INLAND EMPIRE

Started by MacGuffin, May 11, 2005, 04:50:02 PM

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MacGuffin

Director Lynch produces film that puzzles critics

David Lynch is not like other directors. Critics say his films make no sense and even he admits they are difficult.

But he also adds to his air of mystery by doing things like taking a cow for a walk on a busy Los Angeles intersection or deciding to become a coffee merchant so moviegoers can drink his coffee while watching his films.

Lynch says he walked the cow on a leash because everyone likes a cow. When a young woman the other day asked the cow's handler if she could pet it, he said, "No, the cow's working."

So the woman wound up talking to Lynch and suppressing an urge to pat his hair which seems to shoot straight up from his temple, another item that separates him from others.

The director, whose works include "Blue Velvet" and "Mulholland Drive, is walking cows, carrying posters for actress Laura Dern and holding court in a pie shop these days -- in aid of promoting his latest work, a three-hour film called "Inland Empire," which he is slowly distributing across the country himself.

Critics have hailed Dern's performance although they are not quite sure who she is playing or what character she is at any given moment. There are about three to choose from.

But that's OK. Critics are also not sure what "Inland Empire" is about although they say it is a perfect fit for Lynch, one of Hollywood's favorite cult directors thanks to surrealistic works like "Twin Peaks" and "Mulholland Drive" that are replete with menacing images and confusions.

New York Times critic Manohla Dargis wrote recently: "There are, in the movies, few places creepier to spend time than in David Lynch's head. It is a head where the wild things grow, twisting and spreading like vines, like fingers, and taking us in their captive embrace."

TALKING RABBITS

And certainly that holds for "Inland Empire," which starts off telling a story about an elegant blond actress in a big mansion who is starting a new movie that is cursed. Soon she and the role merge and the story ostensibly set in a desert area east of Los Angeles winds up on the snow-filled streets of Lodz, Poland, and then among the homeless on Hollywood Boulevard where the actress seeks refuge.

Every building, street and room in the film turns menacing and to make things more complicated there is a family of rabbits dressed as people. Every time the rabbits speak, there is canned laughter. What the rabbits are doing in the movie is a mystery that Lynch can answer but doesn't want to.

In a recent interview, the 60-year-old director said he understood the film but added it was not an easy task for viewers.

"I did not start from a script. I wrote and shot one scene and then another. I would not see how one scene fits into another but after a while I did.

"This is not an improvisation in which you get together with actors and the crew and bat about ideas. I don't do that. I write out the dialogue, the mood and feel of things and I shoot the scene."

OK, but what about the rabbits?

"In the rabbit scene there is an idea and that tells you that the room is kind of green-blue and that it has a couch and a radiator and a transom," Lynch said, trying to explain an image in the movie that has many critics baffled.

But when pressed as to what the rabbits mean symbolically, Lynch avoids a direct answer. He is a man who will explain his work, but only so far.

"I don't talk about those kind of things. There is something about it that feels correct to me, so correct that it makes me feel happy, even though they are abstract things, they figure into the story very much to me and that's it."

As far as Lynch is concerned, he wants his viewers to feel his films, not understand them in a concrete way.

"It is not an intellectual thing. I am an intuitive filmmaker. You go by intuition. You let the idea talk."
"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol


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Pubrick

Quote from: MacGuffin on December 19, 2006, 10:27:23 AM
But when pressed as to what the rabbits mean symbolically, Lynch avoids a direct answer.
i would give all these jerks a direct punch in the throat.

they must think that if they keep badgering him he'll give them what they want. are they 5 years old? will they feel superior if lynch tells them what everything means in plain english? the answer he gives them is empowering! and they don't care, they even have to be told that it's alright to think for themselves. how insecure are these ppl, how bereft of ideas.
under the paving stones.

modage

yeah i really just love him.  and i love that its not supposed to be unintelligible.  when we met him, we told him that the first time we had no idea what was going on but the 2nd time more of the pieces definitely started to come together and he seemed to really like that.  he said a few more viewings and we'd have it all figured out, i said "maybe 10!" and he was like "oh, i don't think that many".  he's not purposefully sticking to the fringes, he just wants to give people a little credit. 
Christopher Nolan's directive was clear to everyone in the cast and crew: Use CGI only as a last resort.

