Recommendations for Watching While Waiting for Season 3

[Panapaok]

River's Edge (this one is veryyyyyy Twin Peaks-esque and came out around the same time I think)

Yeah. And it's directed by Tim Hunter as well.

[westauck1909]

"Boys from the Black Stuff" - hard hitting British social drama from the early 80`s. Dated now but very relevant in many ways. Set in a decaying Liverpool, no employment, often violent but also very funny in parts. Starring Bernard Hill as the tragic Yosser who would later go on to greater fame in Titanic and Lord of the Rings. The pub scene in the final episode "Georges Last Ride" is incredibly surreal for the time as well as the scene at the (then) derelict Albert Docks. It is a beautiful, sad, funny show that is one of the classic British drama`s of all time. All 5 episodes readily available on youtube.

[jordanlake]

TV shows from the last year or so I would recommend are: Halt and Catch Fire (US), The Affair (US), Trapped (Iceland), The Legacy (Denmark), Broadchurch (UK), Marcella (UK), Looking (US), Togetherness (US), Transparent (US), Top Of The Lake (NZ), Gomorrah (Italy), The Tunnel (France/UK) to name but a few.

I have just got into Togetherness after seeking it out after your recommendation, and am absolutely loving it so far- so thank you (am already a fan of Looking, Transparent, Broadchurch and Top of the Lake)!

[LostInTheMovies]

River's Esge is very...odd. Well-done, achieves what it was going for, but not at all what I was expecting and though I eventually kind of settled into it, didn't click for me for a while. It did help me kind of understand ep. 16 a little better, oddly enough - you can see that Tim Hunter lines a baroque flavor and also that it's very important to him to paint a sympathetic picture of potentially unsympathetic characters.

Also, anyone who watches the film - or doesn't (in fact check this out right now) - should watch Crispin Glover's contemporaneous appearances on Letterman. Acid trip? Performance art? You decide.

Crispin Glover on Letterman, 1986

Look for the follow-ups too. In one he shows up wearing a suit and keeps laughing, and in another one he starts to offer an even crazier "explanation" for his behavior.

[Nightsea]

Good points about Tim Hunter, LostInTheMovies. I've been thinking recently about how death is represented visually and tonally in Twin Peaks, especially in the pilot. There is a romantic and beautiful veneer present, which isn't there in River's Edge, at least in my opinion. When Laura's body is first discovered and the plastic sheet is pulled back, for all intents and purposes it looks as if she is sleeping. In several panel interviews from conventions, Sheryl Lee emphasizes how meticulous Lynch was about her appearance for that scene and that he placed each tiny bit of sand on her face, arranged her hair, etc. It's just interesting for me that both River's Edge and Twin Peaks are essentially dealing with the same subject matter, yet the approaches are so different. There is a grittiness in Tim Hunter's movie. I want to say that with Lynch, the ugliness of death is always hiding just beneath the surface, whereas with River's Edge, that same ugliness isn't hidden... it's right there on the surface. In Fire Walk With Me, especially with the death of Teresa and how she is represented, it seemed to be more gritty and in line with River's Edge. I have a feeling that the deaths in the new episodes of Twin Peaks are going to be much more gruesome/ the horrific inverse of what we had in the Twin Peaks pilot.

Oh, and Crispin– ha ha! He's definitely... unique! I met him briefly at one of his showings of his film entitled What is it? He very much came off as trying to be weird for the sake of being weird, lol. I tried to speak to him about the filmmaker Kenneth Anger- someone who Crispin obviously seems to have an affinity for and mimics stylistically- and he acted like he didn't know who or what in the world I was talking about. Maybe he didn't? Lol. He kept saying," Who is it again? Anger. Angerrrr. Angerrrr. Hmmm."–pausing as he makes a note of the name on a scrap piece of paper-"I'll have to look him up." I just remember thinking, "Look him up? He's all over your movie." I had the same look on my face that Letterman has in the clip you posted.

[Ped]

TV shows from the last year or so I would recommend are: Halt and Catch Fire (US), The Affair (US), Trapped (Iceland), The Legacy (Denmark), Broadchurch (UK), Marcella (UK), Looking (US), Togetherness (US), Transparent (US), Top Of The Lake (NZ), Gomorrah (Italy), The Tunnel (France/UK) to name but a few.

