Inland Empire

Gosh.

What an astonishing film. How boldly abstract, how impossibly funny. Really. Not a patch, I'd say, on my favourite Lynchians - Wild at Heart, Lost Highway - but I love the resonance you feel after a Lynch film experience. Just . . . the replaying of ideas, scenes, music in your head for days afterwards, the way, involuntarily, your brain tries to patch everything together so it all makes sense.

My brother recently started up on a "the emperor's got no clothes" rant about Lynch, and I responded by saying the key to watching a Lynch movie is to take everything on literal face value (in this scene, a movie mogul is disgusted by the brew of his espresso! ok! sure! dwarves! monkeys! women with one leg! talking backwards! an ear in the grass! wahoo!), not to attempt to decipher anything, and just viscerally experience the movie.

The fascinating thing for me, then, is the tension created between the experience of the movie as pure emotional/visceral resonance, and my head inability to rest, my compulsion to try to "figure things out."

Inland Empire, then, is perhaps the purest example of this, because - really - if you want to have fun - you have to let thought go. This is such a Sisyphian task for me that the movie wins my admiration for creating so much turmoil - I can't help but try to figure the movie out.

Laura Dern is superb. Two qualms: running time - it was over-indulgent, repeated beats - twenty minutes could have gone. And secondarily - don't shoot on digital, David! Your films have such a macabre beauty, and its completely undermined by the harsh lighting/realism of digital! Your a film/film type of man! Please.

Oh dear. I think I may be drunk.