INLAND EMPIRE

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

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Gold Trumpet

I just have one request for this film: Someone give me an argument!

I have no clue how I will respond to Inland Empire, but I don't think the film will just flow over me. I think there will be arguments and points to be made. See, I'm asking for an argument because I fear this film will drift into oblivious appreciation. Everyone will love it but no one will say why and only a few people will give anyone the time of day who has any inkling of disagreeance. I'm still not over the flagarant look over I got from a specific person in the discussion for Elephant. I sincerely argued that film and someone who use to actually discuss films announced the film should be only applauded because no one could muster an argument against it. Well, my words because I can only paraphase what I remember. Either way, I'd hate to see this film fall through the cracks of discussion. I'd also hate to see people only anticipate my disagreeance. I loved The Straight Story and highly appreciated Muholland Drive. I do still expect good work from Lynch. I still have a lot of admiration for him.

Pubrick

Quote from: The Gold Trumpet on September 13, 2006, 02:28:20 AMI'd also hate to see people only anticipate my disagreeance.
it's disagreement, and isn't that what you're actively requesting?
under the paving stones.

NEON MERCURY



i love this pic...the smoke motif survives for another film


Quote from: Ghostboy on September 07, 2006, 01:07:25 PM
The reviews that have been trickling in have been pretty negative. And while I don't ever trust initial reviews from festivals, they are something of a barometer of what to expect. Thus, I predict that:

Modage will hate this.
Neon will like/love it.
Pubrick will be perplexed, but will come to realize he loves it.
I will dismiss it, even as I admire parts of it.

hmm, yeah..i know i will love...i've been pretty quiet lately on this film...partly b/c i am running out of adjectives and i feel that the way i write is pretty awful...i am not half as grammatically educated as most here..so, sorry for the shitty verbal stuff...i been reading most if not all reviews..i dont mind reading them b/c they really dont spoil a lynch film....and plus i found out that will macy, zambriski, watts are in this thing...well, watts voice...plus, david takes a top 40s type song and  scores it in a scene with his unique vision...word is its creeppy....i actaully like the negative reviews..for a lynch film that great! ...as blackman mentioned lost highway was panned..and on some days its better than mulholland dr....i was never worried about the dv stuff....i know he can make it work...and maybe start a revolution...i was never sold on laura dern as a great actress but lynch keeps saying shes the shit...but i think hes just being nice..b/c she sucks imo....but reviews have said that shes killer...i'm game to see.....and theroux...it guess it goes like this:

scorcese:dicaprio:lynch:theroux

fine by me....i've had my hetero eye on him since am. psycho....i'm also jazzed that people are saying this is his most "confusing"[which to me equals "exciting"]film...hopefully the fat guy is right and i can see this in november.......and i do have a new fun fact that i found while watching mulholland..in the brief scene with the two guys and that sort of hot chick from showgirls w/the hard nipples..., the scene where the thug guy lights the cigarette and eats hot dog..if you look in the background you will notice a dude carrying a red oversized pole...just like in wild at heart..neat.........

but i talk more later..

MacGuffin

INLAND EMPIRE gets a US Distributor
According to an article at Coming Soon.net, INLAND EMPIRE will be distributed in the US by Magnolia Pictures and will be released theatrically sometime next year.
"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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Sunrise

If true, that is just awful news.

MacGuffin

Lynch's Inland Empire



Village Voice film editor Dennis Lim talks to David Lynch about Inland Empire, which will show October 8 and 9 at the NYFF. It sounds like this DV experiment will make Lost Highway look positively mainstream:

Not one for understatement or half measures, Mr. Lynch takes a giant leap into the post-celluloid future with the three-hour "Inland Empire," his first feature since "Mulholland Drive" in 2001, his 10th overall and the first to be shot on the humble medium of digital video. The movie had its premiere last month at the Venice Film Festival, where Mr. Lynch, who turned 60 in January, was awarded a Golden Lion for career achievement. It will have its first North American showings at the New York Film Festival on Oct. 8 and 9...

