He also knows (or knew, at least) how to deploy a good old-fashioned thriller technique like a fisheye lens or stop-printing, and when he's on top of his game he has Spielberg-level control over his special effects.

I mean…

They can't just sail away on a boat, Jack Black has to bribe the captain to set sail right because the police are on their way to the dock! Naomi Watts isn't just a struggling performer in the Depression, she's a (literally) starving artist and an orphan and an ingenue who's contemplating a career in burlesque and…

Have you visited rural America recently? What they lack in magic they more than make up in sheer volume (though definitely not aesthetic quality).

To his credit, there was actually a music festival.

When Skull Island came out I went and picked up a copy of the Peter Jackson King Kong, which I remember liking in theaters.

I mean, it absolutely tells the speaker "I don't care for you or anything you have to say." If that isn't your explicit intention it's a super shitty thing to do.

Context matters for politesse. If you invite Mike Pence to your house for dinner, you'd damn well better treat him respectfully. If your university invites the Vice President of the United States to speak at your graduation, you owe him absolutely nothing - there are too many layers of power for rudeness to be a…

I recall having a good, proper "session" at my friend's apartment the night before I graduated. I also remember this friend getting all riled up about her distaste for Michel Foucault.

Yeah, the only thing I remember about my graduation is that I was a little hung over, and by pure luck I ran into some friends outside the auditorium and got to sit by them. It was open seating, organized only by college, for a graduating class of thousands. The top handful of students in each college sat in a…

It's less about hurting anyone and more about expressing dissent. Of course, this kind of gesture is purely symbolic - it's not like they aren't going graduate from college, they just won't have to sit through a speech by a person they dislike. But symbolic gestures still have meaning when the alternative is…

Reportedly he left out some characters from the old series (like Piper Laurie) because they didn't make sense in the new series, so hopefully this is all going somewhere.

Especially not on their fucking telephone!

The movie's reputation has really climbed as it moved out of the shadow of the series. It's much more "unfiltered Lynch" than the series, and in retrospect it really has more in common with Lost Highway, Mulholland Dr, and Inland Empire than with, say, the Twin Peaks pilot movie.

It's fair to say that he doesn't mind filming gorgeous women with their boobs out. As with many things, he's just better at it than most directors.

I saw Lost Highway as a teenager, before I knew who Richard Pryor was, so his appearance didn't mean anything to me. Then I saw it again recently, and holy shit. Gut-wrenching discomfort is Lynch's forte, but a barely verbal Richard Pryor at the end of his life is a whole different level.

Just FYI, there are several returning characters, but a lot of the plot/characters are brand-new. If the whole thing is confusing that's partly by intention - the best parts of Twin Peaks are incredibly confusing.

It took my wife and I a minute to recognize him, and then she blurted out, "Wait, is that Matthew fucking Lillard?"

His books can be fun, with the caveats that his prose is awkward and he really has trouble with endings. Congo is about two thirds of a really good adventure novel with an ending that just kind of farts itself out.

Publication is an act of sheer will!