Rushes | Remembering David Lynch, Golden Princess Goes West, HK Documentarian Jailed

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NEWS

Inland Empire (David Lynch, 2006).

• Former MoviePass CEO Ted Farnsworth pleaded guilty to defrauding the company’s investors by making “materially false and misleading representations” of the company’s operations. In the words of a Justice Department official, Farnsworth “concealed that MoviePass’s subscription model was a money-losing gimmick and falsely claimed that [the company] used artificial intelligence to monetize MoviePass’s subscriber data,” the latter tactic described as “AI washing.”
• Shout! Studios has acquired the worldwide rights to the Golden Princess movie library, a collection of 156 Hong Kong action cinema classics that have been unavailable in Western markets for decades. The collection includes John Woo classics like The Killer (1989), Bullet in the Head (1990), and Hard Boiled (1992), as well as Tsui Hark’s Peking Opera Blues (1986), Ringo Lam’s City on Fire (1987), Johnnie To’s The Big Heat (1988), and many more. In addition to home video and streaming releases, Shout! is planning theatrical runs for some titles.
• A Shanghai court sentenced Chinese director Chen Pinlin to three-and-a-half years in prison for “picking quarrels and provoking trouble” after he released a film about the 2022 "white paper" demonstrations against China's COVID restrictions, the largest protest in the country since the 1989 Tiananmen Square demonstrations. His 77-minute film, Urumqi Road, was uploaded to YouTube under a pseudonym in late 2023 and consists of footage filmed by Chen in Shanghai and clips that had been scrubbed from Chinese social media. Chen plans to appeal the sentence.
• Brady Corbet responded to social-media backlash about the use of AI to improve Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones’s Hungarian dialogue in The Brutalist (2024): “Adrien and Felicity’s performances are completely their own. … Innovative Respeecher technology was used in Hungarian language dialogue editing only, specifically to refine certain vowels and letters for accuracy.” The reaction to the use of performance-enhancing AI was spurred by an interview that editor Dávid Jancsó gave to video-tech publication Red Shark News.

REMEMBERING

Weather Report 5/17/20 (David Lynch, 2020).

• David Lynch has died at 78. The American filmmaker is known for such landmark works as Eraserhead (1977), Blue Velvet (1986), and Mulholland Drive (2001), as well as his singular television series, Twin Peaks (1990–91/2017). His name, like Franz Kafka’s, has become an adjective used to describe certain surreal conditions of modernity. He was also an accomplished painter, sculptor, and cartoonist. His extensive discography includes two studio albums, multiple soundtracks, and collaborative records, the latest of which, Cellophane Memories, recorded with Chrystabell, was released in August. For two and a half years, he delivered daily weather reports for the city of Los Angeles. His foundation promotes the teaching of Transcendental Mediation in schools. For his birthday on Monday, Laura Dern wrote Lynch “a love letter of fragments.” “I was willing to follow him anywhere,” remembers Kyle MacLachlan, “because joining him on the journey of discovery, searching and finding together, was the whole point. I stepped out into the unknown because I knew David was floating out there with me.”
• Joan Plowright is dead at 95. The British actress is best known for her numerous contributions to the theater, where she met her husband, Laurence Olivier, performing in such productions as The Entertainer (1957) and A Taste of Honey (1961), for which she won a Tony Award for Best Actress. She received a Golden Globe and an Oscar nomination for her performance in Mike Newell’s Enchanted April (1991). She also acted in such diverse films as Three Sisters (1970), Equus (1977), and Bringing Down the House (2003). On television, she won another Golden Globe for her performance as Nadezhda Alliluyeva in the HBO film Stalin (1992), directed by Ivan Passer. In 2004, she was made a Dame by Queen Elizabeth II.
• Jules Feiffer is dead at 95. The American author and cartoonist is best known for his satirical comics, which became nationally syndicated in 1959 and won him a Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning in 1986. He became a staff cartoonist at the Village Voice in 1956 and produced the weekly comic strip Feiffer until 1997. He was a playwright and screenwriter, and wrote such films like Mike Nichols’s Carnal Knowledge (1971), Alan Arkin’s Little Murders (1971, based on his own 1967 play), and Robert Altman’s Popeye (1980). He also wrote the story for the Oscar-winning short film Munro (1960), about a four-year-old boy accidentally drafted into the Army.

RECOMMENDED READING

Twin Peaks (David Lynch, 1990–91).

