Lost Highway

Started by ono, July 23, 2003, 08:48:09 PM

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NEON MERCURY

...yeah I lucked up and found this new (widescreen/vhs).at an independant music store...

Weak2ndAct

I really, truly love this movie.  I saw it at a time in my life when I was growing tired of everything that was coming out and hadn't been wow-ed in a really long time (plus, it gets the distinction of being my father's most hated moviegoing experience ever-- i've never seen him get so upset, and despite the gratuitious nudity!).  When MD came out, it felt like Lost Highway-Lite, that could be my only criticism for it.  

But the question I pose to y'all is: what do you think of the ending?  The most interesting theory I've been presented with is that the ending is Fred being fried in the electric chair (in a deleted scene, a fellow inmate gets electrocuted-- a fragment still remains, the light flickering and shutting off in Fred's cell).  Or it could be as simple as the 'dream state' being unraveled (all the loose ends and nagging questions from the 1st half were answered/resolved... sort of).

NEON MERCURY

..it's wierd..With this film i don't think about what it means or anything .I take it at face -value it's more fun that way IMO  .....but  on Mulholland drive I wanted an explanation and combing other sources and my own ideas i got one that i am happy with ....

freakerdude

Quote from: chainsmoking insomniacI'm glad someone started a thread on this movie.  I think (like Mulholland Dr.) Lost Highway could have been a superb film, if only Lynch decided to give the audience a real story instead of self-indulgent, atmosphere/mood driven scenes with no real narrative.  
However, the visuals and camerawork are (as usual) terrific.  And Badalamenti, Badalamenti, BADALAMENTI!!!!  Not since Brion/PTA has there been such a powerful duo! :)

These guys are are a prefect match. I just bought WAH and BV CDs but have had Lost Hwy for quite some time.

I saw LH on my b'day night and not in a good mood to begin with. I was really unhappy as I walked out of the theater. But the 2nd and 3rd repeat viewing changed my mind. I don't think Mulholland is a continuation of LH, IMO.
MC Pee Pants

bonanzataz

just watched this over the weekend. fucking rawsome. i loved it. however, i bought the german release because it had 5.1 sound but the sound is slightly out of sync with the movie! anybody with region free, buy the british version, i don't think 5.1 sound is worth it.
The corpses all hang headless and limp bodies with no surprises and the blood drains down like devil's rain we'll bathe tonight I want your skulls I need your skulls I want your skulls I need your skulls Demon I am and face I peel to see your skin turned inside out, 'cause gotta have you on my wall gotta have you on my wall, 'cause I want your skulls I need your skulls I want your skulls I need your skulls collect the heads of little girls and put 'em on my wall hack the heads off little girls and put 'em on my wall I want your skulls I need your skulls I want your skulls I need your skulls

Gold Trumpet

I didn't like the film. Reasons why seem to explain why I loved Muholland Drive so much. The narrative is great in both films, the ideas of how the viewing itself is so intense and emotional and the ambiguilties are endless in what could mean what as nearly two storylines are merged together to think what it all could mean. The problem though is that I don't think the film has any weight to the narrative to really give interest to want to think more about it. Nothing, besides the technical and style, really pushes the film to further think about it and what it could really mean.

As Ebert said, its more the execution of a style and an idea closely related to the one made famous in Bunuel's "That Obscure Object of Desire". That film was also dissapointing in that the technical switch of actresses had little to think about besides what both actresses could represent to the viewer as an image of the normal/exotic and how Bunuel played with our desires by showing the exotic in less revealing and sexual scenes. The story just had little weight of intrigue to further think about.

With Muholland Drive, a convention is shown in clear narrative being present for a while with the relationship of the two girls, but its a set up for making all the breaking of the conventions later on intriguing in that are thoughts and wonders extend with the film and beyond. Muholland Drive is like a puzzle, but ambiguous and really a great film in my opinion. Gets better the more I think of it. It just shows that when dealing with ambiguilties, content has to be there so ambiguilty can take place.

~rougerum

MacGuffin

How to Make an Opera a Riddle: Adapt David Lynch
Source: New York Times



Ever since she was 13, when she first saw "The Elephant Man," Olga Neuwirth, a 35-year-old Austrian composer, has felt an affinity with the filmmaker David Lynch. "In his films, you are put into a vortex without actually knowing what is going on," Ms. Neuwirth said recently from Venice, where she lives. "So this has always been a part of my thinking."

The appeal of the vortex — not to mention the labyrinth, which partly explains her move from Vienna to the mazelike Venice 10 years ago — has been an essential part of Ms. Neuwirth's compositional process.

