Year 8, Day 137 - 5/16/16 - Movie #2,337
BEFORE: Time for a TV update, even though I'm behind about two months in most serial programming, except for "The Amazing Race", which I binge-watched last week, three episodes a night to get ready for last Friday's finale. It's the time of year when we find out what shows are NOT coming back next year, so I'm looking forward to a clearer schedule in September, even though it's going to take me most of the summer to catch up. I've already said goodbye to "American Idol", so that's a chunk of time I'll get back in January, I can also say I got to the end of "Agent Carter", "The Muppets", "Heroes Reborn" - that's a good start but I need more shows to be cancelled, because that's only a small dent in the number of the shows I watch.
Also not coming back is "CSI: Cyber", starring Patricia Arquette, who also carries over from "Lost Highway" in my chain. Hey, she won an Oscar for "Boyhood", I think she'll land on her feet.
THE PLOT: The life of Mason, from early childhood to his arrival at college.
AFTER: Maybe you have to be a parent to feel something for this story, because I'm not, and I didn't. Mostly it just left me cold, although I have an appreciation for the time that it took to make. It's a fantastic, ingenious but simple technique for aging characters, but since it's not used very often, I can only assume that it's incredibly difficult to arrange, making sure that actors are available for one week each year for 12 years. Technically shot in 12 weeks, but those weeks were spread out over 12 years, so it's all in how you look at it, I guess. But what a risk the director took - what if any of those cast members died during the 12-year production? I guess they could have just added that character's death to the narrative, but it would have been a real shame.
(The trivia section on IMDB states that the director asked Patricia Arquette not to have any plastic surgery while this film was being made, because that would have been out of character. But that doesn't explain why she delivers all of her lines on "CSI: Cyber" without any facial expressions - I guess he should have requested a ban on botox, too...)
I felt more connected to the actors during the "Making Of" short that I watched (which also ran on whatever premium channel aired this afilm) than I did to the characters during the main film - I don't know if that's just a by-product of the film's running time, or if the different segments were so disjointed, because they were each shot one year apart. But I almost NEVER watch "making of" segments, I made an exception tonight out of respect for the process.
That's my way of saying that I didn't feel that the segments added up to a coherent whole - not that they HAD to, but it would have been nice if they did. I understand that people's lives change over time, and if you look at events one year apart, people can be in different situations or feel differently about things. But I suspect that this disjointedness comes more from writing the story in pieces, having a general framework but also charting a slightly new course each year, so the film doesn't go in one direction, but rather in 12 different directions, a little bit at a time. That's not really the same thing.
So the format was probably quite freeing, but perhaps it was very limiting as well, because each year the plot couldn't go too far with any one storyline, and they couldn't go back and add foreshadowing to a previous segment, because the actors weren't that age any more. For example, in one segment, Mason's father warns his kids about the danger of texting while driving, and then a couple of years later, we see Mason in the car with his girlfriend, and she shows him a photo of a pet pig on her phone. In any other movie, that would have caused a car crash, because of established rules of cause and effect, but here it's just two unrelated things.
It kind of makes me realize that the average human life would NOT make a good movie - movies follow specific rules in order to be entertaining, and a life follows a different pattern - 80% of all of the days would be exactly the same and therefore boring, and chances are the ending probably won't be much fun.
Also starring Ellar Coltrane, Ethan Hawke (last seen in "The Newton Boys"), Lorelei Linklater, Marco Perella (last seen in "The Life of David Gale"), Steven Chester Prince (last seen in "The Alamo"), Elijah Smith, Libby Villari (last seen in "A Perfect World"), Jennifer Griffin (ditto), Zoe Graham, Bill Wise, Jamie Howard, Evie Thompson, Brad Hawkins, Jenni Tooley (last seen in "Arlington Road"), Andrew Villarreal, Charlie Sexton (last seen in "Masked and Anonymous"), Tom McTigue, Richard Robichaux.
RATING: 6 out of 10 haircuts
Year 8, Day 136 - 5/15/16 - Movie #2,336
BEFORE: I'm presented with a dilemma tonight, because after getting burned by "Eraserhead" and "Mulholland Dr.", I swore off of David Lynch's films vowing to not watch another one of his films until after the new "Twin Peaks" series starts airing - but that's next year, and I've still got a chance of finishing this project this year. And after my last re-organization of the list, I realized that "The Equalizer" would be a dead-end, and wouldn't link to anything else on the list. My next chain, and it's a big one, about three months long at last count, would naturally begin with the film "Boyhood", which only linked to one other film on the list, so it was just sitting there on the other side of a break.
If only there were a film that linked an actor from "The Equalizer" to an actor from "Boyhood" - and after going up and down a few credit lists on IMDB, I found it - "Lost Highway", with Bill Pullman carrying over, and the lead actress from "Boyhood". Perfect, only watching it would mean canceling my fatwa on David Lynch. This was the tentative plan made about two months ago, and I figured that by mid-May, I'd probably have come up with some other plan, or scrapped the planned chain and rebuilt it again. Or maybe I could go see the new "Independence Day" film with Bill Pullman in it, but it's not due to be released for another month. So now I'm committed to "Lost Highway".
(Oh, sure, I could just say "Bill Pullman links to Patricia Arquette" and watch this later, but I'd rather not circle back if I don't have to. And I could back up to "The Great Raid" and follow another actor's thread, but that should be a last resort.)