• “There is no such thing as the ultimate objective reality for any work of literature. Consequently, the intention of a film that tries to come to grips with literature cannot be the realization of the author’s world of images in some fixed and final consensus of separate and contrary fantasies.” e-flux republishes Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s notes on his approach to adapting Jean Genet’s Querelle of Brest (1947) for what would be his final film, Querelle (1982).
• “Social media, which allows scrollers to experience parts of a film as memes before they watch them unfold in a theater, may also prime people to find humor in scenes they wouldn’t have found funny otherwise, irritating some of the more serious film buffs in an audience.” For the New York Times, Marie Solis considers the supposed “laugh epidemic,” a term for cinema audiences laughing at seemingly inappropriate moments.
• “I began to learn about the ‘other world’ of Australian film, of ‘cinema literacy’ and the university-trained imagination, something of a mystery to me as a year 9 dropout from a brutal suburban all-male Tech school some years earlier.” For Senses of Cinema, John Hughes pays tribute to the Melbourne Cinémathèque and its surrounding community.
• “Well, I made my first movie in 1964, so that’s 60 years ago. I’ve been doing this a long time. And I always knew that marketing was important. I always had stills to advertise my movies, I always did the posters, and I always went out there to publicize it because we didn’t have money for advertising.” For PAPER, Ivan Guzman interviews filmmaker John Waters whose new clothing and merchandise collection, co-created with multidisciplinary artist Seth Bogart, is inspired by his films.

RECOMMENDED EVENTS

The Grandmother (David Lynch, 1970).

• New York, January 24: The Japan Society presents a rare 35mm screening of Shuji Terayama’s Pastoral: To Die in the Country (1974), based on Terayama’s autobiographical collection of tanka poetry, featuring a director struggling to complete a film about his own adolescence.
• New York, January 25 through27: Anthology Film Archives presents a retrospective of Jacob Burckhardt, with the filmmaker in attendance. It includes 16mm screenings of It Don’t Pay to Be an Honest Citizen (1985) and Landlord Blues (1988), as well as seven short documentaries screening for the first time.
• London, January 26 through 28: Close-Up Film Centre presents “The Short Films of David Lynch,” including key early works like The Alphabet (1968) and The Grandmother (1970).
• London, January 26: The Institute of Contemporary Arts presents a 35mm screening of Fruit Chan’s Made in Hong Kong (1997), about a triad debt collector who falls for a woman dying of kidney disease, released in the year of Hong Kong’s Handover.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

Lost Highway (David Lynch, 1997).

• For subscribers to his Substack, James N. Kienitz Wilkins presents Still Film (2023), in which he deploys a series of 35mm publicity stills and polyvocal narration to take Hollywood mythmaking to task.
• Music Box Films has released a trailer for Carson Lund’s Eephus (2025), set around the final game of an adult recreational baseball league on a field slated for redevelopment. Starring Keith William Richards and Wayne Diamond—memorable supporting players from Uncut Gems (2019)—alongside former big-leaguer Bill “Spaceman” Lee, the film comes to select US theaters March 7.

RECOMMENDED LISTENING

Blue Velvet (David Lynch, 1986).

• Bertrand Bonello’s 22-minute score for Aude Léa Rapin’s Planet B (2024) is available on Spotify.

RECENTLY ON NOTEBOOK

Eraserhead (David Lynch, 1977).

• “Nightshift opens a portal to a different temporal logic, organized both by the hotel’s shambling panoply of guests and by the waning energy of those who labor for them.” Elena Gorfinkel considers Robina Rose’s 1981 punk requiem, the first in a series of short essays about last year’s notable restorations.
• “We train our eyes on what can go wrong.” Durga Chew-Bose gives us three evocations of youth from the films of Elaine May, Lucrecia Martel, and Hou Hsiao-hsien—these and the following excerpted from issue 6 of Notebook magazine.
• “Now well into retirement age, boomers’ cultural power has again become a lightning rod for the shifting conventions of Hollywood genre cinema.” Christopher Holliday examines the industrial and psychological implications of de-aging technology.
• “I felt that something irreversible had happened: that there had been a moment in which I was still a person who had never watched a man die, and then, bam, another moment in the wake of it in which I had become somebody else.” Philippa Snow reflects on the adolescent desire to seek out graphic imagery, from early-’00s shock sites to the films of the New French Extremity.

WISH LIST

• Sticking Place Books has published Filmmakers Thinking by the Australian film critic Adrian Martin, with a foreword by Radu Jude.

EXTRAS

• The Starring the Computer database, which compiles images of various on-screen computers dating back to 1950, has been updated with the films of 2024.