Posted a half day ago by Walter Kirn:

“Many years ago the New York Times paid all my expenses and held out a nice check on the simple condition that I hang out for a few days with David Lynch and write up the experience.

“I did the hanging-out part, but it didn’t really amount to an experience. I couldn’t get a grip on him, at all. Because there was nothing to grip.

“I’m not saying he was shallow, more that he was truly elusive, meaning the ‘self’ that was in there, supposedly, was simply that of an artist in his off hours. Which is like the self of a vaccum cleaner in its off hours. Meaning it just sits there.

“In Lynch’s case, he smoked and drank coffee while he just sat there. And sometimes he said something. Nothing memorable.

“Anyway, the assignment completely defeated me in a way that no other magazine assignment ever has. I think I’ll write about this at greater length soon, this non-experience I had with someone so eccentric he didn’t even come off as an eccentric, but suffice it to say I’m sorry to hear he’s gone. He kept alive in the minds of millions the figure of the artist, the artist as individual, useless to society at large and therefore invaluable to all.”

At noon on 1.20.25, Orange Plague will be inaugurated inside the Capital rotunda. No, I haven’t the slightest interest in watching. (YouTube clips will suffice.) Horrid cold temperatures have forced the ceremony, which normally happens outdoors on the nippy Capitol steps, to huddle inside.

The same deal prevailed 40 years ago when Ronald Reagan‘s second-term inauguration happened under the Capitol dome.

Washington, D.C, was covered in several inches of snow — essentially a coating of “ice-nine” — during JFK’s inauguration.

Last night I spoke with HE’s “Eddie Ginley” about what the recent BAFTA and PGA nominations portend. And Ginley’s basic money term was that Best Picture Oscars are fundamentally about Big Swings.

What Ginley said, in essence, was that Best Picture Oscars are fundamentally about Big Swings.

What Ginley said, in essence, was that Sean Baker can and should be celebrated, but he can’t win a Best Picture Oscar…very sorry…because Anora, obviously his finest film, isn’t enough of a Big Swing. It’s too Brooklyn, too Russian, too slapstick, too boozy and lap-dancey… right? It doesn’t, like, “say” anything.

This, at least, is what your basic industry dullards appear to feel, according to Ginley. To them it doesn’t matter if a Big Swing movie hits the ball long and hard. Babe Ruth swings don’t have to pay off in a sweet-smell-of-success fashion. All that matters to the none-too-brights is that a filmmaker said “no half-measures or standard strategies…here comes my go-for-broke Stanley Kubrick or Andrej Tarkovsky or trans Stanley Donen film!”

Hats off because Jacques Audiard and Brady Corbet picked up that big fat bat and swung hard! Big concept, drug cartel guy goes trans, long length, overture, intermission, etc. Okay, so they only got a piece of the ball and maybe hit a line drive or a pop-up. Doesn’t matter!

What matters is the ambition, the hunger, the size of the dream and the pretensions and the fevered imaginings that were poured into it. Don’t tell us about smart tap-dancers and brainy popcorns and soul baths that leave audiences in states of soothe and groove…toss that stuff aside, they’re saying.

Eff those guys.

Anora, Conclave, A Complete Unknown…these are the “sing” movies…clear water and unpretentious nourishment….movies that work.

Warning: I’m heartbroken about the static disturbance sounds in these two mp3 recordings, which last about 30 minutes each. I’ll have to figure another way of recording. My trusty digicorder served me well for so many years…no longer!

Last night HE commenter “Nerf” wrote the following about the late, great David Lynch:

For the most part, “things just got repetitive” is a four-word description of what every auteur-level filmmaker tends to go through over the course of a decades-long career.

That is to say that he / she winds up making the same film or certainly the same KIND of thematically-driven film (i.e., drawn from the same inner soul pool or creative wellspring) over and over. They just emerge in this or that varying form, in some instances with greater degrees of refinement.

“A director only makes one film in his life, and then he breaks it into pieces and makes it again” — Jean Renoir.

Because despite whatever annoyance or discomfort this state of affairs may provoke in guys like Bob Hightower (“stop talking about peak periods!”) the artist has only a finite amount of psychic essence to draw from.

And that’s primarily why creative peak periods (the full, robust and unfettered emergence of creative servings or statements or heavy-cat formulations) tend to manifest most often when the artist has gotten the trial-and-error or youthful indulgence stuff out of the way and has begun to develop serious command over what he / she has inside, usually starting during his / her late 20s or early 30s.

