Tag: david lynch

  • Retro Movie Pass Adventures: Lost Highway (1997)

    Patricia Arquette and Balthazar Getty in Lost Highway
    Robert Blake as Mystery Man in Lost Highway

    Somehow, David Lynch’s Lost Highway is both more and less realistic than Hitchcock’s Vertigo. Body doubles, body switches, a Mystery Man who appears in multiple places at once, and a linear story told in non-linear time, but it’s still not as weird as a guy dressing up a woman to look like the woman who thought she was possessed by her ancestor and killed herself but then two or three other layers of unlikely weirdness happen.

    Also: it was fun to see Robert Loggia beat up a guy on the closed road I use to ride my bike to Griffith Observatory.

    Today’s poster was such an clear choice that I almost avoided it for being too obvious. Fun fact: The original poster featured an early example of computer graphics. Vertigo was actually the first movie to use computer graphics; Saul Bass used them in the title sequence and on the original version of this poster. They probably took days to render. I made my low resolution substitute in about five minutes with an online programming language for kids called Scratch. The part that took the longest was all the hand drawn lettering. There are Saul Bass homage fonts out there, but I wanted all the letters to be unique.

    A poster for Lost Highway in the style of the poster for Vertigo.
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  • Retro Movie Adventures: Eraserhead (1977)

    Mrs. X, Mary X, and Henry Spencer in Eraserhead.
    The tiny cooked chicken from Eraserhead, colored bright blue on a red and yellow background.

    This feels like a different movie every time I see it. I don’t mean “Golly, I just figured out a new interpretation”; I mean like they keep shooting other scenes and sneaking them into the film.

    Also: Alamo Drafthouse played a clip of Lynch before the film where he said that no one else interpreted the film the way he did, which means all non-Lynch interpretations are equally valid. Personally, I think it’s the origin of Pencilhead from Mystery Men.

    Doug Jones as Pencilhead in Mystery Men. His costume is yellow with white trunks and cardboard cylindrical hat.
    Doug Jones’ finest role. Way better than when he was Fishboy.

    I had a hard time finding a tangentially related poster to parody for this. The end result doesn’t look much like the original, and the original is hardly iconic. I’d be surprised if you can figure it out without looking at the alternate text.

    A poster for Eraserhead based VERY loosely on the poster for Eraser. You know, that Arnold Schwarzenegger movie. The one with Vanessa Williams? SO iconic.
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