Notable Film Links--September 26, 2008

---In honor of his memory, I've been rereading David Foster Wallace's essay from A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (1998) entitled "David Lynch Keeps His Head," which concerns Lost Highway. Wallace admitted that he was a "fanatical Lynch fan from way back," but I was surprised by his thoughts about Lynch's strong influence on Quentin Tarantino. You can read it in the papers section of The City Of Absurdity. As Wallace writes:

"The peculiar narrative tone of Tarantino's films – the thing that makes them seem at once strident and obscure, not-quite-clear in a haunting way – is Lynch's; Lynch invented this tone. It seems to me fair to say that the commercial Hollywood phenomenon that is Mr. Quentin Tarantino would not exist without David Lynch as a touchstone, a set of allusive codes and contexts in the viewer's midbrain."

--Writing for The New York Times, Jonathan Lethem weighs in on the "cognitively dissonant milkshake of rage, fear and, finally, absolving confusion" of The Dark Knight. Lethem claims that "In its narrative gaps, its false depths leading nowhere in particular, its bogus grief over stakeless destruction and faked death, The Dark Knight echoes a civil discourse strained to helplessness by panic, overreaction and cultivated grievance."

--Writing for Film School Rejects, Neil Miller suggests "The 10 Remaining Must See Movies of 2008."

--Both Out of the Past and Culturazzi discuss Metropolis (1927) and its influence on science fiction films.

--Writing for his 100-Page Super Spectacular, Dr. K finds that Michael Caine's Play Dirty (1968) is one of his favorite "nihilistic, morally ambiguous war movies."

--Confused about the banking situation in America today? Catherine Grant of Film Studies for Free explains how one can listen to BBC Radio 4 and watch the bank run scene of It's a Wonderful Life for guidance.

--Lastly, girish shares the first film book to "grab" him "by the lapels": James Monaco's The New Wave: Truffaut, Godard, Chabrol, Rohmer, Rivette (1976).