A thoroughly instinctual filmmaker, Mr. Lynch could never be accused of overthinking things. Or of overtalking them. In discussions of his work he reverts to affable stonewalling tactics, deflecting detailed or analytical probes with a knowing vagueness.

The vertiginous "Inland Empire" is sure to provoke questions about meaning, literal and metaphoric. Still without a United States distributor, this may be his most avant-garde offering since "Eraserhead." In tone and structure the film resembles the cosmic free fall of the mind-warping final act in "Mulholland Drive."
"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

lynch is obviously taking advantage of the fact that dv is cheap and so the film must've cost heaps less than a normal feature. at that running time, i think he's going further than anyone else has in a major arena to push the limits of what technological freedom can allow an artist to explore. sure ppl hav made avant garde work before, and von trier gets mad credit for his work on video, but nothing major has been as form-shattering as what lynch has apparently done here.

and i don't think it's a bad thing that i can almost certainly know what to expect of this film. knowing that your mind will be blown is entirely different to the reality of your mind actually being blown.
under the paving stones.

MacGuffin

Entire article from above:

David Lynch Returns: Expect Moody Conditions, With Surreal Gusts
Source: NY Times



TO hear him tell it, David Lynch has spent the last five years killing the thing he loves, for fear that it will kill him first.

"The sky's the limit with digital," he said in a recent conversation, his voice approaching foghorn pitch. "Film is like a dinosaur in a tar pit. People might be sick to hear that because they love film, just like they loved magnetic tape. And I love film. I love it!"

He contorted his face into an expression that suggested pain more than love. "It's so beautiful," he said. But "I would die if I had to work like that again."

Not one for understatement or half measures, Mr. Lynch takes a giant leap into the post-celluloid future with the three-hour "Inland Empire," his first feature since "Mulholland Drive" in 2001, his 10th overall and the first to be shot on the humble medium of digital video. The movie had its premiere last month at the Venice Film Festival, where Mr. Lynch, who turned 60 in January, was awarded a Golden Lion for career achievement. It will have its first North American showings at the New York Film Festival on Oct. 8 and 9.

On this clear Los Angeles morning, his first at home after three weeks in Europe, Mr. Lynch was knocking back a huge cappuccino in his favorite corner of his painting studio, a scatter of stale cigarette butts on the cement floor around his Aeron chair.

"It's actually cleaner that I thought it would be," he said, looking around. The sunlit atelier is perched atop one of the three sleek concrete structures that make up his compound in the Hollywood Hills. He lives in one building; another is the office of his production company, Asymmetrical. This one, the hub of creative activity, served first as a location for his 1997 film "Lost Highway" and was later converted into a production facility with a recording and editing studio and a screening room. (Mr. Lynch's chair, off limits to anyone else, can be identified by the sizable ashtray on the armrest.)

The moods and objects throughout inevitably bring to mind that most resonant of eponymous adjectives: Lynchian. Corridors and stairwells are minimally lighted. One room has the signature red curtains. Propped against one wall is an Abstract Expressionist canvas by Mr. Lynch, a brown expanse with a violent splotch of blue and the inscription "Bob loves Sally until she is blue in the face." A photograph of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the Transcendental Meditation guru, sits on a conference table, sunlight illuminating a single cobweb that hangs from its gold frame.

Lately Mr. Lynch has emerged as a keen proponent of Transcendental Meditation, which he said he has practiced twice a day since 1973 without missing a session. Last year he established the David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness-Based Education and World Peace with the goal of raising $7 billion to create "universities of peace." He also went on a campus tour, promoting the benefits of "diving within" with the help of a meditating assistant hooked up to an electroencephalograph.

His other consuming passion of recent years has been the Internet. Mr. Lynch grasped the potential of streaming media earlier and took to it with greater enthusiasm than filmmakers half his age. His sprawling Web site, davidlynch.com, begun in 2001, carries merchandise (mugs, photos, alarming ring tones) and subscriber-only content (original music, experimental vignettes, the animated series "Dumbland"). On the home page he delivers the daily weather report for Los Angeles direct to Webcam.