"How can you draw people in, making it impossible for them to escape from listening?" she asked. "It's so hard in our times to listen. But I never want to make music very clear. It must always be a riddle. There is never a theme you can easily latch onto. A different kind of psychology is happening, one of not knowing what is going on. That's why I'm so close to Lynch."

And that is why Ms. Neuwirth (pronounced NOY-veert) has dared to turn Mr. Lynch's most enigmatic film, "Lost Highway," into an opera. Ms. Neuwirth's "Lost Highway," which just had its premiere in Graz, her hometown (and much to her horror, Arnold Schwarzenegger's), runs through Nov. 8 at the Helmut List Hall.

When the movie came out in 1997, it baffled both audiences and critics. At first glance, it seemed two different movies, surrealistically spliced together via head-on collision.

The first half concerns a jazz saxophonist, Fred Madison (played by Bill Pullman), who is tormented by suspicions that his wife, Renee (Patricia Arquette), is unfaithful. Videotapes left anonymously on their doorstep start off as creepy surveillance of their home's exterior, then, alarmingly, show the troubled couple asleep in their bedroom. The last tape received shows Fred butchering his wife, and he is arrested and imprisoned.

The second half of the film concerns a young mechanic, Peter Dayton (Balthazar Getty), who is released from Fred's cell — Fred, meanwhile, having vanished into thin air. Pete falls head over heels for a blonde, Alice Wakefield, who is the moll of an underworld pornographer, "Mr. Eddy." When their affair shifts into high gear, Alice persuades Pete to commit a robbery with her, then coldly dumps him. Pete transforms into Fred and kills Mr. Eddy. The film hauntingly loops back to the beginning.

The only hint the tight-lipped Mr. Lynch dropped about the meaning of "Lost Highway" was "psychogenic fugue." The term, with its musical overtones, refers to the dissociative disorder in which a person forgets who he or she is, takes on another identity and creates a new life somewhere else. During the "fugue" — or flight from the former self — amnesia erases the past life.

In other words, Fred Madison commits a horrific crime, and his mind opts for the ultimate form of denial: becoming a different person with no memory, Peter Dayton. The twist is that he hasn't really escaped at all. Although his exterior appearance has changed, he falls again for the same woman (Renee and Alice are both played by Ms. Arquette), who ultimately rejects him.

"This is the horrible thing," Ms. Neuwirth said. "You remain a prisoner of your body and mind. You can't escape from yourself, your fears, your inner life."

"Lost Highway," like Alfred Hitchcock's "Vertigo" (which also involves a man who loses the same woman twice), can be seen as a film-noir variation on the Orpheus myth. In this case, Orpheus unconsciously murders his Eurydice out of sexual jealousy, then creates a new identity to have a second chance with her.

"For me, Fred converts into Pete to try again, to have a better life, to be younger and more attractive to this unattainable woman," Ms. Neuwirth said. "So he enters this world of phantasma. But Alice is just another Renee. Again he has to kill." In the opera's first half, the characters speak their lines; in the second — the "phantasma" — they sing.

Ms. Neuwirth and her librettist, Elfriede Jelinek, have stuck very closely to Mr. Lynch and Barry Gifford's screenplay, and the opera is performed in English. Ms. Jelinek, also Austrian, wrote the novel that served as the basis for Michael Haneke's disturbing film "The Piano Teacher," and last year she won Germany's top literary award, the Heine Prize.

"I consider `Lost Highway' one of the key works in the history of cinema," Ms. Jelinek said. "When I saw the film for the first time, it was like a blow to my brain stem, a real physical sensation. It's pretty much impossible to translate an artwork like this into another genre. But musical theater is possible, because, like film, it is another way of playing with time flow."

Ms. Neuwirth, who once considered becoming a filmmaker, is particularly interested in the manipulation of time in music. "There are all these repetitions in the film," she said, "an interesting thing for a composer to think about musically. So structures which occur in the first part return in the second part, but in another context."

As in her first full-length, darkly comic opera, "Bählamms Fest," there is a lively soundtrack of effects as well as a complex interplay between recorded and live music, intermingled to such an extent that you cannot separate one from the other. Live electronics play a central role, and Ms. Neuwirth also incorporates old radio broadcasts of pop songs and snippets of Baroque music.

The resulting score is enigmatic and labyrinthine, constantly morphing from one thing to the next. Ms. Neuwirth, educated at Ircam, Pierre Boulez's electronic-music center in Paris, knows how to bend and twist sound like no other.

"I like to change musical structures very rapidly, or else I get bored," she said. "I want to open petrified brains. I play with very different types of music. It's like a kaleidoscope." Above all, she manages to evoke the reality-confounding dream world of Mr. Lynch's film.

