I like Polley as an actress, but I didn't see her directorial debut. I guess I'll check it out on dvd.

Madget, just to give you a head's up, I sort of responded to you in my blog, although I still haven't seen THE PIANIST.

I'm not sure what your beef with Brody is, but I thought he was good in The Pianist. If it's any consolation, he actually has very little dialogue in the movie. If I remember correctly, I think The Pianist suffered a little from coming out at the tail-end of a time when it seemed like everyone and their brother were doing a big epic tear-jerking holocaust-themed movie, thus creating the impression Polanski was hopping onto a crowded bandwagon heading a little too eagerly for Oscar-town. But that's too bad; upon seeing the movie, I found that this impression – which I probably had shared before seeing it – was a little unfair.

I've seen very little Polanski and very few WW2/Nazi movies, but The Pianist really works for me. Sure, I suppose it does have a little of that old Oscar-winning sorta spit-and-shine to it, and it's relatively conventional storytelling -- but it's certainly no overcooked piece of weepy opportunism, I found it really quite good. I won't go into any detail about it right now, but it manages the kind of emotional catharsis you'd expect given the subject matter, without sacrificing its straightforward sincerity. And yet at the same time, it maintains complexity – there's just so many fascinating elements wound up in and echoing heavily through the movie's music-driven climax/confrontation. I got the sense from the extra features that it's very personal material for Polanski – some of it based loosely on his childhood (though mostly it's adapted from the Pianist's diaries) -- and that he approached it with deep care. He did a good job. It's never cheap, and his application of the piano music – which actually features minimally in the movie overall – is stirring not just for being well-timed or hitting the right button; but for being absolutely loaded with nuanced thematic payoff.

There Will Be Blood is as good as it looked from the No Country For Old Men trailer, eh? I was going to go see it tonight, before being cruelly reminded by the Rottentomatoes.com local theater search that I live in a shitty town with no appreciation for cinema. I.e. it's not playing here. Ah well. Got Inland Empire and Scorpion: Beast Stable via Netflix today.

I liked No Country For No Men considerably less the 2nd time I saw it, incidentally, but by then I'd torn through the book and thought the whole thing to death. So I was a bit No Country'd out, the 2nd viewing mainly just confirming for me that there really wasn't much left for me to absorb from it.

K

I just saw PERSEPOLIS -- it was as good as the book, which means it was perfectly ok.

THERE WILL BE BLOOD's real good. It's something like having John Huston star in a Kubrick movie, which they co-wrote.

I think Brody could make a good movie-Kafka.

[img]http://www.zibaldoni.it/wsc/SiteImage/image/kafka.jpg[/img]

[img]http://www.premiere.fr/var/premiere/storage/images/films-et-seances/fiches-personnalite/brody-adrian/741786-3-fre-FR/brody_adrian_personnaliteLarge.jpg[/img]

K

You really know how to hurt a guy, K.

Hehe.

On that note, what the hell is this?

[img]http://xs123.xs.to/xs123/08020/nietwept651.jpg[/img]

