by ·Comments Off on The White Ribbon (2009, Michael Haneke)

I read very little about this, conscious of spoilers, but certain things, as with Antichrist, were unavoidably overheard (or given away in the trailer). So I knew it was set near the start of WWI and that the evil children in the trailer represent the birth of fascism, but I didn’t realize how subtly that point is made. There are unexplained events, the children increasingly seem responsible, then some major characters disappear and the narrator leaves town, with no ends neatly tied up.

Two things for sure: it’s an excellent movie and the camerawork (DP Christian Berger, his fifth with Haneke) is perfect, beating Cache by a mile. Apparently was shot digitally, in color, then post-processed. Very classic feel to the entire production, except to the acting, especially of the children, which is better than anything from the WWI or WWII eras (sorry, Wild Boys of the Road). Won awards almost everywhere (the BAFTAs preferred A Prophet and oscars preferred something from Argentina), beating out Basterds, Antichrist and Wild Grass at Cannes.

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Interesting to have a non-omniscient narrator, schoolteacher Christian Friedel, who goes on long sidetracks from the town mysteries to chase after a girl, nanny of the baron’s young twins. Town authority figures are painted as corrupt. The doctor (Rainer Bock, small role in Inglorious Basterds) is abusive and perverse to his daughter and to his girlfriend (Susanne Lothar, lead in Funny Games). The pastor (Burghart Klaussner, was just in The Reader) is a tyrannical father. The baron (Ulrich Tukur, The Lives of Others) exercises his power to throw families into poverty at will. The children don’t exhibit the usual responses of sullenness, fighting and petty power games, but band together to commit acts of planned vengeance, terrifying the town. Their crimes go officially undiscovered and unpunished at the end, Haneke’s point, I suppose, being that they grew into fascists and nazis.

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There is, of course, an absolute ton written about this movie already. The Times says “it lacks the intellectual and emotional nuance that would make this largely joyless world come to life,” but that’s just the common criticism that Haneke’s films are cold and unfeeling, which applies less to this film than to his others so I don’t see the point in bringing it up.

Indiewire: “With this detailed exploration of anonymous retribution, Haneke returns to the haunting terrain he last explored in Cache, although in this case, the retribution expands from a personal level to a larger critique of religious zealotry. … However, these events remain notably off-screen. Absence in The White Ribbon is the quality that makes it a harrowing work of art, rather than a historical soap opera.”

Salon: “It definitely can’t be reduced to a fable about the roots of fascism. The White Ribbon is a dense account of childhood, courtship, family and class relations in a painfully repressed and repressive society, which seems to channel both early Ingmar Bergman and the Bad Seed/Children of the Corn evil-tot tradition.”

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Haneke:

The film opens with the narrator saying, “I’m not sure if the story I’m about to tell you corresponds to what actually took place. I can only remember it dimly. I know a lot of the events only through hearsay.” So both those elements, then, raise mistrust in the audience as to the accuracy of what they’re going to be seeing, and the reality of what they’re going to be seeing. Both the black-and-white and the use of a narrator lead the audience to see the film as an artifact, and not as something that claims to be an accurate depiction of reality.

It’s only in mainstream cinema that films explain everything, and claim to have answers for anything that happens. In reality, we know so little about what happens. It’s far more productive for me to confront the audience with a complex reality that mirrors the contradictory nature of human experience.

I remember with my first film that was shown in Cannes, The Seventh Continent, there was a screening and afterward we had a discussion. The first question came from a woman who stood up and asked, “Is life in Austria as awful as that?” She didn’t want to accept the difficult questions being raised in the film, so she tried to limit them to a specific place and say, “That’s not my problem.” You could make the same mistake with this film, if you see it as only being about a specific period.

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by ·1 Comment

Supposedly the first Japanese film shot in 24p digital video, which accounts for its unique look, esp. the wild color in outdoor scenes, but also its annoying handheld shakiness which would become widespread by the end of decade. The middle/high-school kids are obsessed with pop singer Lily (according to shady IMDB trivia, inspired by Faye Wong), are also incredibly shitty to each other. Prime focus is on two boys, Hoshino and Hasumi, former friends but now tormentor and tormented. Each has his own problems at school, but is secretly (and online, hidden behind screen names) deeply moved by Lily’s music. At the end, I think (nothing is quite clear, at least not to me) the bullied Hasumi, denied entrance to Lily’s concert by Hoshino, knifes the bully to death after also discovering that Hoshino is junior member “blue cat” on the forum. And I’m thinking young Hasumi is forum admin “philia,” but again, not sure.

Hoshino with Hasumi over his shoulder:
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Forum posts appear in the middle of the movie screen, sometimes overlapping the scene but usually just white text over black. This should get tiresome (it did for reviewers, I see) but I never got sick of the texting conceit or the length of the movie (hello, Noriko’s Dinner Table), just of the brutality between/among the kids. Just as I’m never visiting Italy after watching Gomorrah, I am never attending middle school in Japan after watching this

Bad girls:
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I love that outdoor night scenes are shot with big green spotlights on the actors, complete with obvious shadows. It’s stylish and effective. In the middle of the movie, Hoshino and friends use stolen money to go on vacation to Okinawa, leading to a lengthy, punishing overuse of the handheld aesthetic.

