Inland Empire (being promoted with coasters, coffee)

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WHAT.

I WOULD KILL ALL THIS STUPID PEOPLE.

― Jessie the Monster (scarymonster), Monday, 11 December 2006 22:12 (seventeen years ago) link

Hippies :(

― cousin larry bundgee (bundgee), Monday, 11 December 2006 23:12 (seventeen years ago) link

i'm still processing this. it felt much longer than it was, and in some respects the length and slllowww pacing annoyed me (i had to pee, and my cell phone rang towards the end, d'oh!) and in other respects i appreciated that i was getting a lot of david lynch for my $11. everything was very very beautiful, all the decay and the garishness and the awkwardness. but there was definite self-indulgence and overwroughtness there too. there are times when the "you just have to GO WITH lynch" stipulation is way OTM, but i hope people aren't using that as a way of saying "i'm not sure if i liked it, but i don't want to tell anyone i hated it because i'll look like one of the great unwashed who don't 'get' these sortsa art fillums."

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

― boo you whore (get bent), Monday, 11 December 2006 23:34 (seventeen years ago) link

b-b-but Blue Velvet is totally funny!

― Shakey Mo Collier (Shakey Mo Collier), Monday, 11 December 2006 23:38 (seventeen years ago) link

(I mean its disturbing too, but don't act like there isn't plenty to laugh at - Frank Booth, the fake bird, MacLachlan being a clueless tool, etc.)

― Shakey Mo Collier (Shakey Mo Collier), Monday, 11 December 2006 23:39 (seventeen years ago) link

ALSO RAPE IS HILARIOUS.

― Jessie the Monster (scarymonster), Monday, 11 December 2006 23:43 (seventeen years ago) link

Yes, I am aware that it is funny at times. Thank you for your help. I was referring to people being douchey and laughing at totally inappropriate moments. Giggling college kids, "intro to film", etc etc.

― cousin larry bundgee (bundgee), Monday, 11 December 2006 23:43 (seventeen years ago) link

(xp) Don't act like rape isn't hilarious.

― cousin larry bundgee (bundgee), Monday, 11 December 2006 23:43 (seventeen years ago) link

anyway with lynch i know audience discomfort is part of his whole sociopath-sadist trip so i thought it added to the er um experientialness of it all.

― boo you whore (get bent), Monday, 11 December 2006 23:44 (seventeen years ago) link

multiple xposts

― boo you whore (get bent), Monday, 11 December 2006 23:44 (seventeen years ago) link

oh I was being totally serious. xxpost

― Jessie the Monster (scarymonster), Monday, 11 December 2006 23:45 (seventeen years ago) link

Ok, so throughout the film you are seeing the same set of people in different times/days, in different identities, in conscious and subconscious moments, in reality and parallel reality, but you aren't really able to distinguish one from the other. I agree there are plenty of moments that are just "there" which you can't pin down to a plot, but now I'm thinking the seemingly random house party at the end with all the characters together seems to suggest that life is at its most joyous when all these alternate/parallel worlds somehow collide.

― Michael F Gill (Michael F Gill), Monday, 11 December 2006 23:55 (seventeen years ago) link

Great sound design, as usual. I thought the long discussion of the bus schedule was the best absurdism I've seen in awhile.

― Dr M (Dr Morbius), Tuesday, 12 December 2006 18:53 (seventeen years ago) link

but don't act like there isn't plenty to laugh at - Frank Booth, the fake bird, MacLachlan being a clueless tool, etc.

don't forget the chicken walk

― this is cutty (mcutt), Tuesday, 12 December 2006 19:09 (seventeen years ago) link

there are times when the "you just have to GO WITH lynch"

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.

― Dr M (Dr Morbius), Tuesday, 12 December 2006 19:20 (seventeen years ago) link

I like Wild at Heart.

