David Lynch's "Inland Empire"

Or Lost Highway or Blue Velvet, I mean come on David's always been prone to certain amount of repetitiveness.

Hahaha.

I don't mind, either way

(U.S.-France-Poland)

A StudioCanal (France) presentation of an Inland Empire Prods. (U.S.) production, in association with Camerimage 2 (Poland)/Asymmetrical Prods. (U.S.). (International sales: StudioCanal, Paris.) Produced by Mary Sweeney, David Lynch. Executive producer (Poland), Marek Zydowicz. Co-producers, Laura Dern, Jeremy Alter. Directed, written, edited by David Lynch.

Nikki/Sue - Laura Dern
Kingsley - Jeremy Irons
Freddie - Harry Dean Stanton
Devon/Billy - Justin Theroux

By JAY WEISSBERG

Laura Dern plays an actress in David Lynch's 'Inland Empire.'

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Nobody loves a mystery more than David Lynch, but the king of the unexpected is awfully predictable in what he doesn't do: He doesn't give answers, he doesn't solve anything and he doesn't try to make sense. "Inland Empire" may mesmerize those for whom the helmer can do no wrong, but the unconvinced and the occasional admirer will find it dull as dishwater and equally murky. Almost held together by Laura Dern's intense performance, the three hours pass slowly by on unattractive digital. Despite frisky international sales, even arthouses may find it difficult to keep auds in seats.
Lynch always resists attempts at interpretation; here, he defies any kind of narrative description as well. Two and a half years in the making, this is seat-of-the-pants filmmaking at its most baffling. There was never a complete script, so thesps turned up each day with a new set of lines and no idea where they were going, making Dern's central turn even more remarkable for its coherence.

Dern plays Nikki, an actress offered a role in a film directed by Kingsley (Jeremy Irons). Co-star Devon (Justin Theroux) is warned to keep things professional, since Nikki's husband (Peter J. Lucas) is fiercely possessive.

Nikki's playing Sue, Devon is Billy, and the two characters are about to launch into an affair. Early in the shoot they learn the script, based on a Polish gypsy folktale, is a remake of a movie that never got finished because the original protags were murdered.

Inevitably Nikki and Devon wind up in bed together, but, during their lovemaking, she starts calling him Billy and he starts calling her Sue. They realize they're mixing lines from the movie into their own lives.

From here on Dern's character fragments, passing through realities in a state of barely concealed terror where everyone is menacing and it becomes impossible to tell whether she's Nikki, Nikki playing Sue, or Sue herself.

But that's the easy part. There are the Poles, who are possibly the first version of the movie's story. There's Grace Zabriskie as a menacing neighbor. There's Julia Ormond's character, first seen with a screwdriver in her gut and later cropping up as Billy's wife. And, of course, there are the giant rabbits on a stage -- two on a sofa, a third ironing (voiced by Naomi Watts, Laura Harring and Scott Coffey).

It could be that these (brown) rabbits are reminders of the White Rabbit in "Alice in Wonderland," taking Alice down the hole into bizarre lands. With the strange and terrifying occurrences, the low ceilings and the non sequiturs, there's more than a whiff of a threatening Wonderland. But since the rabbits first appeared in shorts on Lynch's Web site, it may be that he simply likes the image of people dressed in rabbit outfits.

A possible explanation for Nikki's switch to Sue and back could come from Lynch's deep-seated interest in transcendental meditation and the concomitant belief in reincarnation, making the shifts a kind of transference between lives. But since Lynch believes all things are ultimately connected, and he himself didn't know what he was going to add, there may be no true explanation.

Who knows, maybe the reason a group of prostitutes start singing "The Locomotion" is because Lynch heard it on the radio the day before. Does it belong? Does it matter, since everything belongs?

The usual Lynch trademarks -- intense close-ups, monumental headshots, red curtains -- are all here, but noticeably missing are the deep, rich colors and sharp images. Instead, they're replaced by murky, shadowy DV, which may give him more freedom but robs the pic of any visual pleasure.

Lynch's own experiments with music lead to repetitious spooky sounds and tension-filled noises, repeated so often in dark corridors that they, too, fail to enhance a mood already gone awry.

Camera (color/B&W, DV), Odd-Geir Saether; art director, Christine Wilson; art director (Poland), Wojciech Wolniak; costume designers, Heidi Birens, Karen Baird; sound (Dolby Digital), Lynch; associate producers, Sabrina S. Sutherland, Erik Crary, Jay Aaseng. Reviewed at Venice Film Festival (non-competing), Sept. 6, 2006. Running time: 179 MIN.

With: Terryn Westbrook, Julia Ormond, Peter J. Lucas, Grace Zabriskie, Ian Abercrombie, Diane Ladd, William H. Macy, Karolina Gruszka, Krzysztof Majchrzak, Mary Steenburgen, Nastassja Kinski, Laura Harring.
Voices: Naomi Watts, Scott Coffey.
(English, Polish dialogue)

Inland Empire
James Christopher at the Venice Film Festival

EVEN by David Lynch’s weird standards his latest thriller is an exasperating stretch. For three chilly hours we shadow a small cast of artists and prostitutes as their identities are deliberately blurred in one of the most impenetrable films ever made.

The character played by Jeremy Irons is trying to shoot a psychological drama about love and terror in some sort of crazy labyrinth but there’s something deeply wrong with his script.

The last pair of actors he hired to play the lead roles ended up being gored to death with a rusty screwdriver. He is suitably apologetic about this bizarre mishap. But the omens are not exactly promising for the new replacements, Laura Dern and Justin Theroux.

It appears that the film script has a Machiavellian life of its own. An increasingly hysterical Dern is pursued from one fraught scene to the next by a queue of assorted creeps. Shot for the most part on digital video, Inland Empire is a medley of deliberately blurred faces and grainy handheld action.

Some of the scene-setting is technically quite brilliant with actors in character watching themselves on screen playing other mysterious roles. The sense of being trapped and devoured by your own film creates an atmosphere of claustrophobia.

But the story is hopelessly lost in surreal mazes and pointless dead ends. There’s no telling where doors will lead. One opens inexplicably into a Russian village; another on to the seedier end of Hollywood Boulevard, where streetwalkers ply their trade.

Dern is no stranger to Lynch’s bizarre universe. She starred in Blue Velvet (1986) and Wild at Heart (1990). Yet her bedraggled performance is swamped by Lynch’s impulsive tangents. The only consistent element is a string of heart-stopping fright moments that reach out and rudely clobber us with ear-splitting shrieks.

Few directors can touch Lynch when it comes to experimenting with form. The best example here is a spooky family of giant grown-up rabbits played by stage actors who deliver non sequiturs to an empty theatre auditorium. The absurdity is deeply unsettling. But so is the wilful refusal to explain a single motive or frame. “I don’t know why people expect art to make sense when they accept the fact that life does not make sense,” wrote Lynch by way of introduction to his latest film.

Surely, if the director himself doesn’t have a clue, what hope for his baffled fans?

Out of all the movies I saw for the first time last summer, Lost Highway was definitely my favorite.

finally, the truth about Rancho Cucamonga can be told

Are you Alan Titchmarsh?

Naturally the Times review is the kind of review which, when I read it on the bus this morning, made me want to see the film right there and then.

Yes, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me was unfortunate, and Lost Highway a bit of a shaggy dog parlour game, but Mulholland Dr left me in total awe; when Lynch is great, he's the greatest. So of course I'll go and see it, as I always do with his work.

needless to say - WICKED PSYCHED!

Maybe change thread title to Inland Empire...

I am a Film Society member, and get an advance order form.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle was published in 3 parts from 92-95. Prior to 92, the only relevant Lynch films were Eraserhead, The Elephant Man, Dune, Blue Velvet and Wild At Heart. Twin Peaks was not exported to Japan until 1993.

I'm not saying that Murakami does not have any obvious influences, I just think a Lynch influence on WUBC is pretty far-fetched.

although stephen chow would obv do a bang up job as well.

EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW

*excited*

http://www.demonoid.com/files/details/424940/805059

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0347840

Tony Takitani ]

ah, BUT...he was living in the u.s. while writing wind-up bird:

I was here from 1991 to 1995, which was when I was writing this book.

he mentions lynch later in that interview, and i've seen several other interviews where he does the same. which doesn't mean that x particular element in y particular book came from lynch, but they certainly have a shared sensibility.

re: inland island: i know the rabbits are going to freak me out. am mostly worried about the digital video b/c one of the things i love so much about lynch is the lushness he gets with real film. i just wonder if DV will fit.

As well as Industrial Symphony #1: Theme of the Broken Hearted.

http://static.flickr.com/27/39509889_458d902ea4.jpg

His last line in this profile nails why I often don't care for DVD commentaries.

David Lynch Returns: Expect Moody Conditions, With Surreal Gusts
By DENNIS LIM

LOS ANGELES

TO hear him tell it, David Lynch has spent the last five years killing the thing he loves, for fear that it will kill him first.

“The sky’s the limit with digital,” he said in a recent conversation, his voice approaching foghorn pitch. “Film is like a dinosaur in a tar pit. People might be sick to hear that because they love film, just like they loved magnetic tape. And I love film. I love it!”

He contorted his face into an expression that suggested pain more than love. “It’s so beautiful,” he said. But “I would die if I had to work like that again.”

Not one for understatement or half measures, Mr. Lynch takes a giant leap into the post-celluloid future with the three-hour “Inland Empire,” his first feature since “Mulholland Drive” in 2001, his 10th overall and the first to be shot on the humble medium of digital video. The movie had its premiere last month at the Venice Film Festival, where Mr. Lynch, who turned 60 in January, was awarded a Golden Lion for career achievement. It will have its first North American showings at the New York Film Festival on Oct. 8 and 9.

On this clear Los Angeles morning, his first at home after three weeks in Europe, Mr. Lynch was knocking back a huge cappuccino in his favorite corner of his painting studio, a scatter of stale cigarette butts on the cement floor around his Aeron chair.

“It’s actually cleaner that I thought it would be,” he said, looking around. The sunlit atelier is perched atop one of the three sleek concrete structures that make up his compound in the Hollywood Hills. He lives in one building; another is the office of his production company, Asymmetrical. This one, the hub of creative activity, served first as a location for his 1997 film “Lost Highway” and was later converted into a production facility with a recording and editing studio and a screening room. (Mr. Lynch’s chair, off limits to anyone else, can be identified by the sizable ashtray on the armrest.)

The moods and objects throughout inevitably bring to mind that most resonant of eponymous adjectives: Lynchian. Corridors and stairwells are minimally lighted. One room has the signature red curtains. Propped against one wall is an Abstract Expressionist canvas by Mr. Lynch, a brown expanse with a violent splotch of blue and the inscription “Bob loves Sally until she is blue in the face.” A photograph of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the Transcendental Meditation guru, sits on a conference table, sunlight illuminating a single cobweb that hangs from its gold frame.

Lately Mr. Lynch has emerged as a keen proponent of Transcendental Meditation, which he said he has practiced twice a day since 1973 without missing a session. Last year he established the David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness-Based Education and World Peace with the goal of raising $7 billion to create “universities of peace.” He also went on a campus tour, promoting the benefits of “diving within” with the help of a meditating assistant hooked up to an electroencephalograph.

