PORTLAND, March 26, 2016--In May 1990, a film so shocked the senses, so boggled the mind, so assaulted the very audience it was ostensibly there to court the approval of, that it inspired laughter, applause and boos "in about equal measure," only to saunter off with the Palme D'Or (the Cannes film festival's highest honor) for its director David Lynch (Eraserhead, The Elephant Man). That film was Wild at Heart, a lushly romantic and brutally violent tale of Romeo & Juliet on a blood-soaked odyssey in the Deep South, by turns both gorgeous and ugly, sweet and mean and, at times, darkly (indeed, very darkly) funny.
Lynch was riding high in the early 1990s, on the wave of success garnered just a few scant years earlier (in the aftermath of the critical and commercial drubbing of his adaptation of Frank Herbert's Dune no less) with Blue Velvet (1986), which had inspired both acclaim and disdain (particularly from Pulitzer Prize-winning Chicago Sun-Times film critic Roger Ebert), and the (very) early episodes of his eventual cult classic prime-time soap opera/sci-fi murder-mystery hybrid Twin Peaks making their fresh debut on ABC to the delight and bewilderment of millions.
With Wild at Heart, Lynch's adaptation of the first in a series of novels by poet and occasional screenwriter Barry Gifford (who would go on to co-write 1997's much-maligned but occasionally adored Lost Highway; this kind of balance of reactions is typical of Lynch's work), the sardonically-amused Bunuelian surrealist had let his imagination run roughshod. A bizarre amalgamation of the lovers-on-the-run genre which had already been a staple of American exploitation (from both adaptations of The Killers and Gun Shy to Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde and Sam Peckinpah's The Getaway to Terrence Malick's Badlands) and even foreign art cinema (Godard's Breathless) and the kind of surrealist touches we'd already come to expect from Lynch (and boy were we in for a kick in the ass down the line!), Wild at Heart is one crazy ride (as Laura Dern's Lula says at one point, half-sad/worried and half-bemused, "This whole world is wild at heart...and weird on top", as fitting a distillation of the insane journey of the film's characters as anyone could make). From an Elvis-inspired ex-con who sporadically launches into credible renditions of classic Presley songs to the kind of conniving big-shouldered pastel-wearing femme fatale (Dern's own mother Diane Ladd) who wouldn't be out of place on a show like Dallas, Falcon Crest or Dynasty, to hitmen (J.E. Freeman) and private eye's (Harry Dean Stanton) and men who wax quasi-philosophically about their dogs and who themselves quack like ducks and scream about aliens and put cockroaches in their underwear (those last two characteristics being those of Crispin Glover's Uncle Dell), to pop culture references (Ebert credits Russ Meyer as a major inspiration to this film) and visceral - even carnal - acts of gory violence, and then, of course, tons of references to The Wizard of Oz, this would seem almost incongruous were it not for the over-the-top nature of the characters who inhabit Lynch's world. Instead, it all comes off as something of a coherent pastiche, if such a thing can even exist.
The film was inspirational too, for better or worse, with more violent, blood-soaked road odysseys about young lovers on the run coming throughout the 1990s, including Dominic Sena's Kalifornia (1993), Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers (1994), Tony Scott's True Romance (1993) - those last two based on original screenplays by Quentin Tarantino, and even absolute nadir Greg Arraki's The Doom Generation (1995), among others.
On the night before Easter 2016, on the eve of the film's 26th anniversary, author Barry Gifford came to Portland, Oregon's Hollywood Theater (entering its 90th year!), a grand old movie house that still shows 70mm, 35mm and recent digital prints as well as older movies to audiences on a very democratic basis. The film was screened on 35mm film to a sold out crowd, and afterward Gifford took part in a moderated Q&A (the video of which I shot on my Kindle Fire from the second row and can be seen in its Youtube form below).
Gifford spoke about how the characters and story came to him, how Lynch conceived (to the degree that anyone - even Lynch - can know how he conceives of really anything) of the Wizard of Oz references strewn throughout the film, how the film was received in France (in the aftermath of the popularity of the book) and how he himself responded when Lynch showed it to him, and even how his next book, about the character of Perdita Durango (Isabella Rossellini) was adapted into a barely distributed 1997 film (known in the USA as Dance with the Devil) which starred Rosie Perez and was to be a launching ground for Javier Bardem (who, of course, became a decent-size international star years later). Gifford was good-humored, kind and generous with his time. Copies of Sailor & Luna: The Complete Novels in paperback and Writers were sold in the lobby for $20 each.
Perhaps the greatest nugget, as alluded to in a Willamette Week interview this week in preparation for the upcoming film screening & Q&A, and suggested both Nicolas Cage's and David Lynch's interest in adapting The Up-Down, published last year, the 8th book in the Sailor & Lula Saga, in which Cage himself would play his (Sailor's) own son Pace, age 58. We can dream...
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Below a Q&A transcript is forthcoming...
