Lola

 

Champagne
Like Cola

Lola
Ireland/UK 2022
Directed by Andrew Legge
Cowtown Pictures

Warning: Some spoilers.

Lola is a new, ‘found footage’ science fiction film (after doing the usual festival circuits it played on general release over here in the UK in early 2023) shot entirely in black and white in a 4:3 aspect ratio (more or less) and expertly made to look like a cobbled together relic from the 1940s... and, it’s quite a long way into the movie before it just about justifies the polish of the story in terms of that footage and how it’s been deliberately manipulated. I could probably put my hand up and shout that there’s no way anybody would be silly enough to shoot certain sequences (which in itself has become a cliché of the found footage genre) or gotten all of the footage used to make the story work but... I’d be a bit of a killjoy in the case of this one and, it’s not too far a stretch when you take into account the invention at the heart of the movie.

So, the film starts off with various statements informing us that this was a ‘broadcast’ which was found in a house in 2021. We then, via one of many montage sequences used in the film, witness two sisters - Martha and Thomasina - who have been orphaned and left on their own to bring each other up - grow into adulthood by the late 1930s. And one of them, Thomasina (played by Emma Appleton), is an extremely ‘ahead of her time’ inventor. And, within minutes of the movie’s opening, she invents a time machine of sorts, which they call Lola. A screen that can intercept any broadcasts from a particular date and time in the future. Both she and Martha (played by Stefanie Martini) are quite taken with the music of the future... the first broadcast they pick up is footage of David Bowie singing Space Oddity.

And then the war comes and they realise they can predict where German bombers will hit and, through a very clever broadcasting method, they are able to anonymously warn the people of Britain where to evacuate before it happens, saving many lives in the process. The anonymous voice of the girls becomes known to the people of Britain as The Angel Of Portobello. However, a clever army intelligence officer manages to trace the girls and ‘enlists’ them into using future enemy broadcasts to change the course of the war... for the better. Except, while they are doing this, Martha realises that they have erased the future they were so enjoying... including erasing people like David Bowie, Bob Dylan, Nina Simone and her now favourite director, Stanley Kubrick.

Then things get dark and... that’s all I’m saying about the story itself but, I will say it’s one of the more successful and enjoyable microbudget movies I’ve seen in a while. Very cheap movies usually look just that - cheap and with a tendency to wear the limitations of their budgets on their celluloid sleeves (okay... probably not celluloid these days but, you know what I mean). Partially because of the limited locations and partly because of the format in which the movie is presented, it actually feels a little slicker than it probably could have been and, well, ‘value for money’ it well may be but the movie certainly doesn’t suffer from the limited ingredients juxtaposed with the abundance of ideas.

Let’s get to the lead actresses... they really nail this. The girls have that kind of laid back, almost narcissistic attitude towards life that rich people living without the consequences of their actions sometimes are portrayed as having (especially in films set in the 1930s but made with a more contemporary eye, I’ve found). Emma Appleton especially plays Thomasina as a kind of spoiled brat of a genius who also happens to be wanting to do the right things for the right reasons. Martha is more sympathetic and equally righteous in her motivation and it’s interesting because the whole film is pitched as a message to Thomasina from Martha in the future... which you will know from the start and which, in some ways, spoils the surprise of the ending a little but... it does have a good ending and a terrific punchline in a single photograph. Not quite the final shot of Stanley Kubrick’s version of The Shining in terms of style but, certainly it should give those who have been following along with the story and thinking things through a window into whether Martha was successful in getting her message... aka this film... through to Thomasina or not.

One really nice sequence makes good use of a song by The Kinks... although, while the title of the film (and the central time viewing machine) may or may not be a nod to The Kinks, the sequence in question very much is. When Thomasina and Martha are at a celebratory dance party in the 1940s, Martha gets up to sing, accompanied by Thomasina on piano, the song You Really Got Me. And the audience at this point (and it’s a great sequence) will learn from the montage, via a stray news item, that ...You Really Got Me becomes ‘The Anthem Of The War’. And that’s partially what the film is... as well as touching briefly on the nature of film and how you manipulate it to tell a story... the film is all about consequences and what happens when you use knowledge of the future to try and avoid the bad bits. It inevitably catches you out and things can end up getting a whole lot worse. Can the past already done be changed somehow, is what this ‘message in a bottle’ of a film actually manages to answer with its final shot. And it’s nicely done, it has to be said.

