July 2019 Patreon podcasts: Early access to Martha Nochimson interview, LOST IN TWIN PEAKS #6 - Season 1 Episode 6, and LOST IN THE MOVIES #57 - Twin Peaks Cinema - Fire in the Sky (+ favorites films archive #34 - 24: Band of Outsiders, White Heat, Easy Rider, Singin' in the Rain, Red Hot Riding Hood, Goodfellas, Fists in the Pocket, The Searchers, The "Up" Series, Mamma Roma, Young Mr. Lincoln & Twin Peaks Reflections: Cable, Chet & Sam, Teresa, Sam's apartment, Buenos Aires hotel, Teresa Banks case/Inland Empire)

Welcome to the new format for the Lost in the Movies podcast, in which my broad interest in cinema meets my particular emphasis on Twin Peaks. First up is a sci-fi film from shortly after the original series; like Peaks, Fire in the Sky features a disappearance that shakes up a small town while an out-of-town detective navigates local suspicions, as well as a terrifying abduction in the woods accompanied by a blinding light. The culprits, however, are much more specific and the film falls more firmly into a particular genre (or does it?).

On Lost in Twin Peaks, the $5/month members reach the first solo Mark Frost teleplay and we explore how his concerns are reflected in the results...

Lost in Twin Peaks #6 - S1E6 (Cooper's Dreams/"Episode 5")

In addition to Fire in the Sky, my main podcast for July uses The Missing Pieces as a springboard to study several Twin Peaks characters and locations while connecting the Teresa Banks case to Inland Empire. My Favorites archive series covers a couple gangster flicks, a couple sixties Italian classics, and a couple John Ford masterpieces, and I close off the episode by updating listeners on my activities in the spring...

Lost in the Movies Episode 57 - Twin Peaks Cinema - Fire in the Sky (+ favorite films archive #34 - 24: Band of Outsiders, White Heat, Easy Rider, Singin' in the Rain, Red Hot Riding Hood, Goodfellas, Fists in the Pocket, The Searchers, The "Up" Series, Mamma Roma, Young Mr. Lincoln & Twin Peaks Reflections: Cable, Chet & Sam, Teresa, Sam's apartment, Buenos Aires hotel, Teresa Banks case/Inland Empire)

I'm also beginning to open up my old Lost in Twin Peaks episodes for all tiers (these will be published six months after the $5/month tier gets them, all the way through the rewatch). This kicks off with a special two-and-a-half-hour episode on The Missing Pieces, deleted scenes from Fire Walk With Me. Today is the fifth anniversary of their release, so dig in if you haven't already...

bonus: NOW AVAILABLE: Lost in Twin Peaks #32 (The Missing Pieces) open to all patrons 

Finally, I offered an interview with Martha Nochimson, Lynch scholar and author of the new book Television Rewired. Here is the full conversation, which will become public next month but is only available for patrons for now...

Martha Nochimson Interview

To clarify a point, I added a nine-minute bonus a few weeks later...

Martha Nochimson bonus question

And here is a short highlight made public on YouTube...

Podcast Line-Ups for...

Pulp and Popcorn 1993 - 1995 • "32 Days of Movies" Day 28

Twenty-eighth chapter in "32 Days of Movies", an audiovisual tour through 366 films

(2015 update: included Vimeo embed after the jump)


View "Chapter 28: Pulp and Popcorn"

Pulp and Popcorn

Here is where the history of the movies truly begins to coincide with my own personal movie history. I was ten years old in the fall of 1993, and already an avid movie buff, combing the weekly listings to see what was coming out, studying the box office reports as if they contained esoteric messages from the beyond, and wandering down the hallway of coming attractions at the local movie theater to study the teaser posters. That said, I think I only saw one of these films in theaters at the time - however, I was aware of the presence of all of them, and it was only a few years later that I would see them on video as a teenager.

(continued below, along with NSFW warnings)

Little Green Men

A Visual Tribute to the flashback in Fire in the Sky (1993)

A Quick One - Fire in the Sky

[As December, and with it 2008, comes to a close, let me take a moment to look back on several recently viewed (but undiscussed) movies. Each "Quick One" will be a paragraph, with the open invitation for you to keep the discussion going by leaving comments.]

I was intrigued enough by this film to want to write a full-length review. But time is short, so a quick one, my last quick one of the day/weekend/month/year, will have to do. Fire in the Sky came out in 1993 and became one of those films/TV shows (like "The X-Files") that I was obsessed with as a kid, without actually seeing. I think I wasn't allowed. Now, having finally caught up with, I have to admit I can see why. It's the ostensibly true story of a logger abducted by aliens - or so his friends say. Actually, most of the film deals with the abductee's buddies facing increasingly skeptical law officers and suspicious townsfolk. This could seem a drag of you're expecting two hours of whiz-bang sci-fi spectacle, but actually it adds an interesting human element to the story, as well as some suspense (admittedly artificial, if you know anything about this story going in). When Travis Walton finally returns, naked and barely able to speak, stranded at a gas station, we still don't know what happened. Only in the final minutes do we get a flashback - about twenty minutes of gruesome, compulsively watchable footage. The aliens look great (the first stereotypical look we get turns out to be their innocuous space suits; the real guys are, um, not pretty). And the ensuing torment Walton endures will disabuse anyone of warm and fuzzy views on interplanetary contact. However, the scene does end abruptly and one wonders if it was trimmed to avoid an R rating - regardless, it pushes the boundaries. Whether or not you believe in this sort of thing, Fire in the Sky will make you decide you never want to be abducted by aliens; it's the anti-Close Encounters and the anti-E.T. Which makes it quite the delectable irony that Henry Thomas was cast as one of the loggers though, unfortunately, not the abductee. Now that would have been the casting coup of the century.