Inland Empire (being promoted with coasters, coffee)

http://www.flickr.com/photos/brattle/314393190/

"I've never done a studio picture. Someone asked me that this afternoon. And you can change it to, 'Do you think you'll ever poke a sharp knife through your chest?' And it could happen."

http://www.thereeler.com/premieres_events/coffee_cheese_and_vertigo_lynch.php

Where you don't know what you're after
Or if something's after you
And you don't know why you don't know
In a world without heroes

In a world without dreams
Things are no more than they seem
And a world without heroes
Is like a bird without wings
Or a bell that never rings
Just a sad and useless thing

Where you don't know what you're after
Or if something's after you
And you don't know why you don't know

In a world without heroes
There's nothing to be
It's no place for me

Also, the people sitting behind us in the theatre were laughing throughout the movie at the most inappropriate times.

I did "confront" them at the end of the movie, and I got a "you'll get over it, buddy."

I WOULD KILL ALL THIS STUPID PEOPLE.

i want to watch it again sometime when i don't have to pee.

don't forget the chicken walk

And then there are other times, like Wild at Heart.

someone who likes Blue Velvet lots more than I do claims that Frank Booth is truly SCARY, not funny. I really think D.L. was going for the former.

I have forgotten the chicken walk.

so it's an interesting, but not really touching movie.and again,"mulloland" is the masterpiece.

Since when is it the obligation of a film to do this? I think Mulholland is likely his best, and it doesn't do that either (as far as I can tell, since I'm not sure what kind of "new territory" you're talking about, specifically). ie, compare it to everything new in 2006 and it looks fine.

Weird, Mulholland Drive was already a version of Lost Highway... I kinda wished Straight Story would've signalled a new direction to Lynch, but apparently not.

Smashing theater records in New York, so buy in advance:

http://www.thereeler.com/the_blog/lynch_inland_empire_boom_in_ny.php

It opens here in SF on the 29th, altho I'm not sure where.

i thought the conceptual key was in two lines -- where abused-wife laura dern says to the weird guy in the dark office at the top of the stairs something like, "i don't know what came before or after. i don't know what happened first, and it's kind of laid a head trip on me." and then in another scene, someone (one of the hooker greek chorus maybe?) says, "it had something to do with the passage of time."

a few days after seeing it, for unrelated reasons i looked up the wikipedia entry on the theory of relativity and came across this line: "it is an open question whether or not there is some fundamental principle that preserves causality." that seems like part of what lynch is after -- this sense cause and effect moving in circles, or mobius strips, with all these repeats and echoes and twists. which was present in mulholland drive too, but it's more deliberate here.

the whole thing also made me think of "stuck inside of mobile": people just get uglier, and i have no sense of time. (not to mention, "Waiting to find out what price/ You have to pay to get out of/ Going through all these things twice").

anyway, i want to see it again. and this time i can time a bathroom break to coincide with a lesser scene.

hated the beck song though

whoah

Not for ONE theater! But I'm really glad I came to love films in an era where nobody -- NOBODY, aside from biz people -- knew or cared what the opening grosses of anything were.

Cannot wait to see this movie.

Do you have links, by any chance? I'm not doubting you, but I'm curious.

Lynch also hinted that his interest in Buddhism may have played a role in the structure of Lost Highway. In an interview with Time Out magazine in the August 1997 issue, Lynch elaborated on the parallels with Buddhism. The interviewer talked of Fred resigned to continue forever, making the same mistakes over and over again, in a number of different realities/lives/modes of being, forever striving for the ideal that Alice represents. Lynch replied that, "He is not consigned to this fate forever... He is not traveling in a circle, but rather a spiral, and at the end of the film moves round onto the next level. Maybe eventually he can find release. The film is only a small part of the story."

People were talking about meditation upthread as evidence of his interest in Buddhism. He may very well be heavily into Buddhism I just wanted to point out that when he advocates meditation he's talking about something else and any Buddhist themes evident in his work could quite possibly be ideas that he picked up second-hand through TM.

TM site
Maharishi bio
Anti-TM site
Another critical site

DL: Political intentions. Zero. Some people are very political [Dern raises her hand to indicate she is one of those people] and they'll see politics in everything. This is a world on its own and you just go into this world. When there are abstractions, people have varying interpretations, thoughts, about it. But it's the same with all film. It's so beautiful when the lights go down, the curtains open, and we get to go into a different world.