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Movie had a few beautiful moments, a few embarrassing ones (middle school was terrible, and I used to talk that way about music I loved), but mostly I felt like I’m about ten years too old to be watching it and wondered if the people putting it on their best-of-decade lists weren’t all 17 in 2001.

Suicidal Shiori Tsuda:
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Older boy Hoshino: Shugo Oshinari was in Battle Royale II. Other boy, Hasumi, Hayato Ichihara stars – stars! in Miike’s new God’s Puzzle. The girl who’s raped and shaved bald (did I mention it’s a cruel movie?), Kuno, is Ayumi Ito of nothing else I’ve heard of, and the girl who’s coerced into prostitution, Shiori Tsuda, played a title character in the director’s follow-up, Hana and Alice. After that, I lose track of which kid was which, and, in fact, what happened and when. Reviewers mention the jumbled timeline of the story, and I thought it was linear so I obviously missed more than I realized. I did like it overall, but I don’t think I’ll ever be watching it again to get my facts straight.

Shaved Kuno:
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Reverse Shot:

Iwai returns to the image of students standing alone in glowworm-green fields, attached to headphones. It’s risky, a consummate music-video image, especially with Iwai’s phosphorescent digital palette, and I’m not even sure it ever entirely escapes that. But with its repetition after the murder at the end of the movie—one of the students standing and listening is Shugo, killed a few minutes earlier—these Elysian fields come to replace the traditional blackout’s “return” to reality out of the dream life of cinema. As the text of credits are superimposed, the uniquely personal experience of these lonely bucolic listeners becomes inseparable from the chat rooms and concerts, where they are unified with that pop-culture infinite—the fan base. As if communing with an angel across great distances but with special intimacy, the students and Lily Chou-Chou contain one another as they share that experience with millions.

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Rouge:

What is interesting, however, is that the film not only does not proffer to give answers but, intentionally or otherwise, feeds into our bafflement, in two ways. Firstly, the world in Lily is presented as one in which not only are its teenagers behaving as such, but its adults are also, at best, powerless, ignorant and, at worst, in complicity. Witnessing the ostracising of the class pianist, the teacher capitulates to the persecution by entreating the bullies to perform and promising that the pianist will play no part. A female teacher’s only response to the assaulted Kuno (Ayumi Ito), now also shaven, is to offer her a wig.
…
All About Lily Chou-Chou transforms into a mood piece, self-consciously eschewing account and explanation, less concerned with analysing our bafflement than it is with simply our bafflement itself, as if with the detached curiosity of an observing alien.

by ·Comments Off on Va Savoir (2001, Jacques Rivette)

An unusual Rivette film. First thing I noticed was that it’s strange to see an in-film performance of a finished play in front of an actual, paying audience. I thought none of his plays-within-a-play ever made it past their planning stages. The characters go about their business in a straightforward way. Minor mysteries from the past crop up, some coincidences seem almost magical, but the weight of the drama never sets in. Even the lighthearted Celine & Julie felt weighty. Finally towards the end (during the drinking duel in the rafters) I accepted that Va Savoir is purely a comedy, and a very fine one.

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From the shot above, which is used in the poster art, I’d assumed there’d be more Feuillade influence. People upon Paris rooftops conveys Feuillade, and with Rivette’s ever-present sense of mystery I thought a feature-length homage would be wonderful, but that’s not what we get. Oh well, there’s always Franju’s Judex.

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The play performed is the Italian “Come tu mi voui” by Luigi Pirandello, being performed (in Italian) in Paris for a week. I think we see a scene from each night’s performance, each time a different scene, and not in chronological order. They’re probably arranged to comment emotionally upon that day’s off-stage action, but I’ll have to watch it again to be sure (I also missed the on/off-stage connections in Rivette’s previous film Secret Defense). That’s Camille (the lovely, angular Jeanne Balibar, of Don’t Touch the Axe and Comedy of Innocence) in the middle with her lover/director Ugo (Sergio Castellitto of Around a Small Mountain) at left. Their relationship is strained with her return to Paris after three years away, now closer than ever to her long-term ex Pierre, but ultimately they’re good together.

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I’m getting out of order here, but Pierre (Jacques Bonnaffé, at right, of Lemming and Prénom Carmen) ultimately duels Ugo over Camille. I was never quite sure if Ugo is a nice guy, since he acts like such an ass when first meeting Pierre, but this clears it up. His dueling method of choice is heavy drinking while standing high in the rafters above the stage, but he repeatedly tells Pierre not to look down because there’s actually a safety net below them. This scene made me extremely happy.

