FWWM Movie Review

Okay, I'll bite, Goose. I know there are a ton of David Lynch fans in the Lodge, but I'll brave the room and bust it loose (since besides Dune, one of my favorite movies ever, I'm not a big fan of Mr. Lynch). I was flipping through my On-Demand this past Saturday and, lo and behold, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me was an option on the television. So I passed through the red curtain and clicked "watch". The film runs an excruciating 135 minutes, with maybe 40 minutes of worthy material — enough for, say, one last hour-long television time-slot. In retrospect, if only I had some plutonium and a Flux Capacitor laying around.

Fire Walk With Me is an austere, dim, disquieting, and surreal…hey it’s David Lynch and we expect nothing less. Like an acid-tongued take on the TV series he and Mark Frost originated in the early 1990’s, Director Lynch’s "Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me" is an even more perplexing freak show encircling a small town’s consignment of oddities and inhabitants, and as equally visually transcendent and thematically stunning. Since I just got really wordy... In other words, it's weird.

Here's the thing. In Junior High, I was a huge Twin Peaks fan. Like most, I watched the show every week, wondering if the one-armed man was the killer, what was with the midget in the red room & why Laura Flynn-Boyle was strangely attractive. Now, of course, she's hot. Yet this movie failed to match up to the production values of the show. Watching the show again after college, it still held up. Now watching the movie at the end of the year 2005, the movie is emmensely flawed and, at times, horribly acted (Chris Isaak in particular, Kyle MacLachlan is the only one that brought anything fresh and that could equate to talent to the film). The epitomy of a disfunctional family in the Palmers was one of the few questions the film answerered halfway decent, and even that left you with a sick feeling and wanting to shower after the credits rolled. The questions raised in the show were intriguing, while the questions raised in the movie were annoying and made the script seemingly thrown together because of studio demand. Disappointing, to say the least.

I was still coming down from the effed up nature of this movie after I drove to Jimbo's Saturday night. Where did Chris Isaak go after picking up the ring? Why was David Bowie only in one scene? How did Laura not get killed earlier than at 18 after travelling in that messed up crowd for such a long time and wandering in the backwoods every other night? Mostly, I was angry at the unanswered questions and extremely disappointed overall. Mostly. And when I came back down, I wanted my 2+ hours back and wanted an apology from Mr. David Lynch.

Grade: ** out of 4 stars