Opens in NYC tomorrow. I’m up for a re-viewing, but not this week.
http://notcoming.com/screeninglog.php?id=1612
Can’t beat the cow.
What’s more, December 3rd is now David Lynch Day in Cambridge, MA. What this entails, well, the mind boggles...
psyched!
I particularly urge not reading past the first couple paragraphs of reviews til you’ve seen this (Dargis’ rave in NYT today, for one) for maximum jaw drops.
Lynch the other night in NYC, introducing Vertigo, on cheese and his future:
“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
I wonder if he still does his weather reports whilst on the road.
“So Eric — he’s not here; he’s in an airplane — but anyway, a guy who works with me said, ‘You should have your own line of coffee.’ And one thing led to another. So this is David Lynch Signature Cup coffee. Very, very good. I take about 20 cups a day. It is a very good thing for theaters. Film houses should have good coffee.”
apparently david lynch sings the song in the trailer?
Also, if anyone spots Nastassja Kinski in this thing, yell bingo — I didn’t.
i would take a bullet for david lynch
wtf with your hero worship people?
i’d take a bullet for you as well
hell, i’m up for bullet-taking anytime, anywhere
A world without heroes
Is like a world without sun
You can’t look up to anyone
Without heroes
And a world without heroes
Is like a never ending race
Is like a time without a place
A pointless thing devoid of grace
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
i told a high school girlfriend i’d take a bullet for her once, and she told me she wished i would :(
save the cheerleader and shit
ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!
you guys make lynch look sane
So, those who have seen it, can someone convince me it wasn’t a mistake for Lynch to go DV? I’m not really impressed with the look as showcased in the trailer.
I think I said on the NYFF thread that the gritty dirty look just heightens the dread — content and style say “I do.” It’s a good change from the pristine images of Frederick Elmes (one reason I’ve never signed on to the alleged greatness of Blue Velvet — OH,
THE WRIGGLING WORMS BENEATH THE BEAUTY OF SUBURBIA!).
This was very, very good.
Although I disagree with the people who say you should just let the film wash over you and not worry about plot coherence. I found I was able to enjoy the look/sound/feel of the characters/scenes as well as comprehend a lot of what was going on.
Also, the people sitting behind us in the theatre were laughing throughout the movie at the most inappropriate times.
and you didn’t tell them to go home and watch Lost?
Oh the ZING!
I can’t stand Lost! There’s no end in sight for that show.
I did “confront” them at the end of the movie, and I got a “you’ll get over it, buddy.”
One of my intro to film classes screened “Blue Velvet” and it was pretty painful in that auditorium. You could barely hear the movie at times over the snickering.
WHAT.
I WOULD KILL ALL THIS STUPID PEOPLE.
Hippies :(
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.
b-b-but Blue Velvet is totally funny!
(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.)
ALSO RAPE IS HILARIOUS.
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.
(xp) Don’t act like rape isn’t hilarious.
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.
multiple xposts
oh I was being totally serious. xxpost
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.
Great sound design, as usual. I thought the long discussion of the bus schedule was the best absurdism I’ve seen in awhile.
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
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.
I like Wild at Heart.
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.
“scary? fuck that shit. funny!”
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.
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.
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.
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.
Because the two he has made (Elephant Man and Straight Story) are among his best.
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
i went during the day and the theater was fairly empty.
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.
If it opens in Miami, I’m going to send the distributors coasters with my face on them.
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.
def need to see it again
hated the beck song though
Beck song?!?!
yes :(
beck was more than offset by nina simone, tho.
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.
I guess I survived being exposed to Marilyn Manson in Lost Highway, I can probably ignore Beck too...
Roy Orbison escaped not only unscathed but his reputation enhanced.
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.
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.)
even more than “Little Buddha”?!!?
whoah
more than the golden child, even
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.
Lynch is into TM though, not Buddhism per se.
TM is not related to Buddhism. It was developed by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and introduced in 1958.
Exactly. TM is to eastern religion what Scientology is to psychotherapy.
OTM. (Ha.)
Cannot wait to see this movie.
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.
(before y’all get your torches out note that no one here has said TM = Buddhism)
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.)
lynch has name-checked buddhism too
Do you have links, by any chance? I’m not doubting you, but I’m curious.
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.”
...which pretty obviously prefigures inland empire.