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While in Paris, Ugo seeks a lost play by Italian author Goldoni. He checks with an autograph/letter collector (filmmaker Claude Berri), but to no avail. Funny casting a filmmaker in this role, since thirty years earlier Rivette had Eric Rohmer playing a specialist librarian in Out 1.

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Ugo bounces to this family, descendants of a friend of Goldoni’s who maintain a library of the playwright’s works. The woman (Catherine Rouvel – oh my god, she’s the always-nude girlfriend of the scheming guy in La Rupture) invites him to stay as long as he likes, but after he can’t find the unpublished play all week, he suspects it was secretly sold by her thieving son Arthur (Bruno Todeschini, at left, of Code Unknown and Haut bas fragile)

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Arthur is also meeting secretly with Sonia (Marianne Basler, who costarred with Gabriel Byrne in a WWII drama), coincidentally the live-in girlfriend of Camille’s ex, Pierre. The affair would be harmless but that Arthur steals a precious ring from Sonia, which Camille sleeps with him in order to steal back.

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Finally, there’s Arthur’s sister Do (Hélène de Fougerolles of Innocence, maybe in the scene with Edith Scob in Joan the Maid). She helps Ugo search for (and ultimately find) the play, getting ever closer to him as Camille gets closer to her ex (before he locks Camille in a closet). Peace is restored in the end with everyone happy and dancing, the viewer comforted in knowing that the only really crappy character, Arthur, in debt trouble, will soon find out that his stolen ring is gone.

I only noticed this because of the similarly oval-shaped mirror near the end of Out 1:
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Reportedly there’s an extended cut called Va Savoir+, but little is known about it besides that it had a one-week run in Paris. A message board posts claimed it “wasn’t even an official director’s cut, just an alternate cut Rivette put together for a few screenings, mostly for himself and the other actors,” so I’m not going to worry too much.

Trounced at Cannes (along with decade-faves Mulholland Dr., I’m Going Home, What Time is it There?, In Praise of Love and The Piano Teacher) by a Nanni Moretti film. That must be a good one!

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Filmbo:

In Va Savoir we are spectators instead of participants. And while there are moments when this pays off rather humorously — take for instance the detective work of finding the missing ring in the flour jar or the duel between the rival male suitors — it falls short of being a top-notch Rivette experience. … there was also the more palpable concept of a theater company producing works that only a few are interested in seeing, accompanied by a quest to find a lost work by an obscure writer… should we be thinking of the oeuvre of anyone in particular?

by ·Comments Off on Syndromes and a Century (2006, Apichatpong Weerasethakul)

I don’t really know what happened or what it all meant, but I know I enjoyed every moment of this movie. Strange how that can happen, and it’s more rare than I would think. It’s a LOT funnier than Tropical Malady, which was unexpected. That short I watched a few weeks ago, Letter to Uncle Boonmee, prepared me well for Syndromes, which had its share of lush trees and repeated action. Halfway through, the movie appears to start over (do all of AW’s movies start over halfway through?) with doctors Nohng and Toey going through an interview scene they’ve already played out, but in a new setting. Anyway, I’m not going to analyze and read about the movie all night long, just leave this placeholder for myself to watch it again sometime.

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Part of that Mozart festival that I read about four years ago in a magazine while standing in line at the airport. Sticks in my mind very well for some reason… I believe Opera Jawa was mentioned in the same article. Too bad I watched Opera Jawa as a low-res video projection and Syndromes on a crappy interlaced DVD with burned-in subs. I hope standard-def video dies pretty soon.

Ah yes, here’s A.W. in a Criticine interview talking about the Mozart thing:
“It is funded by Austria. It does not have to be about Mozart, but it has to have the spirit of Mozart. I see his music to be about miracles and its connection to everyday life. My film will look back at the past in order to see into the future. Just people living life, inhaling and exhaling, meeting each other—these are already miracles. It’s a film about beauty.”

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I’m leaning heavily on Grunes these days… his nice intro:

Thai writer-director Apichatpong Weerasethakul has said that Sang sattawat is a tale of two trees representing his doctor-parents, one on the grounds of a rural hospital in the 1970s, the other on the grounds of an urban hospital in the present day. The film is divided into two parts—the bifurcated structure begging a series of questions, including: What is the present without the past? city without the country? one parent without the other? One gauge of the success of this film, which is full of talk about reincarnation, is our sense that the breeze animating one tree is the same as the breeze, eternal, animating the other.

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So there’s a monk (above, played by a lead actor from Tropical Malady) and his dentist (Dr. Ple), a flower breeder named Noom and his girl Pa Jane. The interview participants Nohng and Toey must represent A.W.’s parents, but as M. Koresky puts it, “if we’re truly seeing some version of the meeting between Apichatpong’s mother and father, then the director is much more interested in the settings surrounding them and the forces controlling them—architecture, nature, medicine.” Stories are told which take over the movie; the sidetracks become the new main tracks. There’s possibly a fantasy scene or two, a flashback or flash-forward, and gentle talk of philosophy and love. And trees.