His other consuming passion of recent years has been the Internet. Mr. Lynch grasped the potential of streaming media earlier and took to it with greater enthusiasm than filmmakers half his age. His sprawling Web site, davidlynch.com, begun in 2001, carries merchandise (mugs, photos, alarming ring tones) and subscriber-only content (original music, experimental vignettes, the animated series “Dumbland”). On the home page he delivers the daily weather report for Los Angeles direct to Webcam.

As it turns out, some of Mr. Lynch’s online experiments found their way into “Inland Empire,” which, despite his claims for the speed of direct video, took three years to make. It was shot in fits and starts and, for the longest time, on his own dime and without a unifying vision. At the outset, “I never saw any whole, W-H-O-L-E,” he said. “I saw plenty of holes, H-O-L-E-S. But I didn’t really worry. I would get an idea for a scene and shoot it, get another idea and shoot that. I didn’t know how they would relate.”

Only after the project was well under way did he contact the French studio Canal Plus, which financed the transformation of “Mulholland Drive” from a rejected television pilot into a feature film. Canal Plus signed on to “Inland Empire” even though, Mr. Lynch said, “I told them two things: ‘I don’t know what I’m doing, and I’m shooting on D.V.’ ”

Eventually the grand design revealed itself. In interviews Mr. Lynch has repeatedly advanced a poetic, democratic notion of ideas as independent of the artist, waiting to be plucked from the ether, or, in his preferred analogy, reeled in: he’s working on a book about the creative process titled “Catching the Big Fish.” With “Mulholland Drive,” he said the eureka moment came while he was meditating. With “Eraserhead,” his indelible debut in 1977, inspiration came while reading the Bible. (He declined to specify the passage.) There was no equivalent lightning bolt on “Inland Empire,” but in due course “something started to talk to me,” he said. “It was as if it was talking to me all along but I didn’t know it.”

A thoroughly instinctual filmmaker, Mr. Lynch could never be accused of overthinking things. Or of overtalking them. In discussions of his work he reverts to affable stonewalling tactics, deflecting detailed or analytical probes with a knowing vagueness.

The vertiginous “Inland Empire” is sure to provoke questions about meaning, literal and metaphoric. Still without a United States distributor, this may be his most avant-garde offering since “Eraserhead.” In tone and structure the film resembles the cosmic free fall of the mind-warping final act in “Mulholland Drive.”

“Inland Empire” refers on one level to the landlocked region east of Los Angeles but also evokes the vast, murky kingdom of the unconscious. Like “Lost Highway” and “Mulholland Drive,” the new movie is hard-wired into its protagonist’s disintegrating psyche, a condition that somehow prompts convulsive dislocations in time and space.

Laura Dern, who worked with Mr. Lynch on “Blue Velvet” and “Wild at Heart,” plays an actress who lands a coveted role, only to learn that the movie, a remake, may be cursed: the original was aborted when both leads were murdered. Actor becomes character. Fiction infects reality. The various narrative strands — plagued by déjà vu, doppelgängers and the menacing ambient drone of Mr. Lynch’s sound design — start to unravel. Shuttling between California and Poland, the movie folds in a Baltic radio play, a Greek chorus of skimpily dressed young women and a ghostly sitcom featuring a rabbit-headed cast and an arbitrary laugh track.

Asked to elaborate on some of the film’s themes, Mr. Lynch was illuminating, if not always in expected ways. On his apparent conception of the self as fragmentary, he said: “The big self is mondo stable. But the small self — we’re blowing about like dry leaves in the wind.” Regarding the essential elusiveness of time, he declared, “It’s going backward and forward, and it’s slippery.”

He brought up wormholes, invoked the theories of the quantum physicist (and fellow meditator) John Hagelin and recounted a moment of déjà vu that overcame him while making “The Elephant Man.” “There was a feeling of a past thing and it’s holding, and the next instant I slipped forward” — he made a sound somewhere between a slurp and a whoosh — “and I see this future.”

A nightmare vision of the dream factory, “Inland Empire” belongs to the lineage of Hollywood bloody valentines that runs from “Sunset Boulevard” to “Mulholland Drive.” In one scene a character, stabbed in the gut with a screwdriver, runs down Hollywood Boulevard, leaving a gory trail on the Walk of Fame. Like “Mulholland Drive,” the film is at once a tribute to actors, especially those chewed up and spit out by the industry, and a study of the metaphysics of their craft.

Acting, Mr. Lynch suggests, is a kind of out-of-body experience. Like Naomi Watts in “Mulholland,” Ms. Dern summons an almost frightening intensity in a performance that requires her to inhabit three (if not more) overlapping parts, lapsing in and out of a Southern drawl.

“I thought of it as playing a broken or dismantled person, with these other people leaking out of her brain,” Ms. Dern said in a telephone interview. She said she held as a mental touchstone Catherine Deneuve’s portrait of psychosis in Roman Polanski’s “Repulsion” and noted that the stop-start shoot had its advantages: “It’s unbelievably freeing. You’re not sure where you’re going or even where you’ve come from. You can only be in the moment.”

One of the pluses of video was that the moment could be extended. Despite the overall lack of continuity, the lightweight camera and longer takes allowed for more freedom in individual scenes. “When you don’t have to stop and spend two hours relighting, you’re just able to boogie together,” Mr. Lynch said.

The genesis of “Inland Empire” was a 14-page monologue he wrote for Ms. Dern. They shot it once, in a 70-minute take, on a set built in his painting studio. The scene is carved up and strewn throughout the film but remains its dark heart.

Watching “Inland Empire,” which makes little attempt to temper the harshness of video, it’s hard not to miss the tactile richness of Mr. Lynch’s celluloid images. Instead of a state-of-the-art high-definition camera, he used the Sony PD-150, a common midrange model.

“Everybody says, ‘But the quality, David, it’s not so good,’ and that’s true,” Mr. Lynch said. “But it’s a different quality. It reminds me of early 35-millimeter film. You see different things. It talks to you differently.”

Mary Sweeney, Mr. Lynch’s longtime producer (and ex-wife), called the new film a return to the obsessive experimentation of “Eraserhead,” which he also shot piecemeal over several years. “David got very excited about the ways the new technology could liberate him,” she said. “I think it took him back to a pure and fearless way of working.”

Mr. Lynch also stressed the importance of fearlessness. “Fear is like a tourniquet on the big tube of creative flow,” he said. And thanks to meditation, “negative things decrease,” he added. “You get more ideas. You catch them at a deeper level.”

The dissonance between this upbeat philosophy and the abysmal terror of his films is not lost on him. “You can understand depression much more when you’re not depressed,” he said. “You go to this ocean of knowingness. That’s what you use.”

His body of work may be, short of Hitchcock’s, the most psychoanalyzed in film history, but Mr. Lynch once forswore psychotherapy, fearing it might inhibit his creativity. Most things, as he sees it, are best left uninterrogated.

“As soon as you put things in words, no one ever sees the film the same way,” he said at one point, when the line of questioning turned too specific. “And that’s what I hate, you know. Talking — it’s real dangerous.”

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

(xpost)

If anyone spots Nastassja Kinski in it, let me know.

No original score, but lots of Penderecki, and Beck and "The Locomotion" pop up.

(that should be the only blurb on the poster)

Laura Dern and Lynch did Q&A, and when she described the DV shooting-all-the-time method as leading to "instinctual" acting, he interrupted her with "Intuitive! Instinctual is I'm hungry, I gotta go eat."

http://www.movieweb.com/news/44/15044.php

http://blogs.indiewire.com/anthony/archives/011650.html

Lynch is like the Hollywood Obi Wan Kenobi now... "stay out of trouble. see ya!"

http://ilx.thehold.net/thread.php?msgid=21063

If you need a literal "interpretation," chaki's works as well as any.

Is IE just crawling across the continent city by city?

http://www.musicboxtheatre.com/inlandempire.html

DVD in June.

http://www.inlandempirecinema.com

http://hellonfriscobay.blogspot.com/

Our first chance comes January 19th when Lynch is set to appear at the Rafael Film Center, which started distributing its new calendar last week. The film will open there for an engagement of an unspecified length on February 9th.

plot wise my theory is: that polish chick is stuck in purgatory cuz her movie was never finished and she died cuz she got preggy from some trick (or the other actor?) and her husband kicked the shit out of her or she killed herself with a screwdriver giving herself an abortion and laura dern like 50 years later or whatever finishes the movie or something and the crying polish chick watches the finally completed movie and is sent on her path to heaven or happiness or whatever during that emotional scene where they kiss or i dunno.

keep in mind i saw this movie twice. once on shrooms months ago and once sober last weekend so i dunno i might be wrong. someone help me. i still dont know that the fuck "hes good with animals" thing means.

Hello, did anyone ever answer this for you? There are several threads going on about the film--she's in the very last bit, the same scene Laura Harring shows up in aka the credits. It is completely, 100% "if you blinked you missed her," she's sitting off to the side of Laura Dern. If she shows up elsewhere in the film, I missed it though.

The Q&A in Silver Spring wasn't much cop--Lynch was great, very interesting and funny but it was hosted by one of the most awful people in the entire DC metro area and he got questions that boiled down to "Actresses are pretty huh?"

1. How did you shoot a movie using digital? Did you point the camera at the actors or what?

2. I like Polish composers too. Why do YOU like Polish composers?

3. How did you make this color digital motion picture? Was a camera involved? Perhaps more than one?

4. Do you like girls circle one yes no maybe

5. Was this film made using the Sony Pl508JSXminiDVcamcamcorder-corder? Should I buy one to make my thesis? Tell me about the features and the specifications, especially battery life.

6. Did you lie about your answer to number 4 circle one no yes sorta

7. Dude I want to have your babies, so what's it like, working in digital?

xpost please do not make it sound like there were that many technical questions, #7 did not actually ask Lynch a question at all and actually said "I just wanted to tell you I love you" or something to that effect. And it was the last question too! They cut off everyone else! If I was in line, I would've killed that little 14 year old fucker.

The more I am away from it the more I like it! There are a lot of loose ends and things that make very little sense to it but I like the core of it.

-- TOMB07 (tombo...), Today 1:53 PM. (TOMBOT) (later) (link)

i thought that meant the next bit with the screwdriver.

As for the Lost Girl, I guess being stuck watching TV in an attic is the perfect definition of Purgatory. I don't quite understand why her liberation is the joy of being reunited with her/Nikki's husband, who in all his previous guises has been a scary bastard.

anyway, need to see this again.

one of the two guys sitting next to me to his friend, both of whom left about an hour and a half into the movie: "this is the worst fucking movie i've ever seen, screw this shit..."

also: bjork and matthew barney were in attendance!

also, i completely forgot that william h. macy has a ten-second cameo in this

this was discussed, i guess on the sandbox, the song is by lynch, also sung by lynch

btw, happy birthday david lynch, and happy birthday to me

But I'm surprised that so many folks (not here, necessarily) have complained about the DV look. Thought it suited Lynch's style very well. Loved the heavy graininess on the blown-up and darker shots. Loved the bleary, blurry, supersaturated reds. The endless, swollen close-ups were great, as were the rougher, hand-held sequences. Visually, I thought it was a breakthrough for Lynch.

