Arts Entertainments

TWIN PEAKS: Fire Walk With Me Bluray Review

The original television broadcast of Twin Peaks in 1990 coincided with my recent interest in David Lynch films after renting a copy of Blue Velvet on video and the break between the first and second seasons also saw the release of Wild At Heart in the cinema, which launched a sudden and unexpected wave of Lynch mania that swept both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. Around the same time I first visited the United States, landing in Los Angeles in January 1991, I couldn’t wait to pick up a copy of the LA Reader so I could see Lynch’s famous cartoon strip, The Angriest Dog in the World, with my own. eyes!

Twin Peaks recently celebrated their 20th anniversary and is back in the public consciousness with current shows like Psych which reunites some of the original cast members in the Dual Spiers tribute episode that revolves around a Laura-style copycat murder. Palmer. After the initial battle for distribution rights that prevented season two from being released on DVD for years, CBS Paramount has now released the full show in their David Lynch-approved Gold Box set and it’s even available for download on iTunes in HD, which has caused talk of a possible Blu-ray edition to follow.

When I met my future wife, one of the first things we did was sit down to watch the original series, she was instantly hooked and we watched the pilot and all 29 episodes of Fire Walk With Me in the space of one. long weekend. To commemorate our recent wedding anniversary, we just saw them all again for the first time in 5 years and it remains an astonishing milestone in the annals of mainstream television history; All the credit goes to creators Mark Frost and David Lynch, as few shows can claim to have been as innovative or influential as Twin Peaks.

The show was canceled midway through the second season due to falling ratings once Laura Palmer’s killer was revealed and a number of weak and largely comic subplots failed to fill the void despite a Kenneth Welsh’s tour de force performance as ex-agent Cooper. partner and Nemesis, Windom Earle and introducing an element of science fiction with Project Blue Book investigations of the local mythology of the White and Black Lodge; There was still a lot to enjoy on the show and many questions were deliberately left unanswered in the final episode, which is very reminiscent of the end of Patrick McGoohan’s seminal ’60s series The Prisoner.

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me was released in theaters in 1992; a year after the puzzling final episode had trapped Agent Dale Cooper inside the Black Lodge. The film serves as both a prequel, as it examines the death of Killer Bob’s first victim, Teresa Banks, and the last 7 days of Laura Palmer’s life prior to her murder, providing psychological insight into her father’s deranged mind. Leland, and a sequel as it clarifies Agent Cooper’s fate, expands Dugpas’ story and lets Laura’s troubled spirit rest in the final moments. For many unfamiliar with David Lynch’s darker films, this came as a total shock as the show’s hilarious supporting characters weren’t around to make up for the deeply disturbing secrecy that had always been at the heart of the series and in reality. he was booed by hostile audiences at the Cannes film. Festival first.

There’s no getting around the fact that there are some heartbreaking scenes in the movie that deal head-on with the psychological pain of realizing that, stripped of all its fanciful mystery, this is the story of the long-term physical abuse of a teenage girl. for his father and this is something that Lynch had felt had been forgotten towards the end of the second season and that he was still concerned about the character of Laura Palmer. Actress Sheryl Lee, who had only been able to play Laura in stylized flashbacks or her cousin Maddy on the TV show, wanted to really bring her to life and give her doomed existence a closing element.

There are many Hitchcockian influences in Lynch’s work, the most obvious here being Maddy Ferguson’s name, a nod to Vertigo in which Kim Novak had a dual role; plays Madeleine, whom Scotty Ferguson (James Stewart) falls madly in love with and also Judy, whom Scotty meets after witnessing Madeline’s apparent suicide and, while in a psychotic state, changes Judy’s style to the image of Madeline, changing her hair and clothes to evoke reality. woman with whom he is morbidly obsessed.

When Hitch was asked if he could cut the “rape” scene from his 1964 film Marnie by hired screenwriter Evan Hunter, who felt it would make the character played by Sean Connery insurmountable at least in the eyes of the women in the audience, Hitchcock refused to explain that the only reason he wanted to make the movie in the first place is because of that scene and replaced Hunter with renowned feminist playwright Jay Presson Allen, who reworked the script while keeping the scene from “sex without consent” between Connery and Tippi Hedren. firmly in place. Likewise, I think the only reason Lynch wanted to do Twin Peaks was because of the abusive father / daughter relationship at the center of the story and Fire Walk With Me is his way of emphasizing that point.

The French distributor MK2’s Blu-ray release of Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me will never be the definitive edition, while the full 1080p picture quality is a notable improvement over the DVD version and the DTS-HD 5.1 soundtrack. it’s solid and fixes the infamous mixing issue in the “Red Room” sequence that was captioned due to the excessive volume of the club’s live music; in the previous version of the DVD, the music had been lowered so that you could clearly hear all the dialogue making the on-screen subtitles ridiculous.

I’m happy to report that after nearly 25 years, the entire mystery has been released on a Blu-ray box, including the highly coveted 90 minutes of deleted scenes! Not for the faint of heart and probably only for true fans of Lynch’s work as a whole, Fire Walk With Me is a fitting footnote for a historical television series and a cathartic release and appropriate closing for a story. impregnated with the indignant suffering of its central character. , also marks the end of a period when, for a fleeting moment, David Lynch was the coolest cat on the planet.

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