
I'm thinking about 'em, now, for some reason.

Then we're in a first person camera POV,
diving into a pillow.
Is all that transpires after this but a dream?

Now we're following a limo through the curves of Mulholland Dr. a famous road associated with Los Angeles, with Hollywood, with the movies. It was the setting for a hilarious road rage episode in Lost Highway. Deepest night, and a beautiful raven-haired woman is riding in the limo, apparently against her will, as one of the goons in front points a silenced handgun at her. The woman is rescued when drunken teen joyriders collide with the limo, killing the goons, and tossing the woman clear, albeit with a serious head injury. She staggers off into the night.

The woman with the head injury eventually lays down to rest . . . are we entering a dream within a dream? Or is it all just one big dream? Who is dreaming who into existence?

Because the blonde beauty queen arrives in Los Angeles as an aspiring actress from Ontario. And soon enough she and the beautiful raven-haired woman meet, and the whole scenario feels like . . . a film scenario. Happenstance. A woman in trouble. A plucky young civilian investigator. The Canadian beauty queen makes like a wannabee Nancy Drew and offers to assist the amnesiac limo lady with her dilemma.

Oh, yeah: and there's a hitman who just barely manages to shoot his way out of a hairy situation, piling up two too many corpses. Three, if you count that poor damn vacuum cleaner.

Meanwhile, a filthy homeless man-who may be the secret evil god of this reality-hangs out behind a diner's dumpster, scaring to death anyone who looks directly upon his face.  Also: a sinister cowboy seems to dictate the fate of a young filmmaker. And then there's Mr. Rocque, the studio head who seems to want to exercise total control over the young filmmaker's dream project just because he can. Why have power if you cannot inflict it upon people, right?

Lotta sinister secret masters in this world-do I need to include the creepy-as-fuck elderly couple?
The mobster who is very particular about his espresso?
And Dan Hedaya-that guy always seems to have the weight of the world on his shoulders. Just like a secret master would . . . shit, he might even be playing the same character he played in Clueless. One moment he's fretting about his teenage daughter's provocative fashion sense, the next he has to go give the business to some upstart young director punk. When it rains.

Has anyone ever written fanfic about the Mulholland Dr./Clueless Extended Universe? Somebody oughtta get on that shit.

Initially, we are presented with idealistic, youthful people trying to make it in Hollywood: an aspiring actress/civilian detective and filmmaker making his first big studio film. The Canadian actress wants to become a star AND solve the mystery of her new friend's amnesia while sinister forces swirl all around her. The filmmaker is trying to resist the oppressive hand of the studio while also dealing with his unfaithful wife and worsening financial situation.

But then the narrative shifts: and an idealistic actress/detective becomes a vengeful jilted lover and the rebel filmmaker is revealed to be a self-serving cog in the studio machine; and the beautiful amnesiac woman is revealed to know exactly who she is and what she wants out of life no matter who gets hurt along the way. The idealistic protagonists struggling against fate are all unmasked as opportunists trying to hustle and con their way through life just like every other person in Los Angeles.

A weird nightclub host tells us, "IT IS ALL RECORDED," and, "IT'S ALL ON TAPE," and a song goes on even after a singer collapses . . .

A blue key opens a void that displaces one reality with another . . .

A woman sees a corpse that turns out to be her own-but only after a shift in space/time . . .

Are we seeing the fantasy Hollywood unmasked as a nightmare of free will cancelled by sinister Lovecraftian deities lurking in deepest mindshadows?

Or is it more of a loop or maybe a simultaneity?

When I first saw this movie, I perceived it as a slow revelation, an unmasking of a horrid reality, but, after absorbing Inland Empire and the third season of Twin Peaks, I can't help but see it not so much as a fantasy followed by the revelation of the dark reality powering it but more of an evocation of the instability of reality itself-of identtiy-of dream-of nightmare.

It's a whole lotta weird shit.

