Reservoir Dogs (dir. Quentin Tarantino) [130 points / 20 votes]
Second place:
Unforgiven (dir. Clint Eastwood) [132 points / 20 votes]
And the winner is...
Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (dir. David Lynch) [133 points / 19 votes]
"Through the darkness of future past
the magician longs to see
one chants out between two worlds...
FIRE WALK WITH ME"
the magician longs to see
one chants out between two worlds...
FIRE WALK WITH ME"
"Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me winning a 'Best Film of 1992' award for 2017 seems as inevitable now as it would have been unlikely then. With Showtime’s acclaimed resurrection of the series vibing more of a Fire Walk With Me: Part II mood than a Twin Peaks: Season 3 one, Lynch’s complicating prequel has never felt more thrilling, relevant and essential. Transforming Laura Palmer from corpse to being Fire Walk With Me problematized the Dead Girl trope the series had been (justly) accused of popularizing. Seeing her in life, Laura shifts from a passive victim to an active agent, one who investigates and solves the mystery of BOB, successfully saves a woman in trouble (distracting death like the knight in The Seventh Seal to ensure Ronette Pulaski lives) and makes a choice her father was either too weak or corrupt to make, to die as herself rather than live as another.
"As stylistically experimental, tonally ambitious, and thematically dense as Fire Walk With Me is, Lynch manages to bring an emotional economy to its storytelling. When we are introduced to Laura as a living teenager, we see her first alone, walking to meet her friend, Donna. The two begin their habitual hike to high school and are briefly interrupted by their overly performative boyfriends, Mike and Bobby. The two make it to school where Laura splits from Donna for a brief encounter her secret love, James, who she slips away from to be alone, again, in the bathroom for a bump of cocaine. In about two minutes of screentime, Lynch offers at least five facets of Laura Palmer. That these altered states hold together is a testament, of course, to Sheryl Lee’s formidable performance.
"Written by two men - Lynch and series writer Robert Engles - Fire Walk With Me is indebted to the preceding works of two female authors. In Agnes Varda’s 1985 Vagabond, the life of a woman found frozen to death, is revealed to be more complex and delicate than the fractured memories of those who thought they knew her suggests. Had Laura’s dharma been the road, her life may have been similar to Vagabond’s peripatetic pauper, Mona.
"Also fueling Fire Walk With Me is Jennifer Lynch’s The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer, a book commissioned by her father between seasons one and two. Jennifer pulled together the disparate pieces of Laura’s persona from Season One into a cohesive character, and many of her storylines and insights found their way into the film’s screenplay. Bobby killing a drug dealer in self-defense, Donna joining Laura in a night-time is my-time sexual encounter with older strangers, and the core concept of Laura holding absolute agency of each of her disparate personas so that her actions are always her own. By diving headfirst into hedonism, enjoying it to control it, Laura resists becoming a passive host for evil, like her father, or allowing her spirit to be bifurcated into a doppelganger, like Cooper. As the Log Lady says, 'Laura is the one.' And, in a world full of doubles, she would remain as one.
"At least, until we saw her again 25 years later." ~ Kevin Cecil
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