Fin: 4th of July/Tokyo Drift edition

Remembering Rebekeh Del Rio, James Cameron’s Hiroshima, the AMC jalapeño conspiracy, a Scorpions movie, and more in this week’s notes column.

Happy 4th of July, everyone.

Sad news this week, of the passing of singer Rebekah Del Rio, at the too-young age of 57.

Del Rio will forever be immortalized in one of the best movie scenes of all time, the “Club Silencio” sequence in David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, in which she sang “Llorando,” a Spanish version of Roy Orbison’s “Crying.”

She remained part of the David Lynch orbit, later appearing in one of the roadhouse scenes on Twin Peaks: The Return, wearing a dress adorned with the Black Lodge floor pattern, featuring similar red curtains to the ones she sang in front of in Mulholland Drive.

She also appeared in Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales in 2006, performing perhaps the most ominous on-screen “Star-Spangled Banner” ever.

I got to see her sing in person, at the Philadelphia Film Center, in the spring of 2023, before a screening of the “Cannes Cut” of that film, although I felt bad that I’d been out of town when she’d done a similar gig, the year before, before a Mulholland Drive showing.

I have no idea if she would have cared about such things — I suspect not — but on the very day of her death, the New York Times named Mulholland Drive the #2 movie of all time.