And then it all starts to wind down during his / her early 60s. Or a bit sooner or later. Ask Pedro Almodovar about this. Ask Alfred Hitchcock, for whom the tank mostly ran dry after The Birds. (No, Frenzy wasn’t a creative rebirth — it was an opportunity for Hitch to get more sexually graphic while re-connecting with some of that old London energy.) Ask Oliver Stone, whose creative powers began to dissipate after Any Given Sunday (‘99).

If only this could’ve happened to poor Buster Keaton, whose creative glory period ENDED around age 34 or 35, when sound came in during the late 1920s.

Exceptions will sometimes occur, as Paul Schrader once pointed out, when a film artist experiences a growth spurt due to some kind of tragedy or trauma (i.e., George Stevens or James Stewart’s experiences in Europe during World War II). In which case the psychic essence trove is reenergized or freshly reflected upon.

Obviously (a) variations abound and (b) this formula doesn’t generally apply to big-time rock musicians like Bob Dylan or David Bowie or Paul McCartney, all of whom were cooking with gas beginning in their early 20s if not younger.

In 2014 Lynch, then in his late 60s, was asked when a new feature film might emerge, and he said something along the lines of “I’ve got shards and slivers and segments in my head, but I don’t have THE BIG IDEA…I just don’t have that yet.”’

Surely Lynch knew deep down that big ideas are generally not ripe for plucking when artists are in their late autumnal years. It just doesn’t work that way.

I’m just going to be flat-out honest about eccentric filmmaker extraordinaire David Lynch, whose untimely passing at age 78 (four days short of his 79th birthday) was reported earlier today. But I’m going to speak in generalities.

Lynch was basically a fascinating, unconventional, gut-hunchy, marquee-brand surrealist artist who excelled as an auteur filmmaker for roughly a quarter-century (from ’77’s Eraserhead to ’01’s Mulholland Drive).

In HE parlance Lynch didn’t exactly peak for that whole 25-year stretch but he certainly flourished creatively for most of that period– Eraserhead, The Elephant Man (sturdy, compassionate period piece), Dune (not admired), Blue Velvet (arguably his only truly great theatrical film), Wild at Heart, the groundbreaking Twin Peaks TV series (’90 and ’91), Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, Lost Highway (in my book his second best feature), The Straight Story (fourth best…spare, earnest and true) and Mulholland Drive (third best).

Yes, Lynch continued to work excitingly or at least imaginatively in the 21st Century (Inland Empire, the 2017 Twin Peaks reboot for Showtime, paintings and musical collaborations and whatnot) but if you ask me his main creative effort / handle / identity over the last 15 or so years was projecting his testy, feisty, snappy-ass personality in YouTube and TikTok videos…his John Ford cameo in Steven Spielberg’s The Fablemans was a standout for most, but for me the clips of Lynch losing his temper over this and that are wonderful. The iPhone rant, the “what is this shit about the length of a scene?” rant…all are magnificent.

So he was basically a prolific signature-level director over the last quarter of the 20th Century (face it…the ’80s were his glory years), and a sometime filmmaker but mainly a great, irascible, cranky-as-fuck personality from the late aughts until just recently.

A lifelong smoker, Lynch stated last November that emphysema had gotten the better of him. And yet his poor health was exacerbated, it seems, by the ongoing L.A. firestorms. Sometime last week Lynch evacuated one of his Los Angeles homes (he owned three on or near Mulholland Drive) due to the fires. He went downhill soon after.

Initially posted on 5.14.12:

The Blues Brothers (6.20.80) was about John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd having dry, sardonic fun with the “white musicians looking to generate authenticity by performing the Chicago blues” concept.

This kind of thing was originally personified with utter sincerity by the scowling, grittily-posed, Rayban-wearing Paul Butterfield Blues Band.

The Blues Brothers act was nervy and funny when I first saw Belushi-Aykroyd perform it on Saturday Night Live in April 1978. They doubled down on this when I saw them live at Carnegie Hall later that year (or was it sometime in ’79?).

But the coolness went all to hell with the release of John Landis‘s Blues Brothers flick.

What was it about this Universal release that obliterated and suffocated? Oh, I don’t know. Maybe the fact that it was an unfunny, over-emphatic, overproduced super-whale that was made on cocaine (or so the legend went)?

