Oh, no!

Lost Highway

Bill Pullman is sent to jail for killing Patricia Arquette and then turns into Balthazar Getty, directed by David Lynch.

This is some spooky shit we got here. The first 45 minutes of the film are great - pure Lynch, with a creepy, dreamlike quality. Then it seems like co-author Barry Gifford takes over and turns it into a clunky film noir fantasy, with Arquette as a femme fatale and a porn film subplot. But the dream logic is gone, and none of the different pieces really fit together. Getty is a less talented Charlie Sheen, putting Marilyn Manson in the film dates it pretty badly - maybe not as much as putting Frankie Goes to Hollywood in Body Double, but still - and worst of all, Lynch himself seems to go missing, only turning up occasionally, like in the coffee table scene. Some ideas in the film reappear in Mulholland Drive, with a much better result.

John Irving

Top 5 John Irving books:

1. The Cider House Rules
2. The World According to Garp
3. The Hotel New Hampshire
4. A Prayer for Owen Meany
5. Not sure... A Widow for One Year? There's a gap between those four books and the ones that came after and that never quite reach the same heights.

David Lynch

Top 5 David Lynch films:

1. Blue Velvet
2. Mulholland Drive
3. Elephant Man
4. The Straight Story
5. Eraserhead

Nid de Guêpes

A French variation on Assault on Precinct 13, by Florent-Emilio Siri, who also did Hostage, the Bruce Willis film.

Now this is more like it! It's a far better film than the Assault remake. The story is mostly told visually, with not that much dialogue. Holding off the exposition, it takes about half an hour before you know who the different people are. Then, in the last half hour, all hell breaks loose. And the film even got some style to spare.

Sigh

El Dorado Silverado

El Dorado: A variation on Rio Bravo, by Howard Hawks, with Robert Mitchum in the Dean Martin role, James Caan as Ricky Nelson, Arthur Hunnicutt as Walter Brennan and Charlene Holt as Angie Dickinson. John Wayne is still John Wayne. It even has the same scene of a bad guy being shot and hiding in a saloon and the sheriff going in after him. But they're not able to recapture lightning in a bottle, the magic is mostly gone.

Silverado: The first time I saw this film, by Lawrence Kasdan, I didn't care for it too much, but rewatching it now, it's actually pretty good. It's more of a pastiche, though, with Kasdan putting in every scene he loved from watching Westerns as a kid, leading up to the gun duel at the end. There's something slightly mechanical about the film, and politically correct as well. But there's also the guy falling off the roof scene, so I can't really complain.