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| Delicious | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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The thing I don't understand about most people is that they say the films of David Lynch are impossible to understand. If you watch and pay attention, not everything is going to necessarily make perfect sense, but you're going to get the jist of what he's trying to do.
In this brilliant new film (certainly as good as, if not better, than "Mulholland Drive" in many ways), Laura Dern gives on the most terrifying performances I have ever seen as promising, beautiful actress Nikki Grace/ a low income, degraded, hideous woman who has nowhere to go. If you want an idea of the kind of non-linear, angst-ridden surreality you're in for, here's an example: about a half an hour of the film is devoted to Susan, not Nikki's, plight with a group of prostitutes, some looking like Hollywood stars and others like crack addicts. She is stabbed by her Polish husband in the cursed film. Bleeding to death on the Hollywood strip all over the "stars", a homeless black woman says: "You're dyin', lady". Then a Japanese girl speaks in her native language--while Dern's schizoid character is dying--about a bus going to somewhere else in Hollywood. This takes about five minutes. Then the black woman holds up a lighter and says to Dern: "Sometimes we die, is all. Here. You see this light? You won't see no blue when you wake up." Then Jeremy Irons bursts in with his megaphone screaming "Bravo! Smashing cut!" Either Nikki was never Nikki or she was Nikki and became Susan once she prostituted herself for Devon. Or Susan fantasized about being Nikki. In any case, this is schizoid identity crisis in the extreme, but more than that a very nicely placed punch on the nose of Hollywood itself: as in "MH", he portrays most actors and actresses as elitist snobs who are amazingly empty and superficial apart from their roles, wrought with hanger ons and arrogant directors. I don't know if this is Lynch's conspiratorial, paranoid fantasy about Hollywood or how it actually is. This movie is brilliant, exciting, terrifying, and simply enjoyable all the way around. Art. Lynch continues to transcend himself. Watch out for the Polish lady! |
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| Perhaps the creepiest film I've ever seen. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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David Lynch has consistently been one of my favorite filmmakers. He doesn't work often, but when he does it's an event. No other major filmmaker has been able to so exquisitely expose to us his very subconscious in such frightening, arresting ways. "Inland Empire" is now the third straight Lynch film -- after "Lost Highway" and "Mulholland Drive" -- to explore a similar subject in a similar style. All three films appear to be about guilt fracturing a person's personality.
Visually, this may be Lynch's best film. Playing around with his little digital camera, Lynch creates stunning, scary, skin-crawling images that will leave you totally unnerved. Actors' faces pushed close into wide-angle lenses, Edward Hopper-esque still settings of the "bunny family," actors leaning into still shots from out of frame, light and shadow and noise used to completely shock your senses. "Inland Empire" is an atmospheric feast. With all the gimmicky, dumb horror movies out there -- with their killers and ghouls and other nonsense -- here was a movie that, simply with visual and auditory style, scared the hell out of me. With a Lynch movie, people always want to know if it really makes sense in the end. Does "Inland Empire"? I don't know. I'll admit I'm not sure how all the threads fit together. But who cares? I don't think you have to understand every component of a Lynch film to enjoy it. "Inland Empire," to me, is a stygian nightmare vision -- paranoia, the subconscious, fear, jealousy all alight across the screen. Forget about making sense of this movie and instead enjoy Lynch's showmanship -- the lighting, the camera work, the soundtrack -- and the incredible performances he receives, especially from Laura Dern and Julia Ormond. "Inland Empire" is another brilliant glimpse into Lynch's mind. |
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| an argument winner for the anti-lynch brigade | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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I once had an argument with some friends who detested The Beatles. I love them - even an earlier, deceptively simple song like 'Please Please Me' is sheer melodic genius. These friends thought their 'argument winner' was "Ok...what about 'Ob La Di, Ob La Da' then, huh?!".