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Here's Roger Ebert's original coverage from Cannes 1990: http://www.rogerebert.com/festivals-and-awards/david-lynch-gives-filmgoers-all-they-can-handle
and his 2.5 star review: http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/wild-at-heart-1990
and, for comparison's sake, my original 4-star review (on Letterboxd, as my original blog posts are being edited right now): http://letterboxd.com/polanski28/film/wild-at-heart/
****
Here you can see the 40 minute Q&A video shot with my very own Kindle Fire (and below, the original trailer):
Lynch was riding high in the early 1990s, on the wave of success garnered just a few scant years earlier (in the aftermath of the critical and commercial drubbing of his adaptation of Frank Herbert's Dune no less) with Blue Velvet (1986), which had inspired both acclaim and disdain (particularly from Pulitzer Prize-winning Chicago Sun-Times film critic Roger Ebert), and the (very) early episodes of his eventual cult classic prime-time soap opera/sci-fi murder-mystery hybrid Twin Peaks making their fresh debut on ABC to the delight and bewilderment of millions.
With Wild at Heart, Lynch's adaptation of the first in a series of novels by poet and occasional screenwriter Barry Gifford (who would go on to co-write 1997's much-maligned but occasionally adored Lost Highway; this kind of balance of reactions is typical of Lynch's work), the sardonically-amused Bunuelian surrealist had let his imagination run roughshod. A bizarre amalgamation of the lovers-on-the-run genre which had already been a staple of American exploitation (from both adaptations of The Killers and Gun Shy to Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde and Sam Peckinpah's The Getaway to Terrence Malick's Badlands) and even foreign art cinema (Godard's Breathless) and the kind of surrealist touches we'd already come to expect from Lynch (and boy were we in for a kick in the ass down the line!), Wild at Heart is one crazy ride (as Laura Dern's Lula says at one point, half-sad/worried and half-bemused, "This whole world is wild at heart...and weird on top", as fitting a distillation of the insane journey of the film's characters as anyone could make). From an Elvis-inspired ex-con who sporadically launches into credible renditions of classic Presley songs to the kind of conniving big-shouldered pastel-wearing femme fatale (Dern's own mother Diane Ladd) who wouldn't be out of place on a show like Dallas, Falcon Crest or Dynasty, to hitmen (J.E. Freeman) and private eye's (Harry Dean Stanton) and men who wax quasi-philosophically about their dogs and who themselves quack like ducks and scream about aliens and put cockroaches in their underwear (those last two characteristics being those of Crispin Glover's Uncle Dell), to pop culture references (Ebert credits Russ Meyer as a major inspiration to this film) and visceral - even carnal - acts of gory violence, and then, of course, tons of references to The Wizard of Oz, this would seem almost incongruous were it not for the over-the-top nature of the characters who inhabit Lynch's world. Instead, it all comes off as something of a coherent pastiche, if such a thing can even exist.
The film was inspirational too, for better or worse, with more violent, blood-soaked road odysseys about young lovers on the run coming throughout the 1990s, including Dominic Sena's Kalifornia (1993), Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers (1994), Tony Scott's True Romance (1993) - those last two based on original screenplays by Quentin Tarantino, and even absolute nadir Greg Arraki's The Doom Generation (1995), among others.
On the night before Easter 2016, on the eve of the film's 26th anniversary, author Barry Gifford came to Portland, Oregon's Hollywood Theater (entering its 90th year!), a grand old movie house that still shows 70mm, 35mm and recent digital prints as well as older movies to audiences on a very democratic basis. The film was screened on 35mm film to a sold out crowd, and afterward Gifford took part in a moderated Q&A (the video of which I shot on my Kindle Fire from the second row and can be seen in its Youtube form below).
Gifford spoke about how the characters and story came to him, how Lynch conceived (to the degree that anyone - even Lynch - can know how he conceives of really anything) of the Wizard of Oz references strewn throughout the film, how the film was received in France (in the aftermath of the popularity of the book) and how he himself responded when Lynch showed it to him, and even how his next book, about the character of Perdita Durango (Isabella Rossellini) was adapted into a barely distributed 1997 film (known in the USA as Dance with the Devil) which starred Rosie Perez and was to be a launching ground for Javier Bardem (who, of course, became a decent-size international star years later). Gifford was good-humored, kind and generous with his time. Copies of Sailor & Luna: The Complete Novels in paperback and Writers were sold in the lobby for $20 each.
Perhaps the greatest nugget, as alluded to in a Willamette Week interview this week in preparation for the upcoming film screening & Q&A, and suggested both Nicolas Cage's and David Lynch's interest in adapting The Up-Down, published last year, the 8th book in the Sailor & Lula Saga, in which Cage himself would play his (Sailor's) own son Pace, age 58. We can dream...
****
Below a Q&A transcript is forthcoming...
****
Here's Roger Ebert's original coverage from Cannes 1990: http://www.rogerebert.com/festivals-and-awards/david-lynch-gives-filmgoers-all-they-can-handle
and his 2.5 star review: http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/wild-at-heart-1990
and, for comparison's sake, my original 4-star review (on Letterboxd, as my original blog posts are being edited right now): http://letterboxd.com/polanski28/film/wild-at-heart/
****
Here you can see the 40 minute Q&A video shot with my very own Kindle Fire (and below, the original trailer):