I have just got into Togetherness after seeking it out after your recommendation, and am absolutely loving it so far- so thank you (am already a fan of Looking, Transparent, Broadchurch and Top of the Lake)!

Togetherness is a great wee drama. Another Duplass brothers hit. Cracking music throughout the series too. Pity it hasn't been picked up for S3, and from what I understand, can't be picked up elsewhere like Netflix or Amazon due to contractual reasons.

I've been trying to scope out your own recommendation American Crime. Just found out that nowhere in the UK has picked this up yet. That's a shame because it has got rave review from what I see.

[jordanlake]

I've been trying to scope out your own recommendation American Crime. Just found out that nowhere in the UK has picked this up yet. That's a shame because it has got rave review from what I see.

I know, it's a shame, I'm in the UK too. Torrents are your friend in the meantime

[LostInTheMovies]

I can completely envision that incident with Crispin Glover lol.

[Clueless]

As for my own recommendations:

Television:
Six Feet Under

Seconded

It took me far too long to realize that Gary Hershberger plays the corporate shill tasked to buy out the Fisher funeral home. Now I always see him as a grown-up Mike.

[mtwentz]

This one is not so much like "Twin Peaks" but it sorted of reminded me of "On The Air":

Has anyone seen 'Hail Caesar' by the Coen Brothers?

If not, I recommend it to get a taste of some of the type of humor we might be treated to in Twin Peaks, Season 3.

[Mr. Reindeer]

I second many of the choices named in this thread, particularly Top of the Lake, Les Revenants and Mad Men (btw, Elisabeth Moss told a hilarious story about how she and Jon Hamm had coffee with Lynch and he insisted on calling them "Peggy" and "Don" the entire time).

I also HIGHLY second the person who named Louie. I'm not sure if Lynch regularly watches the show, but I think it would be just his cup o' Joe (and the same goes for many of his fans). Like many of the other series named here, it doesn't have much in common with TP aside from being utterly unique. The first season is more of a straightforward observational comedy (a hysterically funny one), but beginning with the second season and increasing with each subsequent season, the show defies genre, often devoting whole episodes to character studies focusing on depression and alienation, or on celebrating the beauty and joy of life, often without a single "joke" in the half-hour. Episodes that I'd recommend for viewers looking to get their feet wet are "Daddy's Girlfriend Part 2," "Eddie," "New Year's Eve," and the entire "Late Show" arc (which features Lynch's hilarious appearance as Jack Dahl in Parts 2 and 3). Although the same characters periodically reappear, there's very little continuity, so the episodes can be watched out of order. I even think watching the aforementioned "Daddy's Girlfriend Part 2" (one of the most beautiful half-hours of television I've ever seen) without having seen Part 1 isn't problematic (although that episode should be watched before "New Year's Eve"; and the "Late Show" arc should probably be viewed as a whole).

I'd also recommend Louis CK's recent web series, Horace and Pete. You'll have to shell out some money on CK's site for it (he self-produced and self-distributed it), but it's a beautiful, heartbreaking, occasionally hysterical ten-episode play-on-film. I especially recommend Episode 3, which has very little to do with anything else in the series, but takes place entirely at a table in the bar with guest star Lauri Metcalf giving a tour-de-force performance (the episode opens with a nine-minute continuous one-take monologue by Metcalf, and throughout the episode she tells a story very similar to the sort of "confessional" Laura Dern might have delivered in Mr. K's dingy office in INLAND EMPIRE).

I also endorse Hannibal - Bryan Fuller has said many times that his aim with the series was to do a Hannibal Lecter story as it might be directed by David Lynch. In the first season, NBC forced him to make a "procedural" show, where the overarching narrative took a backseat to "killer of the week" stories (most of which are fun, creative and shockingly gruesome for network television, but not really what Fuller wanted the show to be). Thankfully, low ratings led to the network taking a more hands-off approach in seasons 2 and 3, allowing him to get increasingly surreal - season 3 plays like one long dream and, IMO, lives up to the "as Lynch might have directed it" mission statement. (Fun fact: Lynch very nearly directed the first Hannibal movie, Red Dragon, for Dino DeLaurentiis - the film which eventually became Michael Mann's Manhunter).