― cousin larry bundgee (bundgee), Tuesday, 12 December 2006 19:23 (seventeen years ago) link

The frequently asinine exchanges between characters, for example, only strike us as such because we're not used to hearing the kind of aimless talk we enage in daily in movies. And if we closely examine Jeffrey and Sandy's tentative romance, we realize how mannered young love can be. Jeffrey's offer to demonstrate his "chicken walk" for Sandy, apart from being a uniquely eighties gesture, draws attention to itself because of its astounding sincerity. The mystery itself is similarly routine, anticlimactic in its solution, yet it only seems that way in relation to other pictures about small-time crooks.

― this is cutty (mcutt), Tuesday, 12 December 2006 19:29 (seventeen years ago) link

"scary? fuck that shit. funny!"

― latebloomer's mayan name is tapir ballz (clonefeed), Wednesday, 13 December 2006 03:55 (seventeen years ago) link

if "mullholand drive" was never existed, the movie would seem much better,but,cause of the fimiliarity, the viewer must compare ,and "mullholand" is so much better.
the lo-fi dv quality, and the failure to push the limits of film making into new teritory of sub-conscious and new,pure cinema is evident.
sometimes putting limits to lynch, only makes him (and other artists as well) a better director.not everyone is orson wells.

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

― john lang (emekars), Wednesday, 13 December 2006 04:38 (seventeen years ago) link

the failure to push the limits of film making into new teritory of sub-conscious and new,pure cinema is evident.

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.

― Dr M (Dr Morbius), Wednesday, 13 December 2006 14:20 (seventeen years ago) link

if "mullholand drive" was never existed, the movie would seem much better,but,cause of the fimiliarity, the viewer must compare ,and "mullholand" is so much better.

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.

― Tuomas (Tuomas), Wednesday, 13 December 2006 14:23 (seventeen years ago) link

Not that I don't like his weirdness in general, but it gets kinda repetitive. I wish he'd do conventional films more often than once in 20 years.

― Tuomas (Tuomas), Wednesday, 13 December 2006 14:24 (seventeen years ago) link

Because the two he has made (Elephant Man and Straight Story) are among his best.

― Tuomas (Tuomas), Wednesday, 13 December 2006 14:25 (seventeen years ago) link

The Straight Story is only 'conventional' on a plot level; it's mighty strange, and identifiably his work.

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

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

― Dr M (Dr Morbius), Wednesday, 13 December 2006 16:55 (seventeen years ago) link

i went during the day and the theater was fairly empty.

― j.m. goatse (get bent), Wednesday, 13 December 2006 17:05 (seventeen years ago) link

I guess that's cool that he's breaking records, but a $21k opening for a film seems ... well, kinda depressing.

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

― Shakey Mo Collier (Shakey Mo Collier), Wednesday, 13 December 2006 17:16 (seventeen years ago) link

If it opens in Miami, I'm going to send the distributors coasters with my face on them.

― Alfred Soto (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Wednesday, 13 December 2006 17:24 (seventeen years ago) link

i think inland empire is pretty great, even though significant chunks -- especially the stuff set in poland -- are careless and much less interesting than the rest of it. (just because something's not "linear" doesn't mean you can stick just anything in anywhere and have it work.) the major advantage of the dv is how much it lets him get away with playing in the dark.

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.

― tipsy mothra (tipsy mothra), Wednesday, 13 December 2006 17:24 (seventeen years ago) link

def need to see it again

hated the beck song though

― this is cutty (mcutt), Wednesday, 13 December 2006 17:31 (seventeen years ago) link

Beck song?!?!

― Shakey Mo Collier (Shakey Mo Collier), Wednesday, 13 December 2006 17:42 (seventeen years ago) link

yes :(

― this is cutty (mcutt), Wednesday, 13 December 2006 17:44 (seventeen years ago) link

beck was more than offset by nina simone, tho.

― tipsy mothra (tipsy mothra), Wednesday, 13 December 2006 17:51 (seventeen years ago) link

also, i don't know how serious lynch is about his interest in buddhism -- i know he's a big advocate of meditation, and i've seen him reference buddhism in some interviews -- but the movie works pretty well as buddhist allegory. if you called it something like "hungry ghost wandering through her lives" and showed it in a zen monastery, you'd probably get a lot of monkish nods of comprehension.

