Inland Empire

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The Original BJ
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Post by The Original BJ »

Sabin wrote:This is Lynch's One for the Fans.
You know, I thought this too...then wondered if I'm truly the Lynch fan I thought when others seem to love it so much and I thought it simply okay. Well, actually, I thought the first hour was pretty great -- the early scene with the neighbor had me convinced another Lynch masterwork was on the way. But in the second and third hour -- and here I fully acknowledge my own ignorance -- the film began to lose me entirely. As Sabin says, it's certainly horrifying (and the soundtrack alone jolted me several times in ways most horror movies only dream of), but I can't even begin to make sense of what this thing means. I'd put it alongside The Fountain as another 2006 film I absolutely admired for its go-for-broke singularity, but one whose interesting parts (for me, at least) failed to cohere into a meaningful hole. I hate to knock Inland Empire, because I assume the problems are with me and not the film...but I was pretty disappointed.

Also, and I may be risking some ire from the film's fans, I don't like the idea of Lynch refusing to work on film again. Great visual beauty has always been a trademark of Lynch films, and while some have marveled at Inland's digital photography, I have to admit I found it pretty ugly (and not the best fit, IMO, for this film.)

I did like seeing my friend as one of the "Locomotion" girls, however. :p
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Post by Eric »

Sabin wrote:This is Lynch's One for the Fans
Very true. I loved it.
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Post by Sabin »

Thoughts on 'Inland Empire' without at all discussing "What it means"...

...this is the most horrifying movie I've seen in a while, a long while. Both in the anticipation of how horrifying it's going to be, how horrifying it is, and how strange it is to feel the horror subverted. But make not mistake about it: I have feared for my life during this movie. This is Lynch's One for the Fans...and he makes uneasy spectators out of us.

...this is also one of his most uneven pieces of work. There are moments fo Lynchian flourishes that just don't work for me, especially involving his usually phenomenal use of music and sound design. Shame.

...Laura Dern gives the performance of her life, which is fitting because I think her career might be over. Nobody who sees this movie will ever cast her in anything. Her face is so monstrous and distorted in this film, especially in one image late in the film in which I almost screamed in the theater. I almost want to make her an Oscar and send it to her because Lord knows, this is it. I can't imagine how physically exhausted she must have been at this film's completion, and how insulted she must have been to see herself presented like this. If she wasn't, then my God, we're dealing with one of the saints of cinema.

...more to come.
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Post by Franz Ferdinand »

That's pretty classy, promoting Laura Dern on a streetcorner with a real cow. Quite unorthodox.
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Post by Mack Ten »

Dern is amazing in this.
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Post by Eric »

How is that different from any other Oscar campaign, then? I gather the intention is always to drum up business.
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Post by Sonic Youth »

But he's not REALLY campaigning for her. I think it's just pretense to get people to see the film.
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Post by Eric »

The Original BJ wrote:In the midst of Oscar hoopla, I sometimes forget about the films that aren't in contention, and it's nice to be pleasantly reminded that there's at least one more film worth anticipating on the holiday movie horizon.
Amen ... excepting for the fact that Lynch is campaigning hard for Laura Dern to get a Best Actress nomination.
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Post by The Original BJ »

I can't wait for Inland Empire (or INLAND EMPIRE, if that's what it is). I have a friend who has a small role in the film, and she has the most wonderful things to say about David Lynch and the film.

In the midst of Oscar hoopla, I sometimes forget about the films that aren't in contention, and it's nice to be pleasantly reminded that there's at least one more film worth anticipating on the holiday movie horizon.
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Post by Sabin »

Peter Travers weighs in with another non-review.

'Inland Empire' -- ***1/2

David Lynch's INLAND EMPIRE (he insists the letters be capitalized), shot with a consumer digicam (the Sony PD-150), is three hours of mesmerizing (often infuriating) incoherence, a puzzle whose pieces you'll keep trying to put together in your head long after you leave the theater. Some filmmakers work outside the box, but Lynch -- the maker of surreal masterpieces with Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks and Mulholland Drive -- never fit in any box to begin with. A painter before he ever shot a frame of film, this Montana avant-gardist (Mel Brooks once called him Jimmy Stewart from Mars) and longtime practicer of transcendental meditation treats the screen as a canvas on which he can shape abstract ideas. Lynch's canvases always spill over. You watch his films -- INLAND EMPIRE is arguably his most ambitious mind-bender yet -- in a futile effort to grasp what's there and what isn't. In a multiplex world that can be summed up with the mind-numbing words Big Momma's House 2, I find this a good thing.

