Is it future or is it past?

February 13, 2018 5:48 AM

"Twin Peaks: The Return, or What Isn't Cinema?" - a four-part essay by Nick Pinkerton at Reverse Shot: 1: Where You Find It, 2: Myth Makers, 3: The Art/The Artist, 4: Life Lessons.
posted by sapagan (12 comments total)

Can't wait to dig in to this. I've had the Season 3 Blu-Ray set plus The Final Dossier sitting on my coffee table since Christmas, waiting for a full rewatch and read.

TP: The Return was one of the absolute high points of my TV/film watching year. Combined with Logan and The Last Jedi (as well as myself turning 40), 2017 was basically the year to watch all of my childhood/adolescent heroes coming to terms with their own mortality/fallibility, and I was 100% there for it.
posted by Strange Interlude at 6:35 AM on February 13, 2018 [1 favorite]

Well, be warned he has a lot of harsh words for The Last Jedi in the second part. I'm a bit baffled that a critic would find it such an affront to cinema, but there's no accounting for taste, I guess.
posted by He Is Only The Imposter at 7:05 AM on February 13, 2018

The dude also hates Del Toro for inscrutable reasons.
posted by Dmenet at 7:21 AM on February 13, 2018

Too Weird for Prime Time, review of seasons 1 and 2. All the reasons I liked season 1 and 2, seen from a different angle

David Lynch's Personal Recommendations on How to Watch Twin Peaks Properly

Fanfare commentary

posted by otherchaz at 7:48 AM on February 13, 2018 [2 favorites]

he has a lot of harsh words for The Last Jedi in the second part

The dude also hates Del Toro for inscrutable reasons.

[KermitNoseScrunch.gif]
posted by Strange Interlude at 7:57 AM on February 13, 2018 [2 favorites]

he has a lot of harsh words for The Last Jedi in the second part

The dude also hates Del Toro for inscrutable reasons.

TLDR - Corporate filmmaking sucks, fanboys suck, fanboy film makers suck and only "authentic" artists are worth watching.
posted by Ashwagandha at 8:41 AM on February 13, 2018

Ok I haven’t read the piece, but I was with the first 3 of these 4 points ... seems legit
posted by thedaniel at 11:07 AM on February 13, 2018

I have a hard time seeing either Rian Johnson or Guillermo del Toro as sellouts, even if they've both made big-budget commercial genre films. Because guess who else made one of those?
posted by Strange Interlude at 11:37 AM on February 13, 2018

Because guess who else made one of those?

It may surprise you to learn that Pinkerton is aware of the existence of Dune.
posted by kenko at 1:46 PM on February 13, 2018

In Pinkerton's estimation Dune is a "ravishing folly" while Rian Johnson & Guillermo del Toro are not artists because he feels their art is part of a corporate machine, they are tainted by their juvenile and mercenary interests, and as such are compromised talents. While I think he makes some decent points about Lynch, Pinkerton loses me here. Lynch is an independent auteur who's worked hard at that independence (so a singular artist), and Pinkerton suggests that Del Toro and Johnson are not because they have taken the easy path and are making "successful" films for a general audience, for corporate franchises, and from a perspective of being fans of "low culture" but not the right kind of low culture and not fans of it in the right way. He seems to be saying that it is in fact impossible to do meaningful creative work from within that corporate structure of the studio. A rich artist is a bad artist, an artist who is a fan boy is no artist at all... Here's the telling passage regarding Del Toro (and Lovecraft) from the third part of the essay:

"Lovecraft, whose fiction was flavored by quack-scientific racialism and who died in penury with a bellyful of potted meat, is a crucial artist, and dear, sweet, perfectly progressive Guillermo del Toro, who has repeatedly announced his intention to film Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness and will expire well-fed, filthy rich, and surrounded by memorabilia, is no kind of an artist at all."

Film criticism would do well with shedding some of its elitist baggage and contrarian onanism. YMMV.
posted by Ashwagandha at 2:28 PM on February 13, 2018 [1 favorite]

Pinkerton may be aware of the existence of Dune, but apparently not Pan's Labyrinth.
posted by whuppy at 8:22 AM on February 14, 2018

Is my reading comprehension terrible or does he seemingly drop random peoples’ names from nowhere just to complain about them? I just got to that Del Toro part and it seems really left field in context. Even before that, bringing up Lovecraft seems really weird. It’s like he wanted to make the point about Del Toro but needed a bridge to it, so he mentioned Lovecraft just so he could do so. It completely derails the point he was making beforehand.
posted by gucci mane at 9:20 AM on February 14, 2018 [2 favorites]