K

INLAND EMPIRE: Definitely Lynch at his Lynchianest. Not as satisfying as Mulholland Drive, I'd say, but I've never been so frightened by things as mere as lamps and glassy highlights. This is a super creepy fuckin' movie. As an abstract 3 hour symphony of light, color, imagery and sound coming together with the effect of a pretty disturbing horror movie, I could only argue its effectiveness. There is an element to it I worried about a bit – i.e. "David Lynch discovers how to noodle around with digital cameras" – whether or not one views this as a bad thing I suppose depends on their appreciation of Lynch. It's there and occasionally it does feel real pretentious and film-schoolish, but more often Lynch reminds you of how much more he has to offer and it's absolutely brilliant. I liked Inland Empire. At times it was almost like watching Brakhage with traces of a plot and a huge and mostly well-sustained (considering the length and level of abstraction) Lynchian undertow of mystery and dread. Any sort of plot reconstruction/riddle-solving going on around the net anywhere? I was surprised – a bit pleasantly – when I realized that Mulholland Drive actually made pretty good sense as a story once you got your head around it right. I'm not holding out that kind of hope for the further-afield-seeming Inland Empire, but hey. This isn't really a new qualm with Lynch generally speaking, but I would probably agree there's a sense of reiteration in his work, particularly here, that makes it a little tiresome at times, especially when self-indulgence is cranked so completely to the max. It's like Haruki Murakami where after a while you feel like you're sort of reading the same story over and over, with many of the same idiosyncracies and characters. True of most auteurs in a way I guess. In Lynch's case this might be partially attributed to just how distinctive, imagination-grabbing, and weirdly terrifying his idiosyncracies are, sure, but those are the technical idiosyncracies. I could bear to see him tackle something really unusual (for him) next outing, vs. another story of split-identities, scrambled timelines, and murder in a nightmare-vision of Hollywood. I liked Inland Empire, but there's a feeling of endless noodling to it. It goes lots of interesting places for me, but only in pure abstraction. I'm not sure I want to argue Lynch should be more coherent. At his most coherent I sometimes cease to enjoy him as much, cease to find him as special. For me, I felt like Mulholland Drive had the right balance. Super fuckin' weird, with lots of wiggle room for the viewer's imagination, but it satisfied. I can only speak for myself. Even before I fully understood the story, it just felt more coherent to me somehow. Like a part of me kind of got it, or something. Or just enough elements were present and joined up in at least some fashion or other. Inland Empire's a little muddier and gets off on that awkward "cursed film script" foot (wtf?) – and then follows the Lynch trajectory I'm more used to, i.e. start off strong and weird and with a lot of superb elements that might go someplace really interesting story-wise, and then take a long slow walk into increasing and accelerating weirdness, linking various things together but creating twenty more questions for each answered and ultimately leaving the viewer a bit psychologically exhausted (if not totally numbly mind-fucked.) Some might say this is a good thing. I'm always sort of in the middle on it. But if as nothing more than a purely atmospheric and technical study, Inland Empire has a lot to offer. There are few American directors – if any – with Lynch's sense of freedom and imagination when it comes to the potential of cinema and cinematography. And sound. Such incredible audio in this film. Like worthy of prestigious awards maybe. It's arguably overdone, especially in IE, but nobody knows how to create and use a bassy drone quite like Lynch.

Isn't that Lynch himself singing on one or two of the in-movie tracks, though? I could've done without that. I think he voiced Bucky the camera operator too. It takes me out of things to hear a voice and kinda ... "Oh ... that's Dave, isn't it?"

Also, it has scary rabbits. It's amazing in a way. Nobody who hasn't seen it real recently probably remembers this specifically, but there's a scene in the rabbit-room where the room goes to all red and high contrast and the 3rd rabbit comes in from the background out of the kitchen or wherever holding up two (candles?) which are superhighlighted in that highlight-centric motif the whole movie has. And she's moving them around a little like two eyes and the other two rabbits sit there frozen-like. You see something like that and I mean, I was fuckin' horrified by it. And you have to wonder why. What is scary about this? Certainly no fuckin' idea what it means in terms of any narrative, but man what a scene out of a nightmare. And as I alluded to at the beginning, Inland Empire has to be the first movie in which a lamp has made me just about jump out of my seat.

K

(Possible Inland Empire spoilers.) I was thinking about it this morning and maybe Inland Empire is -- like MD -- more understandable than I first thought. "More" is pretty relative here but we can take the framework of MD as a starting point, say. We can assume the manifestation of the characters nearest to the end is the closest to the true characters and plot at the heart of all the Lynchian weirdness. If this is the case, I might assume this is a movie about a lower-middle-class couple, presumably husband and wife, and their (probably illegitimate) child. If I come across a sensible enough interpretation of the main threads it's probably worth noting that although IE is creepier, MD is probably closer to horror (the characters seem to conquer their demons and accept love for each other as a family at the end of IE; no such happy ending for the murderer in MD.) The murder in IE would seem to be more metaphorical.