As for the alleged plot of INLAND EMPIRE, here's as far as I'll go: Laura Dern, in a monumental performance that holds the line of humanism even as reality and illusion blur, plays Nikki, an actress signed to star in a new movie, directed by Kingsley (Jeremy Irons) and co-starring the womanizing Devon (Justin Theroux). A neighbor, played with freakish intensity by Grace Zabriskie, warns Nikki about the role. As well she should. The film, based on a gypsy curse, is actually a remake, shot before in Poland but never released because the original stars were brutally murdered. Soon Nikki can't tell herself from her character, Sue. And viewers must deal with the appearance of giant rabbits (voiced by Naomi Watts, Laura Harring and Scott Coffey), hookers who sing The Locomotion, and scene shifts from the Lodz ghetto to Hollywood Boulevard. My advice, in the face of such hallucinatory brilliance, is that you hang on. Don't peg Lynch as an elitist -- this is a guy who recently parked himself and a live cow at a Los Angeles intersection to tout Dern for an Oscar. See him for what he is: an artist following his own maverick instincts and inviting us to jump with him into the wild blue.
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Post by Sabin »

Ed Gonzalez, Contrarian Rex.

****
David Lynch's new film is many things, among them a sinister waltz through a So-Cal underbelly known as Inland Empire, a murder mystery, a movie-within-a-hallucination-within-a-movie-within-so-on, and the story of love affairs that span the boundaries of time, space, and reason. It is happening again, you may think (or dread—Lynch, after all, has his haters): a redux of Mulholland Drive, which is only half true. Perform a post-mortem on this three-hour beast of a film and you will find only half a heart beating inside its chest, but you will also discover innards that coil in more grandiose directions. Mulholland Drive, possibly the greatest work of American film art since Altman's Nashville, is an impossible act for Lynch to have to follow, but the bug-eyed director—pupils dilated and imagination tripping in almost inconceivable directions—has made the Atlas Shrugged of narrative avant-garde films, compulsively watchable and insanely self-devouring.

Seeing Inland Empire bright and early on a Sunday morning for the first time—a second, very necessary viewing already awaits—was not unlike slipping into a nightmarish reverie not long after my equally prolonged adventures in REM sleep the night prior, which, incidentally, accommodated a screening of a Lynch movie that was not at all similar to this extraordinary freak-out. There is a very clean divide in Mulholland Drive between a woman's dreams and waking life, but the walls between the two are completely dissolved in the more fragmentary Inland Empire, Lynch's most self-reflexive creation to date. The director has vowed never to work on film again, and for this, his first feature shot on digital video, he lobs a cherry bomb at his entire canon, recording the jagged remnants that resonate from the blast as they slide and dissipate into the swirl of his projector beam. Some may call it a toilet, but I like to think of it as a splendiferous whirlpool of wonders.

Where to begin? At the end, perhaps, with the word sweet, Inland Empire's answer to Mulholland Drive's silencio, though sweetness is not a feeling Inland Empire exactly radiates. Much earlier, a nosy neighbor played by Grace Zabriskie (possibly on the same crazy pills Fiona Shaw took for The Black Dahlia) walks into the home of an actress, Nikki (Laura Dern), in order to rant and rave about the younger woman having "it": the part of Sue in a remake of "a Polish gypsy story" titled 4/7 that was never finished because two of its actresses were gruesomely murdered (the American version, directed by Jeremy Irons's Kinglsey, goes by the Sirkian title On High in Blue Tomorrows). Zabriskie's nosy interloper, like Lee Grant's Louise Bonner from Mulholland Drive, ostensibly sees into the future, offering an implicit warning—to Nikki but also to Lynch's audience—that time is about to collapse on itself, leaving identities crushed and blurred almost beyond recognition.

Inland Empire is totally ####ed up, picking up reception from metaphysical wavelengths past and present and places here and there, sometimes from Lynch's own short work: the story's hilarious white-trash scenes are essentially live-action variations of the director's Dumbland series, and Rabbits, an anthology of shots starring Laura Harring, Naomi Watts, and Scott Coffey as sitcom rabbits possibly waiting for Godot, is fascinatingly incorporated into this film's metaverse. (This time when their phone rings there's someone on the other end, and when their door opens someone walks through.) From her own den of frustration, a woman—Nikki/Sue's 4/7 proxy or, perhaps, a spectator of Inland Empire—watches Rabbits, whose canned laughter undermines her fit of busy tears. These shorts act as one of many exciting portals in the film through which characters cross between worlds, and what is Inland Empire in the end but a hall with walls equipped with barbed rabbit holes, each one daring us to peek through, possibly even to take a plunge into the sea of Lynch's id?