I have no explanations, no solutions, but I'm reminded of something the science fiction writer Samuel R. Delany said about how a writer should not attempt to employ popular tricks and commercial writing techniques to improve their fiction, but rather should be aware of the opposed tensions within the text. The writer can only control those tensions and how they are deployed. Everything else is out of the writer's control. I'm not sure I completely understand what Delany was getting at-he also brought up Wittgenstein, I think-but it resonates in my mind with what Lynch is doing in Mulholland Dr.: opposed visions of reality, of characters presented within the same film. What does this bizarre set of oppositions do to us, as filmgoers?

It confuses the shit out of us, but that confusion goads us to think about what we've seen, heard, felt, thought, experienced. We are no longer being passively entertained. We are engaged.

Or maybe we're yelling at the screen in frustration.

Maybe we're desperately wondering what the fuck is going on, what did I just watch?!

Maybe we're all just a dream in the mind of Alicia Silverstone's character in Clueless.

"As if."

"Silencio." 

The Lynch Meditations -22

Mulholland Dr. is the first David Lynch movie I saw in a theater and on a big screen.
After years of watching Blue Velvet on shitty pan-and-scan VHS,
I could see a Lynch film exactly the way it was intended. It did not disappoint.

Mulholland Dr. was that rare movie that ended up being everything I could’ve hoped for and then some.
Initially, I was concerned that it might be a bit of an overheated mess, like Lost Highway,
which was the most recent Lynch film I had seen at the time.
(I’m not sure I even knew about The Straight Story back then.)
But Mulholland Dr. delivered a nightmarish and hilarious mystery rooted in character and atmosphere
and driven by clever dialogue suffused throughout with a sense of the cruel and the absurd.

Some movies, when I’ve watched them, have confused the shit out of me.

I am full of questions and perplexities and conundrums.

I am left profoundly unsettled, uncertain of the ground upon which I stand.

I no longer know who I am, or I’m not as certain about myself as I was before.

What does this mean?

Why is all this weird shit happening?

Who is that guy? Where did this gal come from?

Why are the dead rising from the grave?

Who actually thinks nuclear war is a good idea?

What the fuck is going on?

Why was Kane so hung up on that snowsled?

Did the monolith make the primates smarter?

Why does the primate ancestor throw the bone up into the air?
Did the bone become an orbital missile platform just like that?

How did that happen?

Is the magic in the choice of edit?

Is the magic of the edit the power to fuck with space and time and space/time?

Why is there a giant fetus-in-a-bubble in orbit around the Earth?

Why did the astronaut-man get old and die?

Was the elderly astronaut-man reborn as the giant space fetus?

Why did the smart computer being murder the one astronaut?

What was HAL-9000’s major malfunction?

Did Tetsuo evolve into a universe at the end?

Why did the kid go and do that?

Where did he get all that extra mass?

Why do Kanaeda and Tetsuo shout each other’s names over and over?

Where does Optimus Prime’s trailer go when he transforms?

Why do all the crew members of Space Battleship Yamato have arrows on their uniforms
pointing down towards their crotches?

Is Space Battleship Yamato the one true Love Boat?

Did Batman actually die in a nuclear fucking explosion?

Did Alfred actually see Bruce and Selina at that cafe, or was that just his fantasy?

Did The Dark Knight Rises rip off Gundam 8th MS Team’s indecisive double ending?

Why would they do that?

Is it so hard to say goodbye to Shiro and Aina or the Batman?
Or to let a powerful ending work-just leave it the hell alone, people!
Sometimes it’s okay for your protagonist to die.

Especially if it counts for something big, y’know?

Why does Hollywood spend millions of dollars to make a new Halloween movie,
when they could spend a fraction of that cost just to re-release the original John Carpenter film?
That’s the one to see.
None of the sequels or remakes have lived up to the original.
Not even close.

