Blurbing For The Weekend 1/24/25

When I learned about the passing of David Lynch, I finally got around to removing the plastic wrap from my Criterion Blu-Ray of INLAND EMPIRE. Ironically, all the fantastic bonus features are now on the Criterion Channel, which I also have, but the man earned the gesture. I know he would have rather I got around to meditating again, but I’m worried I’d ironically fixate on how annoyed I am at many of his most vocal fans. And he wouldn’t have wanted that.

I shared most of these gripes in my post about Twin Peaks (already two years old! Maybe I am zen), so I’ll try not to regurgitate them too much. After all, I think the director of INLAND EMPIRE, Blue Velvet and Eraserhead deserves tribute. I appreciate his attempt to square his love of zen philosophy and Americana without ignoring the potential horror in either. I loved his commitment outside of filmmaking to spreading good vibes & an artistic mindset. Watching a supercut of his weather reports is right up there with a meditation practice and getting tested for ADHD on my to-do list. But the common refusal to believe he was not just of earth, but of this Hollywood industrial complex, is one of my biggest umbrages with film fandom. I still haven’t read a take on the universally hailed experimental classic Mulholland Dr that acknowledges what the “experiment” actually was: adding a nude scene and a Wizard Of Oz coda to a network TV pilot, at the request of financiers for cinematic release. More than twenty years later, the origins of the product never under wraps, people still engage with the film as if the plotholes and dubious leaps in logic were intentional, rather than caused by the haphazard nature of its creation. They’re still trying to unravel the mystery while refusing to read the ingredients label. 

Lynch enabled this perspective with his genial acceptance of awe and his refusal to correct the oblivious, but I don’t blame him for it. (I still think his decreased productivity may have been partly inspired by the gap between Mulholland’s appreciation and EMPIRE’s, despite the latter being a genuine attempt at the auteurist “dream logic” Mulholland is blithely praised for. He just knew better than to call it out.) Admitting you’re watching a TV pilot with a cliche resolution added by a businessman hoping to recoup on his investment would force one to either cop to being suckered, or to say you enjoy it despite the unquestionable influence of crass Hollywood capitalism. Just once (and I assume such takes have risen here and there in obscurity over the last twenty years - like mine!), I’d love to see someone say Mulholland is their favorite movie because the themes gain strength from the construction. That admitting the reality of the production enhances the work. But, as far as I can tell, the conventional POV overwhelmingly remains a hyperromantic fantasy of auteurism, where there’s not just a reason for your confusion, but a good reason. A commendable one worthy of the rare true cinematic artist. It can’t be that he carelessly left the pilot’s mob & Billy Ray Cyrus subplots in the final film despite deciding they didn’t matter. It can’t.

Some of the same critics and cineastes decided, after watching season 3 of a TV show, that what they saw was actually a movie, because it was directed by David Lynch. So I’m ready to accept Lynch simply breaks people’s brains. Again, it’s not his fault, and I will miss the guy. But having to dwell on this horseshit did keep me from finally viewing Lost Highway and The Straight Story last week, or revisiting Eraserhead and Blue Velvet. I’m sure I’ll get around to it soon, but today…I’m gonna talk about my earlier rewatch of the Die Hard movies.

I went back to the first Die Hard on Christmas, and you don’t need me to tell you it’s a POPCORN CLASSIC. Debating just what kind of classic it is became a cultural phenomenon a few years ago. My take is that Die Hard is indeed a holiday season movie, but not a Christmas Day movie, as it ends before Christmas comes. If you think that was a dumb, annoying debate, look at the paragraphs above. At least people were debating how to classify the movie rather than arguing how Al having to kill Karl, despite Karl having already been quite dead, makes sense because of dream logic. You’re allowed to say “yeah, that’s just stupid” in regards to Hollywood narratives fans accept are Hollywood narratives. For now.