You may ask what the film's stream of non sequiturs, anecdotes, clues, doublings, folktales, and psychotic episodes mean. We could say nothing and declare that Inland Empire doesn't so much fall into the abyss as it resides in it, telegraphing dizzying sounds and visions from its drowned world toward the outside, which should suffice as an explanation if you've learned to respect the fact that Lynch carves his films much closer to where our subconscious impulses resonate from than anyone has ever dared. Lynch, more honestly than Godard, embraces the dark and dingy contours of the DV format, which reflect Nikki's in-too-deep thesping. She goes after her married co-star Devon (Justin Theroux), thinking he is really Billy, the character he plays in On High in Blue Tomorrows, screaming for him not unlike Irene Miracle does when she flashes Brad Davis her breasts in Midnight Express, only to finally confuse her own self. Nikki is Sue and Sue is Nikki and never shall the two part—and realizing how they inhabit and torture each other may just save the world.

Lynch indulges familiar fixations, risking the self-importance of Ghost World's Nearer, Father, Nearer video, but he's serious about burrowing into Sue's psyche and tapping its resources. Dern works fiercely with the director to send us blistering imprints of how Nikki's consciousness filters itself into her unconsciousness and then back again, and together they weave a meditation on the ecstasy and healing power of watching movies. Dern's is the performance of her career, a spectacle of freakish facial expressions, primal screams, and howling monologues; like Watts in Mulholland Drive, she is not afraid to get ugly for her art—which also happens to be Sue's own daring in the film. She is a mess of hurt trying to find herself, but what she ultimately stumbles upon, like Watts and Harring do inside the club Silencio, is a form of rapture that permits others to transcend loss. More viewings will, no doubt, suss out new riches, possibly even clear up or muddle what has already been revealed. After all, where films like Little Children spoon-feed their audience, Inland Empire rewards their scrutiny.
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Post by VanHelsing »

There goes Dern's shot at Best Actress.
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Inland Empire


By Ray Bennett
Hollywood Reporter


VENICE, Italy -- It's a shame David Lynch is such an artist. If he were more of a journeyman filmmaker he might have made a pretty good picture about the blurring of life, real and imagined, with motion pictures, but instead he's come up with an interminable bore titled "Inland Empire."

"I don't understand what I'm doing here," says Laura Dern somewhere in the middle of the film, and she's not the only one. Filled with dreary sequences in poor lighting, incongruous scenes featuring characters who are never explained, with occasional startling images, the films lasts almost three hours and seems longer. Boxoffice prospects appear limited to Lynch devotees and the contentedly bewildered.

The annoying thing is that it starts quite well. Dern and Justin Theroux are starring in a movie being made by a director played by Jeremy Irons, who surprises them by saying the film is a remake. The first one was never finished, he says, because the leading actors were murdered.

It's all nice and spooky at this point, with a foreign-sounding woman having earlier warned the actress about time shifting and how evil actions have consequences. Then the actress's husband cautions the actor that he'd better not try anything with his wife.


As they begin rehearsals in a studio soundstage, there's an intruder behind the flats at the back and the actor goes to look in the dark. The director has a shrewd-looking assistant named Freddie, played coolly by Harry Dean Stanton, who is always borrowing money from everyone.

Soon the actors in the film within the film are confusing themselves with the roles they're playing, and Lynch's film looks set to become a dense and intriguing psychological mystery about the inland empire of dreams and fantasies fed by the movies.

It all goes terribly wrong. Perhaps the sitcom sequence with people wearing rabbit heads is the first clue. A young woman is watching them on television and there's a laugh track although she's crying. Then a woman (Julia Ormand) is talking to what appears to be a policeman about having been hypnotized by a man in a bar and how she's going to murder someone with a screwdriver.

Later, there's a roomful of wholesome and pretty young women whose chatter seems to be about boyfriends until one bares what is apparently a new set of breasts and soon they're all out on Hollywood Boulevard doing business. There are sequences in what sounds like Polish involving people who might be the characters from the original doomed film.

The actress weaves in and out of all these seemingly unconnected sequences and she's either herself or in the character from the movie she's supposed to be making or someone else entirely, it's hard to say.

Irons and Stanton are barely seen again. Dern works hard and gets to speak direct to camera in the voice of a mistreated woman who has learned to be tough with men, but who she is by this time is anyone's guess.