And not much more to say, I think, about Lola other than, I really enjoyed it and I hope the writers and director (not to mention the crew) get more of a budget to carry on and do something even more spectacular. In some ways, Lola is a stretched out episode of The Twilight Zone in substance... just like a few other modern directors I could name have been doing over the years... but it’s a really successful one and has a style all of its own. Definitely one to catch if you are into the usual scientifiction conundrums done right. Loved it.

Twin Peaks - The Limited Event Series 3

A Prayer For The Diane


Twin Peaks - The Limited Event Series 3
2017 USA Directed by David Lynch
Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: I guess there are spoilers.

So finally... finally... we come to the part of the process that my Twin Peaks rewatch has been leading up to. Namely, I get to see the latest series that aired last year for the first time.

Now, I’m not sure quite what I was expecting here but the one thing I do know for sure is... it wasn’t this.

I remember a couple of years ago that David Lynch and co-writer/co-producer Mark Frost started tweet hinting that the new series of Twin Peaks was on the cards. I also remember Showtime putting the money up for it and then, all of a sudden, David Lynch backed away because he wasn’t being given final cut (if memory serves). Well, I don’t believe he totally had that on the first two series but I couldn’t imagine him doing anything these days unless he has the final say on it and I suspect a lot of people are of a similar opinion because... well, I remember the supporting tweets flying around fast and furious.

However, in the end, Showtime somehow managed to do the right thing and granted Lynch final say and it was all back on again... with twice the number of episodes than originally planned, too.

Honestly, I believe it was absolutely the right thing for Lynch to dig his heels in like that because, having now watched all 18 episodes of this new television odyssey, I can say that I personally don’t believe he would have gotten away with doing a fair amount of what he’s accomplished here on commercial television if he hadn’t stuck to his guns in those early negotiations. Although the ‘brand’ of Twin Peaks has always been synonymous with the auteur David Lynch, I’d have to say that this new incarnation of the show is, if anything, more Lynch-like than anything else we’ve seen made for television... and that includes both his original seasons of the show and another programme I used to like by him called On The Air.

This version of the series feels like an artist at the peak of his powers (which is no mean feat for someone of Lynch’s age) but it also, in many ways, harkens back to his much earlier work and I personally felt that this series was a lot more like the first thing I saw by him many years ago and which has, throughout his interesting career, always been my favourite work of his... Eraserhead.

Certainly the timing and pacing of Eraserhead is all over this thing. People will walk around or sit around and sometimes they will say something and sometimes they won’t say anything but they will, without fail, take their own time about anything they do and this laid back sense of ‘not getting on with things’ permeates the new show in every episode... which is kinda refreshing, actually. When I said, you’d never get away with something like this on television normally I wasn’t referring to the occasional nudity and quite hard violence on display in some of the episodes... the pacing is beyond leisurely but that’s no bad thing.

I mentioned in a previous review that the last time the dead Laura Palmer saw Agent Cooper in the The Black Lodge, where he too was trapped, she told him that the next time she would see him would be in 25 years time and... that’s more or less what it turned out to be, both in real time and also in the time that has passed in the chronology of various characters in the show. This carries on some quarter of a century later and we are reunited, over the weeks, with many of the old cast members (some of them didn’t return)... a number of whom died after finishing their filming. So  characters like Catherine E. Coulson’s The Log Lady, Miguel Ferrer’s FBI agent Albert and Harry Dean Stanton (reprising his role from Twin Peaks - Fire Walk With Me) are all in here but, alas, the actors playing them are sadly no longer with us. Many of the old cast returned though, with some notable exceptions. However, there’s also another generation of the families inhabiting the town highlighted in one or two cases so... lots of characters turn up and there are also a fair number of A list movie stars who seemed to have just turned up for the odd episode or two. Some of them, like Michael Cera, are quite unusual and just one offs. Monica Bellucci, for example, turns up as herself in FBI Director Gordon Cole’s dream about her. Others, like Amanda Seyfried, Caleb Landry Jones, Tim Roth, Jennifer Jason Leigh, James Belushi and Tom Sizemore have more substantial roles.

The old gang that do return are, in some cases, significantly moved on from their previous characters. For example, Dana Ashbrook’s Bobby Briggs character, who was a real hooliganistic, murdering brat in the original show, has made good and joined the police force. He’s actually, along with Michael Horse’s good old Deputy Hawk, one of the most trusty and reliable characters in the whole town now... which surprised me. Other returners, like Andy and Lucy, haven’t changed that much... they are still as entertaining to watch as they always were, though.

