Twin Peaks

It's all so confusing and disappointing. Not confusing because Lynch scorns coherence, confusing because it's disappointing, while the general populace doesn't seem to agree. I'll admit again I didn't experience this all anything like it was intended. I skipped so many episodes, and skipped the 25 year gap. But I just don't get the appeal.

I enjoyed the pilot, some moments in the first two seasons, much of Fire Walk With Me, and basically none of The Return. FWWM was a highlight -- super intense. Some of the most memorable scenes of the whole set involved Laura, so those must have mainly been in FWWM when she's still alive. But I also have fond memories of Dale, who isn't much featured in FWWM, so that's from the first two seasons. I'm also into BOB, who's legitimately terrifying. Most good moments involve either Cooper or BOB. The episode that unmasks Laura's killer had some good Leland moments too. The Red Room was solid, but got totally wearisome in The Return.

The Return was at almost all times either tedious or silly. I don't get it.

I remember hanging on every jumbled word mumbled in the Red Room in S1. By S3 I was skipping those scenes. Who would have the time for this whole series??

I definitely feel something for Twin Peaks. Years later I may want to rewatch a few good moments. The first few episodes of all got me pretty excited, like when I saw the first few of GoT. So much was building, while Cooper and others were surprisingly pleasant. And some of it did pay off, but only very occasionally throughout S1, 2, and FWWM. Only occasionally. But it did. The Return never paid off. But I have some fond memories of the earlier stuff. Some good frights too.

The Accountant 2

This is one of those sequels that didn't need to happen -- one that'll forever dangle vestigially off its predecessor -- one that'll go down in history as a mindless milking of a piece that didn't ask to be milked -- an udder moolestation (thanks ChatGPT). This is so typical for sequels, I know it is, but I'm not usually involved with such material, so it's still kind of confounding for me. Through my family I'm involved with this franchise, though, so I'm confronted with this mainstream conundrum of a parasitic appendix for the first time in a while.

Not only did it not need to happen, it apparently didn't know how to make it happen. It focused on the wrong things, such that it feels less like a sequel and more like there was a completely separate screenplay that wasn't deemed good enough to stand alone, so we subbed in the superficialities of The Accountant to gain that base audience. "This screenplay isn't terrible, but it won't make money, so how about we make it look like a sequel to The Accountant? Shouldn't take too much rewriting, and we'll instantly tap that whole fanbase, particularly the Bien's, who make up most of our views." It resembles its predecessor basically just in superficial characters and being a standard action movie.

The first installation at least tried to say something about autism, brothers, accounting... this one doesn't. It's just an action movie. Christian doesn't do any accounting, nor is his autism displayed in any kind of natural way. Not knowing much about autism myself, I would guess that community would decry this movie's inconsistent portrayal. Maybe I'm wrong and it got the autism right, I just doubt it based on its juvenile handling of other elements.

Some of the pacing was weirdly misguided. There were extended frivolous sequences, like the blind dating and the line dancing, that seemed intended to build character, but came off instead like those deleted scenes you occasionally encounter that you can't believe they even considered including in the movie... only in this case, not only were they considered, they were included. One problem here is the writers leaned too heavily and overtly on humor. If you're going to stall the action so long, it'd better really build character or really be funny.

Sicario

Sicario flows like the waters of Wisconsin: all sharing a general direction, but multitudinous, under multitudinous influences, winding and pooling at varying rates. Most fiction is more like the mighty Mississippi, fed by many factors but barreling forward with identity, usually in the form of a main character's personal development; Sicario focused on an arbitrary cross section of tributaries.

And I mean arbitrary -- I'm not sure why the writer chose Kate's perspective. She's a secondary character, a protagonist chosen at random. She was our hero, who ended up not being a hero; nor did she become a villain; nor did anyone else take her place. The movie left us heroless. That's okay when the whole point of the thing is moral ambiguity -- for another heroless Josh Brolin movie, see No Country for Old Men -- but this one wasn't satisfying like that one. If I remember right, that one never gave Llewelyn a protagonist's soul; I mean it was shocking when he died, but it wasn't emotionally unsatisfying like Kate never proving her strength or conquering the forces she's up against. If I remember right, NCFOM never set up Llewlyn for that kind of conflict. Anyway, Sicario has this strange ambiguity that doesn't definitively define the movie, yet precludes the movie from any other sort of definition. It's surprising to see Kate so unfulfilled by the end.