I asked Landis about this wildly inflated, pushing-too-hard aspect when I interviewed him in ’82 for an American Werewolf in London piece.

It was over breakfast at an Upper East Side hotel (Landis was hungrily wolfing down a plate of scrambled eggs and home fries), and I said that the “enormity” of The Blues Brothers seemed “somewhat incongruous with the humble origins of the Chicago Blues.”

That hit a nerve. “It wasn’t supposed to be a documentary about the humble origins of the Chicago Blues!” Landis replied. But the essence of the Chicago blues wasn’t about flamboyant energy and huge lavish musical numbers and car chases or mad slapstick, I said to myself. And your movie seemed to take that Paul Butterfield pose and amplify it beyond all measure or reason.

I didn’t literally say this to Landis, of course, but he knew what I meant. Nor was I impolitic enough to call it “a cocaine movie” but that’s what it damn sure felt like.

As Landis argued with me the Universal publicist sitting at the table started making “no, no” faces, indicating that I should tone it down.

In any case I mostly hated The Blues Brothers from the get-go, and here it is 45 years later and after giving it a fresh re-watch last night, I’m still not a fan.

Why didn’t Sam and Dave have a cameo? Everyone else did.

HE reply: Outside of the super-wealthy, the blissfully ignorant and the simply-lacking-sufficient-brain-cells crowd, life itself is a kind of misery index. If you’re living an examined one, I mean.

That old Annie Hall joke about human experience being categorized by the horrible for some (afflicted with ghastly disease, suffering in concentration camps) and the miserable for everyone else? It got a big laugh when I first saw Woody Allen’s classic film in the spring of ‘77.

Life is occasionally punctuated with deeply satisfying accomplishment breathers or mountain-peak highs or blissful peace-outs (family dinners, silent communings with nature, pet affection, great music, early-morning airport arrivals in Europe) or fizzy champagne cocktail moments (and who doesn’t love these?) but otherwise is mostly about pushing the plow through rocky soil and slogging through as best we can. I wish it were otherwise, but then again misery and anxiety and sore shoulder muscles build character.

Barry Levinson‘s The Alto Knights (Warner Bros., 3.21.25) would sell more tickets if it was called Wise Guys (original title), Goombahs, Vito and Frank or Old Fuckheads.

Okay, those aren’t very good titles either, but what the hell does The Alto Knights mean?

The Alto Knights Social Club was the original name of Little Italy’s’s Ravenite Social Club (247 Mulberry Street). Founded in 1926, the joint was a hangout for Charlie “Lucky” Luciano and Albert Anastasia. (The name “Alto Knights” came from the Order of Saint James of Altopascio.)

The screenplay is by Nicholas Pileggi (co-author of Goodfellas).

The Alto Knights stars 81-year-old Robert De Niro in a dual role as mob bosses Vito Genovese and Frank Costello. Debra Messing, Cosmo Jarvis, Kathrine Narducci and Michael Rispoli play supporting roles.

If someone were to offer me a clean, crisp $100 bill in exchange for my agreeing to sit through the entirety of Leigh Whannell‘s Wolf Man, I honestly wouldn’t know how to respond. I think I’d hold out for $250. I would sit through this obviously poisonous film for that amount.

I’ve never seen Terence Fisher‘s Curse of the Werewolf (’61), which starred Oliver Reed and was set in 18th Century Spain. (Although it was shot in England.) It was the first werewolf film to be shot in color. Stills indicate that Reed’s makeup wasn’t bad.

For the last 30 years my all-time favorite werewolf flick has been Mike Nichols‘ Wolf (’94), which has an excellent screenplay by Jim Harrison (whom I met and hung out with on a warm evening in March ’96 at the premiere of Carried Away, which was based on Harrison’s “Farmer”) and Wesley Strick. I didn’t like the last half-hour of Wolf, of course — nobody did. But the first 90 minutes moved along nicely.

Control: “And uhm…how do you feel about him?”

Leamas: “Feel?”

Control: “Yes.”

Leamas: “He’s a bastard.”

Control: “Quite.”

No backbone, no principles, no belief in the rule of law.

Remember Scott Feinberg’s enthusiastic Angelina Jolie promotions? All the gush? Well, none of that panned out. No SAG or BAFTA noms…sorry. That’s because of the horrible recriminations against Brad Pitt by Jolie and the kids. It’s called karma.