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An exercise session in the park cuts to credits (including one for “ringtone composer”) with loony upbeat music, giving the giddy impression that you’ve just watched a madcap comedy. Maybe you have. A.W. seems to have no regard for familiar storytelling or filmmaking conventions, so maybe besides the sex jokes in the dialogue the form itself was meant to be humorous.

by ·Comments Off on Platform (2000, Jia Zhang-Ke)

The first post of my special four-part In Over My Head series, in which I watched some movies I didn’t fully understand, and can’t adequately describe, or even remember properly. I must have been tired last week.

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A big title on the decade list. Not only did it show up on multiple lists, but it’s one of Jonathan Rosenbaum’s top 100 of all time, and the Telegraph called it the masterpiece of the “sixth generation”. I’ve now seen five of Jia’s movies and I probably like this one second-best to The World, but I don’t even love The World very much. I watched it once in theaters, then a year later when Cinema Scope sent me the DVD (to replace the announced Colossal Youth) I just tossed it onto the shelf, thinking “don’t suppose I’ll ever watch this again.” I find a great Jia movie less desirable than a pretty-good Brian De Palma movie, and since Jia won the consensus critical vote for auteur of the decade in Film Comment while winning my own WTF Award of 2009 for Dong and Still Life, I am clearly missing something.

First, a quote from the esteemed Acquarello. Despite all the big, big words he uses, this is my favorite short description of the film that I’ve found:

An estranged and depersonalized chronicle that illustrates the marginalization of humanity under the turmoil of profound national change…
Similar to the plight of the perennially dislocated acting troupe in Theo Angelopoulos’ epic film, The Travelling Players, the evolution of the itinerant performers – from disseminators of peasant propaganda, to champions of an eroding, indigenous culture, and eventually, to gauche (and unintentionally comical) assimilators of commercial pop culture – is a poignant articulation of a generation foundering in their own seeming irrelevance and figurative exile from within their homeland, desperately struggling for inclusion and a sense of place in their country’s future. It is this sentiment of cultural displacement that is illustrated in the repeated encounters between Ming-liang and Ruijuan among the ruins of a disused ancient fortress: an elegiac image of unrequited love lost in the expansive and formidable landscape of a silent, unarticulated, and disconnected human history.

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During the first hour of the movie (the “peasant propaganda” section) I wrote: “it must be tiring to be that nationalistic all the time.” During the last hour (the “unintentionally comical” section) I noted the group was calling themselves The All Star Rock ‘n’ Breakdance Electronic Band.

Cui Mingliang, is our sorta-hero, a glasses-wearing bellbottoms-wearing so-called artist who doesn’t seem to believe much in anything he’s doing, just going along with the group. He meets with his girl regularly, but they never seem to fully connect, and when he comes home from a tour at the end, she has become a cop or a commie or something. Camera is mostly stock-still, but not afraid to pan around when outdoors. Whoa, does the movie really end with some girl and her baby playing around a teapot? Since I have no wisdom, here are more helpful quotes.

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AO Scott: “The story, which unfolds episodically over more than three hours, might be described as a Boogie Nights about socialist cultural politics instead of pornography.”

Senses of Cinema:

That Jia shows the negative consequences of this economic revolution goes without saying but his imperatives are non-judgmental and totally undogmatic. His cinema belongs to a humanistic tradition in the larger ecumenical sense but Jia’s style is buffeted by postmodern means and a dedication to realism. At the same time, Jia associates his humanity with a feeling for home. Home is Fenyang, which to Jia, acts as a microcosm of China itself. Fenyang shows the “original face” of China. Jia depicts the fundamentally harsh conditions of the backwater that is Fenyang as the wheels of the market economy turn, driving the residents of Fenyang into the modern age and leaving many by the wayside.

Jia himself makes a surprisingly good interview subject.
“A hundred years ago, if you felt lonely, you would write a poem. A hundred years later, if you felt lonely, you might make a movie. Such problems persist.”

S. Teo: “But your movies are banned inside China, and in fact, they have been mostly seen outside of China, in foreign countries.”
JZ: “This is a fact. This is the most embarrassing and tragic aspect of being a Chinese filmmaker. … Then again, Xiao Wu is quite widely seen in China because there are pirated VCDs being circulated. So I have conflicting emotions. My film is being pirated on the one hand, but on the other hand, it is one method of getting my film shown. I feel embarrassed and helpless.”

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Jia again:

I use a lot of long shots. If the audience can see things in there, that’s good, if they can’t, so be it. I don’t want to impose too many things onto the audience. For instance, in Platform, I used only two close-ups. One was the close-up of the postcard that Zhang Jun sent from Guangzhou. It’s not that there are special situations where I wanted to hold back some information. I don’t want to impose a message onto the audience. I want to give them a mood and within that mood, you can see things that you want, or you can’t see things. My films are rather challenging for the audience. They are not very clearly stated to the extent where the audience can see clearly the objects they want to see – this pen or this watch. If they don’t notice it, they don’t notice it. It’s not that I am being indifferent. Through all these, I am imparting a director’s attitude, how he sees the world and the cinema. What I mean to say is that it’s only an attitude because you can never be absolutely objective. When you need somebody to look at something, it’s no longer objective. There is no absolute objectivity, there is attitude, and through this attitude, there is an ideal.

