Someone else's Inland Empire review
Jan. 1st, 2007 11:12 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
progThis review of Inland Empire jibes well with my feelings about the film.
It is worth seeing if you want to be exposed to some really overpowering, if often abstract, film art. I've had the chance to sleep on it (with a lovely NYE party in between somewhere as well) and I've decided that it is so. I'm glad I saw it.
Just keep the running time in mind. I know I would have been less distracted and impatient if I knew when it was going to end, since the structure of the film's latter, nightmarish major section contains no conventional cues that things are heading towards a climax, let alone a resolution. (At least, none that tell the truth.) I found myself looking at the Brattle's purple-lit wall clock more often than I would have liked.
Yes, it's probably not playing in any theaters anywhere at this point; I caught it on the last day it was held over at the Brattle. But I might like to see it again on DVD later.
It is worth seeing if you want to be exposed to some really overpowering, if often abstract, film art. I've had the chance to sleep on it (with a lovely NYE party in between somewhere as well) and I've decided that it is so. I'm glad I saw it.
Just keep the running time in mind. I know I would have been less distracted and impatient if I knew when it was going to end, since the structure of the film's latter, nightmarish major section contains no conventional cues that things are heading towards a climax, let alone a resolution. (At least, none that tell the truth.) I found myself looking at the Brattle's purple-lit wall clock more often than I would have liked.
Yes, it's probably not playing in any theaters anywhere at this point; I caught it on the last day it was held over at the Brattle. But I might like to see it again on DVD later.
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Date: 2007-01-01 05:49 pm (UTC)I'm ambivalent about Mullholand Drive--it's beautiful and sorta clever, but once you've figured out that nothing is real it kinda takes all the mystery out of it.
I don't agree with the conventional critical wisdom that there are two stories, one of which is "real" and the other is imagined. It's all imagined (by Lynch, with the willing collusion of his audience). That's the whole story, the whole point, and we keep forgetting it even after we've had it rubbed in our faces again and again. So as an effective example of the power of fiction and illusion in the human mind it kinda works, but beneath the finely embroidered surface the film is a thematic blunt instrument, and the theme itself is more than a little tired. It was done to death by surrealists in the mid-20th century, and has significant treatments as far back as Shakespeare.