TheVoiceOfNick

On Sunday night I saw David Lynch's new film, Inland Empire, which he is self distributing around the country. David Lynch is one of my favorite directors, not because he's the most accessible filmmaker, but because he has such a unique style and his ideas are so bizarre. Although I love mainstream movies, I need films like Lynch's to balance that love. I can't satisfy that balance with most indie movies, as these days even indie Laemmle-type movies are full of formulaic stories and structure that would make Hollywood proud, if only they had more mass appeal. So Lynch works outside the system, in both his style and his production (he's financed by Studio Canal, not Paramount).

Anyways, Inland Empire. This was one wierd movie. I enjoyed it a lot, but I don't quite understand it. This is what Lynch was going for. Let's just say, if you were confused after watching Mulholland Drive, expect to be at least 10 times as confused after watching this movie. It deals with multiple stories, characters with multiple identities within the various stories, and yes, people dressed in bunny suits who get canned laughter responses from an unseen audience after they speak a line.

Lynch breaks the fourth wall several times by poking fun at the fact that the audience doesn't know what the hell is going on. At one point, Laura Dern mentions that this whole thing is a "mind fuck"... was she refering to her situation, or our viewing experience?

If you're looking to see a truly original but bizarre movie, go see this. If you prefer Michael Bay and chick flicks, pass on this. It's also worth noting that there are some very frightning situations, so if you're easily startled or hate scary movies, pass on this as well.

Pozer


TheVoiceOfNick

OK, thanks for the not so gentle nudge.

TheVoiceOfNick

I tried searching but nothing came up.  Maybe I searched in the wrong search area?

What kind of things have changed?  I don't remember someone being so meanly confronted when posting something that was already posted.  They were kindly redirected to the thread, and the thread was locked.  No attitude.  I came back to talk about Inland Empire (or INLAND EMPIRE, sorry), and I'm rudely confronted. 

MacGuffin

Quote from: TheVoiceOfNick on December 19, 2006, 01:01:05 PMMaybe I searched in the wrong search area?

You mean the area that's not the David Lynch forum?
"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol


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MacGuffin

Beyond the Multiplex
David Lynch discusses his film "Inland Empire," his new signature coffee blend, and why movies should make you dream.
By Andrew O'Hehir; Salon.com

David Lynch should come with a personal Surgeon General's warning: If you're the right kind of ex-smoker with a vaguely bohemian past, hanging out with him can make you furiously want to light up.

I avoided smoking when I met Lynch the other day in a freezing artists' loft overlooking the West Side Highway in New York, but the Lynchian mood of total enthusiasm and commitment, saturated in caffeine and nicotine, was contagious in other ways. At age 60, Lynch is a long way from being the enfant terrible of American film. His hair has gone completely white and his face is seamed. He looks and sounds like the eccentric, charismatic art or drama teacher at a Middle American high school (Lynch grew up in Missoula, Mont.), the one the oddball kids flock to. He was dressed like an undertaker, in a starched white shirt buttoned to the neck and a black coat that reached his knees.

The man who made "Eraserhead" and "Blue Velvet" and "The Straight Story" and a notorious, doomed version of "Dune" has been through Hollywood and come out the other side, more of an outsider now than he's ever been. After making the international cult hit "Mulholland Drive" in 2001, he could easily have gone back to a major or "mini-major" studio and commanded an eight-digit production budget. Instead, he spent almost four years with Laura Dern, a large supporting cast and an off-the-shelf digital video camera (the Sony PD-150, for you equipment mavens), making up a movie as he went along.

By Lynch's own account, he began writing and shooting scenes without knowing how or even whether they were connected, and only late in the process began to stick them together into something resembling a narrative. And the resemblance, one has to say, is pretty vague. The resulting movie is called "Inland Empire," although I don't think any of it takes place in the suburban desert valleys of southeastern California that bear that name. It might be about a Hollywood actress named Nikki (Dern), married to a rich but sinister Polish aristocrat, whose comeback project turns out to be a film haunted by a Gypsy curse, and who suffers a psychotic breakdown (or, if you prefer, travels through a portal into an alternate reality or two).