(and re: bunuel obviously i should have said roman catholic freudianism)
Thanks, that makes sense. As noted above, no one here has said TM = Buddhism, but anything that even approaches conflating the two strikes me as very unsound indeed; which is not to deny the Buddhist tendencies of some aspects of Lynch’s work, as explicitly stated in the Wiki extract, but let the distinction not be lost.
(before y’all get your torches out note that no one here has said TM = Buddhism)
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.
pardon the didacticism, but what i initially said was “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.” just to be clear. my parents are zen buddhists, i grew up hanging around a zen center, i know the difference between buddhism and TM. (well, i don’t actually know much about TM beyond maharishi jokes, but i know it’s its own thing.) some of inland empire, to me, resonates with some buddhist ideas. whether it resonates with TM ideas, i don’t know.
OK, we cool. Torches DOWN. BTW, if you’re interested:
TM, Buddhism, it’s all baloney anyway.
Lynch/Dern interview:
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.
huh—didn’t know he and Altman had any kind of relationship, interesting.
and another:
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.”
So how bootylicious is Justin Theroux in this film?
I find him kinda repulsive.
Bleh. He was the only reason to briefly watch “Six Feet Under.”
he has a weird style in this
ie, sleazy rockabilly actor playing Southern gentleman and weeping nightmare fuck
goddammit I cannot wait to see this
i am seeing this in a couple of hours
jesus, what a movie
i saw it at a weekday matinee. while i was waiting in line before they opened the auditorium, there was an older couple — late 60s or so — behind me talking with a guy of similar vintage they’d just met. the woman from the couple asked him, “do you know a restaurant around here that sells pie?” the guy said, “oh, i just at the waverly diner.” “the WAVERLY!” the woman said, “i think that’s it. do they sell pie?” “oh yeah, they got pie. lotsa stuff.” the woman turned to her companion (who she had introduced as a “friend,” so maybe a sort of widow’s boyfriend or something) and said, “did you hear that? he says he knows the restaurant.” “well there you go,” said her companion. “they have pie!” she said. “how about that,” her companion said. “is the pie good?” she asked, turning back to the new acquaintance. “oh yeah, sure, everything’s good,” he said. “it’s a good place. i saw mayor koch in there last month!” “is that right,” the woman said. “did you hear that,” she said to her companion, “he saw mayor koch!” “how about that,” her companion said. “well,” she said, “all i could remember was there was a restaurant we used to go to near here that had very good pie.”
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?”
sure is nice that this is playing absolutely nowhere near me. sure is nice resisting the urge to pirate it. ugh.
i have a video that will help you make your decision
haha surely that pie couple was some kind of Lynchian guerilla marketing.
Laura Dern is on the Late Late show and Carson Daly next week. Ho boy.
an appropriate name for mr daly.
brutal fucking murder
Has anyone run across any nerd-level breakdown of what Lynch’s camera/production set-up was on this? I loved how some of this (esp. the early bunny sit-com scenes) looked like those tilt-shift photos that distort the focus and make things look like miniatures.
it was all dv except the bunny scenes.
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.
haha! great review chaki
The ifc center in new york offers a free ticket for those who will see the movie there for the 10th time.
as for now, there are 2 people who saw it 4 times.
and i say—isn’t 1 is more than enough?
isn’t 1 is more than enough?
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.
WAHT WAS “LB?”
a pound?
Louise Brooks?
LB Mayer?
Left, Back?
Any walkouts in Minn, Eric?
& how much laughing?
I think there was one couple that left, but this theatre was solidly filled, so statistically none.
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.
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.
It must be difficult — Hoberman called it “a miasma”!
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.
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.
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
actually in the context of his review, it read like a pejorative.
the attempts at decoding begin. this is pretty good, actually
http://greenliefonfilm.blogspot.com/2007/02/examining-empire-deconstructing-waves.html
No appearances in Miami of either Laura Dern, Lynch, or his cow.
Completely god awful. His worst since Dune.
contrarian!
Haha not this time I’ll bet.
well, at least you’re closer to Armond White on this one than I am.
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?
“Sinner Man” by Nina Simone
Really? When the hell is that from? It sounds totally unhinged.
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.
1964
arrghh x-post!
I will have to buy that album now.
I seriously thought it was some crazy Hustle Disco cover of Peter Tosh and the Wailers’ “Downpresser”.
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.”