Speaking of ambiguity, I hate when characters needlessly, suavely, withhold information from the protagonist. This is so common in movies. It's all over this one. It really brings down the writing. I dislike Josh Brolin altogether here, not just his cocky character, but his cheesy action movie performance. He brings Kate along for the ride and tells her to be a sponge; that's what it's like to watch the movie. It's so confusing, partly because characters chronically conceal info for no reason other than being in a cheesy movie.

Some of the movie was pretty cool. I like the moral ambiguity too, it just missed the delivery, in a way that I'm struggling to communicate. In an effort to be gritty and ambiguous, it ended up unsatisfying.

Not a bad movie though, and I liked some of the artsy shots. I really disliked some of the dialogue.

Twin Peaks S3E3-7

Even aggressively skipping through each episode is almost too tedious to bear. Of course, it wouldn't feel so tedious if you really just sunk into them, not expecting efficient delivery. But I have not nearly the time for that, so I'm feeling really impatient. I really can't imagine this being a good season of TV. It's almost a comedy at this point, it's so silly and random. Or... it's bad TV.

I know I can't judge the series, having not watched it at all like it was intended. It's just worth pointing out how hard it is to imagine this being good.

Twin Peaks S3 beginning

Oof, if I wasn't somewhat Lynchianly experienced I would write this off. It's pretty poor. Even being somewhat Lynchianly experienced, I can only spot a couple of compelling features amid the muck. Full slice of bleh with just a dollop of intrigue on top. I watched the first episode and a half and it's hard to see how this can pay off. There are lots of new storylines, which are disappointing to have to begin, while the old stuff e.g. Red Room seems to have a low ceiling. Now, the new storylines could turn out great, and the old stuff probably has lots of untapped potential, otherwise why was this made, but it's just a little hard to see. For example, how many more hours can we endure Cooper staring silently at various cryptic figures? It needs to either get more stimulating (the wonder of the Red Room wears off, or maybe that's just because I watched the old series and the new one back to back, no decades in between) or get more coherent. Okay, it's early in the season, it's fine to kick off some stuff without explanation, I'm just a little weary immediately after going through the older material. I'm already impatient for some escalation, I guess. It's hard to see how the Red Room can escalate, but I bet it can. Also, come on, you just have to admit that Lynch is almost intolerable sometimes, with his corny dialogue that always prefaces the action. It's like when I showed someone Mulholland Drive, they commented "this is so bad!" halfway through, and then ended up getting their mind blown off -- Lynch is easily mistaken for poor filmmaking, at least in his rising action. Even by the end, in an alternate universe, you can imagine everyone agreeing he produces crap -- he sets the stage with some cheesy junk and then spins it into self-indulgent incoherence masquerading as originality. Ultimately, I like Lynch, and he's notable, though I'm not gaga like many folks.

I figured finishing FWWM and starting The Return in the same night was a bad idea, but I did it anyway, and this is what I get. I figured there belongs some volume of space in between. It's almost part of the show, that empty space, like John Cage's 4'33" or the forgone resolutions in a jazz solo. The negative space in a painting. Sometimes it's about what you don't say. And the emotional arc of the Twin Peaks fan in those intervening decades, in which Lynch said nothing of Dale Cooper, Laura Palmer, the town, or anything related, is as much a part of The Return as the shuffling and coughing of the audience in 4'33". I skipped those introspective decades, rushing from the climax of brutality and surrealism that is the end of FWWM to the patient unfolding of S3. If it's anything like his other work, it's a thickly folded piece of paper with something written inside that takes painstaking hours to reveal. Typically what it says inside is just where to find the next brutal bit of origami, and so on, until Lynch dies, which has now happened, so I guess we never find where this all leads. The point is probably just the process of the unfolding, not the message inside.

