A review requested by Gabe P, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. Spoilers are going to be crawling up and down this post like ants. If you haven’t seen Mulholland Dr., know that I give it a perfect 5/5, and if I were making a list of the films of the 21st Century that are essential viewing for anyone even moderately interested in […]
We’re living through a golden age of “the rich are evil and out of touch, and must be destroyed!” pop culture objects being made by people who are, themselves, extremely rich and out of touch, and are acting (one suspects) less out of a place of good honest class betrayal than a neurotic need to think of themselves “The Good Ones”. Which, when I phrase it that way, doesn’t sound […]
A review requested by Michael, with thanks to supporting Alternate Ending as a donor through Patreon. Do you have a movie you’d like to see reviewed? This and other perks can be found on our Patreon page! “Eraserhead is about David Lynch’s terrified disgust at the thought of being a father” is such a well-worn piece of conventional wisdom that makes so much sense relative to the content of the […]
There isn’t a writer-director who presents a stronger argument for the value of treating film as a collaborative medium than Charlie Kaufman. He is an unmistakable authorial voice: his films all hinge on the existential fear of being lonely and unloved; they almost all involve complicated manipulations of reality, subjectivity, and narrative chronology; they all involve people having awkwardly well-read, verbose conversations about philosophy and art, like if Woody Allen’s […]
One of the first things to happen in The Turning is that Kurt Cobain dies.* This has nothing to do with anything that follows: Cobain never becomes a plot point, and there’s no Nirvana on the soundtrack (though there is some Courtney Love). But it does let us know, right away, that this story takes place in 1994. And this also has nothing to do with anything that follows. They […]
A review requested by John Taylor, with thanks to supporting Alternate Ending as a donor through Patreon. Do you have a movie you’d like to see reviewed? This and other perks can be found on our Patreon page! First things first: form dictates that I give this film a star rating, and I want you to go right on ahead and ignore it. That’s probably the right thing to do […]
This year has brought a lot of retrospectives on the movies from 1999, which are now twenty years old, as well as reflection on the year 1999 itself. Many have marked 1999 as a standard bearer for great cinema. A short survey of the movies released that year – The Matrix, Being John Malkovich, Magnolia, Eyes Wide Shut, All About My Mother, Toy Story 2 – immediately justifies its reputation. As much […]
Return to the complete Twin Peaks index Written by Mark Frost & David Lynch Directed by David Lynch Airdate: 3 September, 2017 Author’s Note: This and all reviews of Twin Peaks: The Return will freely give away details from the episode at hand, and all those preceding it. The spoiler-averse should back away slowly. It’s no fresh insight to suggest that Twin Peaks: The Return acts as something of a […]
Return to the complete Twin Peaks index Written by Mark Frost & David Lynch Directed by David Lynch Airdate: 27 August, 2017 Author’s Note: This and all subsequent reviews of Twin Peaks: The Return episodes will freely give away details from the episode at hand, and all those preceding it. The spoiler-averse should back away slowly. I am certainly a fanboy in the matter, but Part 16 of Twin Peaks: […]
Update 8/14/17: And with that, two year and seven months after it started, we are DONE! Thanks to everyone who donated, and thanks especially to Robert Hamer, who very kindly agreed to let me save his for last, to make a great big grand finale of it, and so added something like 20 months to his wait for the review. Apologies all around to those of you who had to […]
Return to the complete Twin Peaks index Written by Mark Frost & David Lynch Directed by David Lynch Airdate: 30 July, 2017 Author’s Note: This and all subsequent reviews of Twin Peaks: The Return episodes will freely give away details from the episode at hand, and all those preceding it. The spoiler-averse should back away slowly. Twin Peaks: The Return is in large part a show about nostalgia. Or at […]
Return to the complete Twin Peaks index Written by Mark Frost & David Lynch Directed by David Lynch Airdate: 23 July, 2017 Author’s Note: This and all subsequent reviews of Twin Peaks: The Return episodes will freely give away details from the episode at hand, and all those preceding it. The spoiler-averse should back away slowly. Part 11 of Twin Peaks: The Return has a second shot (or the illusion […]