We also have some replacements for characters who Lynch obviously needed back to make his story work where they’ve passed on in the years between series. So the late Don S. Davis character Major Garland Briggs is found as a non-aged headless corpse (with someone else’s head placed above his in the aftermath of a murder) but that doesn’t stop his head from floating around an alternative dimension and speaking to Agent Cooper, courtesy of CGI effects. Similarly, David Bowie’s character from the prequel film has been replaced by what I can only describe as a sort of giant tea pot that speaks and spells out things with its steam.Didn't see that one coming.

Then there’s Agent Cooper himself, played once more by Kyle MacLachlan. This gets complicated...

There are at least three versions of Cooper to start with. We have the evil version of him who replaced him from The Black Lodge at the end of the last series and he’s the villainous Cooper who has been active in the last 25 years in our world. We also have a kind of stand in duplicate of Cooper called Dougie Jones, made by Bob as a dupe to replace him when he is supposed to return to The Black Lodge. When Bob fools the people in the other dimension by sending Dougie back... Dougie’s arm shrinks and his head explodes into black fire. However, the real Agent Cooper, after a bit of a surrealistic odyssey, manages to get out of the other dimension, escaping back into our world via an electrical socket. Alas, although he is mistaken for Dougie by all... including Dougie’s wife, son and employer... it would be true that he’s not in charge of his faculties and for most of the entire series he pretty much gets handed around by people in the same kind of way that Peter Sellers’ character did in the movie Being There. He’s operating at just one stage past vegetable but, somehow, he accomplishes so much by accident while he’s in this state. It’s actually not until a couple of episodes towards the end until Coop finally returns to us properly.

A significant new cast member is Robert Forster... who was supposed to play Sherif Harry Truman the first time around but had scheduling conflicts. So instead, he’s now playing Truman’s brother and is the sheriff in Harry’s absence (the character is off sick and, apparently, the actor wasn’t asked to return this time around... which is kind of a shame, actually).

Another interesting cast member is Lynch regular Laura Dern as... wait for it... Cooper’s faceless secretary Diane. We’ve heard ‘of’ her so many times over the years but now we get to meet what is actually a quite iconic feeling character in the flesh. Or do we? Well, it’s complicated but... let’s just say that there’s at least as many Dianes running around as there are Agent Coopers in this series and leave it at that. It was just a pleasure to see her interacting with Lynch, Ferrer and newcomer Chrysta Bell as Special Agent Tammy Preston.

What can I say more about this?

Well, it’s a long series and quite a lot of it doesn’t even take place in Twin Peaks but one strand of the story does and it all leads back there and comes together for the end. My favourite installment was episode eight where the second half of the episode goes ‘full tilt Lynch’ as we hurtle back to the first atomic bomb test and a load of surrealist imagery, much of it in monochrome, much of it set to Penderecki’s Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima. This includes lots of groovy imagery including a kind of flying frog thing which crawls into the mouth of a girl at the end of the episode. Personally, although we’re given absolutely no context or answers to a lot of the things we see on screen, I believe the girl might have been a young Sarah Palmer (Laura’s mother) and that would maybe explain why, in a later episode when Grace Zabriskie’s character is being harassed by someone in a bar, she is able to unhinge her face to reveal a monster on a screen which then lashes out to bite a guy's neck off. At least, that’s the way I figured it.

The series is chock full of cool stuff and, although slow, the experience of watching and wondering how it’s all going to end up is quite an addictive process to be fair. It’s interesting because Lynch does kind of tie most of the things together in the penultimate episode, to the point where I was able to predict a lot of what was going to happen in it and... I did wonder where the heck else he could go in the final episode. Well, after bringing things to a mostly natural conclusion, he then goes one further and messes things up good and proper... at least as far as the clarity of the story goes. I’m not 100% sure of what went down at the end of the final one, although I do have my theories and it’s clear that, although Cooper is put in a bad spot, he also knew most of what was going to happen (if, indeed, it was Cooper). The universe is pretty much reset slightly differently but that doesn’t stop the forces of evil coming for Laura Palmer... or at least the person she has ended up kinda being (or not, depending on your point of view).

A couple of things I didn’t understand were... and if you have seen this series and have any answers then please feel free to leave a comment... just who the heck the ‘glass box’ killer entity was supposed to be. Also, since Audrey’s vision of dancing at the Bang Bang Bar was clearly an illusion from her coma induced insanity (or some such), does that mean the interminable episode endings, where almost every installment finishes with a group performing a song in the bar, are also just a part of Audrey’s nightmare? I don’t know but, in some ways I’m kinda glad I don’t know too... after all, it’s David Lynch we’re talking about here.