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!!!SPOILERS!!! Read at yr. own risk.

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Saw it as a film about redemption -- about "rescuing" oneself from the burden of guilt. Mulholland Drive was (arguably) about a character who is eventually consumed and destroyed by her own guilt and shame. In Inland Empire, Laura Dern seems to betray her husband and, as a result, is plunged into a purgatorial dreamscape of lost identity, madness, prostitution and murder. Her very powerful husband curses her: she becomes a whore, and her identity fragments. She tumbles through worlds-within-worlds and seeems, even, to die. But somehow, in finally, quite horribly, dying, she escapes the curse. She frees herself from self-loathing and self-destruction. In the endless hallways that seem to represent her unconscious mind, she confronts her demons, killing them and unifying the world -- which seems only to be her self.

Was she ever really an actress, or a whore? In a "real world" sense, did she ever betray her husband or lose a son? It's hard to say. So much remains unexplained. In the end, all I can say for sure is that the murderous Polish husband (in the historical sequences) and the screwdriver-weilding woman who stalked her and competed for her identity seemed only like fractured, male and female reflections of her own self-loathing.

In destroying/escaping these beings, she regains the power to author her own identity. Which leads into the very upbeat version Nina Simone's "Sinnerman" over the end credits, with its celebratory refrain: "power!" A movie about escaping cursed narratives (those placed on us by others and those we author for ourselves), about self-redemption.

But what or who is "LB"?
Why all the weird hostility toward Hollywood?
Whose star was it? ("Dorothy...")
What's the deal with looking through a cigarette burn in silk?
Does it have anything to do with the "cigarette burns" that match one reel of film to the next (visible frequently in the print I saw)?
"Good with animals"?
So, ummm, the rabbits...

And Allyzay's right. Kinski is sitting to Dern's left on the couch in the final party scene -- wearing a yellow dress, I think.

yeah i wondered that too. was the in-film cigarette burn in the top right corner of the frame as well? i forget now.

I believe that a "cigarette burn" (small white circle in the upper right-hand corner of the frame/screen) did appear during -- or right before or right after -- the first literal cigarette burning scene. Have to see it again to be sure.

Why all the weird hostility toward Hollywood?

Any kind of hostility toward it seems nonweird to me, esp regarding the exploitation of women.

I believe it was Dorothy Lamour's star.

Is it ever clear that the original attempt to film the Blue Tomorrows story was American? or Euro?

The "exploitation of women" angle you bring up is interesting, though. This film's primary character is both an actress and a prostitute. Mulholland Drive seemed to make a similar comparison, if more obliquely. Women frequently appear as victim/objects in Lynch's films: they’re subject to male desire and anger, powerful in their "mysterious" allure, but fundamentally other-than. Inland Empire is the only Lynch film in which the camera eye & authorial voice seem to genuinely identify with a female protagonist. Dern isn't an exotic bird that Lynch and his audience observe, perhaps pity -- she's us. While we're watching the film, we're experiencing her story, from her POV. This, too, seems like a breakthrough.

Is it significant that it was Lamour's star? Can anyone expand on this?

DEFINITELY appeared, i think during.

I wouldn't particularly see any signif re Lamour, unless the Hope-Crosby movies were cursed by gypsies.

Yeah, and that bugged me. You don't see many cigarette burns these days. It's my understanding that they're kinda obsolete. Most theaters no longer punch holes in the film to line up reels.

And when they do occurr, they should take place at the beginning or end of a scene, during a cut or fade-to-black. Not right in the middle of the action. Which suggests that the very visible cigarette burns in Inland Empire are a device. In-film events or footnotes of some kind. Not an artifact, but an intentional part of the movie.

They're especially strange in that Inland Empire is a digital film (see Morb's post, above). So the CBs call attention to the fact that we're watching a film made from a non-film source. The fact that Blue Horizons appears to be shot on traditional film just exaggerates the dissonance.

HO DAMN

Lynch's Dorothy wd be Vallens, of cawse

But I getcher point, blood. Still, I suspect that these ostensible "cigarette burns" appear in the print of the film itself, and show up even if the film is being digitally projected. Wonder whether we'll see 'em on the video...

Reason you wouldn't want to place the splice in the middle of a shot is that if the leaders were damaged (which is common), the shot would end up jumpy and fragmented. Dang. I have to see this thing again.

cf. fight club

Saw it on Saturday night of opening weekend, in Seattle. Theater was 1/3 full at best. This was an 8:30 pm showing in the crowded "University District" of a city that's always been art art-film oriented. While there hasn't been much by way of press hype & media blitz, word was definitely out. David even presented a screening on Wednesday night. Hell, I bought tickets online and showed up early, expecting lines around the block. Nope.

Kinda depressing. Hope word of mouth is good and that audiences give Inland Empire a shot. I can see why it wouldn't appeal to everyone, but it's hardly a failure.

Also, the cigarette burn in silk seems to connect to the hard drugs which made the hole in the vagina wall of the woman in the blonde star wig.

Reminds me of Lost Highway, with its split-in-two storyline, and split-in-two murder victim.

What are the other ones? Apart from the three above, the abortion-with-a/killing-by-screwdriver seems to fit.

Anyone know if Lynch's new book Catching the big fish is good?

Another easy example is the heroine's seeming death near the end of the film. That violence allows her a kind of rebirth. And there's a definite sense of breaking/fragmentation when the lights begin to flash and loud electrical buzzing appears on the soundtrack, heralding the transition from one world to the next. Lynch pulls the same trick in Lost Highway, to similar effect.

I don't know that there are so many different ways the theme is expressed, but certain devices are used over and over again.

Anyway, I think it's likely that TM is a shitpile, but I dug the movie. Go figure.

Dennis Lim finds that cheap DV suits the nightmare perfectly, and compares IE to Scott Walker's The Drift:

http://www.cinema-scope.com/cs29/cur_lim_inland.html

Lynch interview at Reverse Shot (rhapsodizing about Billy Wilder's sense of place!):

I couldn’t and wouldn’t work in a studio if I didn’t have final cut. It would be the theater of the absurd. How could anyone do that? Absolutely pure suicide. Sadness. Ridiculousness. Absurdity upon absurdity. Never in a million years. A person’s voice is what’s critical, and staying true to the ideas. No one should interrupt that, it should be supported, there should be enthusiasm and inspiration for that. The other is totally wrong, a horror.

http://www.reverseshot.com/article/strong_an_interview_with_david_lynch_strong

Rosenbaum (like me, not a huge DL fan), likee:

Lynch also seems to have realized that in Hollywood remaining disengaged and innocent ultimately compromises his freedom as an artist, and like it or not, he's had to take a political stance. Dern spitting gobs of blood on the Walk of Fame couldn't make it plainer.

http://www.chicagoreader.com/features/stories/moviereviews/2007/070126/

I'll still probably buy the DVD when it comes out...

It's much better than being trapped in Will Ferrell's nightmare world.

Rosenbaum's point about the gang's-all-here karaoke dance party accompanying the long-awaited end credits is something I wholeheartedly agree with. That was the Rolaids: girls dancing, fan service, Laura finally smiling, etc etc. It's a more fulfilling payoff, after everything that precedes it, than most movies I've ever seen. And I really, really needed a happy ending after all that drubbing.

The sound design was top notch, btw. I keep thinking about that, too.

ZUH?

OH-oo Bay-BEE

It really is some kind of achievement. Over the course of 3 hours I was rarely bored. Sure, it could be trimmed 15 or 20 minutes, but that's saying something for a 3 hour, nonsensical, shot-without-a-script headtrip. Even when the film's in the throes of random & unmoored shapeshifting, Dern's performance and Lynch's craft sustain the emotion and mood. This is pure cinema, musical in a way, flowing forward & free under its own dissipation, a piece of ice moving across a hot stove. Not only does the grubby DV cinematography do justice to the nightmare world, it throws into stark relief the total control Lynch has over his materials. The shot composition, set design, lighting, makeup, and sound are impeccable.

And yeah, I've got my own pet theories about what happened. When Nikki wanders into the suburban home, she assumes another role, that of the lost girl watching the TV, following the garden of forking paths that various bad decisions have taken her in her life. On one path she has a son who dies, on another she is reunited with her son and husband. But it somehow seems petty or unfair to force strict logical structure over the movie's open ended mysteries.

I like how the themes resonate throughout; Hollywood & prostitution, performance & illusion, acting & role-playing, time & causality, choices & consequences. Mostly in passing details, like when the first visitor tells the story of the boy going out to play, she says something like "when he went through the door it made a reflection, and it was evil". The obvious word choice here would be "shadow" instead of "reflection", but reflection, doubling, mirroring, are all key to the film.

-- Edward III (edward.thur...), February 7th, 2007.

*clears throat*

Also coulda sworn the walk of fame star she drops the screwdriver on read "Dorothy Valens", but that was probably mind playin' tricks...

Leonard Bernstein, Leonid Brezhnev, Lenny Bruce and Lester Bangs

Ah, I'll go w/ latebloomer.

And one of the most beautiful.

I should probably limit my Tarkovsky quotes to somewhere between 0 and 1 a day, but the scene reminded me of this:

The allotted function of art is not, as is often assumed, to put across ideas, to propagate thoughts, to serve as an example. The aim of art is to prepare a person for death...

Most of the laughter I heard at Inland Empire = nervous.

In Hollywood, girls congratulating each other on how great their fake boobs are must be like Pazz & Jop voters backscratching on their insights.

The one thing I feel like I'm missing, reading discussion here and reviews elsewhere, is the impact of the low-res DVD and how that enhanced the movie. I wasn't really feeling it during some of the scenes where the edges were really harsh and everything was pixilated -- I mean, it's an aesthetic choice, of course, but it had a distancing effect for me that didn't necessarily seem right for the mood at times.

I also sat behind Shakey Mo for the screening.

Keep far away from the Pazzin' Jop thread.

Since the film hasn't opened in Miami and probably won't, I've reconstructed the movie based on this thread discussion.

This is key, I think; Lynch being able to shoot + shoot + shoot and pick the best stuff was freeing, as well as the ability to move the setup around easily. I guess a question to ask is, could he have made this movie using traditional film? Lynch sez no. That is a bit of a tradeoff...

also Lb = 47 turned upside down

Nice one.

the whole black background and camera on closeup and having the character walk from out-of into focus is repeated from a similar shot of BOB in either the series or the film.

also Laura Dern checking the screen of the theater and then behind her in real time reminded me of the kyle maclachlan's opening scene of FWWM with david bowie where he's checking the security monitors.

more later, i'm really still processing a lot of the film.

justin thoreaux's character does that fast walk into extreme close-up that echoes a bowie scene in FWWM.

I have never seen FWWM but have reserved it at the library.

I dunno, I really liked the picnic scene. It was like a hellish pixelvision home movie.

FYI: I believe it was "L.B." not "Lb".

It was, but there was also that weird red line running through it. Seems like the kind of visual pun Lynch would pull.

Axxonnn? Action?

sounds like John Ashcroft's b-side to "Let The Eagle Soar".

