Twin Peaks: The Missing Pieces

It's impossible to review this collection of clips (I cannot call it a feature movie) without looking back at Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me.

Although I liked TP:Fire Walk With me, I found it lacking in many departments, especially the pacing in the first "Blue Rose & Dale Copper" - prehistory part. Still, the latter part of the movie, about the last 48 hours of Laura's life remain, a chilling and upsetting depiction of a torchured young life. All of this made it for a very uneven film for me.

The Missing Pieces right this wrong. There are many insightful clips that extend the universe and the meanings behind all things Twin Peaks and even make some things in the third season of the TV series more clear.

So basically, if you've watched TP:FWWM and liked it you NEED to watch this. If you are confused with few bits and pieces from the third season of the TV show - you NEED to see this. If you have not watched Fire Walk With Me or you did not care about it, you can skip this - it will look like a whole bunch of nonsense to you. For me it made perfect sense and I enjoyed revisiting the world of Twin Peaks once more.

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me remains one of the major polarizing efforts that any American filmmaker has made in the past 30 years. That may sound like a bold statement, but for people who watched the television show Twin Peaks, whether it was during its initial run or years later (I was part or the latter), seeing how those two seasons came out - one very short at 8 episodes, another longer at 22) - and then going into the last gasp of TP for decades as Lynch's film (co- written by Peaks regular Robert Engels), was disappointing. It's not, as it stands today as a 134 minute film, a pleasant sit overall: it's weirder than the show, if you can believe that, more daring in its experimentations with light and sound and super- impositions and other parts of the grammar of cinema that Lynch has manipulated over time, and most of all it's darker and grimmer than the show. Or, that's not accurate entirely; what one should say really is that it lacks the *warmth* that the show had, the charm.

To be sure there are two different ways to look at it: Twin Peaks the show was about Laura Palmer post murder, and looked at the town as it had an innocence to it ("Not Laura Palmer, not *Her*, heavens!") and how, piece by piece and episode by episode, we got to see more of what was under the surface. This was not unlike in its way how Lynch operated in Blue Velvet, showing us what's under the hood of suburban society and out in the 'woods' of the surreal and dreamlike dimensions. By the last part of the 2nd season things were getting trippier and weirder and darker, but when a third season didn't happen (and when Kyle MacLaughlin, for the most part, wanted to move on to other things), to continue Lynch and his collaborators had to find another story to tell. Laura Paulmer's final seven days is less like the soap opera of the show and more of a Lifetime movie - the most dangerous, f***ed up Lifetime TV movie known to man/woman.

Which brings us to "The Missing Pieces", which is a treasure trove of deleted scenes from Fire Walk With Me, or some extended bits, that give more than a simple 'what if' of what the movie could have been. It gives another cinematic experience for fans of Twin Peaks, to get more of the characters we love while also learning more about characters who, frankly, got the shaft in the feature. Philip Jeffries is one such guy (the now late David Bowie), and seeing his full scene, plus set up at a hotel, with the FBI agents suddenly makes his appearance less of the WTF walking-in-from-another-movie that happened in the original movie. People like Josie Packard, Bobby's parents, Andy and Lucy, Big Ed, Jack Nance, they get to be seen here, and it suddenly occurs to one watching this what might have been had Lynch simply gone back and done "Redux" version ala Coppola with Apocalypse Now.

Not every one of the newly found scenes is perfect, and some of the pacing may be off. I'd even say that one or two moments, like the extended bit showing the characters going from the one bar to the "Pink Room" club was more succinctly cut in the feature film. But a nagging issue that I'm sure those who may even like the film, that certain scenes feel shortened or lack context (yes, even for a nightmarish Lynch trip into teenage horror and incest), gets cleared up with scenes here, and other people like Grace Zabriskie (Sarah Palmer) get fleshed out relationships (she even gets to *smile* who knew that was a thing!) So you can watch this separately, as its own sort of stream-of-consciousness 'film', or imagine it with the rest of the feature, and suddenly it becomes better, stronger, more humane. Or, if you already love FWWMe as it is, these extra scenes are the equivalent of extra whipped cream on your sundae of despair.

The Missing Pieces is a collection of never-before-seen scenes from Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, the divisive prequel to the television series Twin Peaks. This feature length edit, put together by David Lynch himself, is almost like a second Twin Peaks movie. It is a chance to get some new scenes with beloved characters from the show, starts to explain some of what David Lynch was going for with the movie, and even has some scenes taking place after the end of the TV show. I actually enjoyed it more than the film it was cut from.