And I admit I'm curious about "Lost Highway", so I resigned myself to watching it. I guess I figured some cable channel would have run it, given several months' time, but that didn't happen. So I figured I'd watch it on Amazon Prime, only it's not available there. OK, no problem, I'm sure it's on iTunes, right? Nope, not there either. There it is on Veoh, but it's in Russian or something. (Hey, that might improve it, you never know...) I eventually found it online for free, in English, but I won't say on what site, because it's probably an illegal posting.
I want to start watching more films online, because that may be the only way I get to see everything I want, but I'm generally not in favor of illegal downloads or violating copyright. But maybe this is the best of both worlds - I would have paid up to $3.99, let's say, to watch this film on Amazon or iTunes, but now I can have some small measure of revenge against David Lynch for making the mess that is "Mulholland Dr.", or trying to pass of "Eraserhead" as an artistic, meaningful film - which it is not.
THE PLOT: After a bizarre encounter at a party, a jazz saxophonist is framed for the murder of his wife and sent to prison, where he inexplicably morphs into a young mechanic and begins leading a new life.
AFTER: Curse you, David Lynch, you got me again! You put a film together that makes little or no sense, and everyone and his brother calls it a masterpiece, simply because they don't understand it, and that fools people like me into thinking that the film has some merit, when really, it's just a mess. Honestly, this feels like two half-stories that got stitched together, with the transformation of one character into another being a really cheap way to connect them. Sure, let's just subvert the narrative form, nobody really cares for it anyway, right? And it's FINE if an actor or actress plays two roles in the same film, and you never explain how that's possible, or if one's supposed to be real and the other isn't, or what's really going on if that's not the case.
This is the same trick he pulled in "Mulholland Dr.", just about. If the story doesn't want to move toward a logical conclusion, just force it toward an illogical one, open up a mystery box or have some character move into a dark corner and then they become someone else, or they get disconnected from reality, cause and effect get subverted, and then time somehow loops back upon itself, eats itself, and then craps itself out. Err, I think. Nobody can really say for sure what happened here, but that shouldn't automatically qualify a film as something akin to brilliance - it's possible that there's nothing complex there that we aren't understanding, and random events are just that, random.
Based on what I remember from "Twin Peaks", I know that Lynch thinks normal people can be murderers, or they can be possessed by demons or spirits and be made to kill without their conscious knowledge - so perhaps Fred Madison wasn't framed for murder at all, perhaps he did kill his wife, and he just doesn't remember it. And maybe the pale-faced man isn't real, since he does some fairly impossible things and is VERY creepy, maybe he represents a part of Fred's personality, or he takes over when Fred goes away for a little while. But these are just pieces of the puzzle, they can't explain everything that's seen here.
Maybe part of the film is a dream, or an imagined reality as a method of escape (same thing, right?) - but then where does the reality end, and where does the dream begin? Gad, but you know when the Wikipedia description of a movie's plot uses the words "inexplicably" and "somehow" a lot, then we're somehow in the realm of the impossible or the unreal, no? There's also no guarantee that the order of scenes we're shown in the film is chronological, although it may seem that way, there's a bit of a time loop that calls the whole thing into question - so maybe there's more shown out of order than we first believe.
What about Renee and Alice, two characters (err, I think) played by the same actress? Is one real and the other a fantasy? Is part of the film with the unreal one therefore a dream? What about the photo with the two characters together, does that mean that there's something else going on, other than what appears? This is another of Lynch's trademarks, like how Sheryl Lee played two characters on "Twin Peaks", only they were "identical cousins".
And, as stated in the plotline, the main character, Fred, changes his appearance while in jail - and the guards can't explain where Fred went, or how "Pete" took his place. Yeah, neither can I - what, exactly, was Lynch going for here, what was he trying to say, or is the story as much of a jumbled puzzle as it first appears? Lynch later said that he was subconsciously inspired by the O.J. Simpson trial, so that's another vote for the possibility that Fred DID kill his wife, and what we're seeing is his brain's way of coming to term with that reality. Err, I think.
Maybe the whole film is a dream, from start to finish, that's another possibility. They say that in your dreams you play all the parts, this is a simple enough explanation for why one character would turn into another. And it would explain time looping back on itself, because events could repeat themselves in a dream. And then, of course, one wouldn't expect a dream to make complete sense, so it would cover all the bases, but it would also be a complete cop-out.
Another possible explanation would be that Fred had a bad reaction to the drugs that were given to him by the prison doctor, and they caused him to hallucinate the entire rest of the film, and eventually he is (unseen by the audience) executed in the electric chair, although his mind is still in the hallucination, so he's not aware of it until the last minute. I guess each viewer has to choose the interpretation of this film that they prefer - but that's another cop-out.
Also starring Patricia Arquette, Robert Blake (last seen in "This Property Is Condemned"), Balthazar Getty (last seen in "The Judge"), Gary Busey (last seen in "Thunderbolt and Lightfoot"), Giovanni Ribisi (last seen in "Masked and Anonymous"), Natasha Gregson Wagner (last seen in "Two Girls and a Guy"), Robert Loggia (last seen in "Return to Me"), Henry Rollins (last seen in "Johnny Mnemonic"), Michael Shamus Wiles, Jack Kehler, Lucy Butler, Scott Coffey (last seen in "The Big Picture"), Michael Massee (last seen in "CBGB"), with cameos from Richard Pryor (last seen in "California Suite"), Jack Nance (last seen in "Eraserhead"), Marilyn Manson (last seen in "Bowling for Columbine") and the voice of Mink Stole.
RATING: 3 out of 10 headaches