47

{Kappa-Epsilon-Phi-Alpha-Lambda-Eta Mu-Zeta}

WINDMILL-WORDS

Asana gets rid of Anatomy-con- \
sciousness. | Involuntary
Pranayama gets rid of Physiology- | "Breaks"
consciousness. /
Yama and Niyama get rid of \ Voluntary
Ethical consciousness. / "Breaks"
Pratyhara gets rid of the Objective.
Dharana gets rid of the Subjective.
Dhyana gets rid of the Ego.
Samadhi gets rid of the Soul Impersonal.

Asana destroys the static body (Nama).
Pranayama destroys the dynamic body (Rupa).
Yama destroys the emotions. \ (Vedana).
Niyama destroys the passions. /
Dharana destroys the perceptions (Sanna).
Dhyana destroys the tendencies (Sankhara).
Samadhi destroys the consciousness (Vinnanam).
Homard a la Thermidor destroys the digestion.
The last of these facts is the one of which I am most
certain.

the Axxo.n.n. thing I'm totally clueless on, that seems pretty random.

AT FUCKING LAST

well, you see it "buzz"-free, then. The pressure's off.

LET THE MEMING BEGIN HERE(my friend made these):

http://pics.livejournal.com/koalafrog/pic/00185gs8
http://pics.livejournal.com/koalafrog/pic/00183y7y
http://pics.livejournal.com/koalafrog/pic/00187was

JESUS CHRIST SPOILERS

I WANT TO WATCH THIS AGAIN!!!!!

It's out on DVD soon! (and there's some kind of weird russian type bootleg thing somewhere out there already, but I don't quite know what all of this means, so I've just preordered the real thing. 0:-)

street date: Aug 14

Laura Dern will hawk it in a nationwide Best Buy tour.

oh i've been waiting for this

LYNCH & COW TO BEST BUY

I am so buying this the day it comes out

Did anyone notice this? http://jurgenfauth.com/2007/07/26/sunset-blvd/

Lynch interviews (best after viewing, esp Greencine):

http://www.villagevoice.com/screens/0732,lee,77431,28.html

http://www.greencine.com/central/lynchempire

The DVD awaits me at home – I may leave work early! Any suggestions – should I not scrub the floors or boil water for rice whilst watching it?

Have a meal first.

haha yes definitely

MY LOCAL MUSIC/MOVIE STORE SUCKS. :(

I called four places here, three semi-local. One of the four had it (Best Buy), and only one of the four people had heard of the film (also Best Buy..."Oh, that new David Lynch film?")

I won't have time to get this today or tomorrow, unless they happen to have it at the Virgin Megastore on my lunch break...

Any exciting extras etc? I'm half-considering bumping this up my netflix queue, but also wondering if I can face watching it again yet.

see Voice interview above. Atypical 'extras'.

I liked it even better the second time.

The deficiencies of his chosen DV are even more apparent on video, and yet this movie continues to soar in my estimation. I think it possibly even surpasses Mulholland Drive.

Based on one viewing, I'd rank it above Mulholland Drive.

the second disc of extra material sounds GRATE cannot wait to see

i'm looking forwarding to watching this. FUCK YEAH

(I guess I'm the first to post since it was released on DVD)

Ok. WTF.

WTF.

The usual line after watching this is, "I'm still trying to `process' this, but..." It's not his masterpiece; there's too many bits that felt like etiolated repetitions on themes from Lost Highway and Fire Walk With Me. Despite Rosenbaum's excellent essay, this is too oblique a "condemnation" of Hollywood than Mulholland Drive, which is a tighter delineation of the same themes.

Like any artist, he just gets better at the details: the sound design and art direction are about the best I've ever heard and seen in a Lynch film. The sequence in which Beck's "Black Tambourine" competed with this Kid A-esque string section swell was hallucinatory and frightening; every room looks like it was a legitimate part of the nightmare the film's recreating (I love the sky-blue walls and Doric column design in one of the last sequences). gypsy mutha OTM: i think it's because at his best he has this total command of light, sound and movement that is on the one hand clearly virtuosic but on the other not too thought out

All of Dern's scenes with the mute analysand are superb. She brings to bear the history of her relationship with Lynch: the backwoods slattern of Wild at Heart, the pink-dressed wily ingenue of Blue Velvet merge. She's amazing, and deserved an Oscar nomination. BUT...I didn't see a character, just fragments, which, I suppose, is the point; but Naomi Watts was able to fuse disparate selves to create something approaching pity and terror. Again, I will see it again. I just didn't get a sense that Lost Girl and Nikki were even the same person, which, judging by the remarks made upthread, I'm supposed to have concluded.

(This brings up another problem: THIS FILM DOES NOT WORK VIEWED AT HOME. Sure, unplug the phone and stay away from the computer, but you know that's impossible. Plus, the DV and sound require the 21st century indulgences of the modern theatre. I just couldn't concentrate like I normally would.)

One harrowing sequence no one's mentioned: the Polish guy confronting his wife (?) about the dead person. The moving-underwater delivery of dialogue coupled with the actors' rigid expressions evoked the reality of every husband confronting a guilty wife -- or the reality of a husband trying to make his wife feel guilty.

One element that didn't disappoint: Justin Theroux's inexplicable hotness.

So, yeah, I'll buy it this weekend.

Oh: William H. Macy nicely reprised/parodied his bit in Seabiscuit.

Give it a few weeks.

I remember still being on the fence about it immediately after seeing it the first time.

I've now re-watched the first ten minutes and, suddenly, IT MAKES SENSE.

Well, I wouldn't go that far.

Well, much of what comes afterwards makes sense.

suh-weet

I was quite disappointed with this. It looks the cheapness of shooting in digital got Lynch to think he can just shoot scene after scene and put them together into an endlessly long film. It seems like he really fell victim to his worst instincts. His previous films, as surreal as they've been, have at least had some sort of structure, but here he apparently didn't even have a script. There is a reason why the best totally surreal and plotless movies are short films: if you want have a three-hour film which is still interesting you need to have some sort of a structure.

The first hour of Inland Empire was actually quite ineresting, but after that whatever point there was to the film quickly melted into air. There were just endless close-ups to Laura Dern's face and shots of her wandering blandly through different spaces. There were still some interesting scenes in the next two hours; for example the one were she's dying on the street with the homeless people, and then the camera pulls off and it was all a movie. I though the film was gonna end there, but there was still 30+ minutes left of close-ups and wandering through rooms to suffer through. Lynch is still a masterful visualist, and the movie was beautiful to look at, but I strongly suggest that he gets someone else to produce his next film, someone who can put an stop to his wankery when needed.

geez, you and your need for linear, non-mystical states of being

Well, Lynch himself has made a few linear, "mystical" films.

I know I just think its weird when Tuomas repeatedly complains about Lynch's pet obsessions and techniques - like, why are you watching a David Lynch film if you have basic problems with ideas like "spirits" or using film as more of an imagistic medium than a narrative one

he's like one of the old ladies in that "the food here is terrible", "I know! And such small portions!" joke

Does anyone else agree with chaki? I'm not sure:

plot wise my theory is: that polish chick is stuck in purgatory cuz her movie was never finished and she died cuz she got preggy from some trick (or the other actor?) and her husband kicked the shit out of her or she killed herself with a screwdriver giving herself an abortion and laura dern like 50 years later or whatever finishes the movie or something

sounds perfectly plausible but I withhold judgment until second viewing

if you want have a three-hour film which is still interesting you need to have some sort of a structure

I haven't seen it, but I'm told La region centrale disagrees.

Did anyone notice this? http://jurgenfauth.com/2007/07/26/sunset-blvd/

gah! all things being interrelated, jurgen fauth is a very good friend of a very good friend of mine. the internet scares me.

There most definitely is "some sort of a structure" there.

I know I just think its weird when Tuomas repeatedly complains about Lynch's pet obsessions and techniques - like, why are you watching a David Lynch film if you have basic problems with ideas like "spirits" or using film as more of an imagistic medium than a narrative one.

What do you mean "repeatedly"? I like almost all of his films, I think the only thing I've criticized here is parts of Twin Peaks. And I think films like Lost Highway do a great job in balancing between some sort of a narrative structure and totally surreal, non-narrative wtfness - that's exactly what's great about Lynch. However, I don't think feature film is a medium where you can just put whatever imagery comes to your mind on the screen for three hours, and not expect the audience to be bored. In most of his films Lynch has managed the aforementioned balancing act, and kept some sort of thread that ties it all together, but in Inland Empire I think he simply loses the plot (both literally and metaphorically) after the first hour.

And yeah, I do think Inland Empire has some unifying themes (Lynch does try to tie all together, doesn't he?) but that doesn't change the fact that at some point the succession of scenes becomes so incoherent, it's almost impossible to decipher what they relate to. I mean, sure you can put random scenes of crying people on the screen, and they still carry some emotional relevance, but without any context to them they do start to feel pretty pointless.

There seems to be at least four different incarnations of Laura Dern in the film (plus the Polish girl), but because Lynch provides little help in following them, it's pretty hard to understand how the things that happen in one scene relates to other scenes. So it's just crying without a context.

watched most of the extras on disc 2 last night - quite a lot of material, some that informs the material, some that's clearly extraneous (the cooking Quinoa thing, for example, which is still pretty funny by itself). The "making of" clips in the "Lynch 2" segment reveal a lot about Lynch's methods which is pretty fascinating... (also he swears a bit more than I've been led to believe, he says fuck/fucking a bunch of times)... as far as Tuomas's complaints about a lack of coherence/structure one of the things that struck me in "Lynch 2" is the way he rattles off shots and scenes and their proper sequence in such an authoritative and commanding way. Inland Empire elicited a similar reaction from me as his other films - there was a general thread I could follow and try to make everything match up to, but there were plenty of red herrings and misdirection along the way, enough to make me feel like I wasn't quite getting everything even as I was enjoying watching it. Perhaps Lynch's various stylystic tics and tangents are just used to create an illusion of depth - implying a textual density that doesn't really exist - but I'm not sure that's the case; even if it was, I'm not sure it matters. Certainly watching Lynch behind the scenes of the movie gives the impression he knows exactly what he's doing and that it all makes sense on some level - even if that level is more one of intuition and recurring symbols than some sort of straight narrative.

I haven't rewatched it yet, but my expectation is that as with Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive, and even Blue Velvet and Eraserhead, I will have a firmer grasp of the film's underlying narrative structure upon repeat viewing.

(no fucking way would I watch this on mushrooms a la chaki tho! jesus christ)

watched most of the extras on disc 2 last night - quite a lot of material, some that informs the materialfilm

I found Lost Highway SO much more annoying/frustrating than this.

Have seen this once, would like to see it again. Tempted to get the DVD but, as someone said upthread, my feeling is that this is a movie to see at the movies, not at home.

I was really enthralled for the first half of the movie, not in the least bored despite not really understanding what was going on. There were some really breathtaking moments. I have to say though that I did think it could profitably have had a good half-hour taken out, and slightly simplified, ie maybe one of its myriad "plotlines" removed. I really think with some editing it would be Lynch's best film ever, the perfect showcase for Lynch's obsessions. As it stands, I think Mulholland Drive is the better film.