Mr. Grunes: “Some reviewers have called the film ‘static’ – technically, an odd claim given the film’s prolific use of moving cameras (pans, trackings, fixed cameras in moving vehicles), but a claim that makes emotional sense.”

Aha, Jia also says the whistling teapot at the end is meant to evoke a train whistle, the train having the same meaning of escape from the small-town ordinary as it does in Pather Panchali. He gives a very good interview, plainly explaining his style and intentions – and, horror of horrors, he says he prefers the shorter cut of the movie, the version I watched, not the elusive 3+ hour so-called director’s-cut.
Eat it, Film Comment.

by ·Comments Off on The Tracey Fragments (2007, Bruce McDonald)

Tracey is in therapy for teen-rebellion issues. One day while hooking up with a boy she likes from class, she loses her cute little brother, who presumably drowns in the icy river. Tracey can’t deal with what she’s done, wanders the city getting into dangerous situations looking for her brother. Part of her actually expects to find him but mostly it seems like a grief/catharsis journey.

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Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic say the movie was mostly disliked, the IMDB reviewers say it “sucks,” but a lone blog (Subtitle Literate) put it on their best-of-decade list alongside nine other movies I saw and liked, so I sought it out. And I’m going to side with the lone blogger. It’s a teen family-problems death-and-grief depression drama AND it’s presented via extreme split-screen, with frames within and beside each other, displaying memory and fantasy and foreshadow and unrelated footage, and the timeline of the main narrative is scrambled as well. Sounds like the kind of thing I would hate, but it’s done very, very well. I liked Ellen Page (Juno, Hard Candy, Whip It, X-Men 3, gee I watch a lot of Ellen Page movies) and loved her little brother (pretending to be a dog), her cross-dressing psychiatrist (would anyone visit a cross-dressing psychiatrist?), the questionably dangerous guy she befriends in the city (“Lance From Toronto”) and dream sequences of her behind-the-music imagined future with new kid in school Billy Zero. But mostly I was bowled over by the editing, which doesn’t seem arbitrary like 21 Grams, but carefully thought-out to make emotional sense.

What’s it say on the board? Pontypool (changes everything).
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Bruce’s first theatrical flick since 2001 (I’m not sure that it opened here). McDonald once again has book’s author write the screenplay (see also: Pontypool). Shot on Inland Empire-looking “bad” DV and populated with the finest Canadian actors, including Ari Cohen (Archangel) as Tracey’s dad, Max McCabe (Land of the Dead) as Lance From Toronto and Julian Richards (Hard Core Logo, Survival of the Dead, opening scene of Cube) as the psychiatrist.

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D. Sallitt, 2007:

Knowing that he’s discovered the philosopher’s stone, McDonald tirelessly generates new formal prototypes every few seconds, and leaves us at film’s end with the sense that he could have kept going forever. What makes Tracey more than an impressive demo is its unity of form and feeling, the sense that its screen may have been shattered by its young protagonist’s hormonal violence, McDonald’s wild-eyed punkish sense of drama, and Medved’s vivid dialogue

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D. Sallitt, 2008:

McDonald and his admirable writer Medved did not choose random subject matter for this experiment. Not only does the style seem intended to reflect the streaming consciousness of Medved’s material, but there is also a strong underlying musical structure to the film, with music and dialogue working together to organize the story into movements that almost resemble musical numbers.

by ·1 Comment

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A film by a guy who I’m surprised hasn’t been killed, based on the novel by an author who I’m surprised hasn’t been killed (IMDB says he’s living under police protection). Won every Italian academy award and every European Film award, got second place to The Class at Cannes. After watching the beginning of Fellini’s 8 1/2 on TCM a few nights ago, I was just glad to watch an Italian flick without rampant dubbing.

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Multiple story threads that manage not to crash (see: Crash) together into one narrative, but stay where they belong, illustrating different parts of the problem. The problem is the Camorra, the Naples crime organization which, as the end titles claim, is widespread enough to have invested in reconstruction of the world trade center in New York. Movie is well-shot, but mostly handheld, not stylish like most classic gangster movies (such as Scarface, referenced here a few times). Scary as hell in that non-horror, Collapse sort of way; I would never ever like to visit Italy after watching this.

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Toni Servillo is a busy man, playing Franco the illegal dumping magnate and the lead in Il Divo the same year. Two dumb-as-fuck youth steal some guns and get predictably killed at the end. Clothing manufacturers spy on each other. A kid helps get his neighbor killed, desperate to join the local gang. All is sadness and violence with no hope. To hell with Italy.

