Word: velvets
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...legged woman walks past David Lynch's table. She might be a victim from Blue Velvet or local color from Twin Peaks. But the man who dreamed up both of those nightmare entertainments pays her no heed. In the woodsy main dining room of Musso & Frank's, Hollywood's oldest eatery, the 44-year-old multimedia auteur concentrates on ordering his usual lunch: "A Swiss cheese, real Swiss cheese, on whole wheat. A side order of steamed broccoli. And a Coke." In his soft tenor voice, he discusses nutrition: "Do you like it when your sandwich is burned like that...
...million Oscar nominee (The Elephant Man in 1980) to a $50 million sci-fi dud (Dune in 1984). Each film had segments of bafflement and spectral beauty. But Hollywood, looking at the escalating price tags and plummeting ticket sales, wrote the director off. So Lynch made Blue Velvet (1986), a magnificent revenge drama -- his revenge on fettered movie conventions -- about small-town life and lust, drugs and death. Twin Peaks, you could say, is only the TV domestication of that warped masterpiece...
...Southern Gothic soul, is a tonic for the senses and an assault on the sensibilities. Heads splatter, skulls explode, biker punks torture folks for the sheer heck of it, and a pair of loopy innocents find excitement in a side trip to hell. Pretty much like Blue Velvet. Yes, it's different, but the same kind of different; Lynch could no longer shock by being shocking. Many critics figured they had solved the mystery of his visual style and thematic preoccupations. Next mystery, please. By August, when the film opened in the U.S., the Lynch mob was more like...
...character in Dune says, "Let me teach you the weirding way." In 1986 Lynch took moviegoers the whole way with Blue Velvet (also, ironically, made for De Laurentiis). "I started with the idea of front yards at night," Lynch says, "and Bobby Vinton's song playing from a distance. Then I always had this fantasy of sneaking into a girl's room and hiding through the night. It was a strange angle to come at a murder mystery." The murders were the least mysterious element in this feral, fertile inversion of It's a Wonderful Life. Each shot was crafted...
...face," complained Duncan in Macbeth, but he was a primitive Scot; after Titian, there emphatically was such an art. The fierce, glaring authority of Doge Andrea Gritti; the plump self-assurance of the Florentine historian Benedetto Varchi; the saurian cunning of old Pope Paul III, huddled in his velvet cape; and the inflexible determination of the military commander Francesco Maria della Rovere, whose carapace of bombshell-black armor is painted with a freedom and virtuosity that looks forward to Velazquez and, beyond him, to Manet -- to scan these portraits is to realize what an appetite for human character Titian...