Facebook reels of Samuel L Jackson interviews had me thinking about revisiting Die Hard With A Vengeance anyway, so I finally saw it for the first time since the VHS release. I like how Jackson’s Zeus believes black kids need to keep their pants off the ground because of his vocal contempt for white supremacy, rather than as a capitulation to it. I also liked Graham Greene getting to play a workaday cop sans stoic Native American cliche, and how Colleen Camp’s absurd wig retroactively turns her into a Kristen Wiig character. But that was about it. Director John McTiernan, returning from the first film, is clearly playing catch-up to ’90s post-Tony Scott action cliches here. New York City almost looks like LA with all the sun and sweat. The script is similarly post-Tarantino in its uptick of race-baiting and profane cruelty. Whether it’s due to his indifference or the editor’s, Jeremy Irons doesn’t make clear whether he’s actually a goofball supervillain or just pretending to be one. Inscrutably goading Willis over the phone in a wandering accent, Irons is less the brother of Alan Rickman in Die Hard than the brother of Taylor Negron in Die Hard 12. Was American blonde singer-songwriter Aimee Mann playing a German henchlady in The Big Lebowski a reference to American blonde singer-songwriter Sam Phillips playing one here? You might fondly recall Willis and Jackson barking at each other, or a dynamic setpiece or two. But by the twelfth dynamic setpiece, I was pretty checked out. THREE BAGS OF POPCORN.

I’ve historically called Live Free Or Die Hard my favorite Die Hard sequel, and it still gets that honor by default. One of my proudest moments as a pretentious film fan is when I learned Bruce Willis intentionally went for a John Wayne in The Searchers vibe here, as I idly wondered in the theater, watching him taunt bad guys with racist comments and act like he’s way too old to be saving anyone, let alone saving America from internet-enabled collapse. Justin Long is pretty terrific as the hacker who may not love America and sit-ups like John McClane does, but shares a similar smart-ass cynicism. (I’m so glad Long honored my enthusiasm for him here by masterfully playing a MeToo’d worm in Barbarian over a decade later, rather than getting MeToo’d.) The coldblooded anarchist thieves played by Maggie Q and Timothy Olyphant don’t get Gruber-level dialogue, but are so hot I‘d be OK if Dennis Reynolds produced and wrote them a prequel. Shit, even Kevin Smith is tolerable in his cameo. If only director Len Wiseman came up with an action sequence that’s more than tolerable. FOUR BAGS OF POPCORN.

I made it five minutes into A Good Day To Die Hard when that hit streaming, and I’m leaving it alone. But after the above, I did feel it necessary to revisit Die Hard 2. I wish I could say it’s my favorite of the follow-ups, as I love that Holly and John are happily married in it. I also love that they shoehorned William Atherton and Reginald VelJohnson’s characters in from the original. But otherwise, Die Hard 2 sets the tone of each sequel mostly involving Bruce Willis grimacing and sassing through the cliches of that particular Hollywood era for just north of two hours, courtesy of a solid, if generic, spec script rewritten to fit the franchise. Vengeance represents the Laserdisc era, everyone chattering, if not grumbling, about the inevitability of digital. Live Free is the DVD era, digital now a given, if still a nightmare. This one, from 1990, is first generation VHS. They literally show a picture of Lethal Weapon in a magazine, and the baggage bay at Dulles Airport turns out to be one of those cavernous warehouses where bullets can ricochet off endless metal railings and pipes that randomly emit steam. T2-era Robert Patrick gets one good close up and sociopathic punchline as a stern henchman, John Leguizamo and Vondie Curtis-Hall sadly getting less. William Sadler and John Amos play remorseless soldiers of the Iran-Contra variety, and along with machine guns there’s now snowmobiles. Instead of two dead business execs establishing stakes, a Concorde’s worth of innocents flown by Colm Meaney has to explode to prove the bad guys mean business. Oh, and Dennis Franz plays a cop that’s cranky and pigheaded. Director Renny Harlin and producer Joel Silver sure did try for popcorn classic status, but by the time Bruce presses a cockpit’s eject button to escape a dozen grenades, I wished I was watching Die Hard. FOUR BAGS OF POPCORN.

Them bags of popcorn are explained here. Anthonyisright at gmail dot com would be where you can best tell me I don’t get Mulholland Dr or Die Hard With A Vengeance.