I just saw the movie/film "Blue Velvet"

Started by ShanghaiOrange, June 02, 2003, 04:07:20 PM

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Pubrick

Quote from: SiliasRuby on April 19, 2006, 01:53:22 PM
Saw this again recently, It was my first Lynch film and still my fav.
thanks for the update.

it wasn't my first lynch and still not my fav.
under the paving stones.

MacGuffin

Residents of So. Cal:

Lynch In Person for the 20th Anniversary Blue Velvet Screening in Los Angeles on Thursday, June 29th

They will be screening a brand new print for this event. Tickets are only $10. Check out the Lafilmfest.com for more details.
"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

SiliasRuby

I'm going. Already bought my tickets. So ready for it.
The Beatles know Jesus Christ has returned to Earth and is in Los Angeles.

When you are getting fucked by the big corporations remember to use a condom.

There was a FISH in the perkalater!!!

My Collection

modage

Thursday, June 29
7:30    BLUE VELVET with Virginia Madsen
(David Lynch will not be able to appear in person.)
Los Angeles

hope everyone with tix is a big virginia madsen fan...
Christopher Nolan's directive was clear to everyone in the cast and crew: Use CGI only as a last resort.

MacGuffin




Strolling Within the Strange World of 'Blue Velvet'
Source: New York Times

Filmmakers have often penetrated the "fourth wall," that imaginary divide separating the audience from the action, by having characters break the narrative spell and address moviegoers directly. Woody Allen extended the device in "The Purple Rose of Cairo," when a character in the film-within-the-film leaves the screen and enters "real" life.

In his installation "On Chapels, Caves and Erotic Misery" the Polish-born New York artist Christian Tomaszewski reverses this logic and invites viewers to enter David Lynch's 1986 art-house thriller, "Blue Velvet."

At the darkened entrance to the basement of the SculptureCenter visitors are greeted with illuminated text etched onto a black mirror: "This film has been modified from its original version. It has been formatted to fit your limits." Conflating the standard video warning with psychedelic, psychological posturing ("are you experienced?") invokes a momentary cringe, but its effects aren't irremediable.

To the right and left are closed doors; the visitor chooses her entrance into the installation. The left door leads into a hallway with gray walls, white wainscoting and illuminated sconces, a skillful re-creation of the hallway in the Deep River apartment building where Dorothy Vallens, the kinky chanteuse played by Isabella Rossellini in the film, lives. The hallway winds around the basement and is lined by doors, most of which are locked and lighted from behind.

Take the door on the right and enter a slightly wider corridor lined on one side with dollhouse-size models of locations in the movie: the booth in Arlene's diner where Sandy (Laura Dern) and Jeffrey (Kyle MacLachlan) discuss what to do after he finds a severed human ear in a vacant lot and delivers it to her detective father; a craftily conceived view through louvered doors into Dorothy's kitchen and living room; three versions of Jeffrey's parents' home surrounded by a white picket fence; and a vitrine with a re-creation of the infamous severed ear resting on a mirrored base.

On the other side of this space is an arrangement of vintage lamps combining Haim Steinbach's shelf-sculpture aesthetic with Mr. Lynch's revivalist kitsch (as well as a version of Brion Gysin's 1960s "Dreamachine," a spinning, perforated cylinder with a light bulb inside). Also in this room is a flashing orange neon sign with the image of a gun and an arrangement of cardboard triangles on the ceiling, which are easy to miss.

Access to two other parts of the installation can be gained through the hallway that winds around the basement. One is a bright, narrow corridor painted white, with Dan Flavin-style fluorescent tubes lining the ceiling. The other is a pitch black hallway with illuminated texts on the wall, including directions from the "Blue Velvet" screenplay.

Mr. Tomaszewski has done a skillful job recreating "Blue Velvet" objects and locales (most in miniature). This isn't his first crack at the project; it is the fifth and final version. Others have been installed in galleries in New York and Poland and in museums in Germany.