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by ·Comments Off on Inland Empire… and More Things That Happened (2006, David Lynch)

Didn’t stick with me very well the first time, maybe because it didn’t make enough narrative sense for my brain to properly hold on to, like a wacked dream that I remember clearly when I wake up but is already gone by the time I hit the shower, not related enough to reality to survive my beginning to ponder my work day. Should have watched it a couple times originally. But now I see I should watch more than a couple times, maybe annually from now on. Lynch’s most free, most trippy and loose movie, existing almost entirely in dream state, but also his most dirty and real looking because the DV photography feels like a home movie. Completely inexplicable and entirely worthwhile.

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Hard to watch at home. The three hour runtime, the almost entirely black scenes, and the very dynamic audio levels (quiet whispers turn into sudden shock sound effects and screams) work best when I’m home alone and wide awake on a winter’s night. I think it freaked out my birds more than anything else I’ve watched. Next time I’ll watch on my laptop, in accordance with Lynch’s dreams of an all-digital cinema.

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The plot, thanks to Cinema Scope:

Dern’s first incarnation, Nikki Grace, is an actress who lives in a cavernous Hollywood mansion and lands a coveted role in a Southern melodrama titled On High in Blue Tomorrows opposite suave ladies’ man Devon (Justin Theroux). She soon learns that the film is a remake and that the original Polish production was aborted when both leads were murdered.

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Nikki begins to merge with her character, Sue, and the script’s adulterous affair spills over into real life. But what’s real, and who’s dreaming whom? The boundary between the film and the film-within-the-film — indeed between all levels of reality — vanishes completely. Besides Nikki and Sue, Dern plays at least two other overlapping variations on the character: One lives in a shabby suburban house, sometimes with a harem of gum-chewing, finger-snapping young women. The other, a tough-talking Southern dame, is spilling her guts out in a dank room, telling floridly vulgar tales of sexual violence and terrible revenge. Interspersed throughout are scenes from a Beckettian sitcom with a rabbit-headed cast. Certain phrases, often pertaining to identity confusion (“I’m not who you think I am,” “Look at me and tell me if you’ve known me before”), repeat in varying contexts and start to acquire talismanic power. (The key to transcendental meditation, which Lynch has practiced for over three decades now, is the repetition of a personal mantra.) Meanwhile, the film we are watching is beamed to a TV in a hotel room, and a mystery brunette watches along with us, silently weeping.

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Did I write this weeks ago, or was I quoting from a website?: “Dern changes identities and locations, each with only a faint memory of the others, giving her a constant sense of unease.”

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The neighbor who visits her is awfully good in a Twin Peaks sort of way. A choreographed dance to “The Locomotion” manages to be one of the spookiest parts. Seeing father Rabbit leave his locked-down living room set is thrilling. Cameo by the girls from Darkened Room (actually only Jordan Ladd is strictly from Darkened Room, but I like to think they’re the same characters). William H. Macy in a big cheesy cameo as a radio reporter and Harry Dean Stanton as Irons’ sad assistant, always bumming money off people.

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Bright Lights:
“It sounds complicated, but it makes clear emotional sense, just as Mulholland Drive did.”

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House Next Door calls the ending hopeful, and I guess you could say that. Dern escapes from at least one of the films she’s trapped within, wakes from the dead and goes back home where, per HND, “Lynch returns to the face of Grace Zabriskie’s Neighbor and, before our jaundiced eyes, this formerly intimidating and ugly figure becomes suddenly beautiful and ethereal. Moreso than Dern’s final close-up (a stunner in its own right) I think the answers to the film’s many mysteries, for those who need them, are contained in Zabriskie’s sideways glance and virtuous smile.”

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Extras on the UK DVD are all interview-style. One is by The Guardian, one is by Mike Figgis at a hotel in Poland.
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Interviewer: “If T.M. creates positiveness… some people might ask: what about all the darkness that’s in the films?”
Lynch: “Exactly.”

On the inclusion of Rabbits in Inland Empire: “Sometimes we start something and we think it is that, and later… it sprouts and becomes a bigger thing.” Okay it’s not a great quote.

“Really the only difference [between IE and the earlier films] is Inland Empire was shot with DV… and it was a low-grade, bad DV.”
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“It is true that the 50’s gave birth to rock and roll and that early rock and roll holds a very special power, I think. It started the whole thing rolling, but in my mind it drifted away a little too quickly. And I think there’s more gold to mine from that feel of the first rock and roll.”

