Lost Highway

 Year:  1997

Director:  David Lynch

Screenplay:  David Lynch and Barry Gifford

Starring:  Bill Pullman, Patricia Arquette, Balthazar Getty, Robert Blake, Natasha Gregson Wagner, Gary Busey, Robert Loggia

Running Time:  135 minutes

Genre:  Thriller, drama, horror

Jazz saxophonist Fred Madison (Pullman) and his wife Renee (Arquette) are disturbed to receive a series of mysterious VHS tapes of their large Los Angeles house.  Fred is convicted of Renee's murder, and sentenced to death.  In his jail cell, Fred transforms into Pete Dayton (Getty), a mechanic who has seemingly no connection to Fred.  The authorities release Pete, who comes under the influence of violent gangster Mister Eddy (Loggia), and finds himself drawn to Eddy's moll, Alice (Arquette again).

David Lynch saw in the 1990s on a critical and commercial high, with his cult TV series Twin Peaks (1989-1991, 2017) at the peak (no pun intended) of it's success, and his film Wild at Heart (1990) winning the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival.  However, Twin Peaks came to an end and Wild at Heart received mixed reviews and underperformed at the US Box Office.  Lynch's next film, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992), seemed like a guaranteed hit, however, the film, which leaned heavily into all the darkness, violence and weirdness that he was unable to put on mainstream TV in the early '90s baffled and dismayed both fans and critics, and was a commercial disappointment (except in Japan where it was a smash hit).   

The five years between Fire Walk With Me and Lost Highway were the longest gap between film projects of Lynch's career to that date.  Lynch's inspiration came from coming across the term "lost highway" in Barry Gifford's book Night People (1992), and also the O. J. Simpson murder case.  Lynch, who knew Gifford after adapting his novel Wild at Heart, teamed up with the author to work on the film's screenplay.  The film is a "2 A. M." movie.  Whatever time of the day or night you put it on, it feels like it is two o'clock in the morning.  That kind of night time delirium, where the world feels like it made of shadows and ghosts.  Lost Highway does not offer up its secrets easily or willingly, working as it does with a kind of dream logic.  Among the cast, Robert Blake, who would be accused of murder in 2001, although he was acquitted, is genuinely terrifying as the "Mystery Man", dressed in black, with slicked back, black hair, white makeup and black lips and eyes.  Patricia Arquette appears as the mysterious woman in both Fred and Pete's lives (although as Renee she has dark hair, and as Alice she is blonde), who may in fact be the same person, or may not be.  Gary Busey appears as Pete's dad, and Richard Pryor has a cameo as Pete's boss.  Robert Loggia plays the seemingly affable but threatening gangster, in one of the film's standout scenes, he violently attacks a tailgating driver, yelling lessons on road safety while savagely pistol-whipping the man, in a scene that could have come from a Quentin Tarantino film.  Lynch regular Jack Nance appears in a small role as Pete's coworker, however Nance died before the film was released, following injuries sustained in a brawl outside a donut shop.

The film's baffling narrative, surrealism and graphic sex and violence, put off many viewers and critics.  However, it has its own beauty.  Lynch is a master at using sound and visuals, and this is a film that benefits hugely from being seen with the best possible screen and sound system.  Lynch started out as a painter, and the film has some beautifully composed shots, and a complex sound design, ranging from sinister low rumbling, and quiet whispering, to loud industrial rock from the likes of Marilyn Manson and the Nine Inch Nails.  If some of Lynch's films are dreams wrapped in nightmares, this is like a nightmare in hell with dreams of heaven.

  Patricia Arquette and Bill Pullman in Lost Highway

  

Bringing Out the Dead

 Year:  1999

Director:  Martin Scorsese

Screenplay:  Paul Schrader, based on the novel Bringing Out the Dead by Joe Connelly

Starring:  Nicolas Cage, Patricia Arquette, John Goodman, Ving Rhames, Tom Sizemore

Running Time:  121 minutes

Genre:  Drama

New York City, the early 1990s:  Burned-out paramedic Frank Pierce (Cage) works the night shift.  Depressed, unable to sleep, and wracked with guilt for those he has not been able to save, Frank begins to hallucinate the patients he has lost.  After responding to a call about a man suffering cardiac arrest, Frank forms a tentative friendship with the man's daughter Mary (Arquette).