Now, I can’t see us returning to the sleepy town of Twin Peaks anytime soon but the possibility is certainly there and, though he seems somewhat less interested than co-creator Mark Frost, Lynch hasn’t ruled out the possibility of a fourth series entirely, so, you never know. Either way, I really enjoyed this third season and would definitely recommend it if you liked the first two series and the movie, with the caveat that it all feels a little less diluted than you’ve seen it before. Approach with a delightful shiver of apprehension.


Twin Peaks at NUTS4R2

Twin Peaks Series One
Twin Peaks Series Two
Twin Peaks - Fire Walk With Me
Twin Peaks Series Three - Limited Event Series

Twin Peaks - Fire Walk With Me

Dislodged

Twin Peaks - Fire Walk With Me
USA/France 1992 Directed by David Lynch
Warner Brothers Blue Ray Zone B

Warning: Spoilers for anyone who’s
never seen any episodes of Twin Peaks.

And so onto the theatrical movie release of the ongoing Twin Peaks saga.

I remember my friends and I rushing to see Twin Peaks - Fire Walk With Me at the cinema when it was released. I’d absolutely loved the first two seasons but I remember being sorely disappointed by this big screen continuation. I’d had no idea that the movie was going to be a prequel (of sorts) to the original series so was expecting to see all of my favourite characters thrown back into the mix and with some kind of closure, or at least acknowledgment, of the cliff hanger style nature of the final episode of Season Two (reviewed here).

Instead, the majority of the movie is set over the last week before the very first episode. There’s not much of the series’ main protagonist... Kyle McLachlan as Special Agent Dale Cooper... in this at all, which is to be expected in a prequel, since he doesn’t enter the narrative of the story in the show until two thirds of the way through the first episode. Although, he does appear in this movie in other ways, through the use of dream sequences involving Laura Palmer.

Laura Palmer is the main protagonist in this as Lynch’s camera puts her under the microscope, with Sheryl Lee reprising her role and giving a truly astonishing performance. No matter what I’m going to go on to say about this mis-fire of a movie, it doesn’t take away from the fact that Lee literally carries the film and gives so much of herself over to this role.

Now, there’s no way that you should ever be tempted to watch this movie before seeing the first two series... even though it technically takes place chronologically before them. There are two main reasons for this. Reason one is that it gives away the identity of Laura Palmer’s killer (or killers, depending on your view point of host and controlling, demonic spirit) right from the outset so, if you see this first it kinda knocks out the ‘whodunnit’ nature of the original story. Secondly, it becomes apparent in one scene that some of the ‘visions’ Laura has of ‘The Black Lodge’ are from the future and not of the chronology of when the film is set. This is made apparent when we see the corpse of Agent Cooper’s girlfriend Annie, played again by Heather Graham, appear in Laura’s bed, warning her that the good version of Agent Cooper cannot escape from The Black Lodge. So, again, this relates directly back to the last episode and is something you are not going to want to go into the series knowing at this point.

The film starts off with a fairly bold statement... as the opening credits play over a static field from a TV set and, once they are done and the camera pans back to identify that’s what we’ve been watching, the TV set is destroyed by an axe. I guess that’s David Lynch’s way of breaking with the TV format and drumming home that this is a proper, cinematic experience he’s going for now. Which is a shame because... well I’ll get to my problems with the film in a minute.

The first half an hour of the film focuses on two characters completely unknown to us... two FBI agents investigating a murder, played by Chris Isaak and Kiefer Sutherland. After this, Agent Cooper takes over the case when one of them goes missing and although we see Lynch, McLachlan and Miguel Ferrer returning to their roles from the TV show, the scene is brief (Lynch also appears in the first half an hour, though). There is a sequence with David Bowie but, again, this is all, along with the first half an hour, thrown away and goes nowhere. My understanding is that the brand new TV show, which I’m about to dig into, picks up a few of these pieces, although this opening stuff actually takes place ten years before the rest of the movie.

After about 35 minutes, we finally get back to Twin Peaks, with the familiar Angelo Badlamenti signature music kicking in but... it’s not quite the Twin Peaks we’ve come to know and love from the TV show. For a start, Lara Flynn Boyle’s Donna Hayward, Laura Palmer’s best friend, has been replaced by another actress, Moira Kelly. She does a reasonably good job in the role but, the effect of seeing somebody else replacing such a regular face was kinda jarring at the time. Of course, I’ve since seen Lynch deliberately switch actors backwards and forwards in a role within the same movie, something I suspect he picked up from Luis Bunuel when he did it (although the name of the film escapes me)... but back then it seemed like the wrong thing to do here. I am more accepting of it nowadays, to be honest.

