Lost in the Movies: Patreon update #10: Rogue One, Brawl in Cell Block 99 & Marie Antoinette (+ Mark Twain on the French Revolution, right-wing hypocrisy, Eisenstein vs. Griffith, Cooper's Diane tapes audiobook & more) and preview of the TWIN PEAKS Character Series Top 30 Runners-Up from The Return

Patreon update #10: Rogue One, Brawl in Cell Block 99 & Marie Antoinette (+ Mark Twain on the French Revolution, right-wing hypocrisy, Eisenstein vs. Griffith, Cooper's Diane tapes audiobook & more) and preview of the TWIN PEAKS Character Series Top 30 Runners-Up from The Return


There's not so much Twin Peaks in the podcast this week (there will be more, and especially more Lynch, on Patreon in a few days) but before highlighting this episode I'd point you to the third tier reward which is super-Peaksian, a two-page preview of the "Top 30 runners-up from Twin Peaks: The Return" entry which will help kick off my character series. This provides the full list of these runners-up - characters who appeared for less than ten minutes in season three, and thus won't be included as individual entries in the series, but still left an impression. The preview also includes statistics for each one (rough screentime, number of scenes, primary location, top episode, even sometimes their ranking within an episode), as well as a paragraph-long write-up for the first character. If you've been considering becoming a patron at the $10 level, this will be a perk you're sure to enjoy. (As always, of course, the podcast and other features are available to all patrons, from $1 on up.)



The episode this week is a doozy. Another triple feature, plus other segments that are longer than usual themselves. All in all, this may be an episode best experienced in installments. Most future episodes will be much shorter but hopefully the length means that there's something her for everyone to enjoy; take your pick.

And there is a lot of breadth here. It would be hard to gather three more different Films in Focus: a massively popular sci-fi blockbuster, an ultraviolent prison exploitation flick, and a Golden Age Hollywood period piece with lavish sets and costumes. Here goes, though (spoiler alert for this triple feature, though two of the films' conclusions are pretty much universally known): all three films end with the main characters sacrificed for a larger purpose - the Rebels are blown up after stealing the Death Star plans, Bradley is blown away after rescuing his pregnant wife from torture, and Marie is beheaded after losing her family, possessions, and perhaps her fragile sanity (in this case only, the cause for which the protagonist loses their life is not of their own choosing though she is as stoic as the others in death).

The Marie Antoinette entry ends with a powerful, relevant literary quotation from A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, and after a discussion of Diane...: The Tapes of Agent Cooper (the audio-only spin-off written by Scott Frost and released in the fall of 1990), I resume that focus through an exclusively political "Other Topics" section. This covers a lot of the things I tweeted about in January (before I took a long Twitter break): Mark Wahlberg's recent pay controversy, celebrities as labor, examples of right-wing hypocrisy on Hollywood and other matters, the National Enquirer's shameless, bizarre Trump propaganda, and finally Eisenstein's heady inquiry into why the Soviet style of montage differed from Griffith's dualistic approach. This is followed by class-oriented feedback on High and Low, which I discuss in relation to Italian neorealism.

Finally, I go over one of my favorite periods in my blogging history, where I was able to conclude and publish a series of big projects, some of which relate back to other topics in this episode: two back-to-back posts on the Star Wars saga, a study of Field of Dreams' socio-historical context (it's as much about the 60s as baseball), a visual survey of western art through the BBC series Civilisation (I think this one even includes a sketch of Marie Antoinette's execution), and finally a multimedia tribute to "cities of the imagination."

Next week will strike an entirely different note from this week's disparate, worldly content as I pair two Lynch films and dive into one of the most fraught aspects of Twin Peaks: The Return. See you then.

Line-up for Episode 8

INTRO

WEEKLY UPDATE/recent posts: Twin Peaks Unwrapped appearance

WEEKLY UPDATE/Patreon: 3rd Tier Biweekly Preview - Who are the 30 "Runners-Up" of Twin Peaks: The Return?

WEEKLY UPDATE/works in progress: 30 runner-up characters (list combined rankings of certain characters), reading Twin Peaks articles, Cinepoem w/ Baudelaire, TV viewing diaries - some series moved to Hulu, Clone Wars w/ Bob Clark

FILM IN FOCUS: Rogue One

FILM IN FOCUS: Brawl in Cell Block 99

FILM IN FOCUS: Marie Antoinette (w/ quote from A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court)

TWIN PEAKS REFLECTIONS: Diane... The Tapes of Agent Cooper

OTHER TOPICS: Mark Wahlberg pay scandal, hatred of celebrities as hatred of labor, right-wing hatred of Hollywood, National Review's blatant contradictions (Nelson Mandela & the confederate flag), the National Enquirer won't touch Trump, Sergei Eisenstein writes about D.W. Griffith & montage

LISTENER FEEDBACK: High and Low (& Italian neorealism/Michelangelo Antonioni)

OPENING THE ARCHIVE "Heading Home" (June - September 2010), this week's highlight (Cities of the Imagination)


BECOME A PATRON

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