A fish by any other name is still a fish!

Hotel Room

(1993)

(SPOILERS) In terms of visual flourish and scope, Hotel Room couldn’t be more different from David Lynch’s previous couple of features. Even in comparison to his two prior TV series. This trio of shaggy dog stories, centring on the Railroad Hotel at different intervals in its history, is theatrical in its minimalism, consisting mostly (in the two Lynch-directed segments) of two or three-handers. Barry Gifford, the writer of the Lynch episodes, fully gets on board with the eccentric Lynch quality, but it’s channelled into something for more verbalised and so less stylistically provocative. As such, it’s interesting that the most fully-fledged of these, Blackout, which is therefore in theory the least Lynchian, is the most satisfying.

1.1: Tricks

Set in September 1969, Harry Dean Stanton’s Moe takes prostitute Darlene (Glenne Headly) to Room 603. But, before he can get up to anything you’d rather not see Harry Dean Stanton get up to, his associate Lou (Freddie Jones) arrives, and proceeds to get up to things you’d rather not see Freddie Jones get up to (with Headly or anyone).

This is oblique, cryptic and fractured; the relationship between Moe and Lou references murky past deeds and indiscretions; Lou appears to know Darlene’s past precisely; he and Moe suggest she has killed her husband before giving her the fear sufficiently that she exits for her own safety. Then Lou leaves, telling Moe “Remember, don’t wait too long”; Moe falls asleep and is roused by the police at the door, who arrest him for the murder of his wife, Phylicia. Whom Moe earlier indicate Lou was having an affair with.

Lynch throws in unusual shots and asides (the empty mirror when Lou walks by it, the focus on his hand as he places it into his pocket), and occasionally the content becomes engaging in itself (Moe recounting taking groceries to a woman in a nightgown as a teenager, to Lou’s rapt interest), but divining clear narrative meaning from this escaped me.

It has been suggested that Lou and Moe are one and the same, which would make sense of a buttoned-down man, drinking, losing control (unleashing his dangerous side) and about to kill again (Darlene), but doesn’t explain Darlene clearly referring to the two of them (“I’ve had some strange tricks before, but you guys are weird” and “Call the cops! These guys are going to hurt me!”).

Tricks never feels more than a curiosity, but it’s a well-performed curiosity, and interesting to see Lynch focussing so closely on just the performances.

1.2: Getting Rid of Robert

The same room as before but occurring in June 1992, it’s a bit of snooze. Jay McInerney (Bright Lights, Big City) wrote and James Signorelli (er, Elvira, Mistress of the Dark) directed this vignette of Sasha (Deborah Unger) meeting with friends Diane (Chelsea Field) and TIna (Mariska Hargitay) in 603 and rather unengagingly discussing splitting up with her fiancé Robert (Griffin Dunne), who is cheating on her.

Getting Rid of Robert does enliven when the friends leave, and Robert breaks off with Sasha before she gets a chance to say anything (“You’re not a nice person” he informs her), at which point she takes a poker to his skull.

An eccentric scene follows in which the maid (whom Sasha earlier accused of aiming a champagne cork at her) enters and sees Sasha attempting to move the body; then we discover Robert isn’t actually dead and he and Sasha end up making out (Sasha invites the maid to leave with “Do you mind? We’re having a private conversation”). An arrestingly curious ending (Robert has left a substantial amount of blood on the carpet), and decent performances (you could easily imagine David Tennant in the Dunne part), but rather airless overall.

1.3: Blackout

It’s only the Lynch episodes that justify the portentous, Eraserhead-meets-Twilight Zone introductory narration (“For a Millennium the space for the hotel room existed, undefined. Mankind captured it, gave it shape and passed through. And sometimes when passing through, they found themselves brushing up against the secret names of truth”). Dated April 1936, Blackout is superbly performed by a dialled-down Crispin Glover (Danny) and contrastingly cranked-up Alicia Witt (Diane).

Diane clearly has some reality-check problems, seemingly resulting from the trauma of the death of their son at age two; they’re at the hotel because she has an appointment to meet with Doctor Smith the next day (“He has a nice voice, Danny. A good voice”). We first see her with her hand over her eyes, and when she looks, she perceives the room as “like being inside a Christmas Tree” (due to the titular blackout it is lit by candles, which makes it also the most atmospheric of the trio).