In a catalog interview Mr. Tomaszewski describes Mr. Lynch as an "enigma of Postmodernism," while admitting that Mr. Tomaszewski is "more interested in Modernism and its utopias." The play between Postmodernism and Modernism enters here in both the title of the work — which comes from the original name for Kurt Schwitters's "Merzbau," the famous proto-installation Mr. Schwitters erected in his house in Hanover, Germany, featuring found and created objects and called "The Cathedral of Erotic Misery" — and those easily missed cardboard prisms on the ceiling in the basement, which mimic some of the interior architectural configurations in "Merzbau."

You sense, in paging through the catalog, that Mr. Tomaszewski made a deeper connection between these disparate sources — "Blue Velvet" and "Merzbau"; Modernism and Postmodernism — in earlier versions of the piece. (The installation was enclosed in a prismatic, cavelike structure in Chemnitz, Germany; here it is remade into a subterranean labyrinth.)

Mr. Tomaszewski offers plenty else to chew on. There is the notion of trying to recreate the fictive, dream space of film in three concrete dimensions; the juxtaposition of different forms of representation, from film and still images to text and objects; the play between memory (assuming you've seen the film) and actuality; and the idea of a Polish-born artist reading America through David Lynch. Mr. Lynch's films, Mr. Tomaszewski says, are "quintessentially American and by and large confirm my own observations," which makes you wonder just what and how much he has seen of these United States.

Despite these rich veins of inquiry, however, the installation feels sterile and flat. "Blue Velvet" is a rich, visceral film full of deep, saturated color and moody music, and it becomes a tough act to follow, particularly when the characters are exiled and what remains is a silent conceptual shell that merely grazes rather than gets under your skin.

Yet "On Chapels, Caves and Erotic Misery" encouraged me to go back and watch a film I hadn't seen in more than a decade and rediscover not only a slice of Postmodern noir but Mr. Lynch's absurdist, neosurrealist sense of humor. This was expressed in everything from Jeffrey breaking unexpectedly into the "chicken walk" on his first date with Sandy, to Dean Stockwell lip-syncing Roy Orbison's "In Dreams."

In his effort to address serious issues of art history, theory and film, Mr. Tomaszewski overlooks the humor. He might also be accused of overreaching, of trying to pack too much into a work not built to carry it. But when art leads you to chase down its sources and remember or discover something new, it must on some level be considered a success.
"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

Sleepless

So I was browsing an antique store yesterday and came across a first edition of 'On Cherry Street,' the book which Lynch has cited for inspiring those images of idealized small towns in the 50s. It's all there; the fire engines, the white picket fences.

I bought it and am going to use it to teach my future kids to read someday :)
He held on. The dolphin and all the rest of its pod turned and swam out to sea, and still he held on. This is it, he thought. Then he remembered that they were air-breathers too. It was going to be all right.

Just Withnail

I'm going to show my future kids Blue Velvet to teach them how to see.

hedwig

i'm gonna show my future kids Blue Velvet to teach them how to talk because i want their first words to be "MOMMMYY.... MOMMY... BABY WANTS TO FUUUCK."

MacGuffin

'I've got to find the flaming nipple!': the hunt for Blue Velvet's lost footage
For years Lynch-heads and film historians have speculated about deleted scenes from Blue Velvet. Now they've been found – and they're quite something
Source: The Guardian

"I've got to find the flaming nipple!" No, it's not a line from a David Lynch script. That's the man himself, reacting to the news last year that missing footage from Blue Velvet had been rediscovered. For years, Lynch-heads and film historians had speculated about the whereabouts of the deleted scenes: footage left on the cutting room floor after Lynch snipped his three-and-a-half-hour rough cut into a two-hour movie. Time passed and everyone – director included – figured it was lost for ever. As for the flaming nipple (nipples, in fact), they belong to a dropped scene. "That's one of my favourite scenes," Lynch said in an interview for the book Lynch on Lynch. Why cut it and (metaphorically speaking) kill his baby? "It was too much of a good thing."

