Yes, Kiefer Sutherland was in the Firewalk “prequel”?, whatever it was. Now you bastards have my brain helplessly imagining what Jack Bauer would have done with those cases.
Grrr.
Lynch’s work elicits rather polar responses, those being: Excessive Yayness, Excessive Confusion and, of course, Scorn. In my opinion, his stuff doesn’t age well. Twin Peaks, Lost Highway, Blue Velvet all lack the “whatever-the-Hell-they-had-when-they-first-came-out.”
For a more recent example of this cinematic phenomenon, see the Blair Witch Project.
The big difference being that Blair Witch sucked ass from the moment it was released.
I disagree that Lynch’s stuff doesn’t age well. I find Blue Velvet and TP as compelling today as I did when I first saw them. I was never a big fan of Lost Highway or Wild At Heart anyway, so aging well has nothing to do with my problem with them.
I’ll have to partially disagree with you. I think it was a brilliatn concept. And I applaud that a film with a relatively low budget was so successful. Its main (and fatal) problem is that it depended on the audience not knowing that it was a mockumentary. In that context it would have been a very scary film indeed. What the filmmakers didn’t count on was that some of their audience would know that the story is just a story. Thus they did not add elements that would make the film scary for those of us who knew the secret. If you know it’s fake, you’re not going to like it as much. For me, I got a chuckle when much of the footage was shot on (expensive) film. When you have eleven minutes of film in your magazine, you’re not going to run the camera until you have something to shoot. I don’t recall if they had an audio person running along with them. (No sound is recorded on film – Unless… Weren’t they using a CP? They could justify having audio because some of them had single-system sound.)
In any case, I thought the film was effective for its intended audience. For the rest of us, not so much. But I think it’s great when an indie filmmaker gets some recognition. I think they could have added a couple of very simple things to make it better without being obvious for the people who thought it was real.
They also didn’t count on the good people of Maryland knowing that the stretch of woods near Burkettsville is less than a mile wide. It was roundly scorned around here.