Trying to force Lynch's films into some unitary interpretive structure has rarely been helpful, and it's even less so here. No plot summary can capture all the salient elements of "Inland Empire" -- the hopscotching from Los Angeles to the snowbound city of Lodz in Poland; the cryptic fragments of thriller; the interpolations from "Rabbits," Lynch's Dada-style Internet serial; the eerie dance number featuring a bunch of Hollywood Boulevard hookers performing the Locomotion. More than anything else, "Inland Empire" is about its own haunting auditory and visual experience; in her marvelously written review, New York Times critic Manohla Dargis argues that it's best understood as a series of crumbling, glorious interior spaces, the kinds of locations Lynch has always employed to powerful and mysterious effect.

I'm on record as expressing exhaustion and frustration -- as well as fascination -- with "Inland Empire" after seeing it at the New York Film Festival, and there's no need to repeat all that. Talking to Lynch (and also to Dern and costar Justin Theroux) reminded me that no single viewer's response is sufficient or explanatory when it comes to a movie like this. Lynch is trying to push beyond the boundaries of 99 percent of contemporary cinema, trying to reinvent, or at least re-access, the revolutionary cinema of his idols Bergman and Fellini. While I remain skeptical that there's much of an audience in 2006 for a film this deliberately abstruse, there can be no doubt about the nobility of the effort.

Lynch's company will be distributing "Inland Empire" entirely on its own, without help from any major studio or indie distributor. When I met him, Lynch had just flown in from a promotional screening in Boston, and had only a few minutes to talk to me before heading for another at Manhattan's IFC Center. One of his assistants told me that setting up a traditional media junket at a midtown Manhattan hotel would have cost $50,000, so instead reporters met Lynch, Dern and Theroux in a donated, and apparently unheated, arts space on 11th Avenue.

The experience was not unlike a scene in "Inland Empire" itself. You entered through an unmarked red door on the wind-blasted avenue, and ascended a long, dim and steep staircase with portable closet lights strung along the floor. I sat down with Lynch in a stark but cheerful studio space, hung with abstract paintings in bright primary colors. It was a perfect setting, not ironic in the slightest.

Himself a former painter, David Lynch is an artist to his bones, and his core audience will always be the art-school types, the film geeks, the true believers. But Lynch has an artist's purity and optimism, and perhaps naiveté as well. James Joyce apparently believed that ordinary, bourgeois 20th-century readers would intuitively understand the stream-of-unconsciousness narrative of "Finnegans Wake," a book long since abandoned to the academic priesthood. Lynch talks in similar terms about the ponytailed 14-year-olds he hopes will flock to see "Inland Empire."

If there still are ponytailed teenagers in Middle America, outside the patented small towns of Lynch's imagination, no less likely audience for this film can be imagined. On the other hand, if he can get them sufficiently stoked on his David Lynch Signature Cup coffee blend -- as I told him, this is by far the most marketable idea he's ever had -- then anything is possible.

So, David, you've got this new film, "Inland Empire," and you're basically putting out the darn thing yourself. Most of the time when somebody makes a movie and we get to see it, either a big company in Los Angeles puts it out or a small company in New York puts it out. You don't have either of those.

No. I've done that before. Any one of those companies has a team -- one person does this thing, one person does that thing. So I have a team; it's just not at a studio.

And it's a lot smaller. Can your team really do all the things you need to do, to get people to come see your movie?

You know, money is great. But there are things that can be done these days without spending a bunch of money. A lot of it's tied to the Internet. Distribution is changing. The people at distribution companies are human beings. Sometimes they get it right, sometimes they don't. There's no real experts. There's no studio head that always picks a winner. So the bottom line is, in the past I've gotten advances and never seen anything beyond the advance. [Long pause.] There's, um, no guarantee I see anything this way either. [Laughter.] But at least it'll be my fault. I think it's the way things are going. Advances are going down for films. There's no big payoff anymore. This has already all happened in the music business, and now it's starting in films. It's better to go this way.