― tipsy mothra (tipsy mothra), Wednesday, 13 December 2006 17:56 (seventeen years ago) link

I guess I survived being exposed to Marilyn Manson in Lost Highway, I can probably ignore Beck too...

― Shakey Mo Collier (Shakey Mo Collier), Wednesday, 13 December 2006 17:56 (seventeen years ago) link

Roy Orbison escaped not only unscathed but his reputation enhanced.

― Alfred Soto (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Wednesday, 13 December 2006 17:57 (seventeen years ago) link

Lynch's interest in meditation/buddhism seems pretty intense to me. You don't meditate every day of your life for the last 30+ years without taking it seriously.

― Shakey Mo Collier (Shakey Mo Collier), Wednesday, 13 December 2006 18:00 (seventeen years ago) link

well consciously or not this film is a much more sophisticated expression of some buddhist ideas than any other hollywood "buddhist" movie i can think of. (although groundhog day i guess comes close.)

― tipsy mothra (tipsy mothra), Wednesday, 13 December 2006 18:12 (seventeen years ago) link

even more than "Little Buddha"?!!?

― Shakey Mo Collier (Shakey Mo Collier), Wednesday, 13 December 2006 18:16 (seventeen years ago) link

http://i.imdb.com/Photos/Events/906-dog/th-reeves_keanu2

whoah

― Shakey Mo Collier (Shakey Mo Collier), Wednesday, 13 December 2006 18:17 (seventeen years ago) link

more than the golden child, even

― tipsy mothra (tipsy mothra), Wednesday, 13 December 2006 18:20 (seventeen years ago) link

a $21k opening for a film seems ... well, kinda depressing.

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.

― Dr M (Dr Morbius), Wednesday, 13 December 2006 19:17 (seventeen years ago) link

Lynch is into TM though, not Buddhism per se.

― walterkranz (walterkranz), Wednesday, 13 December 2006 20:46 (seventeen years ago) link

TM is not related to Buddhism. It was developed by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and introduced in 1958.

― ice bat f/k/a xero (ice bat f/k/a xero), Wednesday, 13 December 2006 21:20 (seventeen years ago) link

Exactly. TM is to eastern religion what Scientology is to psychotherapy.

― walterkranz (walterkranz), Wednesday, 13 December 2006 21:22 (seventeen years ago) link

OTM. (Ha.)

Cannot wait to see this movie.

― ice bat f/k/a xero (ice bat f/k/a xero), Wednesday, 13 December 2006 21:23 (seventeen years ago) link

ya, but lynch has name-checked buddhism too. that's why i said i don't know how serious his interest in it is (as opposed to TM, which he tends to drone on about in interviews). either way, inland empire would make sense in a buddhist context. the circularity of its existential unease has a kind of eastern bent.

― tipsy mothra (tipsy mothra), Wednesday, 13 December 2006 22:06 (seventeen years ago) link

(before y'all get your torches out note that no one here has said TM = Buddhism)

― Shakey Mo Collier (Shakey Mo Collier), Wednesday, 13 December 2006 22:08 (seventeen years ago) link

xpost: (as opposed to like the more western-style freudian surrealism of bunuel. not that lynch is devoid of freudianism, but his surrealism draws on a lot of other sources too.)

― tipsy mothra (tipsy mothra), Wednesday, 13 December 2006 22:10 (seventeen years ago) link

lynch has name-checked buddhism too

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

― ice bat f/k/a xero (ice bat f/k/a xero), Wednesday, 13 December 2006 22:11 (seventeen years ago) link

only thing google finds fast is this, from the wikipedia "lost highway" entry, but i've read other similar things:

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."

― tipsy mothra (tipsy mothra), Wednesday, 13 December 2006 22:15 (seventeen years ago) link

Skipping 34 messages at this point... Click here if you want to load them all.