There are conventional thriller episodes with sudden cuts and shrieks, sinister voices and skewed camera angles, but composer Angelo Badalamenti's music does all the heavy lifting. If it weren't for the extraordinary range and texture of his underscore, much of this film would sink without trace.
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Post by Sonic Youth »

Two reviews, both highly negative. Why bother hiding spoilers?


Inland Empire

By JAY WEISSBERG
Variety


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.




------------------------------------------


THE INLAND EMPIRE


Lee Marshall in Venice
Screendaily

Dir/scr: David Lynch. US-Fr-Pol. 2006. 189mins.


Around 10 minutes into INLAND EMPIRE, David Lynch’s baffling new cinematic mindgame, a guy with the head of a rabbit drones: “I do not think it will be much longer now”. Wrong, bunny: it will be another two hours and 50 minutes of improvised plotting, rumbling sound effects and blurry digital camerawork before the final credits roll.

Lynch’s latest, which he spent two-and-a-half years filming on and off – and with no script – begins intriguingly enough, apparently promising a dark mystery along the lines of Mulholland Drive or Lost Highway. But in those tastily bizarre earlier films, you always felt that you could puzzle out the whole thing if only you watched them enough times. With INLAND EMPIRE – and yes, that’s how it’s spelt - we soon begin to suspect that there’s nothing to solve. All we’re left with are a few atmospheric scenes, some menacing music and sound effects – and a great performance by Laura Dern, who commands the screen despite the fact that she doesn’t seem to have a clue what’s going on either.

The film already has distributors in place throughout most of Europe (though not the UK) and much of South and Central America, plus Australia, New Zealand, Korea and Japan. In these territories distributors will benefit initially from Lynch’s strong cult appeal, but results will tail off sharply after the first weekend once word gets out that this is not a dark and sexy mystery but a punishing experimental experience that borders on video art.

INLAND EMPIRE will undoubtedly get a US release sooner or later, but it will be unusually limited for a Lynch film. There was a real sense of collective disappointment after the film’s press screening at Venice, where it played out of competition; the stunned silence from those of us who had expected more was far louder than the few isolated handclaps from diehard Lynch fans.

It’s almost impossible to summarise the plot of a film that doesn’t really have one; by the end of the three hours, we have little to add to Lynch’s laconic press-book statement that INLAND EMPIRE is about “a woman in love and in trouble”.

The woman is Nikki (Dern), an actress who appears to live in a palatial mansion with a jealous husband upstairs. A creepy neighbour (Grace Zabriskie, a Twin Peaks regular) predicts that Nikki will get an important part in a film, and seems to suggest that evil will follow.

Dern indeed gets the part, and begins rehearsals with Kinglsey, an English director (Jeremy Irons), and his lugubrious assistant (Harry Dean Stanton). Her co-star is a cocky young actor called Devon (Justin Theroux), whose romantic pursuit of Nikki in the film within the film (where she is called Sue and he Billy, and they both talk with Gone With The Wind Deep-South twangs) soon spills over into real life.

Kingsley tells his actors that the film they are making is actually a sort of remake: the first attempt to shoot the script, years before, ended with the murder of the two leads before the venture wrapped.

This is a promising Lynchian premise – but the set-up described above takes up no more than half an hour. For a while, as Nikki steps from the film-within-film to another layer of reality that seems to lie behind it, we remain hooked, as Dern’s initially magnetic performance, swinging from tender passion to paralysing fear, plays against the often mannered dialogue and seems to suggest that answers will be forthcoming in due course.

But as the Dern character gradually loses her way in reality’s backstage area, we begin to lose patience. Along the way we meet a desperate, homicidal woman (Julia Ormond) with a screwdriver embedded in her stomach who later turns out to be Billy’s wife; we keep cutting back to the family of rabbit-heads (one voiced by Naomi Watts) who spout annoying Pinteresque non-sequiturs; and we are introduced to some girls who later turn out to be hookers, and who dance in formation to The Locomotion. Oh, and we get some scenes shot in snowbound Polish streets that we strain in vain to relate to the rest of the story. The Irons, Stanton and Theroux characters have pretty much left the scene by the end of the second hour; they probably had other films to make.

Perhaps one of the biggest let-downs, though, is the director’s conversion to digital film-making, which he enthused about on the Lido. Though the format has undoubtedly allowed Lynch greater creative freedom, the result for much of the film is a poor TV-quality image that bleeds colour, and lighting that even a Dogme director would blush at. There are exceptions – notably some striking black-and-white moving collages that take us back to Eraserhead and German Expressionist cinema.

Lynch’s sound design comes on like the boiler room of a Transatlantic liner for much of the time, and though it often racks up the tension, it becomes wearing when we stop caring enough to get tense.
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