As it turns out, some of Mr. Lynch's online experiments found their way into "Inland Empire," which, despite his claims for the speed of direct video, took three years to make. It was shot in fits and starts and, for the longest time, on his own dime and without a unifying vision. At the outset, "I never saw any whole, W-H-O-L-E," he said. "I saw plenty of holes, H-O-L-E-S. But I didn't really worry. I would get an idea for a scene and shoot it, get another idea and shoot that. I didn't know how they would relate."

Only after the project was well under way did he contact the French studio Canal Plus, which financed the transformation of "Mulholland Drive" from a rejected television pilot into a feature film. Canal Plus signed on to "Inland Empire" even though, Mr. Lynch said, "I told them two things: 'I don't know what I'm doing, and I'm shooting on D.V.' "

Eventually the grand design revealed itself. In interviews Mr. Lynch has repeatedly advanced a poetic, democratic notion of ideas as independent of the artist, waiting to be plucked from the ether, or, in his preferred analogy, reeled in: he's working on a book about the creative process titled "Catching the Big Fish." With "Mulholland Drive," he said the eureka moment came while he was meditating. With "Eraserhead," his indelible debut in 1977, inspiration came while reading the Bible. (He declined to specify the passage.) There was no equivalent lightning bolt on "Inland Empire," but in due course "something started to talk to me," he said. "It was as if it was talking to me all along but I didn't know it."

A thoroughly instinctual filmmaker, Mr. Lynch could never be accused of overthinking things. Or of overtalking them. In discussions of his work he reverts to affable stonewalling tactics, deflecting detailed or analytical probes with a knowing vagueness.

The vertiginous "Inland Empire" is sure to provoke questions about meaning, literal and metaphoric. Still without a United States distributor, this may be his most avant-garde offering since "Eraserhead." In tone and structure the film resembles the cosmic free fall of the mind-warping final act in "Mulholland Drive."

"Inland Empire" refers on one level to the landlocked region east of Los Angeles but also evokes the vast, murky kingdom of the unconscious. Like "Lost Highway" and "Mulholland Drive," the new movie is hard-wired into its protagonist's disintegrating psyche, a condition that somehow prompts convulsive dislocations in time and space.

Laura Dern, who worked with Mr. Lynch on "Blue Velvet" and "Wild at Heart," plays an actress who lands a coveted role, only to learn that the movie, a remake, may be cursed: the original was aborted when both leads were murdered. Actor becomes character. Fiction infects reality. The various narrative strands — plagued by déjà vu, doppelgängers and the menacing ambient drone of Mr. Lynch's sound design — start to unravel. Shuttling between California and Poland, the movie folds in a Baltic radio play, a Greek chorus of skimpily dressed young women and a ghostly sitcom featuring a rabbit-headed cast and an arbitrary laugh track.

Asked to elaborate on some of the film's themes, Mr. Lynch was illuminating, if not always in expected ways. On his apparent conception of the self as fragmentary, he said: "The big self is mondo stable. But the small self — we're blowing about like dry leaves in the wind." Regarding the essential elusiveness of time, he declared, "It's going backward and forward, and it's slippery."

He brought up wormholes, invoked the theories of the quantum physicist (and fellow meditator) John Hagelin and recounted a moment of déjà vu that overcame him while making "The Elephant Man." "There was a feeling of a past thing and it's holding, and the next instant I slipped forward" — he made a sound somewhere between a slurp and a whoosh — "and I see this future."

A nightmare vision of the dream factory, "Inland Empire" belongs to the lineage of Hollywood bloody valentines that runs from "Sunset Boulevard" to "Mulholland Drive." In one scene a character, stabbed in the gut with a screwdriver, runs down Hollywood Boulevard, leaving a gory trail on the Walk of Fame. Like "Mulholland Drive," the film is at once a tribute to actors, especially those chewed up and spit out by the industry, and a study of the metaphysics of their craft.

