INLAND EMPIRE
* courtesy of CCC *

Since the other thread bloated to 22 pages and was starting to become a bit convoluted, per suggestion from several members I've created this new thread. Go crazy, folks. Post all the IE commentary you can possibly handle.

(BTW, the other thread isn't gone. I just don't have the ability to lock it out right now, so it's been moved out of view for the time being; I'll restore it once I can lock it)

~ Amanda

"Just fear me, love me, do as I say and I will be your slave..."

LYNCH ROARS AT LIDO (translation from FOTOGRAMAS online, the main Spanish cinema magazine)

Exceptional David Lynch. Exceptional Golden Lion Award and exceptional his new film “Inland Empire”, scheduled out of competition, flying object shot in digital and still unidentified, that extends his disconcerting course for three hours more, while the chewed cinema audience has absolutly nothing to hold on.
Even Laura Dern, the leading actress, admitted she didn’t understand anything. Only Lynch himself, who has shot in digital and without a script this very dark movie, seems to own the key. But he keeps it safely and doesn’t say a word.  
Once more, the opinions were extremely different; some of them said he is a genious, some of them he’s a swindler. But extremes, anyways, always touch (sorry, I don’t know how to translate this) and in his new film, Lynch just takes the constants of his cinema to the paroxysm.
If a member of the audience sits on his seat waiting an old-fashioned story, he should be comitting a basic mistake. He may let himself be seduced or left the theatre. It makes no sense suffering this three-hours film if  he doesn’t have any special interest in living this experience.
Producers have already said that the movie is too long and, for its theatrical release, it should be cutted and re-edited.
And, if Lynch could leave some clues to make the audience don’t feel completely lost…even better. The question is….¿which version will be shown on Sitges Film Festival?

As much that is being said about this film right now...

....I give it a week before its 22 pages again.

It is killing me that Inland Empire is out there and it will be ages before I can watch it...I find myself stumbling upon reviews and desperately trying not to read them. So far so good. I don't want to know any more about this film before I see it and interpret it for myself, but by that time I will be so far behind everybody else!! aaaaaaarghhhh can you feel my frustration ???

I second what Zodas just wrote : by creating a new thread and as the first thread is out of view, I guess a lot of things are going to be repeated over and over.
It's going to be only a matter of days before this new thread is 20 pages again !

So it doesn't make me feel like I want to contribute a lot to it, but anyway... here is the last news from France :

2 of the major daily newspapers in France published rave reviews of IE (they are the most enthusiastics I've read so far, no matter from which country) :

http://www.liberation.fr/culture/cinema/202845.FR.php

http://www.lemonde.fr/web/article/0,1-0,36-810524,0.html

Liberation says that Lynch makes them feel like he has made his own "2001..." ; Le Monde says as soon as the screening was over, they wanted to see it again and concludes it's "great art".

Sorry, no time for a full translation... and more over, I wouldn't spend so much time on it and have all this work lost when this thread will be 20 pages long again :-)

"Who is able to tell INLAND EMPIRE's plot should receive a special prize too!. Yes, a plot, everyone has spent so much energies and ink saying that this latest lynchian masterpiece is experimental, thus incomprehensible... But they forgot to tell that a plot actually exists. The thing is that even the most skilled fanatics can't figure out how to make it have a little sense. If Mulholland Dr. was basically split in two opposite universes (the real and the personal feel sensed through the fantasy, the memory and even the hallucinated), IE looks more like a giant Rubik's cube that's almost impossible to look neat in one only take.

Laura Dern plays the role of an actress who plays a role in Jeremy Iron's film. Justin Theroux is her companion. The impassive Harry Dean Stanton smells to be there just as one of Lynch's fetish-actor. Nightmares within other nightmares. Reality mixed and confused with representation and fantasy, then the duality between life and cinema, truth and fiction with no more dividing boundaries. Too obvious? The word, the sole the most mocking Lynch uses profusely is "mystery", sometimes alternated with "unknown". Evoking the experience of musical listening, he invites to put our intuitions in action... Actually Lynch says "Let the film hook into you". Okay, let's do it by ourselves, but the admiration for this 180 minutes of  wild experimental nature doesn't prevent us from missing Mulholland Drive, an equally obscure movie but more fascinating"  D'agostini, from La Repubblica (Italian national daily newspaper)

"Did they scoff the whole damn Smörgåsbord?" (Audrey) 

"Gimme a donut!" (Coop)

This would look good on your wall.

