Podcasting Them Softly

It’s true that Francis Ford Coppola had a rough time after the first two Godfather films and Apocalypse Now, but that’s not to say that the films that would follow would all be without merit or importance. 1988’s deeply underrated Tucker: The Man and His Dream deserved to do better than it did at the box office ($19 million on a $25 million budget), and despite solid critical response, it’s a late 80’s gem that not enough people seem to have seen, but once you’ve seen it, it’ll be hard not to be a fan. Jeff Bridges gives a warm, winning, and hugely sympathetic lead performance as Preston Tucker, a dreamer, schemer, and all together believer in his own mystique and passionate ideas. He wants to build a car, a special car for the people, but has to fight corrupt business partners, shady journalists, and government meddling all in effort to get his dreams realized for real and on a national stage. In a career filled with underappreciated performances before he finally got his Oscar, this is one of my favorites from Bridges.

Vittorio Storraro’s expansive cinematography is lush and vibrant (this film is screaming for a Blu-ray upgrade) and Joe Jackson’s uplifting score hits all the right notes of “feel good” inspiration without becoming overly cloying or cheaply sentimental. The Oscar nominated production design by the absolutely amazing Dean Tavoularis is stunning, and the film certainly bears the optimistic thematic imprint of long time Coppola buddy George Lucas, who served as producer, and ultimately rescuer, when Coppola was having problems getting the film financed.  The excellent supporting cast also includes Joan Allen, Mako, Martin Landau, Elias Koteas, Frederic Forest, and Dean Stockwell, while the strong script by Arnold Schulman (Funny Lady) and David Seidler (The King’s Speech) really keeps this one on firm narrative ground. A passion project since childhood, you can smell the love that Coppola brought to the entire, lavishly appointed production. Tucker: The Man and his Dream is available on DVD.

Damn. Shot Caller is a piece of hard-as-nails cinema. I’d love to see the expression on Walter Hill’s face after viewing this testosterone drenched display of movie machismo; the fact that it’s basically air-tight from a conceptual level only helps to make the film feel all the more spectacular overall. Written and directed by Ric Roman Waugh, a former stuntman turned indie filmmaker who apparently has a fetish for prison narratives (previous credits include the very good Felon; Snitch, which I’ve not seen; and the intriguing sounding In the Shadows, which sounds like a riff on Richard Rush’s The Stunt Man), and it’s abundantly clear he understands this milieu extremely well. Maybe too well, as Shot Caller made me quite afraid of spending any amount of time in jail, which I would have to imagine was Waugh’s intent. Circular in its construction and devised with a driving sense of forward momentum despite a non-linear presentation, Shot Caller is never unnecessarily gory or over-plotted, instead relying on smart and explosive moments of graphic violence to punctuate the gritty story. Waugh’s anxious and dangerous little B-movie transcends its trappings as a result of dynamic acting from everyone in the beefed-up cast, with Nikolaj Coster-Waldau turning in a transformative piece of acting that elevates the picture to an even higher plateau. The film pivots on a successful family man who causes a deadly traffic accident. He’s sent to prison, and when he gets there, he realizes that nothing will ever be the same, and must fight to stay alive by any means possible. And yet, there’s so much more, none of which I’ll hint at or spoil.

Add in Joe Bernthal (love this guy!), Jeffrey Donovan, Emory Cohen, Holt McCallany, Benjamin Bratt, Evan Jones, Omari Hardwick, and Lake Bell and you’ve got rock-solid support from a deep supporting cast. Everyone registers with authority, and Bernthal has definitely got the market-cornered in terms of playing hot-tempered alpha-males who love to get physical. The matter-of-fact cinematography by Dana Gonzales gets down and dirty with all of the bloody shankings and hand-to-hand killings, and there’s a prison yard brawl where nearly everyone is brandishing some sort of shiv that feels as visceral and fucked up as what was shown in a similar scene in The Raid 2. Michelle Tesoro’s strict editing keeps a fast pace and goes a long way in escalating the inherent tension in Waugh’s scenario, while the film belies its likely low budget with a terrific sense of verisimilitude in and out of lock-down, with some great nocturnal locations chosen for maximum atmosphere. Shot Caller is an R-rated actioner made for people who really appreciate this type of hard-nosed entertainment, and a total rebuke of the homogenized, PG-13, CGI-jizz-whiz culture that the major movie studios are so obsessed with. So naturally, that means that Shot Caller was entirely funded by independent sources of money, with Direct TV helping to pull it all together and showcasing the end product on their service a few weeks before anyone else. Whatever it takes is my motto. I’m so happy that these new outlets are catering to the people whose interests have been abandoned by the big-dollar suits.