And you're all set to put out the film on DVD when the time comes?

Oh, yeah, yeah.

I'm just guessing you have a lot of great extra stuff for the DVD.

People love extra stuff. And this is a heartache to me. Because the film is the thing! But the film isn't the thing [on DVD]. I mean, it is the thing, but people want Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. Do you know what I mean?

That's interesting. I do sometimes feel like the film itself recedes into the background on DVD. People get so interested in the back story, the peripheral stuff. You know, if you want to watch "Citizen Kane," watch "Citizen Kane"!

Yeah. Beginning, middle and end. At least once. And then get going on the extras.

OK, let's try to talk about your movie. I know you have your reasons for not discussing things like intention or meaning. But you're asking people to go see a three-hour film by David Lynch. So what can you tell them? What's it about?

A woman in trouble.

Right. Well, that's short and pithy. What else can we say about it? That woman is played by Laura Dern, who's playing, I don't know, either three different characters or one character split up three ways. It takes place in a lot of different settings, in California, in Poland, maybe other places. It's partly set in the film industry, and it feels partly like a commentary on the film industry.

[Lynch smiles but doesn't respond.]

Well, look. With or without your help, you know people are going to devote tremendous energy to figuring it out and piecing it all together. On Salon, there was a ferocious discussion about "Mulholland Drive" between our readers and a couple of writers, trading theories and trying to figure out what was going on in that movie. Are you OK with that kind of thing?

Absolutely! You know, people -- we're all detectives. We all have intuition. We're all sensing more than what meets the eye, deciphering things, figuring things out. So beautiful for the human being. It's part of it, it's part of us. Some films can be great, they're entertaining, you love 'em, but that's it. You're on to the next thing. And others, you can roll 'em around, you can think about them, live with them. And if you like that world that you get to go into, that's a beautiful thing. You can visit that world again, and go in and, in a way, get lost, like Chet Baker -- "Let's Get Lost." You get lost in a dream, and there's indications of things, that you can put it all together. It's all there.

OK, that's a good, cryptic David Lynch answer. I'll run with that.

OK. [Laughter.] That was completely straight-ahead, man.

I've heard you say before that you personally like to experience movies that are like dreams.

Well, that have room to dream. That get you going on what you could say was a dream.

So what movies have done that for you, in your life?

Well, like, Bergman and Fellini. Hitchcock, in a way. Kubrick. A lot of film directors -- Billy Wilder -- they make such a place, such a world, that you want to go there again and have that experience. It's an experience and a mood, and some abstractions that you can't necessarily put into words for your friends, but you say, "You have to feel, to experience that. You have to go in there and experience that. It'll make you dream."

This is a tricky one, maybe. You don't want to mess with my understanding of your film, and I can respect that. But don't you believe that your subjective understanding of what "Inland Empire" is about -- given that you directed it -- is necessarily more accurate than mine or anybody else's?

Maybe. [Laughter.] But yours is accurate for you, and as valid as anyone else's interpretation. It's like the world around us. We all maybe think we see the same world, but they say that we don't. They say that the thing is, the world is as you are. A lot of people are really, like, say, political. And they'll see films in terms of politics. Other people are into something else, and they'll see any film in terms of that, but it really means in terms of themselves. Their interpretation comes from that. As I say, the analogy is [gesturing at the paintings on the walls] standing in front of an abstract painting. The more abstract it is, the more varied the interpretations. And each viewer standing in front of that painting is getting a different thing. It's hittin' a different system each time. Same painting!

Well, it's my judgment that "Inland Empire" is the most abstract or experimental film you've done, at least since "Eraserhead" and maybe ever. Do you agree with that, and was it part of your intention?

No, my intention -- there's no intention. Ideas come along and you fall in love with them. In some ways that could be right, but it's a different thing. Each film is different, because the ideas are different. My hope is that the 14-year-old girls, maybe with a ponytail, going down the tree-lined streets in the Midwest, embrace "Inland Empire." Get their boyfriends into the theater with them. Have this experience. It would be so beautiful. [Laughter.]