I found Lost Highway SO much more annoying/frustrating than this.

otm. lost highway is by far my least favorite of his movies. there are some good scenes, but the tone is sour and the recycling of his motifs feels more opportunistic (and artistically vapid) than in anything before or since. for example, the red curtains appearing in inland empire feel like an in-joke, a nod to the audience and to himself; in lost highway they feel like product placement. in inland empire he's really pushing himself to find different ways of doing things, technically and narratively, new ways to free up and/or frame his ideas. it wanders a little because of that, but its payoffs feel exciting when they happen. i'm looking forward to seeing it again.

OK 'Lost Highway' wasn't all that but...'product placement'?

I'd say this ws much much better than "Mulholland Drive". I never looked at the clock when I saw it, got very immersed - looking back now is probably just as hard as when I came out of the cinema on that sunday evening, three-four months ago now.

I thought that, yes, there ws a narrative there. Simple (feeble?) enough so as to need the complication - the qn then becomes as to whether it'll all fall apart in subsequent viewings.

Only one way to find out...

...although its not like I'm gonna see this many times again or get a DVD or anything, but more in the sense of catching it at some cinema in 5-10 years.

OK 'Lost Highway' wasn't all that but...'product placement'?

i just mean a lot of lost highway felt to me like a David Lynch Movie (trademark symbol here).

It took several viewings of Lost Highway for me to appreciate it - as the first film in this pseudo-trilogy about mutable identities and wandering/cursed spirits and whatnot I don't think its surprising that it comes off as the weakest. I get what tipsy means in a "Lynch-by-the-numbers" sense - not sure if I agree with it tho...

i just mean a lot of lost highway felt to me like a David Lynch Movie (trademark symbol here).

blame the artist for being himself

difference between "being himself" and being David (Hey, Weird!) Lynch. but anyway. he turned around and made mulholland drive and inland empire, so whether lost highway was a dry run, a holding pattern or a mere lapse of attention and devotion doesn't really matter.

The problem with Lost Highway is that the actors suck. I didn't buy Robert Blake's Frank Booth reprise one bit, Balthazar Getty epitomizes bland, and Patricia Arquette wasn't a believable skank.

and bill pullman as a jazz guy.

robert loggia's ok, but to no particular purpose.

(there are two moments of lost highway that stick with me. one, when pullman and arquette return home from somewhere and he looks up and sees a quick sequence of lights and shadows flare across the top floor of their house. and then his dream sequence where patricia-who's-not-really-patricia is in his bedroom. those had that disorienting, disassociative spookiness, which other scenes -- like robert blake calling himself on the phone -- i think were aiming for too consciously.)

I didn't mind Pullman so much! Those scenes of him playing Coltrane-esque stuff are the ones I remember most.

That scene of Blake calling himself reminded me of what I hate about lots of Dali paintings.

ok i'm done with ilx film threads forever

ok i'm just being a bitch im in a bad mood.

All good, bro.

I think Lost Highway is the best Lynchian film Lynch has ever made; Mulholland Drive is great too, but it feels like repetition since it has the same plot as Lost Highway, only with some lesbian action. The scene where the guy calls himself is more like Magritte than Dali, since it relies on a very simple idea yet is totally surreal. Actually, to me Inland Empire feels more like Dali (whom I don't like much), because in it Lynch just throws all sorts of freaky stuff on the canvas to see what sticks. Compared to that Lost Highway is quite streamlined, at least as streamlined as Lynch can get.

i think the end of LH is great

rammstein and all

i think the beck inclusion in IE is one of the biggest missteps of his career--the other songs in IE are so amazing and eerie--then we get beck.

If it's any consolation, you can barely hear him.

i heard him loud and clear

oh pls, complaining about Beck in an era where hipsters like Justin Timberlake.

i liked this, not as much as mulholland drive though.

everyone likes justin timberlake, what do hipsters have to do with it

and my comment has nothing to do with liking/disliking beck (which is irrelevant)

it has to do with removing the film from its reality (and entering ours) and subsequently ruining the mood of the film

it's about sharing a faith.

it has to do with removing the film from its reality (and entering ours) and subsequently ruining the mood of the film

i had that reaction too, but it made me wonder if maybe it was my problem (i.e. me bringing my beck baggage with me) rather than lynch's. maybe he knows and cares dick-all about beck and just liked the way the song sounded. if the song didn't scream out "BECK" to me in a distracting way, it would probably be fine with that scene.

Teh world in that bit is more modern and familiar to us. Hence Beck. No brainer.

Actually to elaborate a bit - I think why Lynch seems so happy with this film in particular is that it achieves the MD and LH thing a lot better. I'd say whilst those two show you some nutjobs psyche Inland Empire is more of a collaborative thing between viewer and whats on screen. I think thats why despite being a lot more dispersed and on-the-surface random than the other two it feels more satisfying. It manages to maintain superb pace despite having less of a narrative thread. It never once speeds up or slows down or jolts you without giving you time to come to terms with the change of pace, mood, whatever. I think the Beck song is great for this as it is in a scene where Dern is figuring things out and the dream is lifting. It makes the whole previous dreamy psychotic melodrama start to crack simply by just being there (even better is how it's competing with a Lynchian drone and winning). Same way the Locomotion is used to crack through the ghastliness and unreality of the whores-in-the-house section. The choice of Beck and the Locomotion are really for our benefit rather than the characters.

the locomotion scene and the credits sequence with "sinnerman" are two of the greatest music videos ever.

just bought this today, stoked

Lynskey said what I wanted to say, and much more eloquently. :)

I didn't notice the Beck song, personally

WITHOUT READING THIS THREAD I AM CERTAIN THE CONSENSUS IS THAT INLAND EMPIRE IS THE BEST VISUAL REPRESENTATION OF ANYTHING WITH SOUND SINCE SALVADOR DALI WAS QUOTED AND YOU RECALLED THAT WHILE WATCHING HIS PAINTINGS TRIPPING ON NO SLEEP

BORE LOSTWAY IS LIKE MAGRITTE WITHOUT THE EDGE. INLAND EMPIRE WAS TOO POLITICAL, THUMBS DOWN

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F4wh_mc8hRE rol

the "more things that happened" feature on the second disc of the DVD set is worth watching; there are quite a few deleted scenes that connect clearly to other things in the movie; they don't really help explain anything, but they are little additional clues.

also, it took me until the third viewing of the movie to consider that the child laura dern is pregnant w/ when she's living in the pink house is the son that is later alluded to.

Bore Lostway ... that doesn't even rhyme.

This seemed pretty straightforward to me on first viewing. The actress starts confusing her own life with the character she's playing since the plot mirrors the affair she's having with her co-star. She loses the ability to discern which is which, and so do we.

Once the camera pulls away from the death scene and you see that it's a set, it seems you would have to assume that everything that happens in the prostitute thread of the story is what happens in the movie she's in after her rich lover rejects her and she tells her husband that she's pregnant even though he's impotent. The scenes are out of order because you generally shoot a film's scenes out of order, right?

The gypsy curse likely has something to do with her confusion, but that is lifted from the completion of the film, like chaki suggested with that girl in purgatory or whatever until she watched the completed film. After all this though, the actress is still completely fucked in the head.

Anyway, that's the best I can do after one viewing. I'll have to watch it again soon and see how much of this holds water. I'm sure there are a lot of things in there that could contradict any theories you could throw at it, being Lynch, but I think it could end up being my overall favorite Lynch movie.

Package in my mail this morning should have been the DVD of IE. Instead, some tool at the DVDP19net warehouse sent me "WKRP IN Cincinatti" DVD's. I threw up in my mouth a little.

No IE til next week, I guess.

WOAH DUDE! WKRP IS AWESOME!

Not when I paid for IE!!

Certainly watching Lynch behind the scenes of the movie gives the impression he knows exactly what he's doing and that it all makes sense on some level

Yeah, and I also liked the part in Stories where he goes off about people watching movies "on their fucking phones" and the pained expression on his face as he concedes that a 3 hour movie should have DVD chapters for the sake of convenience. Too many people must have complained about the Mulholland Dr. DVD. The Quinoa shit was hilarious. Haven't got to the deleted scenes or the Ballerina thing yet.

I picked it up today, finally! It was originally priced $30, but it was marked down to $20. Phew. I can't wait 'til i watch it on Friday night.

I find it odd that some people here seem to be looking for a definite narrative thread or for some kind of final meaning, feels like treating it as a crossword or something. I sort of don't want to know, saying it was about any one thing would make it far less intersting imo. Maybe when I watch the DVD it will all be obvious or something. Hope not. I like chase movies. It had momentum, never boring.

Lynch doesn't like people searching for a definitive meaning either, but it's his own fault for building in such a 'Aha!' moment into Mullholland Drive.

I find it odd that some people here seem to be looking for a definite narrative thread or for some kind of final meaning, feels like treating it as a crossword or something.

Nah. We just want something to talk about.

Yeah, I don't pretend to know everything that's going on but it's not a bunch of random bullshit like Tuomas seems to think.

Lynch doesn't like people searching for a definitive meaning either, but it's his own fault for building in such a 'Aha!' moment into Mullholland Drive.

it's not so much an 'aha' moment as an 'ok i can sort of make this loose-ended tv show into something that seems like it was supposed to be a movie' moment. i think people overemphasize the "narrative" of mulholland drive, which is really secondary to what the movie's about. in that and even more in inland empire, the narrative structures are more like themes than stories -- ideas that the movie improvises on and around.

I don't think it's as much that he doesn't like people searching for meaning as he doesn't like people asking him for the meaning. The impression I get from interviews is that he doesn't like explaining his movies because he feels that if HE said "that's what it is" then that would kill all the the conversations like this one between fans, and people's ability to decide for themselves what it means to them.

haha "The The"

its like jazz, man

Jazz that you laugh at. Sometimes. I lost my shit at The Locomotion.

paul f. tompkins' jazz bit to thread

http://www.recidivism.org/music/pftjazz.mp3

http://youtube.com/watch?v=kYSYlVFF_94

oh word: http://youtube.com/watch?v=mNv79hywH8c

I've gotta get some Penderecki CDs now.

The soundtrack is out on CD soon:

01 David Lynch "Ghost of Love" 5:30
02 David Lynch "Rabbits Theme" 0:59
03 Mantovani "Colours of My Life" 3:50
04 David Lynch "Woods Variation" 12:19
05 Dave Brubeck "Three To Get Ready" 5:22
06 Boguslaw Schaeffer "Klavier Konzert" 5:26
07 Kroke "The Secrets of Life Tree" 3:27
08 Little Eva "The Locomotion" 2:24
09 David Lynch "BBQ Theme" 2:58
10 Krzysztof Penderecki "Als Jakob Erwachte" 7:27
11 Witold Lutoslawski "Novelette Conclusion" (excerpt) /Joey Altruda "Lisa" (edit) 3:42
12 Beck "Black Tambourine" (film version) 2:47
13 David Lynch "Mansion Theme" 2:18
14 David Lynch "Walkin' on the Sky" 4:04
15 David Lynch / Marek Zebrowski "Polish Night Music No. 1" 4:18
16 David Lynch / Chrysta Bell "Polish Poem" 5:55
17 Nina Simone "Sinnerman" (edit) 6:40

Finally the full version of "Ghost of Love"!