-Noah- 

Actually, that's not what Zodas said. His words imply that with all the buzz, people will chat the thread up to 22 pages. I doubt most of that will be repetition. If anything, it's going to be a lot of discussion and sharing of any news and review resources we all come across. At this point in the ballgame, if anyone needs most of what was in the other thread rehashed, they should give up because they are too far behind to catch up (the first 15 pages were almost entirely about the image quality of digital products and the Room to Dream DVD).

At any rate, you guys are going to complain no matter what us moderators do, so I guess there is no pleasing anyone anymore. So whatever. Yay for IE and all that.
 

~ Amanda

"Just fear me, love me, do as I say and I will be your slave..."

Yay for moderators imo

where would we be without you? somebody needed to cull that monstrosity of a thread

~ Amanda

"Just fear me, love me, do as I say and I will be your slave..."

"I'm honored, it's a prize given by a festival that celebrates cinema. But I have a funny feeling: yesterday I was 19 (yrs old), but today I have a career preceding me!" says Lynch about the lifetime achievement Golden lion that was assigned to him yesterday in presence of Croffe and Muller ("There are special film-makers. David Lynch plays the Stradivari"). Introduced by actress Laura Dern as "an extraordinary man, on the set he gives you a courage that you bring at home and in your life". Welcomed by a standing ovation, Lynch has given his thanks in a willing but funny Italian, talking about the movies as "a wonderful language. I wish them a long and happy life". Laura Dern is the wonderful star of INLAND EMPIRE, which will come out (in Italy) in the beginnings of 2007, distributed by BIM.. Do it yourself, is the sense of Lynch's answers to the critics' request for logical clarifications about the movie. Only a few words about the title slipped from him "There is an Inland Empire in Los Angeles and in its interior there is a place, Pomona, that is quoted during its run. But there is also - inside all of us - a rich and precious world, just like an empire". The only advice "watch the movie following the efforts of your reason and emotions, the thinking and the heart which together will help you to have your personal intuitions. You don't have to fear intuition, it's worthier than your heart or intellect alone. It's the only thing that lets us enter a movie's world and having a perception of it, everyone has their own one, that surpasses any limit of words... If the movie doesn't have a logic or recognizable structure, I didn't do it on purpose. It's been like a stream that began starting from a first scene that I wrote. Then that scene called for another one, and then another one.. The same pattern during the shootings: ideas were changing every day. For that reason, I felt the need of competent actors who have been able to follow me without always asking - why?- I've always believed that a movie exists before it's been made. My only job is to put the pieces, the faces, the words, the noises, the spaces and music together. Just like a puzzle. And I think this quite works also for many of the events in our private lives. For me too understanding is an abstraction that comes out of intuition".

Laura Dern merrily admits "I have played many different personalities, but I never quite gotten who I was in that acting moment. And I think I won't understand even watching the film. I'm watching it for the first time here, just like all of you. I would be glad if he (D. Lynch) wanted to involve me in another project that is more "traditional", like WILD AT HEART for instance, but with him I'm always ready to go down every kind of road". The latest roads Lynch has explored were in Los Angeles, that Lynch loves very much "I started from Philadelphia, a very dark and sad place to live in. It was Hell. When I came to Los Angeles for the first time, it was night-time... Still there was a lot of light, it felt as if I was entering a heavenly place. And I love nights, when an ancient jasmine smell spreads in the air it makes me think of the past, the golden age of Hollywood".

On the abstraction of INLAND EMPIRE Lynch doesn't refuse a comparison with TWIN PEAKS, even though "I've never gotten why that series have been so successful in so much world countries! I can't even remember the reason I made it. The only thing I know is that I'll never make television again. Neither I will return to Film. Yes, it's beautiful, it's been beautiful for a hundred years, but it gets dirty, ruined with scratches, time wastes it and shooting on film is heavy and difficult, it needs a numerous crew and - most of all - lots of money. Digital is lightness and mobility, a dream. But cinema is a universe, there is room for everyone and for every kind of story and there will always be enough space for those who'll want to tell stories shooting on film". Unavoidable the theme of transcendental meditation "It's 33 years now that I practice TM. In the beginning my thoughts were that it's a complete waste of time... Until excstacy came! It's been like a dive into myself, a free-falling - like an elevator from which the wires have been cut off. My life, the creativity, my energies, everything got better. I've become a better person. And it is from the benefits of meditation that INLAND EMPIRE in some way comes."  Maria Pia Fusco, La Repubblica

Guys, mistakes are possible while translating. So, sorry if you run into something that can be defined as blasphemy in the English language, I made it all in a hurry. By the way, the meaning is that!