I think my main problems with this film are that... okay, it’s really, really dull. I like Laura Palmer and it’s a pleasure to watch such a fine performer as Sheryl Lee practicing her craft but the film is incredibly slow and it really, as you might expect, just reiterates stuff we already knew from the slow solution of the case in the original series. There are cameos from a few of the regulars from the original show (I remember people cheering and clapping in the cinema when people like The Log Lady turned up on screen) but not enough of them and they really don’t add much to the story.

Also, in spite of Lynch’s axing of the TV at the start of the movie, which we will see again and make more sense of later in the movie, it still looks really small scale to what you might be expecting in terms of size and spectacle. Admittedly some of the interior sets of the familiar houses seem a little more opened out and Lynch really uses the widescreen ratio to highlight the use of vertical divisions of multiple rooms being seen simultaneously within a frame but... no, it mostly doesn’t look or feel like it gains anything from being a cinema release and that’s pretty sad. Especially when I do admire the director so much and loved the original show. Twin Peaks - Fire Walk With Me is not a film I’d really recommend to anyone, although I understand it’s kinda essential viewing, along with the original shows, if you want to watch the new series (I think David Bowie maybe returns for a short while in that one?). So, a lot of a disappointment then and, alas, still not a film I can appreciate as much as the TV show that spawned it.

However, I am really looking forward to diving into the brand new series sometime very soon so, you know, I’ll report back on that one as soon as I can.

Twin Peaks at NUTS4R2

Twin Peaks Series One
Twin Peaks Series Two
Twin Peaks - Fire Walk With Me
Twin Peaks Series Three - Limited Event Series

Earthward Bound

The Man Who Fell To Earth

1976 UK Directed by Nicholas Roeg

I recently won a competition run by Simon and Laraine Gosden of Fantasticliterature.com (does what it says on the tin... a great site, you should check it out) with the prize being a film of my choice in the recent Science Fiction season at the National Film Theatre (courtesy of the BFI, with thanks to Victoria Humphrys). For my prize I picked The Man Who Fell To Earth as a good movie from my past to revisit.

It’s been a few years since I last watched this (and around about 20 years since I last saw it at the NFT) but this is just one of those movies which never seems to date much. I’ve always admired Roeg as a director and enjoy his fast shock-cut techniques to make metaphors and cross-cut through past and future to build up a slow picture of what is going on in a less linear and, perhaps, more naturalistic fashion. I’ve always compared his movies to one of those polaroid self-developing photos which were predominant in the 70s and 80s... slowly, as the time passes, you see the whole picture fading in to view at once... that’s pretty much what happens in a Roeg movie. All the different fragments that make up the whole of the picture develop at roughly the same rate and give you a whole vision slowly forming in your head... a brilliant way of delivering your vision. I think the last thing I saw directed by Roeg was an episode of the Young Indiana Jones Chronicles and I remember him getting away with great stuff like that even in this “prime-time” TV kinda venue... still recall the quick flashes into Mata Hari’s ultimate fate even though you knew the episode would not go that far forward into the character’s future lives.

Actually, that’s one of the things which surprised me and which I’d misremembered when I went to this screening last weekend... there are no “flash-forwards” in The Man Who Fell To Earth that I could see... just various flashback sequences to Bowie’s character’s past... so in many ways this is possibly one of the most linear of Roeg’s movies that I’ve seen... or at least one of the most accessible maybe.

Another thing Roeg does in this movie is to play with extreme levels of sound... using it in much the same way as Kurosawa might have used it (look at Kurosawa’s snow-demon sequence in Dreams and you’ll see what I mean). Sequences of multi-screen, ear splitting, headache inducing chaos are jarred against scenes of quiet and the contemplation of solitude. This is a film which never gets boring and never seems as much as its 139 minute running time. This is something which, handled by a lesser artist than Roeg, might well start to drag after a short while but keeping the attention of the audience has never been a problem for Roeg.

Bowie’s acting is surefooted, assured, very casual in its impact and it’s very hard to believe that this was one of his first roles. And it fits right in with the, almost lazy, pacing of the movie. It’s a rambling movie, even in it’s jarring and chaotic sequences, of which there are a few. I really like movies like this which get to an ending eventually but which seem in no hurry to connect any dots or employ “cause and effect” editing of narrative sequences which is something which perhaps a lot of modern American movies seem to want to do. The Man Who Fell To Earth has a much more European feel to it... well it is British I guess.

Criterion do a really wonderful Region 1 DVD of this but it’s just gone out of print... at the time of writing though it’s still in stock at places like Amazon.com so it’s worth tracking down if you’ve never seen this absolutely stunning, vision of a movie before.