Plus, almost everyone I've talked to about it since (including one random person who approached me and was all "didn't I see you at the pre-MEER of Inland Empire?") has liked or even loved the film, so maybe it's not as difficult as it's rumored to be. Or it is but people know what they're getting with Lynch.

― Eric H. (Eric H.), Tuesday, 20 February 2007 15:51 (seventeen years ago) link

It must be difficult -- Hoberman called it "a miasma"!

― Dr Morbius (Dr Morbius), Tuesday, 20 February 2007 16:04 (seventeen years ago) link

I should've guessed I'd probably like it, though. Whereas I initially couldn't see the trees for the forest, I see that it showed up on the top 10 lists of nearly every critic whose taste I even vaguely understand (Ed G., Nathan Lee, the whole House Next Door crew) and even Jonathan Rosenbaum, who I've given up on but still respect for his writings in the past.

― Eric H. (Eric H.), Tuesday, 20 February 2007 16:32 (seventeen years ago) link

Mike D'Angelo, otoh...

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.

― Dr Morbius (Dr Morbius), Tuesday, 20 February 2007 16:48 (seventeen years ago) link

It must be difficult -- Hoberman called it "a miasma"!

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

― jo ga11ucci electrix (joseph), Tuesday, 20 February 2007 20:09 (seventeen years ago) link

actually in the context of his review, it read like a pejorative.

― Dr Morbius (Dr Morbius), Tuesday, 20 February 2007 20:10 (seventeen years ago) link

the attempts at decoding begin. this is pretty good, actually

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

― milton parker (milton parker), Tuesday, 20 February 2007 21:19 (seventeen years ago) link

No appearances in Miami of either Laura Dern, Lynch, or his cow.

― Alfred Soto (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Tuesday, 20 February 2007 21:32 (seventeen years ago) link

Completely god awful. His worst since Dune.

― Alex in SF (Alex in SF), Tuesday, 20 February 2007 21:38 (seventeen years ago) link

contrarian!

― Dr Morbius (Dr Morbius), Tuesday, 20 February 2007 21:43 (seventeen years ago) link

Haha not this time I'll bet.

― Alex in SF (Alex in SF), Tuesday, 20 February 2007 21:45 (seventeen years ago) link

well, at least you're closer to Armond White on this one than I am.

― Dr Morbius (Dr Morbius), Tuesday, 20 February 2007 21:46 (seventeen years ago) link

I really liked Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive (the former especially), but usually the best Lynch films are probably his most mainstream ones (The Elephant Man and The Straight Story.)

What is the song that plays in the closing credits?

― Alex in SF (Alex in SF), Tuesday, 20 February 2007 21:47 (seventeen years ago) link

"Sinner Man" by Nina Simone

― jaymc (jaymc), Tuesday, 20 February 2007 21:48 (seventeen years ago) link

Really? When the hell is that from? It sounds totally unhinged.

― Alex in SF (Alex in SF), Tuesday, 20 February 2007 21:51 (seventeen years ago) link

Wiki sez: "Sinnerman" (spelled as one word) is one of Nina Simone's most famous songs and she recorded her definitive 10-minute plus version on her 1965 album Pastel Blues.

― jaymc (jaymc), Tuesday, 20 February 2007 21:52 (seventeen years ago) link

1964

― Shakey Mo Collier (Shakey Mo Collier), Tuesday, 20 February 2007 21:54 (seventeen years ago) link

arrghh x-post!

― Shakey Mo Collier (Shakey Mo Collier), Tuesday, 20 February 2007 21:55 (seventeen years ago) link

I will have to buy that album now.

― Alex in SF (Alex in SF), Tuesday, 20 February 2007 21:56 (seventeen years ago) link

I seriously thought it was some crazy Hustle Disco cover of Peter Tosh and the Wailers' "Downpresser".

― Alex in SF (Alex in SF), Tuesday, 20 February 2007 21:58 (seventeen years ago) link

Lynch:Dern :: Sternberg:Dietrich?

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."

― Dr Morbius (Dr Morbius), Wednesday, 21 February 2007 16:35 (seventeen years ago) link

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