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Art Features Live Action Movies

Twin Peaks
Fire
Walk With Me

Director – David Lynch – 1992 – US – Cert. 18 – 135 mins

****

Movie prequel to Lynch’s Twin Peaks TV series.

David Lynch appears early on in his Twin Peaks prequel Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me as FBI chief Gordon Cole. The TV series’ ubiquitous Agent Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) is soon wandering up and down a nearby corridor before rushing to check himself in the security video monitor, when a crazed David Bowie (as a long disappeared Bureau operative) turns up from what appears to be another dimension.

If you’re one of those who didn’t make it to the end of the TV series, you might just enjoy the apparent wackiness in itself; however, if you stayed with the series, you’ll know all about The White Lodge and The Black Lodge and a lot of other stuff without which this movie doesn’t make half as much sense.

For example, the mutilated body which briefly materialises in Laura’s bed is Cooper’s true love Annie Blackburn (Heather Graham). Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me isn’t so much a straightforward movie as a movie springing from a successful TV series, which makes it a rather different animal altogether.

As demented as – but more structured than – Wild At Heart (1990), the opening three-quarter hour segment investigates a pre-Laura Palmer murder through an FBI Agent who subsequently vanishes and is punctuated by a riot of typically quirky Lynchian detail.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

The Wandering Earth II
(Liulang Diqiu 2,
流浪地球 2)

Director – Frant Gwo – 2023 – China – Cert. 12a – 173m

***

Sequel – or rather prequel – wants to explain how it was that the Earth became the Wandering Earth, but instead throws convoluted plot, big budget effects and action set-pieces at us while not really explaining anything – out in UK cinemas on Friday, January 27th

Gwo’s mega-expensive, blockbuster franchise is back for a second instalment, this time at three rather than two hours in length. Surprisingly, II isn’t so much a sequel to The Wandering Earth as a prequel which attempts to explain its predecessor by exploring many of the events which take place leading up to it, including the attempt by the United Earth Government (UEG) to launch the Wandering Earth Project, the complex system of jet engines constructed around the Equator like a belt round a large man’s belly to enable the ecologically-damaged Planet Earth to be piloted through space in an attempt to find a new home for the human race.

As if aware that three hours of interpersonal drama and action sequences based around this might prove too much for even the franchise’s most ardent fans, Gwo and his screenwriters build in a second plot involving Tu Yuheng (Chinese megastar Andy Lau) whose wife and small daughter are killed in a road accident.… Read the rest