Elden Ring is a great game but it's 10-20% too long
Wrong. Elden Rings greatness comes from those moments during your first playthrough when you have no idea where the borders of that game world is. Where you truly feel lost because you have no idea where you are. Is the mountaintop of giants a particularly great area? No, but if it hadn't been there, the previous areas wouldn't have felt nearly as grand. A shorter Elden Ring might have had higher lows, but it certainly wouldn't have the highs it had. A masterpiece isn't a masterpiece because you cut out all the bad parts.
last time I played New Vegas I just grabbed the only modpack from wabbajack that didn't also require Fallout 3 and while it was overall a pretty good experience, for some reason the author of the modpack decided that luck influencing gambling wasn't part of their vision for the game and disabled that. it was easy to re-enable it, but to this day i am baffled by their decision. like if anything, high luck characters being able to break the bank of every casino in vegas is one of my favorite things in that game, just disabling that makes all the gambling minigames completely pointless.
kinda feel like there was a side to the whole tiktok banning that we all missed: a social media app that americans can't access would have maybe been cool for the rest of the world
Also, minority opinion amongst Lynch fans, I actually really like Lost Highway. That tends to be Lynch fan's least favorite one but personally I kinda dig it.
I'm pretty cold on it personally. It's beautifully shot (the first part in their house is incredibly lit), but its just too cool and distant for me to get much out of. Doesn't really help that to me it feels like the only one of his films that feels "of its time", like it feels like it has an ambition to be "cool" that none of its other films have.
Kinda feel like the Twin Peaks/Lynch fandom was much more prominent in the "old internet" (pre like 2010 or so). There's just something about the cult following of the show and its "puzzle box" nature of it that really flourished back then, but nowadays where everything is controlled by algorithms any sort of fanbase just segmentizes themselves into their own little place on the net so you can't just stumble upon these things anymore. When I first got onto the internet, it was like it was guaranteed it would lead me to watch stuff like Twin Peaks or Evangelion. You kinda couldn't get around these things. Back then the internet wasn't just "everyone is on here" but if you were on it you kinda were a nerd to begin with. I know quite a lot of people who are big lynch fans and they are all under thirty, but much younger than that and you probably won't get as many.
I feel like there's something to young people's minds and lives nowadays that stops them from enjoying and seeking out the things that came before them (I mean I do kinda get it, the world we've left them certainly ain't great, but there's no doubt in my mind that there are things in the past that are more than worthwhile to engage with).
Seems like a fairly well-considered upgrade. Mostly interested in the games though, even though a lot of the people working on their games have been around for decades now, with the Switch it really seemed to me like there was a new wave of creativity and talent involved. Like Tears of the Kingdom is a game with a lot of flaws, but its core is so creative and wonderfully playful that it's just really inspiring. Genuinely can't think of any other company that could make a game like that.
My favorite moment in Mulholland Drive (and maybe in all of cinema) is when Diane gets brought onto the movie set where Adam is currently casting his lead actress. Adam in his directors chair turns around in his seat and their eyes meet and we get this masterfully done dolly shot, going from a medium long shot to Naomi Watts face filling out the entire screen within less than like two seconds. And every single time I watch that film, in that moment I am completely entranced. I know I am not going to get it, but in my heart I want nothing else other than to see the version of that film that hollywood would want to sell to us. I want to see the aspiring but naive actress from nowhere in Ontario make it big in hollywood, have that tumultuous love affair with her director and get that long-awaited happy ending. That Lynch manages to make us believe in the lies of hollywood even while telling us that they are lies is what makes the film a masterpiece.
Very touching and inspiring words by Kyle MacLachlan on Lynch's passing and their relationship
Forty-two years ago, for reasons beyond my comprehension, David Lynch plucked me out of obscurity to star in his first and last big budget movie. He clearly saw something in me that even I didn’t recognize. I owe my entire career, and life really, to his vision.
