Todd: “I know. It’s confusing. Not the bimonthly that means twice a month, the bimonthly that means every other month, and each time it’s a different box of snacks.”
This post discusses the plot of Twin Peaks’ latest episode, “Part 16.”
Netflix has definitely had an off-season, as the recent cancellations of The Get Down, Girlboss, Sense8, Marco Polo, and Bloodline would indicate. Now Variety reports that Netflix will throw another failed log onto its blazing cancellation fire with the axing of Gypsy after a single 10-episode season.
Twin Peaks’ “The Return, Part 10” is a story about telling a story: what to include, what to leave out, and what gets covered over and over, by intent or accident. It’s also about how easy it is to get sidetracked by an attractive distraction.
It boggles the mind that prestige actors like Naomi Watts and Billy Crudup wound up in a project like Gypsy. Sure, Netflix has been on a prolific upswing lately, so it’s not hard to imagine the two receiving some sort of pitch akin to “psychological sexual domestic thriller, featuring Fifty Shades director Sam…
The most striking characteristic of the Twin Peaks revival is its patience. The series has always been more interested in creating mysteries for viewers to lose themselves in than in solving them for us. In the series’ return, co-creators and writers Mark Frost and David Lynch have let that patient, meditative…
Henry Carpenter (Jaeden Lieberher, the kid from Midnight Special) is a tween super-genius who lives with his little brother Peter (Jacob Tremblay, the kid from Room) and their mom, Susan (Naomi Watts), in a big house in the fictional small town of Calvary, New York. The Carpenters are independently wealthy thanks to…
Naomi Watts is one of the shining lights of the new season of Twin Peaks, finding unexpected dimensions within a trite suburbanite house-wife archetype and tirelessly innovating new ways to say the name “Dougie.” Seriously: At least 70 percent of her lines include her tearing into that stupid name, and killing it…
There are currently two Dale Coopers on Twin Peaks. One is a demon using Coop’s body as a lantern-jawed vessel for sowing chaos and misery in the mortal realm; the other is inching ever so slowly (as is the wont of new Peaks) toward consciousness and interpersonal interactions that go beyond toddler-like mimicry.
Naomi Watts, currently reuniting with David Lynch in Twin Peaks, has another TV project coming up. That would be the Netflix series Gypsy—not to be confused with the musical about Gypsy Rose Lee—the trailer for which is now here. It finds Watts playing a horribly unethical therapist, who gets overly involved in her…
This post discusses plot points from the third and fourth episodes of Showtime’s Twin Peaks revival.
In “The Return, Part 3,” exasperated as Lucy and Andy get sidetracked by seemingly irrelevant evidence, Hawk blurts out, “It’s not about the bunny!” After a beat, he second-guesses himself, asking “… is it about the bunny? No! It’s not about the bunny.” The conference room’s adorable doughnut disturb sign…
There really was a Rocky Balboa. Well, sort of. His name was Chuck Wepner, and when he wasn’t throwing punches in the ring, he sold liquor in New Jersey. In the mid-’70s, the “Bayonne Bleeder,” so nick-named for his habit of absorbing a lot of blows to the face, was at the right weight at the right time to score an…
The Weinstein Company has one of the largest and most accommodating shelves in the movie business, able to bear the weight of countless festival acquisitions and in-house productions for as long as Harvey and Bob need to gin up a marketing strategy, distribution money, or an 87-minute voice-over-heavy cut. But…
A thriller that takes a long time to get even remotely thrilling, Shut In spends much of its first half assembling elements that do, at least, inspire curiosity about just how they’ll combine to create havoc. A brief prologue sees clinical psychologist Mary Portman (Naomi Watts) bid farewell to her husband, who’s…
Someone needs to put a bell on Jacob Tremblay. The young actor, whose starring role in last year’s Room earned him widespread acclaim, apparently has a knack for taking parts where he gets lost, imperiled, or otherwise imprisoned, as revealed in the trailer for the upcoming psychological horror film Shut In. Taken in…
The screenplay for The Sea Of Trees, penned by Chris Sparling (Buried), is one of those narrative Rube Goldberg machines where everything falls into place in the unlikeliest, corniest, and worst possible way. Its protagonist is Arthur Brennan (Matthew McConaughey), a science adjunct who buys a one-way ticket to Japan…
Though she didn’t get cast as Lara Croft in the Tomb Raider reboot, The Force Awakens star Daisy Ridley is making up for it by signing on to play a similarly iconic character in Ophelia, a YA-friendly retelling of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The movie will be an adaptation of Lisa Klein’s 2006 book of the same name,…
You know what’s exhausting? Making a highly successful career toggling back and forth between artistically fulfilling and critically acclaimed independent cinema and wildly lucrative four-quadrant Hollywood blockbusters. God, even just typing it is such a drag. Perhaps that’s why Naomi Watts has chosen to pull back…
My World Of Flops is Nathan Rabin’s survey of books, television shows, musical releases, or other forms of entertainment that were financial flops, critical failures, or lack a substantial cult following.