"Did they scoff the whole damn Smörgåsbord?" (Audrey) 

"Gimme a donut!" (Coop)

I asked a well known spanish journalist (who is covering the Venice Film Festival right now) about the digital look of the film. He got extremely bored with “IE” and actually didn’t like it, but that’s the translation of what he answered in his blog:

“The esthetic of the film is not careless at all. As usual, the mise-en-escene (the staging) and the resorts of Lynch’s cinema are splendid, although logically, it hasn’t got the “cleanliness” of his other movies.
For a start, this is darker, and there are parts of it in which the wish of mystery and unknown confuses with the technical impossibility of giving more light and contrast to the scene.
Frankly, between what you don’t understand and what you don’t see…you are completely lost.”

http://www.hecklerspray.com/david-lynch-wins-some-kind-of-golden-lion/20064756.php

I am surprised in a certain way that "Rabbits" is in the film, but not in another way. We shot a whole lot of new Rabbits stuff on a soundstage in Playa Vista a few years ago, and it never went on the website. But Naomi wasn't there for that. She didn't want to do more Rabbits, so Rebekah Del Rio took over her character. If Naomi's voice is in the film, then there is footage from the original set and web episodes. Even I am now curious to see what is in this film.

Hmmm, that is interesting, John. Naomi voiceover for RDR?

Susan

PS  The Lindsay Lohan story within that Heckler article was pretty funny too! 

     
“Half a truth is often a great lie.”

Ben Franklin

Peter
www.orphicfilm.nl

I have to agree. I think I know what Eraserhead really means but that takes me away from how it makes me feel. Its fun to analyze these films to death but it takes the fun out of watching them and not knowing what it all means. Mullholand Dr. is great for this reason; because it has a complete abstract nature to it but people can still find ways to make it work for them.

I just love watching his films and feeling the atmosphere,never wanting to know whats going on.

An example of the literal meaning ruining how it makes feel is a song. When some lyrics are hard to hear, you simply go on its feeling and maybe what you think the lyrics are make you feel better than what they really are. When you find out what the real lyrics are, it ruins that feeling. 

Lynch with the gold lion

As I said in the last thread I don't care what self-appointed critics think. The questions at the press conference made me angry and the reviews have been mostly dull, predictable and unimaginative. It's so fucking arrogant to write a review of a film you've only seen once, let alone a David Lynch film. I've seen Fire Walk With Me hundreds of times and am still finding things that affect my perception of it. They're not interested in the film. They just want soundbites for their highly average articles.   

Youd figure a lifetime achievemnt award would have a bigger statue!

Go figure.

Hey Heeeeyyyy Im baaaaaaaaaaack!!

 I was there!! It was the best moment of my life!!

I was right at the front. The presentation was fantastic...the montage of Lynch films beautiful and the film...oh good god..

 Youre going to love it!!!!!!

 As my festival buddy said...and i think this is the best description..."Its Mulholland Drive on Acid!"

David Lynch has gone crazy...been given complete free range and its incredible. I will stick my neck out and say its like no film ever made...completely original.

Ive only just got back and irs late so i wont post details until the morning but i will confirm a couple of things now...

Rabbits is in it..as is Axxon N...the Room to Dream clip isnt and Angelo DOESNT score most of it.

Personally...and this is a risky thing to say, i think its David's darkest film yet. Not neccessarily because of subject matter (as i cant even figure it out yet!!) but because of unrelenting darkness..confusion..speed...and my god is it scary in places!!! DV is AWESOME....lovely grainy quality and amazing movement between the camera, character and surrounding.

Laura Dern is immense in IE and the music is terrific.

Guys....its beautiful..its a PURE David Lynch experiment...utterly ball-sey...two fingers up to traditional narrative structure (there is little..if none....Mulholland Drive is straightforward next to IE) and yet...as David said when asked if it was meant to make sense.."It's supposed to make perfect sense".

 Best moment of my life. Ill be back tomorrow...

Chandra did not get a ticket which im upset about. There turned out to be 30 tickets avasilable and i got the last one. I cannot believe how lucky i was. I hope Chandra stood by the red carpet to see David.

You made me laugh, B

And thanks for the post Iar.

I said all along the clip on Room To Dream wasn't from IE.