LD: The mere existence of this film is political. It is rare people are using their voice and doing what they want to do. David isn't trying to redefine cinema; he's defining his own voice. And we need more of that. So I think it's a highly political film.

http://www.greencine.com/article?action=view&articleID=380

http://www.lacitybeat.com/article.php?id=4737&IssueNum=184

“It’s like this. At a certain point, you know exactly what it means for you … . If you don’t know what it means, then you have to think about it more to … put the final pieces together. It’s happened to me on lots of films, starting with Eraserhead, I didn’t know what this thing meant. I was building it, but I didn’t know what it all meant, and I was just going nuts. And I start reading the Bible. And I come upon this line, and I said, ‘That is it.’ And it described the whole thing to me.”

I chuckle to signal that I understand the futility of my next question but that it’s my job to ask it anyway: “What line was that?”

“I bet you were gonna ask that,” he says.

“Is this a question you decline to answer, or … ?”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because it doesn’t matter. It would putrify the experience for other people. You work on a film so hard, to get it to feel correct as a whole … and then it’s done. You don’t want to talk about it. It’s cinema! Why break it down and try to put it into words? It’s the language of cinema. It exists that way, for a reason: there it is. It’s on its own. It shouldn’t be taken away from or added to.”

as i was walking out of the theater after the movie, i saw the woman's companion stretching his arms and yawning. "well," he said, turning toward her, "what was that about?"

spoilers and and reactions to this thread so if you havent seen it dont read this.

apparently david lynch sings the song in the trailer?

the song is called fucking 'ghost of love' and its dl singing through crazy amounts of anteres autotune which actually happens throughout the movie during the dialogue. autotune and digital distorion happen during different words throughout the movie but i havent been able to tell if theres a connection.

Also, if anyone spots Nastassja Kinski in this thing, yell bingo -- I didn't

i think shes the prostitute with the burred face in the beginning.

So, those who have seen it, can someone convince me it wasn't a mistake for Lynch to go DV?

it was not a mistake. he gets some really amazing textures with the dv. it fuckes with you. like for real. he says he'll never work with celluloid again and i say fucking cool. theres shit that he does with the dv that he would never be able to do with film. sometimes, during the darkest scenes the, the screen seems to disapear and it seems real.

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.

No. I'm going to see it again over the weekend sometime.

The one negative thing I can say about DV is that it's like the old saw about musicians who put a studio in their house and then discover that absolute freedom = absolute indecision. Chaki OTM about what Lynch does with it... If this film is Lynch experimenting with what he can do with DV and self-distribution, I can't wait until his next movie.

My theory on the plot: The curse is a Limbo/Purgatory-like actuality that exists on some meta-temporal level with all of the cursed rattling around inside it. The motel room is a mental safe place to hide from the curse/dysreality outside. "Inland Empire" isn't just a geographic place, but a mental/emotional retreat from outside horror as well as something that actors tap into when playing roles.

Quite a bit of laughing here and there, though. Maybe more so during the first hour, but the dialogue during Dern's Passion of the Hollywood Walk Of Fame got a lot of response.

Of course, it helps that it's incredibly funny in addition to being horrifying.

they reserve their most tortured arguments for Lynch's use of the Sony PD150, a consumer-grade video camera with such poor resolution that anything beyond ten feet resembles congealed oatmeal. It's fun to hear them maintain that his vision is somehow enhanced by severe pixelation [sic] and zero depth of field, but there's simply no excuse, apart from frugality or aesthetic disinterest, for an artist of Lynch's stature to make a movie that looks as hideous as this.

http://www.esquire.com/features/articles/2006/070205_mfe_March_07_Alt_Oscars.html

But it DOES enhance it, Blanche.

he later noted that another critic who hated it congratulated him for saying this, thinking it was a pejorative

http://greenliefonfilm.blogspot.com/2007/02/examining-empire-deconstructing-waves.html

What is the song that plays in the closing credits?

http://blogs.chicagoreader.com/film/2007/02/12/lost-lost-lost-/

"The truth is I didn't know who I was playing," she said, "and I still don't know."