If Hollywood is going to do exploitative remakes, they should try something kind of arty.
Like a remake of a respectable arthouse picture as done by YouTubers.
Think about it: if the Angry Video Game Nerd, the Nostalgia Critic, and Red Letter Media
spent the same amount of time trying to make actual movies that they’ve spent mocking pop culture,
they would be among the most prolific filmmakers in the business.

I want to see a remake of Blue is the Warmest Color
directed by Mike Stoklasa
and starring Jay Bauman and Rich Evans
in the roles originally played by Adele Exarchopoulos and Lea Seydoux, respectively.
Why can’t Hollywood do something like that?
What’s the holdup?
Mysteries . . .
Will I be forgiven for wishing they would've made the Mulholland Dr. tv series?

Was it Killer Bob or Leland Palmer who ended those young women’s lives?
Did Killer Bob take over all the spiritual command and control functions,
or did Leland let Killer Bob in?

Was it collaboration?
Or total takeover?
Or did collaboration lead to total takeover?

Why did Agent Cooper get fragmented into so many different Coops?
Is the Black Lodge a factory for cranking out doppelgangers or tulpas or whatever you want to call them?

I watch,

and I think,

and I always ask,

“Is this a metaphor or is it just a motherfucker?”

Mulholland Dr., when I first saw it, struck me as a surrealistic mystery which must be definitively solved.
Over the years,
I’ve come to think of it as an experience of unstable identities,
shifting realities,
very much like Lost Highway,
but with more relatable characters, and something closer to a coherent narrative
despite the all-encompassing Lynchian weirdness.

I feel as though I’ve come to understand Mulholland Dr.
in a way that I cannot grasp Lost Highway or Inland Empire-
two of Lynch’s more forbidding cinematic works.

And yet, one mystery still abides regarding Mulholland Dr.:

How in hell did Justin Theroux get top billing over Naomi Watts?

Must have a killer agent.

What will I think now?

Diving in . . .

The Lynch Meditations 21: Eraserhead Stories (2001)

Here be some yarns, all right.

The one that is most obvious to talk about is how Lynch got hold of a dead cat, and all the stuff he did to the feline corpse . . . was this deceased animal used to make the monster baby whatsit? Lynch doesn’t say that, exactly, but he says some other things about it. Yeah . . .

This is an entertaining watch, but it is also the “official story,” produced by and centered upon David Lynch, so keep that in mind while watching. I found it generally convincing, but it is on-brand with Lynch’s policy of not explaining the why of things, what the movie means, things of that nature. There is a lot of how here, though, and that’s as it should be. There’s quite a remarkable story behind Eraserhead, one of absolute devotion to the pursuit of an uncompromised artistic vision despite every kind of hardship. Lynch and his collaborators lived and breathed this movie for about six years or so. Kind of unbelievable. But it’s all true.

And, yes, this does seem to be the start of a kind of brand identity for Lynch as an independent filmmaker, which he would carry on with Inland Empire a few years later. Eraserhead Stories seems to be the start of Lynch taking a hand in how he is documented as an artist at work, and more of his process as a filmmaker would be documented as it happened in behind the scenes special features for Inland Empire and Twin Peaks Season 3. Lynch seems to have an interest in controlling how he is perceived as an artist, which is interesting considering how cagey he can be in interviews. I get the impression that he wants to shift the emphasis solidly from why questions to how questions in this regard.

Lynch speaks into a microphone. There are curtains in the background. It’s in black and white. Great stories. Goes deeper than the usual behind-the-scenes puff pieces. You get an actual sense of what went into the making of Eraserhead.

Not much more to say about it on my end. Watch it after you’ve watched Eraserhead, is the only thing I can think to tell you.

Onwards . . .

The Lynch Meditations -21

David Lynch produced a documentary about the years he spent in the 1970s making Eraserhead back in 2001. I’ve never seen it, ‘til now. My understanding is that it is sort of the precursor to the special features on the Inland Empire DVD, but who knows?

Going in . . .