The man who found the deleted scenes is movie sleuth and champion of lost causes, Darren Gross, who works in MGM's technical services department (which archives, preserves, restores and remasters the studio's movies). The detective work is a labour of love, "a side-project", says Gross on the phone from his office in LA. For a couple of years he chased down Blue Velvet leads, trawling inventories of companies that had owned the film before MGM. He was close to abandoning the mission when, last September, he located all the missing material (including "pretty much pristine" negatives) gathering dust in a warehouse in Seattle. "For an independent producer, it's unusual that all of this stuff has survived," he explains. "Why keep hundreds of boxes and pay the storage? So, often they just throw them away. That happens a lot."

Perhaps producer Dino de Laurentiis had an idea someone would come looking for Blue Velvet. It was the most talked-about, most polarising movie of 1986. Some critics were appalled by Dennis Hopper's freakishly sadistic nitrous-oxide huffing psychopath Frank and his relationship with Isabella Rossellini's masochistic sex slave. JG Ballard considered it the best movie of the 80s – "without a doubt". There's a clip on YouTube of a TV interview with Lynch at the time, the presenter trying to engage him on the controversy: "Do you think you are a genius or a really sick person?" That really tickles him. "Well Valerie I don't know," he answers, all wholesome aw-shucks-ness.

Altogether, 50 minutes of never-before-seen footage have been re-edited – supervised by Lynch – into an extra on a new DVD celebrating the film's 25th anniversary (available early next year in the UK).

The flaming nipple scene will open the new footage on the DVD, giving audiences more of Hopper in what is possibly his scariest performance – in a career of scary performances. (He phoned Lynch, not long out of rehab: "David, I love this script. I am Frank.") The action unfolds in a bar where Frank threatens a man who has been hanging out with a posse of naked women. On set, one of the actresses happened to show Lynch a trick she had for setting her nipples on fire with a match. He liked it so much he filmed it and gave her the closing line: "Motherfucker, you're really going up in flames this time!" Clearly it's Blue Velvet: The Director's Cut that the diehards want to see. But Lynch never revises his work. What's more, unlike, say, Ridley Scott on Blade Runner, he had the final cut on Blue Velvet (in return for halving his salary and the budget). So Lynch politely declined the opportunity re-edit the movie with the new footage: "I think he thinks of it like sculpture," explains Gross. "You have to chisel away at it. And it's heartbreaking to see some of the little pieces go. But the final form is ultimately what he wants to express." Nor should we expect Blue Velvet: The (Even) Bluer Bits. Flaming nipples aside, the deleted scenes mostly expand on the characters. What surprised Gross were the inclusion of a few bloopers: "There are a couple of really funny outtakes. Only a couple of minutes, but I never thought I'd see a David Lynch outtakes reel."

As for Lynch, he couldn't be happier: "It's like the song Amazing Grace. The footage was lost but now it's found."
"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

Pubrick

good stuff.

re-releasing Blue Velvet with these bonus deleted scenes is going to be the best thing he's done in ten years.
under the paving stones.

SiliasRuby

This is the best news I've heard in a month.
The Beatles know Jesus Christ has returned to Earth and is in Los Angeles.

When you are getting fucked by the big corporations remember to use a condom.

There was a FISH in the perkalater!!!

My Collection

Pubrick

Why, what happened a month ago SiliasRuby?
under the paving stones.

SiliasRuby

I know most of you will mock me for this but I don't care, some will love this cause I'm ballsy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHkmBlqR2GI&feature=relmfu
The Beatles know Jesus Christ has returned to Earth and is in Los Angeles.

When you are getting fucked by the big corporations remember to use a condom.

There was a FISH in the perkalater!!!

My Collection

03

yeah so apparently this played in a local theatre recently and no one knew about it.
if you didnt catch that:
BLUE VELVET PLAYED IN A MOVIE THEATRE IN ALA FUCKING BAMA
and i didnt know about it. thanks, little movie theatre, dick move.

wilder

New restoration opens at Film Forum on March 25th and then will tour nationwide