Wow. I can only hope you succeed. Talk about the process of making this film, because I think it's quite different from anything you've done before. When you started shooting, you still didn't know where you were going, is that right?

Exactly. Always, I don't know where I'm going, but by the time I finish writing a script, I know where I'm going. This time, there were just scenes written. A scene written and shot, another scene written and shot. Scene 1 doesn't relate to Scene 2 whatsoever. Then I get an idea for a third scene, and I don't know how these are relating, or if they will ever relate. At this point, I'm just doing this on my own. Somewhere around five, six or seven scenes in, it happens that I see the unification, and a larger thing growing out of it. That would happen in writing a script before, and now it's happening as I'm shooting. Always, when you get one idea that you love, it is like a bait and it draws other things. It's like getting pieces of the puzzle one at a time. If the puzzle is green grass and a blue sky and a house, you get a piece of blue, you get a little thing of green -- you can't even see the grass, it's in the shadow, say, dark green -- and a little bit of roof tile. And you kind of wonder about these things, but then some other ones come, and lo and behold, one day there's the whole thing.

Did this approach change the actors' performances? The fact that they didn't know where they were going?

They talk about that. Not knowing, like, the arc. They've got a term now, it's called an "arc." I know there is one, an arc. [Laughter.] Scene by scene is what you shoot a film with, anyway. You're shootin' this scene and you're working it to make it feel correct. Everybody involved is talking -- action and reaction, rehearsal and talk, rehearsal and talk -- to get 'em to zero in on the original idea that's driving the boat, and working it till it feels correct based on that idea. So scene by scene, it goes that way anyway.

But sometimes they [the actors] know something that's going to happen later. Now, if they know that they are lying in this scene, I don't know if there's some subtle little -- what do you call it in the card game?

A tell.

Right. This way there's no possibility of a tell. It's honestly this scene. I say, "You're you today. You don't know what's going to happen tomorrow." It's kind of interesting to go that way. There was a certain point when I had the future scenes, and so they knew some things that were going to happen, and it became more like the regular way of working.

Do you think that somebody who's trying to impose a single coherent narrative on one of your films is wasting their time, or closing themselves off to the whole experience?

Yes. If I said something beforehand, you mean? If they knew upfront what I thought it meant?

Well, that. But even if they're trying to impose something ...

As they watch? Well, yeah. Many people have said, "You know what? A couple of scenes in, or halfway through, I just said, screw it, I'm just gonna let it wash over me and not worry about it." Honestly, that's the best way. All you've done is you've turned off the intellect a little bit. Other things are still really working, but the thing that tries to make sense of it in a traditional way has surrendered itself. [Laughter.] I think that's kind of beautiful. I think about, you know, like, um, seeing ... [long pause] It's just -- get in that world and let it be.

I think if any of your movies really accomplishes that ...

It's this one. Uh-huh. [Laughter.]

I know you have to go. But this is really important: Tell me about your new line of coffee.

David Lynch Signature Cup. It's the coffee I drink. And I really love drinking coffee.

I've heard that. I wish we had some right now.

Yeah! So it's gonna be sold on the site at first, and then it's going into stores. Yesterday I was at the Brattle Theatre in Boston [actually Cambridge, Mass.], and they want, you know, to put it in the lobby. It would be very cool if it was in art houses. It's a filmmaker's coffee. But a coffee that all people, I hope, will enjoy. It's really good.

Maybe your coffee can help save the art houses of America.

Well, the art houses have got to come back. It's tough going right now. But things go in waves. That's why I'm holding out hope for those 14-year-old girls. I'm not kiddin' you! Hollywood, the blockbuster mentality, has gone around the world killing the art houses, alternative cinema. But it is alive, that cinema! It's everywhere now, but it's hard to see it in the theaters in America. It's hard to see it in the theaters in Europe! So I'm hopeful that this change can occur again, like we saw in the '60s. It would be cool.