Twin Peaks and Fire Walk With Me

I heard FWWM was disappointing after S1&2, but it seemed really seamless. In fact, I think I'll have trouble remembering which events happened in which. Granted, I blazed through S1&2, but FWWM was totally in accord. I think I'll just remember it as being the prequel, which will imply to my memory that it must be Laura's story, distinct from S1&2 which were post-Laura. But that's indirect memory; directly, it blends right in with the rest.

Sheryl Lee deserves some respect for this film. Did they know she could do this when she signed up for basically just being a homecoming portrait in Twin Peaks? This is a classic Lynch task, like Watts or Dern in their respective films: "a girl in trouble" conveying all manner of joy and anguish. Also conveying conventional cheese. Also being sexually vulnerable to the max. It's a role of utter abandon, which is what Lee gives it.

Everything Twin Peaks-related is more brutal and more surreal than I expected. I thought it'd be subdued in the supernatural like Blue Velvet, while tonally tame enough for TV. FWWM certainly bucks both expectations, probably more than the series, possibly because it's a movie. But even the series is pretty extra. Where it's not extreme in its violence, sexuality, or insanity, it's extreme in its misery. I mean these characters are miserable, without redemption! Is that what S3 is for? Redemption for these characters, long after viewers were eternally changed by the tragedy of the first two seasons? Yet I can picture BOB, aged 25 years further, snickering at the suggestion that S3 finds any satisfying morsel of justice. More likely, the reality is that the folks in Twin Peaks are doomed to senseless haunting by malevolent spirits, and that's that. Anyone who tries to save them will go insane at best, get raped and murdered at worst. Actually, worst case scenario is getting brainwashed into raping and murdering your daughter first, which is exactly what happened to Leland. I doubt there's any justice for all this misery. I don't recommend living in Twin Peaks.

Twin Peaks: S1-2

Twin Peaks devotees, you'll want to Oedipus yourself before reading this. No, leave your mom alone -- I mean you won't want eyes for what I'm about to write.

I just watched the pilot, E2, parts of E3,7,8, S2E1, parts of 7 and 9, and then 22. Somewhere in there I started Fire Walk With Me.

What could possess a man to pursue this path of chaos and treachery? Two friends, one LLM, and a mild identity crisis.

Twin Peaks has been on my list for decades. Maybe it was Lynch's passing, or some offhand comments lately, coupled with my recent successes with a few other series, that launched me in. It was so appetizing to cross it off my list, and I got the sense I could skip around, eschewing subplots and tonal meditations for the sake of the crucial scenes alone. ChatGPT was far better counsel on this than I expected. I mean I have no way to confirm, but its advice sounded really measured.

The identity crisis is YOLOing myself into everything I want to watch vs. YOLOing myself into deliberate living, surgically sucking all of the marrow out of life. I gave the latter many years' glorious reign, if not wholly successfully, while GoT introduced me to the former. My path with Twin Peaks is the middle path, perhaps not a YOLO path at all -- a many-lives path, we'll call it.

Twin Peaks: Pilot

As Blue Velvet suffered after Mulholland Drive raised my expectations, so Twin Peaks profits on Blue Velvet's letdown. The plot is nothing abnormal, but you always figure Lynch could do something unexpected at any moment, and anyway the execution is oddly satisfying. I hadn't felt that with Lynch before: simple pleasure without a mind-warp. To give a clearer example, I can't say I've ever found a single moment of a Lynch movie funny, and this pilot offered a few. There's even a fun bit in which Cooper disproportionately enjoys the natural wonders of Twin Peaks and brings them up at the wrong times. That's not necessarily getting laughs, but it's pleasant. Cooper is altogether pleasant. I really wasn't thrilled with Maclachlan in Blue Velvet but he wears pride and pleasantness in proper portions. I like his style, with the dark suit and slick hair. I like him a whole lot more than in Blue Velvet.

So there are the obvious Lynch signatures, but it's more conventional than the others I've seen, and surprisingly nice. It's just an intriguing plot with some decent scenes.