Acting, Mr. Lynch suggests, is a kind of out-of-body experience. Like Naomi Watts in "Mulholland," Ms. Dern summons an almost frightening intensity in a performance that requires her to inhabit three (if not more) overlapping parts, lapsing in and out of a Southern drawl.

"I thought of it as playing a broken or dismantled person, with these other people leaking out of her brain," Ms. Dern said in a telephone interview. She said she held as a mental touchstone Catherine Deneuve's portrait of psychosis in Roman Polanski's "Repulsion" and noted that the stop-start shoot had its advantages: "It's unbelievably freeing. You're not sure where you're going or even where you've come from. You can only be in the moment."

One of the pluses of video was that the moment could be extended. Despite the overall lack of continuity, the lightweight camera and longer takes allowed for more freedom in individual scenes. "When you don't have to stop and spend two hours relighting, you're just able to boogie together," Mr. Lynch said.

The genesis of "Inland Empire" was a 14-page monologue he wrote for Ms. Dern. They shot it once, in a 70-minute take, on a set built in his painting studio. The scene is carved up and strewn throughout the film but remains its dark heart.

Watching "Inland Empire," which makes little attempt to temper the harshness of video, it's hard not to miss the tactile richness of Mr. Lynch's celluloid images. Instead of a state-of-the-art high-definition camera, he used the Sony PD-150, a common midrange model.

"Everybody says, 'But the quality, David, it's not so good,' and that's true," Mr. Lynch said. "But it's a different quality. It reminds me of early 35-millimeter film. You see different things. It talks to you differently."

Mary Sweeney, Mr. Lynch's longtime producer (and ex-wife), called the new film a return to the obsessive experimentation of "Eraserhead," which he also shot piecemeal over several years. "David got very excited about the ways the new technology could liberate him," she said. "I think it took him back to a pure and fearless way of working."

Mr. Lynch also stressed the importance of fearlessness. "Fear is like a tourniquet on the big tube of creative flow," he said. And thanks to meditation, "negative things decrease," he added. "You get more ideas. You catch them at a deeper level."

The dissonance between this upbeat philosophy and the abysmal terror of his films is not lost on him. "You can understand depression much more when you're not depressed," he said. "You go to this ocean of knowingness. That's what you use."

His body of work may be, short of Hitchcock's, the most psychoanalyzed in film history, but Mr. Lynch once forswore psychotherapy, fearing it might inhibit his creativity. Most things, as he sees it, are best left uninterrogated.

"As soon as you put things in words, no one ever sees the film the same way," he said at one point, when the line of questioning turned too specific. "And that's what I hate, you know. Talking — it's real dangerous."
"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

INLAND EMPIRE Photos Online
Here's another website that has posted some INLAND EMPIRE press photos including ones that haven't been seen previously.

http://outnow.ch/Media/Img/2006/InlandEmpire/

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David Lynch's obsessive, surreal "Inland Empire" is the New York Film Festival's hottest ticket.
Source: Salon

How do we explain the unlikely cultural status of David Lynch? There is no hotter ticket at this year's New York Film Festival than the North American premiere of Lynch's new picture, "Inland Empire." I know two movie buffs in their early 20s who are planning to hang around outside Alice Tully Hall on Sunday night and buy tickets from scalpers (if they can find them), and they certainly won't be alone.

What will they see if they get in? An obsessive and surreal three-hour picture, almost totally lacking in conventional plot, shot on high-definition video by a 60-year-old director. You could say, I suppose, that "Inland Empire" is about an actress (played by Lynch favorite Laura Dern) in a Hollywood film that's been cursed by Gypsies. But that's like saying "Ulysses" is a story about a guy who sells newspaper ads, or, more to the point, that the dream you had where you flew over the Atlantic Ocean with your second-grade teacher and Marilyn Manson was about air travel.
"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

At the New York Film Festival, a Global Glimpse of the State of the Cinema
By MANOHLA DARGIS; NY Times

In its second week the New York Film Festival settles down to serious cinematic business. For the most part, the 13 selections in this part of the program are worthy of the festival's past offerings and justify the program director Richard Peña's claim that the event represents a kind of "state of the cinema."

