![]() Films can be abstract and abstractions exist in everyday life and they give us a feeling, and our intuition goes to work, and we make sense of it for ourselves…Watching a film is like standing in front of a painting. Lynch said this in the Focal Press book screencraft directing: “I refuse to give explanations of any film I make. I feel with Lynch what Ingmar Bergman said of Godard, “I have a feeling the whole time that he wants to tell me things, but I don’t understand what it is, and sometimes I have a feeling that he’s bluffing, double-crossing me.” Of course, there’s a good chance that David Lynch doesn’t understand many of his films so doing a commentary could be tricky territory. But I felt compelled to hear what he had to say since he is considered “one of the true originals of world cinema.” Plus he is notorious for not doing DVD commentaries so you grab bits and pieces when you can. I don’t pretend to understand writer/director David Lynch ( Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks) or his films. Or “the great David Lynch” as he was introduced. Yesterday I drove two and a half hours to hear David Lynch speak for an hour. ![]() “Life is very, very complicated and so films should be allowed to be too.” “Have you ever had a dream, Neo, that you were so sure was real? What if you were unable to wake from that dream, Neo? How would you know the difference between the dream world and the real world? ” Legacy Filmmaking (and Your Bank Account): “ They’re never going to talk about your bank account when you’re dead, but they will talk about maybe the movies you left behind if you really cared about what you did.”-Frank Darabont A couple that slipped by me I need to check out: Kurosawa’s Kagemusha and Jim Jarmusch’s Permanent Vacation. And some interesting titles I never saw and probably never will Cannibal Apocalypse, Fists of the White Lotus, Eaten Alive!, Blood Beach.Ĭheers to the class of 1980. Then there’s a list of 1980s films I didn’t catch until later Breaker Morant, Altered States, Stardust Memories, and Alligator (early John Sayles screenplay). Ordinary People (Oscars: Best Picture, screenplay, direction, supporting actor) Stir Crazy (Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor) Urban Cowboy (worth watching just to see Scott Glenn eat the worm) Here’s an eclectic-and partial- sample of what I saw in theaters in 1980: My movie tastes were evolving so I went to see everything I could. This was the pre-internet days and VHS or cable TV hadn’t come into my world yet. The Elephant Man opened in theaters in October 1980 and that was a great time to be a teenager newly interested in movies. Rewatching the movie makes me want to go read the original source material on the life of John Merrick The Elephant Man and Other Reminiscences by Sir Frederick Treves and The Elephant Man: A Study in Human Dignityby Ashley Montagu.Īnd here’s a super article that fills in more about the movie. ![]() I saw the film in theaters when I was a teenager and it definitely peaked my early interest in what films could be. It was nominated for eight Oscars and the winner of BAFTA Best Picture in 1981. The direction (David Lynch), the acting (John Hurt, Anthony Hopkins, Anne Bancroft, John Gielgud), the make-up (Christopher Tucker), the black & white cinematography (Freddie Francis), and the screenwriting (Christopher De Vore, Eric Bergren, Lynch) are brilliant. The Elephant Man is currently available on Amazon Prime and I had forgotten what an extraordinary film it is. Yet today it seems on the verge of being forgotten, and that’s a shame.” “David Lynch’s The Elephant Man is the one Lynch film that found a mesmerizing middle ground between conventional Hollywood story structure and its director’s surreal dreamscapes. ![]()
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