Hmmm... 'Inland Empire' is David Lynch's 'Ob La Di, Ob La Da' - lousy output from a very fine artist. I loved the intrigue of 'Lost Highway', and 'Mulholland Drive' still haunts me. But with 'Inland Empire' the riddles and twists left me absolutely cold. The Lynch ingredients are there but the cake just doesn't rise. I guess it's what can happen when the usual budgetary constraints of film-making are lessened to a large degree by the opportunity to shoot digitally. Discipline and restraint can go out the window as the director gets carried away with his new-found 'freedom'. Quite liked the rabbit sitcom though.... One star for that. |
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| 2 Hours, 59 Minutes of Terrifying Furniture | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Regarding INLAND EMPIRE, David Lynch said digital filmmaking was a revelation for him and he'd never return to conventional cinematic hardware. The smaller equipment offered greater freedom of movement and the superior light-capturing ability allowed for less cumbersome set-ups and more "natural" takes.
And also--he can shoot FOREVER and it don't cost nothin'. The digital world allows Lynch, in INLAND EMPIRE, to, finally, fully indulge in his obsession with the dread eminating from mid-century modern furniture. This isn't so much a movie as a meditation on the decor. As for the story, it's Brand Lynch: the main character (Laura Dern) suffers through endless fracturings of persona and reality. What's new here is the time alloted for the background to roar and yawn and seeth/fester/stutter in tones from dullest taupe to fever red to blinding flourescence. Lynch sees the normality of these 1950s Americana settings as a mask getting ready to fall and expose a truly horrible underneath. Though I think this one has a happy ending. Your call. INLAND EMPIRE isn't great Lynch, like BLUE VELVET or MULHOLLAND DRIVE. It lacks narrative cohesion. BUT--it's something to fall into, watch several times, groove on the truly uncomfortable vibe, maybe nod off and dream some weird stuff yourself and see how it fits into Lynch's bizarre, utterly unique Living Space. Cheers. |
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Inland Empire (David Lynch, 2006)
If a David Lynch movie doesn't have me sitting in the theater muttering "WTF?" under my breath at least once, it's not doing its job. On the other hand, when I spend more time than not sitting there muttering "WTF?" under my breath to myself, maybe it's doing its job a bit too well (and people have a tendency to move away from you at times like that. Except the creepy ones. And you really don't want to have anything to do with them). Here's what I've got for you, and I warn you my perception of the plot may be way, way off: Nikki Grace (Laura Dern) and Devon Berk (Justin Theroux) are cast as the lead actors in a remake of a never-finished Polish film that's supposedly cursed. We alternate between scenes of "reality" (as much as anything can be reality in Hollywoodland), scenes of the production itself, scenes of the original Polish film, and scenes of Nikki Grace losing her grip on reality and seeing the world as if she is Susan Blue, the character she portrays in the film. A Lynchian exploration of the Stanislavsky Method? As time goes on, Lynch ensures that our perceptions of the division between Nikki Grace and Susan Blue are similarly distorted-- though it must be said that there would have been a much sharper dividing line had the "reality" of the first hour or so of the film felt a lot less unreal. (When your second scene involves a sitcom starring a family of rabbits, "unreal" is only one of the many, many words that comes to mind.) As is to be expected from any film put out by David Lynch, there's an entire parade of familiar faces, both from earlier Lynch movies (Dern has been a favorite of his for twenty years, while Theroux is a newer acquisition, but has popped up in Lynch's films before) and from the wider world of film (Harry Dean Stanton, Jeremy Irons, Cameron Daddo, Julia Ormond, William H. Macy, and Mary Steenburgen are only a small sampling). In a production like this, ironically, the raft of familiar faces serves to anchor the viewer in reality-- you know these people, you've seen them scores of times over the past few decades. One wonders if Lynch would have been able to cast reality completely to the winds had he used a cast of unknowns. Oddly, this put me in mind of John Carpenter's short Cigarette Burns. I'm not entirely sure why, other than the obsession with filmmaking and the cursed-film-within-a-film conceit. Maybe it's because Norman Reedus and Justin Theroux are always getting mixed up in my head for whatever reason (with Michael J. Fox lurking on the edges like one of those people who doesn't move away from me in theaters). Maybe it's because Carpenter's finally back on his game, at least judging by Cigarette Burns. (Lynch, of course, hasn't been off his game in thirty years.) Whatever. In any case, Inland Empire is a movie you'll need to watch multiple times to get any sense of what's going on, but as with most of David Lynch's films, it's well worth the time you'll spend puzzling it out. I know I'll be putting in another three viewings just to make sure I've got the plot right. *** ½ |
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