First of all are the additional scenes of the investigation at the start of Fire Walk With Me. These are mostly a curiosity item, a lot of them being no more than extended scenes. There is a pretty good fight scene in there. The most interesting part of this first 30 minutes is the scene with David Bowie's Agent Phillip Jeffries. In the movie, this came out of nowhere and went nowhere. You couldn't even hear what was going on half of the time due to the editing. Here, we can see a clean version of the scene, and it begins to explain some things. It's still a big mystery, but there are some new pieces.

Then we get to the main event. The Twin Peaks staples. There are lovely scenes with Norma and Ed, Bobby's parents, and a hilarious one with Josie, Pete, and an Old Man. That scene felt most like one from the show.

One of the main problems with the movie is that it shows us nothing but the dark, abusive side of the Palmer family, meaning we don't really get a chance to invest in the characters, so we don't care when devastating things happen to them. That's why the initial dinner scene from this edit is the most crucial scene that should have stayed in the movie. It shows us the Palmer family as a quirky yet functional and happy family, masking some darkness underneath. If they had kept this scene in the movie, it would have humanized them, meaning it actually means something when we see them dehumanized throughout the movie.

At the end, we see a scene with Annie from after the end of the show and an extended version of the show's final scene. Neither scene solves the massive cliffhanger the series was left on ("How's Annie?"), but they make it more intricate, tying in aspects from the movie plot.

In the end, this is a must see for Twin Peaks fans, even ones who didn't enjoy the movie. It provides new scenes in the style of the show, illuminates the thinking behind some of the movie's odd choices, and even provides more information about the massive cliffhanger from the end of the show.

In a way it seems wrong to review Missing Pieces as a movie, since it's really just a more elaborate than usual DVD extras video.

It's been years since I saw Fire Walk with Me (which, against popular and critical opinion of the time, I loved), so often I can't put these scenes in a real context within the film. Still, it's interesting to see more of Laura's life, and it's unfortunate these scenes were cut.

Other scenes, on the other hand, aren't really worth much, particularly an endless fight scene near the beginning (the first half hour of Missing Pieces is pretty missable).

Some scenes were basically for fans of characters I never cared about. There were plot threads of Twin Peaks I was never much interested in, like the saw mill, and I'm fine with the movie not doing a shout out to every character.

Releasing these scenes is a nice present to Twin Peaks fans, but it would have been better to simply release the original cut, which was over three hours. Noble amateurs have apparently cut Missing Pieces into the original movie, bless them, but they shouldn't have had to.

If you liked the movie and want to see some more of Sheryl Lee's amazing performance and of the general wackiness, check it out. For that it's quite good.

This is not a movie, but a collection of scenes deleted from "Fire walk With Me". Standing alone, this movie is nonsense and extremely boring. I know that because I accidentally watched it before "Fire walk With Me". But once seen right after TV series and "Fire walk With Me", this addition gets a completely new shape and while watching it I enjoyed more than I enjoyed the movie itself. Those deleted scenes are more like the original TV show than the movie and I think that cutting them out was a terrible mistake. I suppose they did it to cut the movie to a reasonable length, because all together lasts almost four hours, but with these scenes included all objections to the movie disappear. With these scenes in it, the movie would have the same charm and atmosphere we loved in the TV show and most of the characters movie is missing appear here. Besides that, in several spots during the movie, we have sudden switches where it is obvious that something is missing. Well, these deleted scenes are missing. They deleted scenes without ironing the edges in places they were cut out. I saw somewhere that fans asked Lynch to make an extended version of the movie in which he would join "Fire walk With Me" and "Missing Pieces" into one harmonious piece of art, but he refused to do it. So some extreme fan did it on his own. You can find the extended fan version of the movie that lasts 3,5 hours. They did not include every single deleted scene in it, because the goal was to make harmonious result, not to put everything back at any cost. I have to find and see it one of these days, but it was too much for me to do it right after watching the whole series and movie in just a few days period. Maybe in a few years, when the time comes to refresh my memory. If anyone already saw it, I would like to hear your impressions. All in all, this is must watch for every "Twin Peaks" fan, because it fills many holes in the story and opens some new points of view.

8/10