You know, there was a time when they said painting was dead. Painting ain't never gonna be dead. No medium is gonna be dead! Infinite possibilities, always surprises coming along. There are not that many surprises in a formula, an arc. Some solid entertainment, nothing wrong with it. But there's room for much, much more. And let's not miss out on the much more.
"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol


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MacGuffin



Inside each other's heads
Laura Dern and director David Lynch intuit their way through their latest collaboration, "Inland Empire."
By Susan King, Los Angeles Times

After working together three times in the last 21 years, actress Laura Dern and director David Lynch have developed a kind of shorthand.

"Very quickly we are in sync," Lynch said. "I don't know what it is. We have developed a way of working that is so smooth and fun. Laura is just like family."

Dern, the daughter of Diane Ladd and Bruce Dern, was a 17-year-old ingenue when Lynch cast her in his 1986 classic "Blue Velvet" as the innocent daughter of a police detective in a small, perverted town. Four years later, she played a sexpot named Lula Pace Fortune in his "Wild at Heart." In their current project, the puzzling three-hour "Inland Empire," Dern plays a woman in trouble.

Film Independent's Spirit Awards recently announced it would be giving them a special distinction award for their unique collaboration.

The gamin 39-year-old actress admits she didn't quite get Lynch's unique, surreal universe when she appeared in "Blue Velvet."

"I got there was light and there was darkness, and I got that he was a wonderful genius," Dern said recently over tea at Marie Callender's on Wilshire Boulevard. "Kyle MacLachlan and I were sort of the straight men of the story. I felt segregated from aspects of David's world."

But that changed with "Wild at Heart."

"I was immersed into all of it. So [our relationship] has shifted in terms of the roles he's given me. It has shifted in terms of how close we are now.

"To have a filmmaker in your life who gives you that kind of trust to have played these extremes ...."

"Inland Empire" defies description. Shot on a low-resolution Sony camcorder, the drama finds Dern playing an actress named Nikki Grace who is married to a powerful man in Los Angeles. She lands a role in a high-profile love story playing a woman named Susan Blue. Nikki begins an affair with her womanizing leading man (Justin Theroux), then seems to have trouble delineating between her real life and her reel life.

Her problems may be due to the fact that the film in which Nikki is starring has a curse. Another version of the film had been started in Poland but was never completed because the stars were murdered.

Frequently "Inland Empire" switches from Hollywood to Poland and to what could be footage from the unfinished version of the story. However, Nikki also finds herself roaming through Poland streets during winter.

Adding to the puzzle are several scenes involving three large rabbits in clothes that reside in a '50s-style living room; every time they say a line there is canned laughter.

"Inland EMPIRE" began as an experiment between Lynch and Dern three years ago.

"The process started with him writing a scene and saying he wanted to experiment, meaning, I think, with digital," she said. "The scene was a monologue. At that moment, I was thrilled to have fun with him. We shot that and then he wrote another scene and we shot that. And the light was lit. I could tell he was seeing a movie."

Once he felt it would be a movie, Lynch began writing more scenes. "Finally, at some point, he wrote a big chunk, and we did more of a traditional four-week shoot," Dern said.

In between working on "Inland Empire," Dern went off to do other movies, got pregnant and had a daughter two years ago.

"All of it was an opportunity and a challenge," the actress said. "Everything was liberating and terrifying simultaneously. David's requirement is to be in the moment because you don't necessarily know what's coming after or what's coming before or who specifically you might be playing that day."

But within a day's shooting, she said, Lynch is very specific. "Sometimes the blocking isn't structured, but the dialogue is very structured and he knows the feeling that he wants," she said. "He gives you great trust and a real open door to where emotionally you are going to take it."

Lynch liked the idea of shooting a movie in which he didn't know what would happen next. "If you know what is coming, there is always a possibility that an actor would tip their hand," he said. "You don't necessarily want to give anything away in this."

"I think David's world is more true to human nature than you would like," Dern said. "He lives in abstracts, but the story has a lot of authentic truth about it.

"To David, film is a visual medium that is about taking people into an experience where they intuit their way through it. He's a painter and he paints an experience, and he wants you and I standing next to each other looking at the painting and having completely different interpretations or feelings about it."