Among the must-sees from now until Thursday is David Lynch's sadistic, fitfully brilliant "Inland Empire," a plunge down the rabbit hole of the director's imagination and a spellbinding companion piece to his masterpiece, "Mulholland Drive." Nearly as surreal a venture is the Austrian filmmaker Nikolaus Geyrhalter's "Our Daily Bread," a documentary, by turns affecting and wrenching, about contemporary food production. Other highlights include Bong Joon-Ho's monster movie "The Host" and Johnnie To's gangster film "Triad Election," two genre pictures that boast some of the best filmmaking in the festival. Like Pedro Almodóvar's "Volver" and Nuri Bilge Ceylan's "Climates," also playing this week, these are films that feed and sometimes blow your mind.

Mr. Lynch's latest cinematic head trip is certainly the biggest mindblower. Shot in digital video, though it is being presented on 35-millimeter film, "Inland Empire" is his most experimental feature since "Eraserhead." With this new work Mr. Lynch is simultaneously looking back at the past (both his and that of Luis Buñuel, whose influence looms large here) and to the future. Like Michael Mann, whose recent work explores the new aesthetic possibilities opened up by advanced digital technologies, notably by doing away with the image's vanishing point, Mr. Lynch isn't trying to imitate the look of celluloid. Rather, he is exploiting the specific visual textures of digital video, creating images as grubby as those from a building surveillance camera and as cruelly hyper-real as a Chuck Close portrait.

The story spins a familiar Lynchian fairy tale: a blond actress (Laura Dern, in a career-defining performance) lands a coveted film role and spirals down into a hallucination in which dreams become nightmares, and her leading man (Justin Theroux) wears a doo-wop swoop like Mr. Lynch, like Nicolas Cage in "Wild at Heart," like Balthazar Getty in "Lost Highway." There are whores, of course, with laughing and lurid mouths, and shadowy corridors that, in suggestively female anatomical fashion, lead to dark rooms. Mostly, though, there is Mr. Lynch, whose shards of dream logic sometimes achieve the convulsive beauty that André Breton wanted for Surrealism and, at other times, feel like the disgorged bile of an artist who has taken the brakes off his sadism.
"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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godardian

Quote from: MacGuffin on October 06, 2006, 03:47:47 PM
Mr. Lynch isn't trying to imitate the look of celluloid. Rather, he is exploiting the specific visual textures of digital video,

I'm sure that it will be at least "fitfully" brilliant, but of course Mr. Lynch is not the first to take this approach:

""Money doesn't come into it. It never has. I do what I do because it's all that I am." - Morrissey

"Lacan stressed more and more in his work the power and organizing principle of the symbolic, understood as the networks, social, cultural, and linguistic, into which a child is born. These precede the birth of a child, which is why Lacan can say that language is there from before the actual moment of birth. It is there in the social structures which are at play in the family and, of course, in the ideals, goals, and histories of the parents. This world of language can hardly be grasped by the newborn and yet it will act on the whole of the child's existence."

Stay informed on protecting your freedom of speech and civil rights.

modage

Inland Empire was
the craziest movie
i have ever seen
in my entire life.
Christopher Nolan's directive was clear to everyone in the cast and crew: Use CGI only as a last resort.

hedwig

sweet. that's not a bad thing so i guess my prediction was closer..

Quote from: Ghostboy on September 07, 2006, 01:07:25 PM
Modage will hate this
Quote from: Hedwig on September 07, 2006, 07:00:51 PM
modage will really like it

to everyone who saw it, stop hyperventilating and give us your spoiler-labelled reviews!  :shock:

JG

I HATE EVERYONE WHO SAW THIS. 

modage

Quote from: JG on October 08, 2006, 11:44:09 PM
I HATE EVERYONE WHO SAW THIS. 
does that include Mr. Lynch, Laura Dern & Justin Theroux who were all in attendance?  :yabbse-grin:
Christopher Nolan's directive was clear to everyone in the cast and crew: Use CGI only as a last resort.