Stephen King once described the act of writing as telepathy; across time and space, the writer plants thoughts into readers and an unbreakable connection of minds is formed forever.  From a cinematic standpoint, David Lynch holds dreams in similar esteem.  His dreams become ours as we examine every frame of his output, lean in to hear what detail the sounds we’re hearing may offer, wrestle our left brain down so that our right brain might take flight and understand the dream on levels rarely captured by mere words.  It’s no mistake that the most ostensibly good realm we travel to in Twin Peaks: The Return is a theater, resplendent in nostalgic black and white, often showing its residents the ‘reality’ of a world more familiar to most of the characters, but cast upon a movie screen.  And what is that reality?  Much consternation has been stirred up over the course of the new Peaks’ 18 episode run about what parts of what we’re seeing are actually real.  The question itself probably gets a chuckle out of Lynch and co-creator Mark Frost, since if a fictional town populated by actors that’s always been on the verge of bleeding into the surreal and supernatural (and often ultimately does) is a baseline of reality, then we’re already starting far, far from home.  Dating back to Eraserhead, the auteur has seamlessly weaved dreams and nightmares together, perhaps reminding us of our day to day existence just enough that we’re consistently startled by the frequent additions of madmen, monsters, magic and mayhem.  This spurs many to attempt to ground his work in something more understandable to everyone who exists on terra firma, to sort and categorize and separate elements into their individual truths.  But to him, they’re all pieces of the same painting, different colors swirling together and apart to present a picture of a dream—not a picture of reality.

So, Twin Peaks: The Return has finished, our final visit to this place and its many levels of existence may well have happened this past Sunday night.  To complete one of many mirroring tricks used throughout the series and the invaluable film cohort Fire Walk With Me, once again we’re left with a downbeat cliffhanger of sorts, surrounded by loose ends, promised little by way of resolution.  The seemingly happy sendoff that an entity as fundamentally good and admirable as Special Agent Dale Cooper deserves is nowhere to be found, and it’s looking quite likely that he’ll continue searching for it forever anyway, turning up from time to time like his fellow missing Blue Rose cohorts only to disappear into the ethers to swing at windmills again and again.  In nods if not true deference to viewers who were sticking around more for the ‘quirky soap opera’ aspects of the original than the darker subtexts and storylines, Lynch and Frost tossed up a few small stories about old fictional friends of ours with happy endings:  Nadine lets Ed and Norma finally be together, Ben Horne continues his path to redemption by staying true to his wife in the face of temptation, Bobby Briggs lives up to his honorable family name as a sturdy lawman in the Twin Peaks Sheriff’s Department.  Then again, we may never know the fate of his daughter who, like mother Shelly, is prone to poor romantic choices and may have given her life for them.  Fan favorite Audrey Horne looks to be trapped in a level of nightmare well beyond a bad night’s sleep, but details are few and hardly forthcoming.  Even the series finale itself serves as two sides of a coin, with the first hour offering the satisfying takedown of the loathsome Evil Cooper the previous episodes appeared to be building towards and the second hour casting increasingly dark shadows on anything approaching a positive outcome.  Indeed, before the first hour’s up we’re already seeing that much if not all of Cooper’s journey back to lucidity was most likely his own dream; the immediately gratifying but increasingly silly battle and assembly of many of this season’s heroes in one room, resplendent in Wizard Of Oz style pluck and smiles, doesn’t hold up very well as we see his face superimposed over the proceedings.  Cooper’s always been an extremely smart character with great intuition, but in many respects, he usually comes up short.  He’s barely allowed to enjoy this victory before going off to attempt another, while any boundaries between what’s perceived as real and dream are shattering before his eyes and ours.