MT Wentz - Have not yet seen Hail Caesar!, but really want to. IMO, the Coen Bros. pull off "wacky" humor FAR better than Lynch does.

[mtwentz]

MT Wentz - Have not yet seen Hail Caesar!, but really want to. IMO, the Coen Bros. pull off "wacky" humor FAR better than Lynch does.

Yes, I agree, although to be fair to Lynch, the wacky humor in Twin Peaks was pretty damn funny.

I really did not find On The Air funny, and the only episode I watched was the premiere, Lynch directed episode, so I walked away from that experience with the conclusion that doing a pure comedy was not Lynch's thing.

However, 'Hail Caesar' reminds me very much of 'On The Air', in that it is a satire of the 1950s movie industry (where 'On The Air' was a satire of the 1950s TV industry). And I can now kind of see that maybe I judged 'On The Air' too harshly too quickly. The fact is that there is certain humor that is hard to 'get' if you don't understand how the movie or T.V. industry works.

Even though I got quite a few belly laughs out of 'Hail Caesar' there were certain bits that reminded me of 'On The Air', where I did not laugh at all. And I think it means I have to re-watch a few times maybe to understand what is being parodied.

In any case, if you get the chance to watch Hail Caesar, I'd be interested in your opinion and whether you also see the On The Air parallels. Also, it is important to note that critics liked that movie much more than audiences liked it.

[Qubism]

I recommend Outcast, written by Robert Kirkman.(walking dead guy). Imagine the walking dead country/small town locations, The Exorcist movie mashed up with Twin Peaks........also I said this in another thread....

"I'm just watching Grace Zabriskie in Outcast Episode 4, "A Wrath Unseen". She is frankly awesome in it and it makes me so keen to see her again as Sarah Palmer. So I think while we're waiting for S3, the next best thing is to re-watch Lynch interviewing her in character in Between Two Worlds on The Missing Pieces Boxset..."

I've never actually seen Paris Texas all the way thru but I think I will......Harry Dean Stanton is the main man....Dean Stockwell appears, not singing in dreams, but it is a kind of road movie, written by Sam Shepherd, directed by Wim Wenders and winner of the Cannes Palme d’Or in 1984. Frankly Obama should write an exeucutive order making it compulsory for everyone to watch it at least once!

From The Guardian:

"According to actor Dirk Bogarde – the president of the Cannes competition jury in 1984 – festival bosses were less than delighted with the selection of New German Cinema graduate Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas for that year’s Palme d’Or. Writing in his autobiography, Backcloth, Bogarde recalls the instructions he was given from the top: “We were to choose films which would please a family audience, not ones which would appeal to ‘a few students and a handful of faux intellectuals. Family entertainment for all the world markets.’”

Hours before the award ceremony, the authorities were aghast when Bogarde presented them with his crew’s decisions. “What about the American films? There are no American awards?” he quotes. “You think that this … Paris, Texas is family entertainment?”

One has to wonder precisely what families the festival selectors had in mind when they assembled a competition lineup that also included Lars Von Trier’s The Element of Crime, Theo Angelopoulos’s Voyage to Cythera and John Huston’s Under the Volcano. By these austere standards, perhaps Bogarde’s jurors (Isabelle Huppert, Stanley Donen and Ennio Morricone among them) accidentally met the festival’s curious brief as best they could: Wenders’ sweetly desolate desert flower of a film may not be family entertainment per se, but it’s as acute and exquisite a film as has ever been made about family itself – a broken one, in this case, which can only be healed by further heartbreak. As for their “no American awards” objection, I can hardly think of a film more in thrall to the flat gingerbread landscape of the new American west, ribboned with tar and neon, echoing with lonesome blues riffs. Sometimes it takes a foreigner to forge true Americana, even in the forbidding Reaganite environment of the mid-1980s.

Cannes juries can be as capable of worthy-minded myopia as Academy award voters, yet this is one year they called it just right. Paris, Texas isn’t just the most enduringly beautiful and widely cherished title from that year’s respectable competition crop, but a film that remains, for this critic, the crowning achievement of Wenders’ speckled, frequently brilliant career: the one in which his dual inclinations toward aesthetic grandeur and emotional intimacy find their most serene meeting point, outclassing even such subsequent masterclasses as Wings of Desire (which netted him the best director prize at the festival three years later) and Pina. It’s a cinematic peak, too, for the spare, sandy writing of Sam Shepard, the actor-playwright whose tough dramatic sculpting of American male crisis hasn’t always translated as well to the screen as it does to the stage: Wenders and Shepard couldn’t repeat the trick two decades later in their arch, affected comedy Don’t Come Knocking.