Watched this again on DVD last night, and even though I know it's coming one of the shock moments (about halfway through, Laura Dern slowly traipsing down the weirdly artificial-looking yellow-lit wooded path until she gets right up in the camera and ARGH TEETH BOOGIDY BOOGIDY) never fails to scare the shit out of me. Lynch can get more mileage out of the scare-scene musical sting than any filmmaker in history.

i've wondered before what it would be like if he tried to make a genre horror film, a la polanski and rosemary's baby. but then i remember that rosemary's baby is hardly polanski's scariest film. probably lynch would be too busy riffing on genre conventions to take it seriously. still, him doing like a slasher-in-the-suburbs movie could be scary as shit.

David Lynch's Halloween

Couldn't be any more inappropriate than Rob Zombie's, frankly. You have no idea how depressing it was to find out the remade Halloween includes the ridiculous DARK FAMILY SEKRIT crap from Halloween 2 and subsequent sequels. Why is it so hard to understand that it's scarier and more effective if Myers is just fucking nuts and Laurie Strode is some poor girl he's fixated on more or less at random? AND FURTHERMORE oh dear I've started ranting again.

So um yeah Inland Empire! How about that Beck scene huh guys

Where did that tracklist come from?

Uh, where's "At Last"?

No really, where is that tracklist from?

In any case, Amazon says this is coming out on 9.11

Sorry, forgot to check ILE- it's from Dugpa, one of the better Lynch fansites. They've had a pretty good track record in the past (getting information about the international DVDs of Fire Walk With Me or the upcoming complete Twin Peaks "gold" box set, for example). The absence of "At Last" could just be a rights issue.

Cool, thx.

The absence of "At Last" could just be a rights issue.

That or the fact that the disc is already pushing something like 80 minutes there.

on second viewing - more cohesive than I remembered it, actually. The three different narrative threads (Nikki makin a movie/prostitutes in 1930s Poland/white-trash marriage) are jumbled up, altho the clear point at which Nikki is "cursed" (by virtue of performing the script, which is maybe the curse itself...?) and her identities begin to fragment is when she walks onto the set through the "axxonn" door (is that supposed to be some phonetic spelling of "Action!" or something...? any ideas?)

scariest fucking thing ever - clown face after Nikki shoots the Phantom

http://www.axxonn.com/en/Index.asp

You heard the bit about it in the very beginning, right? Something about a radio broadcast.

I couldn't quite make out the dialogue - altho I did catch the "longest running radio show in the history of the world" bit

watched again the other night an was even more impressed than 1st on viewing. ever scene is the most fucking intense scene in the world but in different ways. how he does that?

Watching it on DVD for the second time has been dispiriting -- I'm bored.

His sense of pacing has gone to hell. Rewatching the Zabriskie-Dern confrontation early in the film, I thought there was no reason to keep that conversation, as portentious as it was, going so long. The dude needs constraints.

aw I loved that scene. I think if there's any deadweight its actually somewhere in the middle section where Nikki's kind of wandering from scene to scene.

Oddly, I remember thinking the "interrogation" sequence with the dumpy bespectacled guy seemed to go on forever when I saw it in the theater - but watching the DVD they seemed comparably brief.

I couldn't quite make out the dialogue - altho I did catch the "longest running radio show in the history of the world" bit

Go watch that part again, they're saying something about Axxon N.

also:
http://www.lynchnet.com/axxonn/

http://messageboard.inlandempirecinema.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=71

Ok, to clear things up. Axxon N is the longest running radio show in the baltic region, or something like that. But, as for the actual creation of Axxon N., lynch was planning a 7 or 8 episode series that he was going to release on his website in 2002. The first thing that was shot for Axxon N. was Laura Dern's long 16 page monologue. As he finished shooting that scene, he couldnt stop think about how good it was, and he felt like there was something more. So he wrote and wrote, and it eventually grew bigger and bigger, into what is now called INLAND EMPIRE. This was a process that took about 4 years.

the "more things that happened" feature on the second disc of the DVD set is worth watching; there are quite a few deleted scenes that connect clearly to other things in the movie; they don't really help explain anything, but they are little additional clues.

ARGH. This isn't on the UK 2-disc version at all, just a bunch of interviews with Lynch and some trailers. Gutted.

I'm surprised Lynch allowed them to be included at all, because he hates the idea of deleted scenes. For him each film is a complete piece of work, and any stuff that didn't make the final cut should remain that way.

finally, finally saw this, although had to watch it over two nights and on a tiny tv. still, excellent. i don't think it's any less comprehensible than a bunch of lynch stuff and anyway i'm not too bothered by any of that; he writes wonderful dialogue, taken in 10 minute snippets these things kind of stand on their own as super short stories or dialogue exercises. also, best ending credit sequence ever

I'm surprised Lynch allowed them to be included at all, because he hates the idea of deleted scenes. For him each film is a complete piece of work, and any stuff that didn't make the final cut should remain that way.

Yeah, I know. So it's really shocking that there's over an hour of deleted scenes on the second disc. I started it up immediately after watching the film itself for the first time and now, 4.5 hours later, I feel weirdly immersed in Lynch's world. I kind of want to pop Eraserhead in now and watch it as I drift off to sleep, but maybe that's not the best choice.

re the REAL inland empire: i was at the route 66 car show in san berdoo yesterday and "the locomotion" was playing over their PA. so surreal.

Lynch + constraints = Dune

somewhere in the middle section where Nikki's kind of wandering from scene to scene.

See, I think that section's essential! Not to mention a metaphor for watching the whole thing!

dune rulz

yeah I like Dune a lot even tho it is pretty much a mess.

I would probably prefer the Jodorowsky/Moebius/Giger/Pink Floyd Dune version if it had ever actually been made tho.

Video interivew with him on Amazon.com: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000QQFKYE

Rad hair.

"David Lynch has purchased a large property on Berlin's Teufelberg mountain where he hopes to build a university devoted to Transcendental Meditation. But he is in hot water after his guru chanted "invincible Germany" at a lecture about the project."

Article in Spiegel Online:

http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/0,1518,517873,00.html

Video:

http://nosedef.blogspot.com/2007/11/david-lynch-lecture-in-berlin-turns.html

maybe he meant impossible germany.

awesome

"inland empire", i mean, is awesome

i really hated this movie. i feel like i already said that somewhere but probably not. it made me angry and frustrated.

but you don't hate men.

this film is sort of ridiculous.

in what way

all the really intense conversations with a close-up of someone's face and then they say something and it goes to the person they're talking to and it takes them twenty seconds to reply and then it goes back to the original speaker and so on and so forth. Laura Dern doesn the same facial expression for about 50% of the movie. The thing with the rabbits. The locomotion.

Grace Zabriskie's accent.

the scary face thing (2x)

intense conversations w/ awkward pauses = just made them more intense and loopy in my mind

laura dern's facial expression = yeah, well, that's true of laura in lots of things. but she made up for it with her amazing acting in certain parts, like when she was screaming "i'm a WHORE, i'm FRIGHTENED!" on the streets of LA and generally acting like a crackhead.

thing with the rabbits = genuinely creepy for the length of it, no?

i thought the locomotion was just awesome, as was the nina simone dance at the end.

yeah thing with the rabbits is pretty creepy. I'm not saying it's bad or that I dislike it, just have been sitting here the last couple of hours thinking wtf.

all the really intense conversations with a close-up of someone's face and then they say something and it goes to the person they're talking to and it takes them twenty seconds to reply and then it goes back to the original speaker and so on and so forth.

^^^ My problem, among others, with the movie. The pacing is awfully flatfooted.

she's a terrific actress in this (love the first audition scene w/ the long take closeup of her face)

The pacing is awfully flatfooted lugubriously terrifying

i like to think of this movie as being rita's death-dream. it doesn't exactly fit, but nothing else does either.

the scary face thing (2x)

Somebody learned how to use Photoshop! Seriously though, it was terrifying. All terrifying.

This film made a lot more sense on second viewing, especially once I realised it was all a metaphor for attaining enlightenment through the practice of TM.

rolled my eyes repeatedly throughout this tiresome, self-indulgent, embarrassing, overlong, overly-(self-)referential, ugly-and-i-don't-care-that-that's-appropriate-to-the-story mess of, quoth lynch, "total fucking bullshit." sure there's a bunch of compelling stuff in there that kept me going the first 2 hours, primarily in the soliloquies, and someone maybe could have walked it along a difficult tightrope to good fiction (honestly fuck tacking human-trafficking-allusions onto your hollywood-actress story no matter the intent), but then lynch had to drop three hours of a reunion with his personal obsessions on top of it. laura dern's contorted face is now the lynchian equivalent of spielberg's little kid looking upward in innocent wonder. no mas.

http://www.nicksflickpicks.com/InlandEmpireScream1.jpg

is there any particular reason he thought we would wnat to watch justin theroux again?

http://www.dvdtimes.co.uk/protectedimage.php?image=RogerKeen/inland3.jpg_13082007

I found this film extremely compelling when I watched it, I just don't think I’d care to see it again.

yeah it's great but pretty exhausting. i plan to watch it again soon though. been long enough since i last saw it.

I plan to eventually watch it while neither drunk or stoned. I don't remember one damn thing about this movie. Apart from scary rabbits and laugh track placement being all fractured. Which I think was awesome.

its fantastic but I've only watched the DVD once since seeing it in the theater. its a real commitment to immerse yrself in it.

it just reminds me how awesome Mulholland Drive is

Mulholland Drive's a little easier to take in for sure

I guess that's a nicest way to call me a idiot.

Theroux appeared w/ Lynch at a Q&A at the Kennedy Center a couple of years ago and Lynch had him introduced as "the James Mason of contemporary cinema."

And I could watch this movie pretty much any old time.

I guess that's a nicest way to call me a idiot.

haha no I meant its easier for me too! I've watched Mulholland Drive a bunch but this only twice.

oh god, that picture and bringing back the memory of watching the movie makes me want to throw up

i say this in the most positive manner i can - i'll never forget this film but damn it was a sick experience for me, never want to watch it again

so thumbs up then

I have to say I totally agree with gabbneb, yet I still like this movie. I
feel that in all Lynch's movies there's always messy, ridiculous stuff, but some things
are so beautiful, so brilliant that it's always worth watching them.

I love this movie with all my little black heart.

http://operachic.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/2007/06/05/inland460.jpg

inland empire is a very strange film.

The scene where all the polish people are sitting around a table in the dark and discussing shit (or there's a seance, and the guy in the chair disappears, or something) there is a painting on the wall of a slender hand holding a candle in the dark that I have been trying to find for years and years. Does anyone know the artist of title of that painting?

Kinda feel like lynch movies need to be digested a lot, but largely because its more about the striking incongruous images it plants in your head and how they shift about and sprout in your imagination and become even more, uh, enigmatic and talismanic maybe.

I love this movie and love watching the DVD, although I rarely watch all the way from beginning to end.

There's probably a lot that could have been cut out, although in the theater, the epic length and increasing randomness of the movie was definitely a huge factor in its impact. Being there in the theater felt like being plunged deeper and deeper into a bottomless nightmare.

I also have come to really appreciate the cinematography in this film. Yes it's "uglier" than his other films, but there are so many singular and memorable images, that I really think it may be his masterwork.