On it's release in 1999, this bleak urban drama was seen as a follow-up to Taxi Driver (1976), another collaboration between director Martin Scorsese and screenwriter Paul Schrader.  Both films tell the stories of nocturnal workers in a hellish urban environment, and have strong themes of guilt and redemption.  However, while Robert De Niro, as Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver, finds his salvation in violence, Frank Pierce is essentially a compassionate man, trying to do the right thing in a broken, fallen world.  The film take place over the course of a weekends Frank and his fellow paramedics make the rounds tending to the sick and wounded of night-time New York, and delivering them to the overcrowded, understaffed and under equipped hospital.  Nicolas Cage gives one of his best performances as the haunted Frank Pierce, deathly pale, with sunken red-rimmed eyes, he looks like someone who hasn't slept in weeks, his slow drawl fitting Frank's laconic narration, and even the scenes where Cage delivers some of his more trademark over the top moments, it fits with Frank's mania at that point in the film.  Patricia Arquette delivers a quietly powerful performance as compassionate drug addict Mary, who becomes Frank's angel of mercy.  Sharing Frank's season in hell are Larry (John Goodman), Frank's friend,  Marcus (Ving Rhames), an eccentric devoutly religious paramedic who enjoys flirting with the dispatcher and organises a prayer circle among clubbers while he and Frank try and save an overdose victim; and Tom (Tom Sizemore), a wild paramedic who enjoys beating people up when he's bored.  This is a violent, and dark film, which is sometimes hard to watch and often disturbing, but it is visually impressive, with the fast cutting between flashing ambulance lights, and the camera tearing down the streets of New York, it's also very funny, albeit with humour of the darkest variety, such as Frank begging his boss to fire him at the start ion every shift, and some surprisingly surreal imagery.  It is a tough watch, and failed at the box office when it was released, but it is one of Scorsese's most powerful and underrated works.

Nicolas Cage in Bringing Out the Dead
  

Lost Highway

Year of Release:  1997
Director:  David Lynch
Screenplay:  David Lynch and Barry Gifford
Starring:  Bill Pullman, Patricia Arquette, Balthazar Getty
Running Time:  134 minutes
Genre:  Mystery, neo-noir, horror

Fred Madison (Pullman) is a saxophonist, and has a strained relationship with his mysterious wife Renee (Arquette).  The couple begin receiving a series of strange video tapes showing the exterior and interior of their house.  When Renee is savagely murdered, Madison is accused of the crime and sentenced to death.  However, on death row he transforms into young mechanic Pete Dayton (Getty).  One of Dayton's frequent clients is mercurial gangster Mister Eddy (Robert Loggia), and he finds himself becoming dangerously infatuated with Mister Eddy's seductive girlfriend Alice (Arquette again).  Then things start to get a little strange.

This is possibly one of the strangest films that David Lynch has made.  In fact watching it sometimes feels as if your watching two separate films spliced together.  The first part of the film, plays like a nightmare.  The whole thing is dreamlike, the camera slowly drifting through the Madison's cavernous, shadowy house, full of strange rumblings and odd lights, much like the camera in the videos they are sent.  The character's movements are slow, and their dialogue slightly off-tempo.  The second, much longer part of the film, plays very much like a nineties' neo-noir, at least initially, about a guy being drawn to a dangerous woman.  The scene where Mister Eddy beats and screams at a tailgater could have come straight from a Quentin Tarantino film.  The script was co-written by Lynch with novelist Barry Gifford (whose work Lynch had adapted in Wild at Heart (1990)), and Lynch was inspired to make the film by a phrase in Gifford's short story collection Night People (1992), and the opening scene in the film was based on an incident that actually happened to Lynch, where someone buzzed his intercom to inform him that "Dick Laurent is dead".  Lynch claims that he has no idea who the caller was or who Dick Laurent was.  This film won't be to everyone's tastes.  It's allusive, challenging, disturbing, deeply strange and offers up no easy answers to it's many mysteries.  However, if you pay attention you can come to an interpretation of the film.  There are some classic Lynch moments and characters here, particularly Robert Blake as the genuinely creepy Mystery Man.

  The Mystery Man (Robert Blake) in Lost Highway