She continually confuses facts, asking “Why did you speak Chinese to that man”, whom she believed to the doctor; Danny has just bought Chinese food, and was speaking English to the bellhop. She refers to Danny as away in the sea of red (“Red Sea you mean, when I was in the navy”) and how “I saw you on the other side. I shouted ‘Danny, Danny’. But it wasn’t you”. And the fish that told her of her six children, one of whom is Danny.

Danny: If you weren’t so damn hot, I’d kiss you.

Diane: Kiss me anyway.

The dialogue is mannered, especially so given the period trappings and melodramatic subject (beyond its surreal side), but Glover and Witt (particularly the latter) imbue it with real feeling and sensitivity. There’s the occasional Lynchian moment (the caution over the intermittently ringing phone), but mostly he focusses on Diane’s scrambled mind, letting the weirdness therein tell its own peculiar story, unadorned. Blackout also offers a demonstrably happy ending, as the couple appear to find peace with their loss upon which the power is restored, the room flooding with light (so genuinely uplifting, rather than the tragi-sweet conclusion of Lynch’s previous feature).

Overall:

Agree? Disagree? Mildly or vehemently? Let me know in the comments below.

Comments

I just hope my death makes more cents than my life.

Joker (2019)
(SPOILERS) So the murder sprees didn’t happen, and a thousand puff pieces desperate to fan the flames of such events and then told-ya-so have fallen flat on their faces. The biggest takeaway from Joker is not that the movie is an event, when once that seemed plausible but not a given, but that any mainstream press perspective on the picture appears unable to divorce its quality from its alleged or actual politics. Joker may be zeitgeisty, but isn’t another Taxi Driver in terms of cultural import, in the sense that Taxi Driver didn’t have a Taxi Driver in mind when Paul Schrader wrote it. It is, if you like, faux-incendiary, and can only ever play out on that level. It might be more accurately described as a grubbier, grimier (but still polished and glossy) The Talented Ripley, the tale of developing psychopathy, only tailored for a cinemagoing audience with few options left outside of comic book fare.

You guys sure like watermelon.

The Irishman aka I Heard You Paint Houses (2019)
(SPOILERS) Perhaps, if Martin Scorsese hadn’t been so opposed to the idea of Marvel movies constituting cinema, The Irishman would have been a better film. It’s a decent film, assuredly. A respectable film, definitely. But it’s very far from being classic. And a significant part of that is down to the usually assured director fumbling the execution. Or rather, the realisation. I don’t know what kind of crazy pills the ranks of revered critics have been taking so as to recite as one the mantra that you quickly get used to the de-aging effects so intrinsic to its telling – as Empire magazine put it, “you soon… fuggadaboutit” – but you don’t. There was no point during The Irishman that I was other than entirely, regrettably conscious that a 75-year-old man was playing the title character. Except when he was playing a 75-year-old man.

So you want me to be half-monk, half-hitman.

Casino Royale (2006)
(SPOILERS) Despite the doubts and trepidation from devotees (too blonde, uncouth etc.) that greeted Daniel Craig’s casting as Bond, and the highly cynical and low-inspiration route taken by Eon in looking to Jason Bourne's example to reboot a series that had reached a nadir with Die Another Day, Casino Royale ends up getting an enormous amount right. If anything, its failure is that it doesn’t push far enough, so successful is it in disarming itself of the overblown set pieces and perfunctory plotting that characterise the series (even at its best), elements that would resurge with unabated gusto in subsequent Craig excursions.

For the majority of its first two hours, Casino Royale is top-flight entertainment, with returning director Martin Campbell managing to exceed his excellent work reformatting Bond for the ‘90s. That the weakest sequence (still good, mind) prior to the finale is a traditional “big” (but not too big) action set piece involving an attempt to…

Poor Easy Breezy.

Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood (2019)
(SPOILERS) My initial reaction to Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood was mild disbelief that Tarantino managed to hoodwink studios into coming begging to make it, so wilfully perverse is it in disregarding any standard expectations of narrative or plotting. Then I remembered that studios, or studios that aren’t Disney, are desperate for product, and more especially, product that might guarantee them a hit. Quentin’s latest appears to be that, but whether it’s a sufficient one to justify the expense of his absurd vanity project remains to be seen.