Its one of those where I couldn't imagine the DVD working, and for TV it would have to be a 1am screening, lights out...

yeah, for me it was 3 am in my basement, alone, sitting near a noisy boiler, watching a movie that never seemed to end

BRUTAL FUCKING MURDER

I've got this landlord...

when laura dern was giving those soliloquies about gouging out the eye of the guy who attempted to rape her and getting in a fight with her husband, i couldn't stop seeing her as trixie from deadwood (in looks, accent, and behavior).

I'm not sure why but I naturally gravitated towards that character and those scenes being a "center" of the universe for the film as I was watching it. Maybe because the tone was so much colder and less stylistic. Can't say if that's more true than any of the other incarnations. I later read that those monologues were actually the first scenes shot for the film.

hours of impenetrable garbage

no you don't get it, he's a geniusssss

http://www.nicksflickpicks.com/InlandEmpireScream1.jpg
http://www.nicksflickpicks.com/InlandEmpireScream1.jpghttp://www.nicksflickpicks.com/InlandEmpireScream1.jpg

much like this movie i read ilx w/imgs off

Heh. Lynch with "images off." Heh.

That makes "images off" sound like "lights out", ie you are unconscious. "Yeah, I saw Inland Empire, but with the images turned off. Yeah, somebody hit me over the head with a beer bottle right before the movie started."

I haven't rewatched this since I saw it in the theater with a friend. Afterwards, he admitted he was bored and wanted to leave after a half hour but he wanted to "make (himself) watch the whole thing." I was like, whatever man, I would have been cool if you left.

Who did that painting that is in the room w all the gypsies when they are sitting around a table and people are appearing and disappearing? There is a spooky painting of a arm holding a single candle that I really really want. I'm not at home right now otherwise I'd take a screenshot...

lolz its probably one of Lynch's

I watched blue velvet this week and it was thoroughly meh

u crazy

Lamp do you oft penetrate your garbage?

That monologue by the woman on the sidewalk about the bus (to Pomona?) has always stayed with me.

burial sampled it on his second album

morbz i understand its contours and symmetries at the v least~~~

i mean srsly for about half of the movie i could have just been watching w/ my eyes closed - indistinct black blobs and dancing points of light ftw - & i found it deeply frustrating. i mean the only way in ime is through the mental puzzle of it since its ugly and the story and doesnt make sense and the characters are so fractured but i spent so much of the movie watching on a really basic processing level like "who's talking, who are they talking to, who are they supposed to be" that i missed most of everything? which made watching even more disconnected and uncertain and basically robbed the movie of any power.

i dont need narrative but i do need to be able to see wtf is going on & im not sure what the point of leaving the audience literally in the dark for most of the movie was...

wtf → f−f++f−f was even goin on in this movie, I ask u

hours of impenetrable garbage
― F → F−F++F−F (Lamp), Wednesday, February 24, 2010 4:21 AM (12 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

ile board description

i spent so much of the movie watching on a really basic processing level like "who's talking, who are they talking to, who are they supposed to be" that i missed most of everything

if you were disoriented i don't think you "missed" anything, i think disorientation is sort of the movie's method. (doesn't mean you have to enjoy or admire it, obv.) i know plenty of people who really don't like inland empire despite liking other lynch things -- even people who weren't bothered by the jumble of mulholland drive -- so i know it just ain't for everyone. but i've seen it twice and liked it a lot both times, and there are at least as many scenes and moments lodged in my head from it as from any other lynch film.

who are they supposed to be

lol key question of the film here dontchaknow

Adam Bruneau, i'm pretty sure that's one of Lynch's photographs.

"That monologue by the woman on the sidewalk about the bus (to Pomona?) has always stayed with me."

There was a DVD of student-film experiments made under Lynch's tutelage, and I think that scene might have been poached from that, or if not, it was otherwise sourced from a completely different project and inserted in, video-jockey style, like the bunnies segment was.

i had a similar negative reaction as the thread reviver. a lot of it looked real bad, not interesting-bad, just sloppy-bad. though some stuff looked cool. and frankly i found no way to get even anything resembling bearings such that i was basically 3/4 removed from the film within a flat hour. i should probably see it again though, maybe i won't have such a strong reaction now that i have an idea of what to expect.

There was a DVD of student-film experiments made under Lynch's tutelage, and I think that scene might have been poached from that, or if not, it was otherwise sourced from a completely different project and inserted in, video-jockey style, like the bunnies segment was.

?? Don't really see how this could be the case considering how well its integrated into the film with Laura Dern dying in front of the homeless woman and then the Holy Mountain-style camera pullback/reveal shot

Inland Empire felt like a weak retread of Mulholland Dr. to me.

http://t3.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:53IroJLfjkvRRM:http://www.lovefilm.com/lovefilm/images/products/4/137174-large.jpg

This might be the DVD, but I remembered it having a different cover.

I really liked Inland Empire and on first viewing it kind of washed over me, but with many startling and memorable sequences rising up through the digital murk. Subsequently I had some back and forth emails with a friend who is a much bigger Lynch fan than I and his take was:

I only grasped what the movie was about when Laura Dern went through her 'death scene' in the street. After that it was plain sailing. Once the final sequence kicks in with the song and you realise that Dern and the Lost Girl are actually one and the same and that the whole movie has been about releasing her from the curse it all makes perfect sense. The descent into madness and darkness, the confronting of the Demon - which is Dern herself - and then the restoration of the marriage leading up to that incredible last shot of Dern seeing herself sitting there in a condition of complete calm

Be interested to know what people think of this interpretation?

Theroux appeared w/ Lynch at a Q&A at the Kennedy Center a couple of years ago and Lynch had him introduced as "the James Mason of contemporary cinema."

― Chris L, Friday, May 8, 2009 12:27 PM (9 months ago) Bookmark

he's also into, you know, stupid crackpot science and the dalai lama.

i think trying to interpret this film is just a headache i don't want or need.

did i mention i love some of david lynch's movies?

you realise that Dern and the Lost Girl are actually one and the same and that the whole movie has been about releasing her from the curse it all makes perfect sense.

i call total B.S. on this. the film isn't designed to "make perfect sense" nor do we ever get enough info (or enough non-contradictory clues) to come to any firm conclusions about the relationships between the various protagonists.

i mean in this sense it really is like mulholland drive squared. just in terms of narrative indeterminacy. trying to "make sense" of that movie seems like a dead end, too.

it doesn't make perfect sense, but it does make SOME kind of sense

Can you tie in Inland Empire to Tommy Westphall universe?
Twin Peaks might be the connector.

connection point = Grace Zabriskie no doubt

zabriskie point

i'm trying to 'reappraise' lynch atm in light of various poll results~~ didnt really feel mulldr so long ago but on rewatch there was a lot 2 like abt it esp visually. and certainly parts of twin peaks were incredible. & i can see why ppl really like this i think - its murky and interesting to think abt - but i just couldnt vibe it at all~~~

did you watch it on a screen in a theater

i walked home in the dark without seeing anybody in a city i was new to after seeing this

i mean srsly for about half of the movie i could have just been watching w/ my eyes closed

I DO NOT agree with this. I think the cinematography in this is wonderful and the shots he uses are all as essential to understanding the film as the movements of the actors and the droning on the soundtrack.

But on the other hand the soundtrack (with dialog & effects) is so powerful perhaps a sound-only version would be revealing as well! The 2nd disc DVD has some wonderful interviews with Lynch about the film including some great moments where he talks about the sound.

As for finding meaning in these films, it helps to understand how he directs and the emphasis he puts on theories like Collective Unconscious. My favorite story is when he was directing Twin Peaks the power kept shorting out during a scene. Like 3 or 4 times, right in the middle of shooting a scene. He went into the other room and meditated for half an hour and when he came out he rewrote the dialog. They did a take that went perfectly.

meaning doesn't necessary = "making sense" in narrative terms

i sort of think mullholland drive is, well i hate the word "overrated," but i don't think as highly of it as many do. i think it's about equal to lost highway with a more interesting protagonist i guess and a better soundtrack.

still think twin peaks: fire walk with me is pretty great.

yup

'went perfectly'? is that to say it was a scene that was awkward and didn't lead anywhere?

yah <3 fire walk with me

yup, ilx user gukbe says it's trash but I say no he's trash

>i call total B.S. on this. the film isn't designed to "make perfect sense" nor do we ever get enough info (or enough non-contradictory clues) to come to any firm conclusions about the relationships between the various protagonists.

"perfect sense" is probably a bit strong, and that extract is from a longer discussion which goes into more depth about how the characters and plot fit together. I don't agree that it's BS at all, and I also don't think one can dismiss the idea that the film is about releasing Dern from the curse, which to me seems obvious and is almost spelled out in the opening sequences. I'll grant that the characters are (wifully) opaque, but that's typical Lynch.

One of the things I like most about Lynch is that his films (and especially IE) can connect on a very clear emotional level, but also have layers of detail and meaning to unpick, and beneath what can seem an impenetrable surface there's a great deal of hidden intent.

i spent so much of the movie watching on a really basic processing level like "who's talking, who are they talking to, who are they supposed to be" that i missed most of everything? which made watching even more disconnected and uncertain and basically robbed the movie of any power

this is poss. my favourite movie of the past decade, for one thing; otoh i spend ~50% of any movie i watch doing this? because i just can't be bothered recognising people on film, for some reason, sometimes? so a movie where i am aware i am not meant to bother with this particular bit of mental processing is ~kind of helpful~

the film is about releasing Dern from the curse, which to me seems obvious and is almost spelled out in the opening sequences

otm - how could anyone miss this point???

"film is about" = worst phrase ever

maybe substitute key plot element

yah i think i end up seeing a lot of "video art" moreso than actual movies so the acting and cinematography and actual sort of plot elements are nice for a change but it still feels more like video art than cinema

that's probably roughly accurate

that's probably roughly accurate

As long as you don't think that movies are visual art. Or maybe "video art" is supposed to be something in its own category, apart from visual art? Or movies? "'Video art' moreso than actual movies" is some bullshit I'm surprised nobody else bothered to contradict.

i dunno if video art is 'supposed' to be something on its own, but it definitely is a thing, and it hangs around mostly in museum installations, and inland empire definitely has a whiff of it.

the last one i saw was a looped video of some guy walking barefoot over a slightly active volcano. the sound of wind and dribbling lava sounded kind of like badalamenti.

the other one i saw had a dude in a meatsuit (a suit made of meat) walking around new york flexing at passerbys.

Yeah there was a great one at the Art Institute of ice melting. But that was presented as a video loop and as an art installation. If it's presented as a movie, doesn't that make it a movie?

Secretly swapping Avatar with 3D Meatman would be amazing actually.

Well, sure. But people would tear the seats in the Imax off their bolts.

"Inland Empire" can be opaque, but that doesn't make it less than a movie. I think it's a fantastic movie.

hey hey, what's meatman -- chopped liver?

Oh, you.