What I saw in him was an enigmatic and intuitive man with a creative ocean bursting forth inside of him. He was in touch with something the rest of us wish we could get to.
Our friendship blossomed on Blue Velvet and then Twin Peaks and I always found him to be the most authentically alive person I’d ever met.
David was in tune with the universe and his own imagination on a level that seemed to be the best version of human. He was not interested in answers because he understood that questions are the drive that make us who we are. They are our breath.
While the world has lost a remarkable artist, I’ve lost a dear friend who imagined a future for me and allowed me to travel in worlds I could never have conceived on my own.
I can see him now, standing up to greet me in his backyard, with a warm smile and big hug and that Great Plains honk of a voice. We’d talk coffee, the joy of the unexpected, the beauty of the world, and laugh.
His love for me and mine for him came out of the cosmic fate of two people who saw the best things about themselves in each other.
I will miss him more than the limits of my language can tell and my heart can bear. My world is that much fuller because I knew him and that much emptier now that he’s gone.
David, I remain forever changed, and forever your Kale. Thank you for everything.
Rest in peace. There'll never be another David Lynch. There might have been greater filmmakers in hollywood, but I don't know if there has ever been a greater artist in hollywood. Pauline Kael called him “the first populist surrealist - a Frank Capra of dream logic" in her review of Blue Velvet. He was involved in every aspect of the production of his films, the scripts, the directing, the music and sound effects, the set design and costumes, the editing. You could just listen to his films and get more out of them than out of dozens other movies from lesser filmmakers. That he was somehow able to make the movies he made, with real budgets and often times with actual popular success might be the biggest miracle in this culture industry of ours that often times feels less and less alive and creative with each passing year. And if you watch his less-surrealist films, like Elephant Man or The Straight Story, those are masterpieces of their own and he could have been up there with the greats, even if he hadn't been as experimental, quirky and with his works as he was. And even in addition to all that, has there ever been a filmmaker who has been as willing and successful in "getting with the times"? When he went from the cinema to the television, he didn't lose anything, he gained. When the internet became popular, he made his own website and released shorts to his subscribers. When he went to poland and met some theatre students there, he took that inspiration and filmed parts of inland empire there, a film he shot himself using a cheap prosumer camcorder. He wrote Twin Peaks: The Return with Mike Frost over Skype and when he wasn't able to shoot that on film, he shot digital and created a look that I have never seen before and since, mixing the most simplest of special effects with incredibly impressive state-of-the-art CG. Wherever he went and with whatever means he had, he made art. He has been a huge inspiration to me, ever since I first watched Twin Peaks like fifteen years ago.
Even though he was obviously never idle, some part of me had always hoped he would have been given the chance to make another "big thing". A movie, tv show, it wouldn't have mattered. Twin Peaks: The Return is a work of such depth, such pits of despair, but also of hope and relief, happiness and love and acceptance. And maybe the greatest thing and the most inexplicable thing about it, is that this 71 year old man somehow made what in my mind might be the only work of art in our 21st century to get where we are at. It still feels to me as current and contemporary in a way no other piece of media has managed to feel. There is so much death and aging in that show, in all the people involved in it, but it always felt like me to a show made by people who have made peace with the passing of time and the inevitability of death. I hope his final days were as peaceful as they could be and know that he and his films will live on for as long as people are inspired by them. "Keep your eye on the donut and not on the hole." How can you do anything else other than smile when you read that?
It's absurd that he put that scene into a pilot episode for a TV show. I genuinely recommend reading up on how that whole thing went down. I don't know if there are any examples of artists salvaging a failed project as gracefully and as successfully and as creatively as Lynch did with Mulholland Drive. That movie couldn't be better and it couldn't have become what it was hadn't it fallen apart before.
They are all great. I'd recommend Mulholland Drive or Blue Velvet to a newcomer (or maybe Eraserhead if you are more into the horror/midnight cinema thing)
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They should invent a new season that's not just cold and gray or cold and dark