Just like a beaming father, Lynch is proud of Dern's performance.

And he wants to call attention to the fact with awards' voters. But Lynch is displeased with the amount of money spent on Oscar campaigns. "Always this time of year there is so much hype and generated buzz," he said. "You think something is gold and six months later it's fool's gold. If people can just appreciate her performance for what it is ... "

So in what must have looked like a scene from one of his own films, Lynch recently made a "For Your Consideration" sign touting Dern, hired a piano player and a cow named Georgia and sat for about four hours at Hollywood Boulevard and La Brea Avenue and another four in front of the Tower Records store on the Sunset Strip.

"It was the greatest cow," Lynch said.

"People would come up wanting to pet the cow and talk. So many people came up and said they wanted to help. So there is a part of us that can see through [the hype]. All I want is to try get the word out.... "
"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol


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JG

I saw it again, this time with friends.  The girl I was with started crying at one point toward the end, which i thought was cool and awesome.   

the movie was just as amazing and its defintiley not impossible to get.  after the movie we had a conversation and i feel like we worked out a lot of stuff, at least a main story line. 

hedwig

Quote from: JG on December 30, 2006, 08:34:00 PM
The girl I was with started crying at one point toward the end
is she 14 years old, maybe with a ponytail?

MacGuffin

Quote from: modage on December 19, 2006, 11:22:00 AMwhen we met him, we told him that the first time we had no idea what was going on but the 2nd time more of the pieces definitely started to come together and he seemed to really like that. 

Do you agree with this theory?
http://messageboard.inlandempirecinema.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=17

I'm with the whole prostitute watching TV/Nikki connection, that's what I got too. I still need to see it again.
"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol


Skeleton FilmWorks

MacGuffin

David Lynch and INLAND EMPIRE are about to be a Paramount Event Here In Austin! You've Got To Be There!!!
Source: AICN

Hey folks, Harry here -- The first truly awesome film event of 2007 is upon us. Near the end of the month, January 24th - there will be a screening of INLAND EMPIRE at the gorgeous and amazing Paramount theater - with David Lynch to appear with his film and hold a Q&A afterwards. I can't friggin wait to see the film with Lynch here. Rebecca Campbell and the Austin Film Society contacted me to offer the AFS discount to 200 AICN readers to attend this amazing event. Here's how to do it:

Dear Friend of AICN:
Guess what -- David Lynch is coming to Austin with INLAND EMPIRE, and AICN has arranged for you to get the Austin FIlm Society member price and early purchase privilege. See below for all the details, and if you want to participate, email Harry at HK@aintitcool.com with: Lynch Me - in the subject line by noon on Friday, January 5. Indicate how many tickets you wish to buy. And give me your FULL NAME - as I'll need to give it to the Film Society. I'll let you know if you've made it onto the list via a separate post on the site (I have 200 seats available).

The Austin Film Society presents
INLAND EMPIRE

Wednesday, Jan. 24 @ 7 pm
Paramount Theatre, 719 Congress Ave.
Followed by a Q&A with director David Lynch

"INLAND EMPIRE is a plunge down the rabbit hole of the director's imagination... His latest cinematic head trip is certainly the biggest mindblower." - New York Times

"...Laura Dern in a monumental performance." - Rolling Stone

ADVANCE TICKET PURCHASE
Tickets on sale to AFS members and Harry's list _only_ beginning Saturday, Jan. 6; tickets on sale to the general public Thursday, Jan. 11.

NOTE: AFS/AICN discount and advance ticket purchase available only through the Paramount Box Office, 719 Congress Avenue, opens noon Saturday!

TICKET PRICES
AFS/AICN
Orchestra: $20
Mezzanine: $15
Balcony: $10

General Public
Orchestra: $25
Mezzanine: $20
Balcony: $15

Tickets available to the general public (if you don't make it onto my list) through the Paramount box office and GetTix (1-866-443-8849) beginning Thursday, Jan. 11
"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol


Skeleton FilmWorks

MacGuffin

"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol


Skeleton FilmWorks