Inland Empire (2006)

That was an excellent one.

People are voting emotionally.

Highly Overrated But Still Good

I wanted to like it more than I actually did... But much of the humor totally escaped me and I walked out only mildly impressed.

This is officially the worst thing I have ever seen on the screen. I mean including anything you can see on any screen, from those error messages, windows blue screen to cheap action movies, bad advertisements, and even those annoying physically damaged cellphone screens, this "Inland Empire" is the worst.There is nothing, a whole 3 hours of nothing. The more some Lynch fanboys try to extract something from it, the more ridiculous it gets. And don't get me wrong, I gave 8 stars to some of his other works so this has Nothing to do with a name. The fact is, the movie is a piece of garbage that is an insult to everyone who watches it.Don't waste your time.

After devouring the incredible journey that was Twin Peaks: The Return, I went on the hunt for more things Lynch. Inland Empire is probably his most obtuse and difficult film, yet I must admit that I enjoyed it. I won't pretend to you that I had any single clue about what was going on for the majority of the feature, and whilst at times it did come across like a student film (you can thank the use of the Sony PD-150 for that) I was left feeling very unsettled at the conclusion.Simply put, nobody does dream sequences or dream worlds like David Lynch, and considering this entire film blurs the lines between dream and reality from beginning to end, this is the ultimate expression of that art-form. The budget is minuscule, but you will be left questioning what is real, and what it is that really matters, if anything. Laura Dern is excellent, as usual, and there is a pure- Lynchian (sorry to use that term!) scene where she gets stabbed with a screwdriver, and the people around her continue the most morbid conversation, in the most nonchalant way. It is hard to describe, you just have to watch it to see how twisted it is.

David Lynch has long been attacked for his treatment of women in his films. INLAND EMPIRE, the last feature film he made (and, it's beginning to look as though it will be the last feature film he ever makes) responds to these criticisms with a brilliant, 3-hour epic on the treatment of women around the world.At one point, a homeless woman on Hollywood Boulevard tells one of several Laura Dern characters, "Woman, you're dying." In a hodge-podge of what look like unfinished David Lynch projects, INLAND EMPIRE explains exactly how and why women around the world suffer. The most prominent storyline in the film, if such a masterpiece of abstraction can even be limited to the term film, is that of a movie production in which a cast and crew attempt to film a movie that was filmed decades earlier with disastrous consequences. The trials and tribulations the Laura Dern characters go through represent all the hassles we horrid, patriarchal s.o.b.'s put them through (yes, I'm a feminist who was accidentally born with testicles...)The film ends brilliantly with Dern assaulting her masked, unknown assailant, and then a joyous musical number featuring women of all shapes and sizes, clapping their hands and singing along to a Nina Simone tune (not much more radical than that, eh?)The only part of the movie I struggled with were the scenes that took place in Poland (?). One has to expect a certain amount of confusion when watching a Lynch film, though.

The 3 out 10 I rated this film is for the performance of Laura Dern; when she was given a chance to play a recognizable human character doing credibly human things, she was excellent. If there is any sense to be dragged out of this movie, it's because she put it there. In most other respects, it failed to impress.It gives me no pleasure to say this, because I very much like most of Lynch's other work. I have a feeling that IE is the movie that Lynch always wanted to make, but was at least to some extent constrained to follow the conventions of mainstream film-making by the studios. In IE, however, the brakes are off. It's as if the studio bosses said: "Go on David, do whatever you like." And, oh boy, he did. What we've ended up with seems to be a jumble of all the least comprehensible bits of his other movies, all stuck together in no particular order.Even though we haven't always been able to follow the plot of Lynch's films -- if they even have one -- we could generally rely on exquisite visual artistry. IE, however, lacks even that. I'm told that it was filmed on a mid-priced camcorder; I don't know if that's true, but it surely has the worst technical cinematography of any serious movie ever made by grown-ups. I assume that this is intentional -- it takes work to make something this unappealing. I mean, a bunch of school-kids with a Handycam will sometimes succeed in creating a scene that is properly lit and in focus, even if by accident.And the characteristic, understated humour of Lynch's other films also seems to be missing here -- it's relentlessly grim and gloomy from start to finish.If this movie had been made by anybody other than Lynch, I would have given up after fifteen minutes, and just assumed it was a heap of self-indulgent, pseudo-intellectual nonsense. But because I know that Lynch can make a great film, I toughed it out. I'm not at all sure it was worth it.