Wenders brought a certain European elegance to Shepard’s intellectual machismo (the title may refer to an individual town in the US, but it also alludes to the film’s own transatlantic identity). But the men share a romantic fascination with the road, that asphalt spine of American geography and culture alike, leading travellers either to the country’s heart or its great beyond. For dessicated protagonist Travis (so searchingly played by the great Harry Dean Stanton), it takes him in both directions: reunited with his son after going walkabout in the Lone Star desert, cueing a search for his similarly unmoored wife, he can only locate his family home by leaving it.

Paris, Texas is a road movie: that most essentially American of genres, so beloved by Wenders that he named his first production company after it, midway through his celebrated road-movie trilogy of Alice in the Cities, The Wrong Move and Kings of the Road. But it’s also, in a muted, horse-free manner, a western. Beneath its cool urban trappings, it’s a story of detached men scouring the frontier to restore domestic order to a world out of balance. Nostalgic for the stability and rugged individuality of an old west that has since been irrevocably cluttered with the billboards, petrol stations and blinking identikit motels of modern living, Travis chases some semblance of the American dream, not for himself but for a son he barely knows – retreating back into the wilderness when it seems his work is done. As cowboys go, he’s a self-defeating hero; his grimy trucker cap could be either a white or black Stetson.

There’s a gold-hearted saloon girl in this western too: Jane, the strayed, mistreated wife and mother played by Nastassja Kinski, among the most incandescently artificial blondes in all cinema. Instead of ruffled bloomers, she wears a hot-pink angora jumper; instead of a saloon, she plies her trade in a dingy Houston peepshow booth. It’s that confined space, sliced in half by a one-way mirror, that hosts the film’s name-making scene, as Travis, having tracked her down, relates the story of their bad romance in minute, self-mutilating detail. You’d call it a monologue if Kinski’s perfect face weren’t constantly responding to every scarring revelation; cinematographer Robby Muller, a veritable sorcerer of light throughout, shoots this dual confessional (half-spoken, half-silent) with ingenious fluidity, every word mediated by the mirror’s foil-blue glimmer.

These few minutes would constitute a complete, astonishing short on their own, yet they merely mark the climax of a film with reckless beauty to burn even in its incidental passages. Any passing mention of Paris, Texas conjures a gallery of vivid, isolated images – and sounds, thanks to Ry Cooder’s much-appropriated, much-imitated slide-guitar score – that prompt a prickly feeling in the tear ducts. So many mood pieces sustain their mood only as far as the closing credits; the blissful melancholy of Paris, Texas endures with recall and association, however distant from one’s last viewing. Cannes has rewarded many a great film, but none that is quite so permanently, ever-retrievably embedded in my sense memory." - Guy Lodge

I'm looking for a bluray now.......

[David Locke]

Indeed, Paris Texas is one of the great films in all of cinema. Only perhaps Zabriskie Point has so poetically depicted the American West with all its deserts, motels, smog- and advert-congested cities, snakelike highways, ghosts towns, neon signs and abandoned trains... Not only is the film visually astounding, though, it's also extremely poignant -- a kind of mix of Antonioni's eye with Nicholas Ray's heart (or the setting of Zabriskie Point with the themes of The Passenger). I think it was possibly an inspiration on Lynch for The Straight Story; both films have similar stories and themes, and a similar kind of subdued, patient tempo. Of course Harry Dean Stanton was also in both and, as noted, Lynch favorite Dean Stockwell has a big role too. It's a magnificent film... impossible to overstate how beautiful Robby Muller's photography is, the stuff of dreams.

As usual, Criterion's blu (or DVD) is superb and does the film full justice, packed full of extras too.

[N. Needleman]

Grace is fantastic in Outcast. I am not a huge Robert Kirkman fan - I find his source comics labored and over the top - but the adaptations of his stories are vastly superior, surprisingly so with Outcast where I expect he exerts more control.