Repeats the same information over and over, not saying much for long periods, interviewers asking stupidly general questions hoping Lynch will tell them a nice story. He does tell a couple light ones, but three times each. So the final segment, The Air Is On Fire, comes as a happy surprise. It’s a biographer (who knows enough about Lynch not to ask pedestrian questions) viewing and discussing Lynch’s paintings and sound installations.
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–
“We’re cooking quinoa.”
“This pan is unbelievable.”
The U.S. DVD is already better than the U.K., with a b/w video of Lynch in his kitchen and a nice stills gallery, and that’s before I even get to the meat of the disc. Hey, he times his cooking the same way I do, by yelling out numbers from the clock instead of setting a proper timer.
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More Things That Happened is outtakes from IE. First 20 minutes are scenes with Dern’s circus husband. He comes home late. He sells a girl a watch.
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Dern continues talking to the man at top of the stairs. She has a crossed out “LB” tattoo on her hand. A girl with earrings talks to Dern about meeting Billy at a bar. Mostly people telling each other stories.
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Ballerina
A ballerina performs behind cloudy overlays and blobby digital soft focus to ambient music. Some neat effects in there but too long by half.
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Lynch (one) is a full-length documentary by BLACKandWHITE, whatever that is, company or person, on the making of Inland Empire. Lots of behind-the-scenes dealings, set construction, some talk with the actors, Lynch in every scene. Lynch 2 on the IE disc is presumably deleted scenes from that doc, another half hour of material. Not tremendously eye-opening, just gives you the impression that IE is completely Lynch’s artistic vision, if you couldn’t have figured that out before, down to the smallest detail. He yells at his crew on set then praises them up and down in interviews. We hear a lot about the improv nature of the film and script, but we see careful planning and scheduling of shots and scenes. Watching David choreograph the closing credits musical number, telling the lumberjack not to cut all the way through the log because “we’ve only got one log,” you realize that all the backstage footage in the world might be fun to see, but still wouldn’t explain a thing.
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“It’ll be more than a mouthful, which will look real, and it looks great. And you can throw up a lot of blood. Two times you’ll throw up.”

“There was a thought for a long time that you had to suffer in order to create, and this is just about opposite of the truth. If you’re suffering, even a little bit of suffering cuts into your creativity. In fact, the happier you are, and the more wide awake and rested you are, the better it goes… then the ideas can flow way better, way smoother and faster, and more of them.”

Stories is Lynch talking for 40 minutes, maybe excerpts from the website Q&A segments, about IE and digital and meditation, the usual topics. This is where the famous quote about watching a film on a fucking phone is from. His hatred extends to computers as well, but I think if he was here and took a look at my television setup and laptop setup, he’d have to grudgingly admit that I’m getting better picture and sound off the laptop.
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On a separate disc, Room To Dream: David Lynch and the Independent Filmmaker is mostly Lynch talking about himself and his working methods, and partly an advertisement for Avid systems. Best of all, it includes an extra scene related to Inland Empire. Windowboxed and interlaced, unfortunately – nice going, Avid.
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Sur la route de Mulholland Drive is a half-hour behind the scenes, interviewing all the principals and watching the filming. More interesting than most backstage press-kits if only because I’m unusually interested in the film. Following that is a cutdown of the film’s Cannes press conference.
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Le Son de David Lynch, another doc, from French television in 2007, interviews Lynch and a bunch of people I didn’t understand. Hmm, Wild at Heart was called Sailor et Lula over there. He and Badalamenti (below) recorded music for Twin Peaks and Lost Highway before shooting, and he’d play the music on set… wonderful.
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On the Lime Green box set, Out Yonder is a three-actor stilted-humor throwback to The Cowboy and the Frenchman, only Lynch is one of the actors this time. Not really interesting at all, a conversation where all forms of the verb “to be” are replaced by “bees bein'”, with fart jokes, tooth pulling and a distant cavalry. In the next episode, a girl with gonorrhea seeks her missing chickens.
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Scissors is a Cannes short previously known (to me) as Absurda. A Flash-looking dream-cinema piece incorporating bits of the ballerina footage.
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A couple of greetings for film festivals, both in b/w, filmed in reverse, starring Lynch himself and just awesome.
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Fictitious Anacin Commercial is exactly that, a half-minute gag commercial. A Real Indication is an amateur music video (if amateurs had a crane). And Early Experiments is 16mm footage from the Grandmother/Alphabet/Six Figures era set to overdramatic string music, with some cool motion paintings and lots of mirror symmetry.
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Then there’s Dynamic 01: The Best of Davidlynch.com
David answers member questions about favorite pieces of music, how to write a screenplay, his box full of ideas on scraps of paper, Marilyn Manson, coffee vs. cappucino, and meditating with Roy Orbison.

Intervalometer Experiments:
Ambient videos with slow, rumbling music. The first consists of trees and a distant mountain at sunset, the video grain threatening to destroy everything. The second is a spooky set of stairs molested by an encroaching shadow. The third is the corner of a sunroom in time-lapse, with scary trees and a dormant alarm system.
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Industrial Soundscape is a lock-groove computer animation three times as long as it needs to be. Maybe we were supposed to use it for meditative purposes. Bug Crawls is animation of a bug climbing a mad science house in slow-motion as a blimp passes by. Lamp is a half-hour doc of David making a lamp, which isn’t as funny as when he makes quinoa. And there’s another episode of Out Yonder, which I think I’m gonna skip. No, I guess I’ll watch it. “You bees bein’ barkin’ right up the tree which bees bein’ the wrong one!”

