Alaska Employment Law

For some reason I recently bought the “Gold Box” 10-DVD set of the complete Twin Peaks televised drama.  The box contains the complete 2-hour pilot, the complete international pilot (careful, the international pilot has spoilers, so wait until you watch the whole series), and all 29 episodes that were broadcast over seasons 1 and 2, after which the show was canceled (apparently for confusing people).

If you like David Lynch (Wild at Heart, Blue Velvet, etc.), if you like groundbreaking television, this certainly qualifies, and the first season is, for the most part, electric, spooky, and maddening in a way that television rarely is. Who killed Laura Palmer?  Well, deep into the second season, I now know, but the plot chugs along, dealing with a certain issue of paranormality that is unresolved. Beautifully filmed, with music that can only be called seductive (think of Chris Isaak’s song “Wicked Game,” which is in another Lynch film), Twin Peaks at its best draws you in to a very, very strange world.  Agent Cooper, a man who accepts everything, is hard to forget.  On the other hand, sometimes the show devolves into soap opera, melodrama, and even farce. But it generally manages to pick itself up and pull you back in once again.

I understand that Twin Peaks was canceled because audiences couldn’t understand it unless they had faithfully followed it from the beginning.  It simply does not try to keep newcomers informed, and there are many characters, and many, many subplots.  It’s a wonderful mess. I love it.

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I also picked up the DVD of Gone Baby Gone, starring Casey Affleck in a very Bostonian police procedural about a missing child.  Violent and so heavily accented (allegedly Dor-chestah and Southie accents) that it sometimes requires a translator, it’s a good movie.  Two problems: First: I read the book (which is by Dennis Lehane, the man who gave us Mystic River), and the two detectives, Patrick Kenzie and his paramour, Angie Gennaro, are not as they are portrayed in the movie.  Which is not to say that Casey Affleck’s Patrick is inauthentic; he’s just younger, and different.  Michelle Monaghan’s Angie is mostly decorative in the movie. The complex relationship between the two private eyes that Lehane develops over four novels (so if you read them, please READ THEM IN ORDER) is lost in the film.  Second: the plot works pretty well, but about 4/5 of the way through the film the director (Ben Affleck, by the way) stops showing and starts telling, which is generally a weakness in a film.  Ed Harris plays a great, hard-bitten Boston detective.  Morgan Freeman is less believable.  Amy Ryan, playing a despicable mother, won a nomination for Best Supporting Actress and should have won the award, I think.

Near the end is a shot with the new Boston Convention Center in the background; I kept looking for the building where I live, but didn’t find it.  I recommend Gone Baby Gone, but it’s not perfect.  I wouldn’t mind another Kenzie/Gennaro flick where Angie does more than look pretty, and Patrick shows a little more mileage.

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And in the music department, if you like early British Invasion music, early Who, early Kinks, that sort of thing, then you must go buy something by a new British band, the Len Price 3.  I think their new album is called Rentacrowd.  Go get it.