You're skipping Christmas! Isn't that against the law?

Christmas with the Kranks (2004)
Ex-coke dealer Tim Allen’s underwhelming box office career is, like Vince Vaughn’s, regularly in need of a boost from an indiscriminate public willing to see any old turkey posing as a prize Christmas comedy. He made three Santa Clauses, and here is joined by Jamie Lee Curtis as a couple planning to forgo the usual neighbourhood festivities for a cruise.

She was addicted to Tums for a while.

Marriage Story (2019)
(SPOILERS) I don’t tend to fall heavily for Noah Baumbach fare. He’s undoubtedly a distinctive voice – even if his collaborations with Wes Anderson are the least of that director’s efforts – but his devotion to an exclusive, rarefied New York bubble becomes ever more off-putting with each new project. And ever more identifiable as being a lesser chronicler of the city’s privileged quirks than his now disinherited forbear Woody Allen, who at his peak mastered a balancing act between the insightful, hilarious and self-effacing. Marriage Story finds Baumbach going yet again where Woody went before, this time brushing up against the director’s Ingmar Bergman fixation.

We’ll bring it out on March 25 and we’ll call it… Christmas II!

Santa Claus: The Movie (1985)
(SPOILERS) Alexander Salkind (alongside son Ilya) inhabited not dissimilar territory to the more prolific Dino De Laurentis, in that his idea of manufacturing a huge blockbuster appeared to be throwing money at it while being stingy with, or failing to appreciate, talent where it counted. Failing to understand the essential ingredients for a quality movie, basically, something various Hollywood moguls of the ‘80s would inherit. Santa Claus: The Movie arrived in the wake of his previously colon-ed big hit, Superman: The Movie, the producer apparently operating under the delusion that flying effects and :The Movie in the title would induce audiences to part with their cash, as if they awarded Saint Nick a must-see superhero mantle. The only surprise was that his final cinematic effort, Christopher Columbus: The Discovery, wasn’t similarly sold, but maybe he’d learned his lesson by then. Or maybe not, given the behind-camera talent he failed to secure.

On a long enough timeline, the survival of everyone drops to zero.

Fight Club (1999)
(SPOILERS) Still David Fincher’s peak picture, mostly by dint of Fight Club being the only one you can point to and convincingly argue that that the source material is up there with his visual and technical versatility. If Seven is a satisfying little serial-killer-with-a-twist story vastly improved by his involvement (just imagine it directed by Joel Schumacher… or watch 8mm), Fight Club invites him to utilise every trick in the book to tell the story of not-Tyler Durden, whom we encounter at a very peculiar time in his life.

When primal forces of nature tell you to do something, the prudent thing is not to quibble over details.

Field of Dreams (1989)
(SPOILERS) There’s a near-Frank Darabont quality to Phil Alden Robinson producing such a beloved feature and then subsequently offering not all that much of note. But Darabont, at least, was in the same ballpark as The Shawshank Redemption with The Green Mile. Sneakers is good fun, The Sum of All Our Fears was a decent-sized success, but nothing since has come close to his sophomore directorial effort in terms of quality. You might put that down to the source material, WP Kinsella’s 1982 novel Shoeless Joe, but the captivating magical-realist balance hit by Field of Dreams is a deceptively difficult one to strike, and the biggest compliment you can play Robinson is that he makes it look easy.

He tasks me. He tasks me, and I shall have him.

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
(1982)
(SPOILERS) I don’t love Star Trek, but I do love Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. That probably isn’t just me, but a common refrain of many a non-devotee of the series. Although, it used to apply to The Voyage Home (the funny one, with the whales, the Star Trek even the target audience for Three Men and a Baby could enjoy). Unfortunately, its high regard has also become the desperate, self-destructive, song-and-verse, be-all-and-end-all of the overlords of the franchise itself, in whichever iteration, it seems. This is understandable to an extent, as Khan is that rare movie sequel made to transcendent effect on almost every level, and one that stands the test of time every bit as well (better, even) as when it was first unveiled.

Now In Full Color, with a Happier Ending

Search This Blog