Anyone who feels like a mean trick is being pulled hasn’t been paying attention.  Talk of dreams, questioning whose dream we’re a part of or witness to, these are discussed early and often throughout Twin Peaks, not to mention Lynch’s overall filmography.  The surprisingly large influence of missing agent Phillip Jeffries (played originally by the dearly departed David Bowie, now ably substituted for with a cosmic coffee pot) on the new series comes into play here as well—we’re warned as far back as Fire Walk With Me that “we live inside a dream.”  Lynch clearly loves playing in the dream factory that is cinema, but there’s also an odd, almost masochistic adherence to the truth that he forces his characters to accept.  In Lost Highway, Fred creates a fantasy world of fast cars and faster women to escape into when the reality of his crimes becomes too much, but the illusion breaks down and he’s violently shoved back into the darkness of his true self.  Similarly, Diane Selwyn crafts a beautiful dream of mysterious adventure in Hollywood as Betty in Mulholland Drive, yet an hour and a half of respite from reality is all Lynch allows her before her murderous acts draw her to despair and, ultimately, suicide.  In Twin Peaks, characters such as Dale Cooper and Laura Palmer are clearly on the right side of the good/evil dichotomy, but they’re not spared the truth either.  Cooper, a victim of his own hubris, clearly states “the past dictates the future,” then promptly runs off into another dream dimension or two to try and change that past.  Does he in fact save Laura Palmer from that fateful night in the woods on February 23, 1989?  We’re shown a reality where that appears to be the case, yes.  On the ever present flip side, though, we’re also shown another reality, wherein faces don’t match identities, lovers become leavers, Cooper himself is unsettled, uncharacteristically violent and attempting to complete his mission of saving Laura Palmer and bringing her home in an increasing fog.  Harkening back to the Hard R Hardy Boys hero of Blue Velvet, he barks “Leave her alone!” at some cowboy thugs, then dispatches them with only a shred more restraint than his evil doppleganger would have. This, the final incarnation of Cooper that we’re left with, is an amalgam of all the Coopers we’ve come to know throughout Twin Peaks, good and bad, thoughtful and simple, observant and confused.  Laura hasn’t skipped merrily out of the Black Lodge into a cushy life/afterlife herself; when Cooper finds her, she’s been oddly absent from her waitressing job a Theresa Banks-style 3 days, has no knowledge of her former identity, and is entangled in yet another mystery we won’t get to the bottom of involving a corpse in her living room.  They journey together on lonely highways seemingly more appropriate to Evil Coop’s travels until they arrive at the Palmer home, which of course is not the Palmer home.  The Chalfont/Tremond story, heard before, offers little by way of a road map to sanity, and we’re left with an utterly confused Cooper, stumbling around in the street next to a horrified Laura, screaming in terror—the antithesis of the seeming relief and release seen in the closing moments of Fire Walk With Me.

Usually this part of an essay is dedicated to tying the loose threads together into explanations, conclusions, answers.  Unfortunately for those in need of such things, Lynch has increasingly moved away from these as his career has worn on; unsurprisingly, leaving pat resolutions behind has led to his most striking and lasting work.  Breadcrumb trails of numbers, visual clues, notable repetitions and more will keep internet sleuths and theories afloat for decades to come, no doubt.  Yet the perplexing, mesmerizing finale stands as a tribute to this American maverick’s complex and intuitive take on life itself.  Cooper may well be on an endless fool’s errand to try and fix the unfixable, to erase the history of incest and murder that came to roost on the shoulders of Laura Palmer many moons ago.  Laura, an avatar for goodness in a harsh, unforgiving world, doesn’t get to escape to a new reality or settle back into her old one.  These truths are as close to closure as we’ll be offered.  Lynch and Frost stated early and often that solving Laura Palmer’s murder was something they never wanted to do.  Given the opportunity to return to her story and the town of Twin Peaks, it should be no surprise that leaving Laura’s mystery wide open is the final gift we’re given.