Watched this for the first time the other day - to make things even more confusing we couldn't turn the subtitles on the polish bits on.

http://www.davidlynchfoundation.org/

paul mccartney
ringo starr
david lynch
russell simmons

"transforming lives from within"

http://alsolikelife.com/shooting/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/inlandempirescream2.jpg

Just watched this. Not under ideal circumstances -- about a half hour at a time, over six nights, while feeding the baby. It didn't do as much for me as Mulholland Dr. (which I saw in the theater) but I really liked it.

Loved: the rabbits for some reason. Maybe because I just read Chuck Klosterman's essay about laugh tracks. The way the laugh track almost dies out and then starts again -- EVERY TIME -- slays me. Also the foghorn sound, which I sort of think of as a quote from the closing whistle at the start of the Flintstones.

The fright scene with Laura Dern hustling up the path and then grimacing. One of the scariest things I've seen in his movies.

Also Grace Zabriskie hustling up the walk at the beginning. All the hustling in this movie is great. And the way GZ is shot in that first conversation scene -- somehow Lynch makes her look like a live-action Chuckie.

All scenes with the Hollywood prostitutes -- who I just thought of as "the girls" throughout -- I mean, I take the persistent porousness between "woman being looked at" and "prostitute" to be one of the movie's basic concerns. In the hotel room scenes there are (as elsewhere in the movie) tons of shots of Laura Dern silently onlooking; but they sort of have a different value here -- in other scenes she's looking on in horror, here she appears to be studying and learning "the moves."

Didn't love: everything in Poland. Which I guess from the thread discussion is supposed to be 1930s Poland? But this wasn't clear to me. These scenes evoked nothing for me, they didn't feel connected to the rest of the movie, and I just waited for them to be over.

yeah, this really didn't touch me as much as mulholland drive, and i found the penultimate few acts really hard going to be honest. plus when i watched it somehow we had subtitles off which made the polish bits even more difficult to understand!

I don't think I even finished this. I think I got like 2/3 of the way through and felt I'd seen all I needed to see.

i dont' even remember the poland bits!

it's time for david lynch to make another film

I also HAAAAAAATED that this was shot on video and it made it nearly unwatchable for me.

HD camera of the time, man.

i think this is amazing in the theater and a slog on home video, tbh

i saw it twice at the IFC center, didn't even take a bathroom break either time and was riveted through and through, but it took me about five hours to watch it at home on a much tinier tv, with lots of interruptions for bathroom/phone/food/etc

i agree the poland parts seem extraneous (if it even makes sense to say that about this movie). they seem like notes from an east european gangster movie that he flirted with and then got bored of.

i think this is amazing in the theater and a slog on home video, tbh

― creeping shania (donna rouge), Tuesday, October 12, 2010 1:27 PM (11 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

i saw it twice at the IFC center, didn't even take a bathroom break either time and was riveted through and through, but it took me about five hours to watch it at home on a much tinier tv, with lots of interruptions for bathroom/phone/food/etc

― creeping shania (donna rouge), Tuesday, October 12, 2010 1:29 PM (10 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

otm

I've had this same experience although I still enjoy watching it at home from time to time.

I thought the Polish bits were supposed to be scenes from the original, abandoned version of On High In Blue Tomorrows?

yeah, at the beginning the muffled voiceover says something about "the longest-running radio play in polish history" iirc?

Wait, I'm reading about this now and am totally confused. I thought that the Lost Girl (who watches everything on TV throughout the movie) was the same woman (I mean, the same actor) who kills Laura Dern with a screwdriver, and who appears as Billy's wife. But apparently the first one is Karolina Gruszka and the latter two are Julia Ormond? Is that right? Now I don't know what to make of anything.

what can Lynch really do after Inland Empire? feels like he's kind of exhausted the repertoire with this. feels like something he's been working towards, a condensed, cumulative piece of work.

love the hell out of it.

Found it tiresome and thought it looked awful.

Its look was certainly very intentional (whatever you think of the result)

I heard him interviewed about his music the other day and he said he definitely wanted to make more films, but that there wasn't anything in the pipeline at the moment.

Found it tiresome and thought it looked awful.

― À la recherche du temps Pardew (jim in glasgow), Saturday, 15 January 2011 10:04 (11 hours ago)

I agree but I still enjoyed it and think it's a good film.

Not to cause thread drift or whatevs, but the only film shot with a digital camera that I would describe as beautiful is Miami Vice. Everything else looks either bland or like shit.

what about Public Enemies?

For me the digital worked much better in Miami Vice than Public Enemies. I know we've been trained to view the past through certain filming conventions that can be somewhat contrived. But I couldn't help letting the aggressively modern look of Public Enemies take me completely out of the movie. All the sharpness and handheld work was really distracting and made it feel like it wasn't truly representing its time period.

That said, I think Inland Empire is also a brilliant use of digital cameras, though with very different goals than any Michael Mann film.

we'd talk. he'd tell me about the town he grew up in, all the lil girls he'd fucked. there was a chemical factory in this town, and, uh, he told me it was putting that shit in the air so you couldn't think straight. it got to a lot of people. there was a lot of crazy shit going on there. people having weird dreams and seeing things that wasn't there.

Where am I? I'M A FREEEEEEEEEEEEAAAAAK

i finally watched Inland Empire the other night ("finally" because last year i got really obsessed and watched everything that he had ever made - shorts, films, commercials, etc) in chronological order, only to stop just before Inland Empire because i was having trouble getting anyone to come over and watch a 3 hour movie. about a year went by, and now i've finally completed the journey and can die in peace someday)

i loved it. i was a bit baffled by the last 45 minutes, but as with his other movies, there's a logic to it that accommodates interpretations to it on multiple levels (for example, here's a really REALLY long breakdown, centered on ideas of a purgatory where you have to defeat a reflection of your own evil (manifested as "the phantom") in order to move on). i forget the exact quote, but somewhere fairly recently lynch said in an interview that his mysteries do have answers, and that he's not into the idea of creating an impenetrable puzzle that has no logical solution.

feels like something he's been working towards, a condensed, cumulative piece of work.

love the hell out of it.

― circa1916, Saturday, January 15, 2011 4:24 AM (3 years ago)

totally. i'm glad he's finally working on new stuff again but Inland Empire would be a fantastic way to end a career, if that's where he left it.

laura dern is fucking incredible in this movie.

I think the possible 'answers' are the worst thing about Lynch. The more I think about that well-established explanation of Mulhulland Drive, the less special it seems.

rolled my eyes repeatedly throughout this tiresome, self-indulgent, embarrassing, overlong, overly-(self-)referential, ugly-and-i-don't-care-that-that's-appropriate-to-the-story mess of, quoth lynch, "total fucking bullshit." sure there's a bunch of compelling stuff in there that kept me going the first 2 hours, primarily in the soliloquies, and someone maybe could have walked it along a difficult tightrope to good fiction (honestly fuck tacking human-trafficking-allusions onto your hollywood-actress story no matter the intent), but then lynch had to drop three hours of a reunion with his personal obsessions on top of it. laura dern's contorted face is now the lynchian equivalent of spielberg's little kid looking upward in innocent wonder. no mas.

― gabbneb being gabbneb (gabbneb), Friday, May 8, 2009 1:47 AM (5 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I don't often change my mind, but I was totally fucking wrong here, perhaps because I watched on tv and didn't pay enough attention. Saw it again in the theatre (at MoMA, I think) and was blown away. Great movie.

Watched for the third time (and first time in seven years according to this thread). Some things clicked this time that didn't before -- the Polish girl's story is basically "Wizard of Oz" and Laura Dern's story is "Alice in Wonderland." How they fold into each other is opaque but intuitive and/or sometimes clunky.. The digital video is really going to date this move, but in a good way. The grainy darkness suits it.

The extra scenes feature more stuff things that happened also has a scene heavily reminiscent of Sunset Boulevard

"More Things That Happened"

no movie gets me closer than this one to genuinely fearing something might come out of it

cool post, I always found the TV portal scenes with the girl crying made it feel like we were her as the viewer, like it's a closed loop.

Yeah, and then when Laura Dern actually enters her room at the end, it's like the loop is broken and they're both released. The movie is so dark and disorienting that I forget it has such a warm, almost ecstatic ending.

no movie gets me closer than this one to genuinely fearing something might /come out of it/

Haha I said recently that when I watch this I feel like I'm in 1896 watching the lumières's train arriving, except with Laura Dern's anxiety in place of the train

's

it's like the loop is broken and they're both released

ha was gonna say exactly this last night but thought wait i need to watch it again maybe i'm remembering it wrong-- happy i was not. literally transcendent

i love this movie

lol ive been on like 3 or 4 dates in my entire life. one of them i brought to see this in a theater. we met up before the movie for a drink and chat. she was sick and had to leave after the movie but she still wanted to go out. she had never seen Twin Peaks, never seen Eraserhead or Blue Velvet, never heard of David Lynch. lol. i got to give her credit, she sat through the whole movie.

the 2-DVD set is really wonderful. that great quinoa story. the series of interviews. not to mention the cut footage which is nearly a whole extra movie.

im still wondering about that painting in the scene w the polish people. it's a picture of someone holding a candle and its so spooky and beautiful. i want it. too bad, it's probably a one-off done by one of Lynch's friends and now somewhere in an attic in Poland, lost forever to time.

i love when the homeless lady is cradling her as she dies and she just holds that lighter up and they both watch the flame. it's a really magical moment. very tender.

also the sound effects during "Locomotion". who knows why Lynch decided we need someone jamming like a lunatic on some echo pedals while that was going on, but i'm real glad he did.

i read Hollywood Babylon recently and the story of Lana Turner really struck me as Inland Empire like. Lana's daughter Cheryl saved her family by stabbing a mobster in the stomach with a kitchen knife, killing him. it's a crazy story.

I had somehow never seen Natural Born Killers until very recently and I noticed that Oliver Stone used the 'inappropriate laugh track' trick over a decade before IE

you mean the one used on the "rabbits" sections?

i wonder if Natural Born Killers was the first, then? (this seems like something that Know Your Meme might have an article on, heh)

although arguably, any number of really bad tv sitcoms inadvertently pioneered the inappropriate laugh track before that

That's true. But I was definitely surprised to see Oliver Stone basically employing that device to more or less the same end: pointing out the absurdity of canned laughter

Just went through the experience of watching this for the first time tonight! What a strange, strange film. On one hand, I barely had any idea what was going on and there was about a 30-minute stretch where I hated it -- on the other hand, the first half of the film and the last 45 minutes are so beautiful and eerie and well shot that I can't help but be blown away. The close-ups of everyone's faces (especially Grace Zabriskie's) are creepy in the best way.

anyone got any advice on, like, the best approach to re-watching it? I went into this with no idea what to expect and now I'm wondering if there's any interesting interpretations of the film that are floating around that could be good to look at before a re-watch

It's David Lynch - there will be a million interpretations out there! No doubt on this very thread!

Saw this at the time of release and not since, must rewatch

I just think of it as a representation of one person's ascendance to new consciousness, through the medium of transcendental meditation. All the different story strands are different hierarchies of understanding. TM advocates always seem to be obsessed with it to the exclusion of all else, can't imagine Lynch is any different. In other words, imagine a non-psycho Mike Love making a film.

The camera zoom-back from the Hollywood Blvd death" scene made my stomach lurch the first time I saw it. Also the second.

"death", I meant to say