Darkened Room
A Japanese girl dances with the camera, talks to us about bananas before introducing her crying fried (must be Jordan Ladd of Death Proof) in the other room. I think I hear the Rabbits music. Third girl (Ladd’s Cabin Fever co-star Cerina Vincent) comes out to torment the crying girl. Hmmm, my note three years ago said this is six minutes long, but now it’s ten. Maybe last time I lacked the intro with the bananas. A few visual cues and mention of a mysterious watch purchase tie this in with Inland Empire and More Things. Little did I know the first time I watched it. Little did Lynch know, probably.
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Boat / “When things go wrong, it gets like this.”
David takes his boat (the “Little Indian”) out for a spin, takes low-grade blown-out video then adds a woman-in-trouble descriptive voiceover. He goes fast enough to go into the night.
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by ·Comments Off on 11’09″01 (2002)

Anthology film, with segments listed in decreasing order of greatness.

IRAN
A schoolteacher, an Afghan refugee in Iran with no equipment or facilities, tries to convey the 9/11 attacks to children whose world doesn’t extend far beyond the local well. By Samira Makhmalbaf (At Five in the Afternoon)
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BURKINA FASO
“Bin Laden, come back, please. We all need you here.” Idrissa Ouedraogo, director of Tilai, turns in an unlikely comedy. A kid has to drop out of school to support his mother, thinks he spots Osama Bin Laden, so he and his friends set out to capture him for the reward money. Osama gets away, the kids pleading for him to return so they can get paid. Kind of hilarious and awesome.
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INDIA
Mira Nair, following up Monsoon Wedding (and working with the same writer), recounts a based-on-true story of a woman whose son goes missing on Sept 11, is accused by the authorities of being a terrorist before he’s discovered to have been trying to help. The mother (Tanvi Azmi, I think) is excellent in this. When first questioned by the FBI, she points to her son’s posters, saying he’s American, he loves Star Wars, but she doesn’t say it defensively, just as a mother delightedly telling someone about her son. The final shot in this segment is my favorite of the whole anthology.
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UNITED KINGDOM
Ken Loach, between Sweet Sixteen and Tickets, takes a completely anti-sympathetic approach, choosing to discuss the American-backed Sept. 11, 1973 coup that killed Salvador Allende, including footage from The Battle of Chile. There was probably a time I would’ve considered this tacky, but now I’m thinking “good for you, Ken Loach.”
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USA
Sean Penn, recently off The Pledge (and I Am Sam, shhh), shoots an Ernest Borgnine one-man show in a grubby apartment in the shadow of the towers. Ernest putters around, laying out clothes for his absent wife, talking constantly, in his own crazy world, tending to a pot of dead flowers. Tower 1 goes down and sunlight flows through Ernie’s window for the first time in decades, bringing the flowers magically to life but waking him up to the reality that his wife is gone. Weird, sad one… I liked it better than Katy did.
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JAPAN
The final film of Shohei Imamura (The Eel, Vengeance Is Mine), with writer Daisuke Tengan (Audition, The Most Terrible Time In My Life), and if Shohei were alive he’d have some explaining to do. A man returns from the holy war (WWII) a spaced-out wreck, thinking he’s a snake (Katy did not appreciate the scene in which he swallowed a rat). Closes with the line “There is no such thing as a holy war.” Very odd way to end the anthology… still not sure what I think of it, though Mr. Grunes has named it one of his ten faves of the decade.
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FRANCE
Claude Lelouch (Roman de gare) directs an offbeat story of a French tour guide for the deaf in NYC. His girlfriend is writing him a note saying she’ll leave him unless there’s a miracle, then he comes home covered in dust. I liked it better the second time through.
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BOSNIA-HERZEGOVINA
In 2002 director Danis Tanovic was high off his oscar-win for No Man’s Land. Since then, he’s adapted a Kieslowski script (Hell) and made one with Colin Farrell and Christopher Lee that played in Toronto. Women are going out for their weekly protest of something (local war/genocide) when 9/11 hits. They don’t know what to do, go protest anyway. Lightweight.
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ISRAEL
None of my Amos Gitai experiences have been happy ones. Starts with a guy disarming or examining a bomb after another explosion has already killed a few people, then the news team covering the event is told they’re not on the air because of coverage of 9/11. Gitai could be saying local problems feel humble compared to the scope of the 9/11 attacks, or maybe that America is hogging the spotlight away from his country’s problems, or possibly that it’s all Palestine’s fault.
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EGYPT
Youssef Chahine seems like a humorless Elia Suleiman, not that I know more about either of them than their Chacun son cinema segments. Here, Chahine pulls the same trick as in that anthology, a piece where I think he’s full of himself, then I think maybe he’s joking and it’s modesty in disguise, but no, he is just full of himself. Someone said “Youssef, write a September 11th movie” and he scribbled down every thought that came to mind then filmed them in that order.
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MEXICO
Alejandro González Iñárritu, between the great Amores Perros and the not-great 21 Grams, shot ten minutes of black punctuated occasionally by shots of people falling from the towers and closing with this quote.
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