"Two Thumbs Down!" said the Siskel & Ebert review of Lost Highway (1997) by noted filmmaker and mindfucker David Lynch, and if ever there was a marketing tack to make me want to see a movie even more, foregrounding the negative reviews from America's Movie Tastemakers was it. After making the drive from Mt. Pleasant to Lansing to see it with my then-girlfriend, I overheard someone say "what the hell was THAT?" in the parking lot as we were leaving, a sentiment that my then-girlfriend echoed once we got into the car. But for me, that movie elicited a Lynch Lifetime Pass, a guarantee from me that whatever he did from that point on would be supported and celebrated and trumpeted, even if it didn't scale the lofty heights of Lost Highway.
In the singular queue of my Lifetime Passes, there are the Platinum members (Lynch, Bowie), and there are the Gold members, for whom I will give the latest project more than a passing glance. Among my current Gold members are Nicolas Winding Refn (for 2011's Drive) and Ed Brubaker, the multiple Eisner-award winning comics writer of Fatale (2012), Velvet (2013), The Fade Out (2014), and Kill or Be Killed (2016), so when it was announced that Refn and Brubaker were going to release a limited series for Amazon Prime called Too Old To Die Young, I was all over it. But while it was released in the summer of 2019 -- all ten "episodes" totaling around 13 hours -- I put it in my queue and let it sit, waiting patiently on deck while I watched other lesser things. It took over a year for me to finally dive in, and after finishing it yesterday, I'm bummed that there will be no more transmissions from that particular universe, no buzzing electronics from Cliff Martinez, no landscapes bathed in blue and red.
Of course, I'm strongly recommending TOTDY, but for the curious, here's some background material for you to consider first. Most of what follows is spoiler-heavy, but I want you to know what to expect, because this show is most certainly not for everyone:
And one of my favorite unexpected moments from a series full of them:
If you have even a cursory familiarity with the work of either Refn or Brubaker, it may be enough to know that TOTDY takes the Quaalude pacing and dazzling visuals of Refn and the murky lowlifes and terse dialogue of Brubaker and conjures an uncanny conglomerate of ultraviolence and fascism and masculinity that is entrancing, right down to the last long take. In the hands of lesser artists, TOTDY would have been shaved down to brutal banality easily dismissed and discarded, but it's easily -- EASILY, he said in all caps for emphasis -- the best televisual experience that Amazon Prime has given the world. And it's largely a secret, midnight whispers of depravity and family and the role of the feminine that will most likely cause both your thumbs to start pointing to the ground.
But if you like it, oh, do we have something to talk about.
TOTDY is available on Amazon Prime wherever Amazon is Primed.
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