Anyway, Charles or someone will probably come along and link me to a discussion in which others are already leagues ahead of me here, but let me collect my as-yet-uninfluenced thoughts and dump 'em here. So going on the assumption that the brunette at the end (Susan) and the downtrodden version of her husband in their little not-so-luxurious house are the "real" characters, I can sorta work backwards and figure the Laura Dern character to be a possibly real, possibly dream Hollywood starlet, a Nicole Kidman to Susan's everyday browbeaten working girl or hooker, an (at the beginning) beautiful actress with dignity and grace. The movie she stars in (with "Billy") seems like a sort of Gone With the Wind-ish old southern romance. This is an illusion Hollywood has manufactured to the unwitting detriment of a normal, poor woman like the main character at the heart of this, Susan/Nikki, Susan seeming to the be the version of the character closer to the actual reality of the dreamworld plot we're inside of. In the movie's movie Nikki and Devon play characters who can't be kept away from each other despite their respective marriages. They're in love, they're well off. If the movie (within the movie) ran its normal course they might even end up together. But there's a threat. Nikki's actual husband is not happy about Devon's seduction of her, even though it's fictional. Nikki's actual husband isn't fictional though. The version of him we see early on is, but the character is real. What the character might really be upset about is his wife's seduction by these types of illusory melodramas, because the feelings and dreams they feed are what led her to cheat on him in real life. This (real) couple lives near Hollywood obviously but probably along the outskirts. Close enough for her to go into town and get drinks from rich powerful controlling men (as the fictionalized version of the husband is early on) and whore around. Which in the "real" story she does. So the husband to our surprise is right to be upset maybe, protective.

The real story is that his wife has conceived a child that isn't his. Ultimately they have to work through that and decide whether they can still be a family together, which they seem to do. The only way this can happen is through the murder of the illusion and the illusion-makers. The illusion is Nikki Grace's character, who the "hypnotized" Susan murders with the screwdriver on Hollywood Boulevard. She dies vomiting blood there. But this is also an illusion; the Nikki Grace version of Susan isn't really guilty of anything, she's just another whore taken advantage of but on a different level of society (if she's real at all) and certainly her character in the movie-within-the-movie isn't guilty of anything -- that character is an innocent dream, a manifestation of genuine female desires and longings, say. The actual reality of a character like that is one more like the "real" Susan's, so betrayed in turn, the character of Nikki Grace/Susan must take revenge on the illusion-maker, who I guess is the guy she kills with the gun. Maybe he's just a metaphor for the machinations of Hollywood, a la the weird dwarf in Mulholland Drive, I'm not sure. In the end the fictionally-murdered and thus liberated dream-character version of Susan/Nikki comes into room 47 to reunite peaceably with "real" Susan and become one through the kiss. These demons all conquered, we get the final scene in which real Susan runs downstairs and is happy to have her husband and child and obviously has decided to fully love them and leave the illusions behind. Once you wrap your head around it as such it's interesting how many echoes there are here of not only Mulholland Drive obviously (in which the illusion-propping starlet character is assassinated out of jealousy and even homosexual love) which deals with similar themes, but also of early films like Eraserhead, in which the protagonist is left in a miserable surreal world with a "child" that he doesn't understand or feel is really a product of himself.

I'm not sure what the significance of room 47 is. It seems to be the hotel room from the beginning and with the way she sits on the bed and the look on her face in those shots scattered around the movie my thinking is maybe that's where she first discovered she was pregnant with another man's child?

As for the rabbit room who fucking knows. I don't think any of this is going to make 100% sense but when you approach it back-forward there would seem to be a semi-coherent story threaded in through there.

I've left a lot of stuff out and could be pretty wrong on some of this, but I'll have to come back to that later maybe after I turn it over in my head a little more.

K

Noodled around editing and adding bits to that. I think I'm done now.

K

Well, shit, that's some good stuff, K. I'm going to have to watch IE again before I start thinking about it again. I think approaching Lynch's dream narratives in a straightforward fashion is probably best, and that's what you do here.