Constance Hauman, the voluptuous American soprano who plays Renee and Alice, said: "I'm in awe of Olga. She really sheds light on David Lynch's most mysterious movie. She's created a new medium. It's not really opera, and it's not really musical theater. It's a unique category of its own. It's a fusion of all kinds of different styles, which many composers today aren't brave enough to use."

One of the few significant departures from the screenplay is that Fred is a trumpet player, not a saxophonist. "Fred is a trumpet player because I am a trumpet player," Ms. Neuwirth said. "His story became mine, true for me, my lost highway."

She won't say any more on the subject.  
"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol


Skeleton FilmWorks

Ghostboy

I was so convinced that you'd be reporting news of a new DVD release...damn that opera for getting my hopes up. I refuse to watch this movie again until it's on widescreen DVD. Unless someone invites me over to watch it on laserdisc, but I don't know anyone with a laserdisc player, so that's not likely.

Who owns it now, anyway? Since Polygram folded...

MacGuffin

Quote from: GhostboyUnless someone invites me over to watch it on laserdisc, but I don't know anyone with a laserdisc player, so that's not likely.

I'm looking at my laserdisc copy as I type this.

Quote from: GhostboyWho owns it now, anyway? Since Polygram folded...

USA (region 1): In a recent Video Business article USA Films stated a Special Edition DVD of Lost Highway is in the works. The disc will feature a new 5.1 soundtrack. Most of the work on the disc has been completed, but with USA Home Video's catalog being absorbed into Universal, the disc has disapeared into limbo. No word on if or when Universal will release it.
"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol


Skeleton FilmWorks

Pastor Parsley

Quote from: chainsmoking insomniacLost Highway could have been a superb film, if only Lynch decided to give the audience a real story instead of self-indulgent, atmosphere/mood driven scenes with no real narrative.

There is a real narative, but it isn't spoon fed to you like most films.  You're just used to the traditional narrative.

I agree with with Weak2ndAct, MD is LH lite.  Mulholland Drive is in the same form as Lost Highway, but all the pieces of the puzzle are there.  With LH, there is one piece missing, in fact it was cut from the film, and I think it's better for it.  MD was more appealing to the masses because it included that linking piece.  (Although, I do think that on some other levels that MD is a little tighter than LH.)

By leaving that scene out, ones imagination takes over.  Imagination is better than anything you could do with film, plus it's personalized for each viewer making it even better.

NEON MERCURY

Quote from: Pastor Parsley
Quote from: chainsmoking insomniacLost Highway could have been a superb film, if only Lynch decided to give the audience a real story instead of self-indulgent, atmosphere/mood driven scenes with no real narrative.

There is a real narative, but it isn't spoon fed to you like most films.  You're just used to the traditional narrative.

I agree with with Weak2ndAct, MD is LH lite.  Mulholland Drive is in the same form as Lost Highway, but all the pieces of the puzzle are there.  With LH, there is one piece missing, in fact it was cut from the film, and I think it's better for it.  MD was more appealing to the masses because it included that linking piece.  (Although, I do think that on some other levels that MD is a little tighter than LH.)

By leaving that scene out, ones imagination takes over.  Imagination is better than anything you could do with film, plus it's personalized for each viewer making it even better.



why does Chainsmoking Insomniac ..call it "self indulgent"?????????

ElPandaRoyal

Quote from: NEON MERCURY..it's wierd..With this film i don't think about what it means or anything .I take it at face -value it's more fun that way IMO  .....but  on Mulholland drive I wanted an explanation and combing other sources and my own ideas i got one that i am happy with ....

Strange, that's kind of what I feel about both movies. Although sometimes, when I watch Lost Highway again, I try and look for anything that can tell me something more about what's going on. With no luck, though. But it's an amazing film and the lack of an easily comprehensible story doesn't bother me at all, because only Lynch can make me feel whatever it is that I feel whenever I watch one of his movies, and I love it.
Si

Pastor Parsley

Quote from: NEON MERCURY
why does Chainsmoking Insomniac ..call it "self indulgent"?????????

I think because the narrative isn't straight forward, some feel that the director is making it difficult to understand and isn't thinking about the audience.  I can definitely understand why some would come to this conclusion.  In some films, a poorly crafted narrative makes the film difficult to understand.  In this case it's not a lack of skill, it's intentional.

MacGuffin

Lost Highway US DVD Release 1st half of 2004
Dugpa got confirmation from a contact at Universal that they are in the process of working out all the details, he assures them that they are looking at a release in the first half of 2004.
"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol


Skeleton FilmWorks

Jeremy Blackman

Quote from: MacGuffinLost Highway US DVD Release 1st half of 2004
Dugpa got confirmation from a contact at Universal that they are in the process of working out all the details, he assures them that they are looking at a release in the first half of 2004.

Merry Christmas to you too, MacGuffin!

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