Soundtracking: "Blue Velvet"

This week, Chris Feil's soundtrack series covers a David Lynch classic...

David Lynch has used music to genius effect over his career, particularly drawing from 50s and 60s crooners to create a cinematic world displaced in time. But Lynch’s most definitive use of preexisting songs is in one of his most narratively focused masterpieces, Blue Velvet. This is the best example of how he distorts the wholesomeness of the sound to reveal darker tones beneath performative American culture.

Music is as much a piece of this suburban facade as any of Lynch’s hellscapes, announcing as much when it fades from Angelo Badalamenti’s operatic overture to Bobby Vinton’s title classic. A placid sky descends upon a thorny rose bush, gorgeously staining the picked fence’s rigid sterility like how Lynch poisons our relationship to the music. Vinton’s voice is tinny in its soulfulness, a swingy sanitized ode that matches Lynch’s picturesque neighborhood for quaintness. Musically, it feels as manufactured as this idyllic vision before us until it fades and morphs into something beastly beneath the manicured, bland exterior.

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Blue Velvet at 30

by Jason Adams 

With our host Nathaniel off in Toronto seeing movies this week; some good, some bad... but which ones will last forever? It's a question I put forth because David Lynch's masterpiece Blue Velvet played at the Toronto Film Festival exactly 30 years ago today. Did those fortunate souls sitting there in that audience know they were seeing a stone-cold American classic unveiled unto the world. I can't imagine they didn't know they were seeing something unlike anything else they'd ever seen before, that much seems clear. The film made some noise!

Blue Velvet's one of my Top Five Favorites so let's celebrate its anniversary (it was released in US theaters one week after its screening in Toronto). In honor of 30 years here are 30 favorite Blue Velvety facts, figures, and fun stuff, starting with...

1. LAURA DERN'S FACE

2. But seriously this is Lynch's first collaboration with his muse and most important collaborator (so says me and that cow he stood on Hollywood Blvd with) and it's a pleasure to contrast the character of Sandy with the places the two would later go - the sweetness and naivete here evenautally giving way to all kinds of craziness; it's impossible not to look at this nice young lady now and not see the wild woman -- Lulu Fortune anybody? -- about to come beating out from underneath those fuzzy sweaters.

Ears and lots of the F-word after the break...

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Pick Your Poison: The Hallmark Homages of Stranger Things

Daniel Crooke here. For the past two weeks, I've walled myself off from any pop cultural offering that doesn't include the letters LGBT while working around the clock at Outfest Los Angeles, our seminal, international queer film festival here in the City of Angels. Naturally the only external filmic force strong enough to infiltrate this border includes the words Winona Ryder. Slay, queen, slay.

I too have taken a long, hungry taste of the ananchronistic (and extra-colorful) Kool-Aid that is Netflix's '80s-set Stranger Things, the sci-fi outing that investigates a humdrum Indiana small town as a local young 'un mysteriously disappears in their midsts without warning. Much has been made of the homage-heavy layers that bake into its Spielbergian, Carpenteresque, Lynchian, and Stephen King-adjacent baklava; although the reason it succeeds beyond the hat-tip recipe can be found within the rich, nitty gritty filling of its heart-achingly true familial dynamics, of which Super 8 would have been smart to expand upon beyond the basic ingredients. So let's take a big bite and revel in its delicious influences. My personal favorite so far - despite Ryder's irresistible parallel to Melinda Dillon's momma bear on a misson from Close Encounters of the Third Kind - goes beyond bicycles and plunges the references to disturbing depths.

Jonathan's secret photo shoot in the woods recalls Blue Velvet's voyeuristic view from the closet; despite their quests for homegrown veracity, neither he nor Jeffrey were invited to the peep shows of a teenage pool party or a transgressive Rossellini-Hopper assault, but they've shown up in the shadows nonetheless. And yet we're still glad to be in on the drama. We've spent some time getting to know the traumatic roots of their curiosity via their displaced family units but these Peeping Toms challenge that sympathy through sensually clandestine invasions of personal space.

Apart from the bedroom posters of The Thing and Evil Dead, which Stranger Things visual reference sets your bicycle afloat?

"There is trouble until the robins come..."

After catching a restored, 30th anniversary rerelease of David Lynch’s psycho-suburban nightmare on the big screen last night, Blue Velvet has once again invaded my waking life with huffing menace, casting sinister shadows and nasty neon onto the innocuous surfaces of everyday existence. And it starts from the opening credits. Every time I see this curtain shimmer, I can feel my vision start to go soft as it flickers me into a dream state. The image hypnotically blurs the line between its politely decorative titles and the mysteriously unnerving surface breathing behind them. The strings of the score shimmy with sharp elegance and ironic doom. I’m already huddling inside the closet, unsettled and voyeuristic. Seeing candles dance in the dark. Coiling myself against the danger hiding in plain sight. Soaked in curdling Pabst Blue Ribbon.

Which of your favorite opening credits sequences instantly place you inside the mind and mood of the movie?

Linkman v Superblog

The New Yorker pays tribute to Garry Shandling who passed away suddenly on Thursday
Salon remembers the polarizing response to David Lynch's Blue Velvet 30 years ago
Lee Pace Network they did a "posterized" of sorts on Lee Pace's filmography only with gifs - how many have you seen? I've only seen 7 but he sure is nice to look at
Washington Post fascinating story on Hollywood's latest beauty trend: expensive post-production digital retouching 
Vulture interviews RuPaul
/Film so sad but HBO's Togetherness starring Mark Duplass and Melanie Lynskey has been cancelled. 
Playbill awwww. Hairspray and Smash composer and 5 time Oscar nominee Marc Shaiman got married. Patti LuPone, Nathan Lane, Bette Midler, and Whoopi were guests! 

Meta Humans
MTV Teo remembers Batman Returns "There is only one true Batman movie, one Batmovie to rule them all." Amen.
Comics Alliance Marvel & Disney join other companies planning to boycott business with the state of Georgia if the governor doesn't veto the recently passed anti-gay law 
Vulture asks celebrities to pick Batman or Superman in a fight. Michael Shannon's, the former general Zod, answer is the greatest 
Film Freak Central amazing free associative depressive review of BvS by Walter Chaw 
Terry's Fabrics suggests you decorate your room w/ Batman or Superman accoutrements (to make sure you have nightmares about the movie lasting even longer?) 
Comics Alliance thinks Wonder Woman's MVP status in the new film is not enough to justify the treatment of the other female characters 
i09 you can explore Batman's lair using Google Street View.
YouTube LOL. Sad Affleck hearing about the Batman v Superman reviews
EW Warner Bros DC universe movies schedule through 2020 

Today's Watch
Batman v Terminator from Captain McKay. A fun little stop motion short using actual action figures. And it fits with Easter's ressurection theme, kinda, too.

ICYMI
The Oscars channel on YouTube added a ton of clips and speeches from last month's ceremony a couple of days ago