Day: January 16, 2025

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.

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The 1.10.25 death of Sam Moore somehow led me to re-watch John Landis’s The Blues Brothers (6.20.80). Yeah, I know…weak linkage, only in white-guy land.

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.