David Lynch’s new film receives a screening at the Venice Film Festival this week where the director will also receive a lifetime achievement award. Lynch has been working on Inland Empire for about two years and the result sounds like it’s going to as personal and idiosyncratic as his best works. Time to start getting excited, in other words. The New York Film Festival will also be screening the film and indieWire had this to say about it:
A Polish woman looks, intently, into someone or something … an actress (Laura Dern) is warned that her new movie is cursed … a rabbit-headed family perform sit-com actions on a stage set as if engaged in a solemn ritual … Such are just a few of the elements and recurrent motifs of The Inland Empire (sic), a mesmerizing surge through countless looking glasses that lands us on the far side of the land of nightmares. Lynch’s first foray into high-definition video is just as visually stunning as his work in 35mm, but the long gestation period of his new film (he shot on and off over two years, and wrote as he went) has allowed him to give his own uniquely epic form to many of his primary concerns: the exploitation of young women, the mutability of identity, the omnivorousness of Hollywood.
Justin Theroux, who played film director Adam Kesher in Mulholland Drive, will also star. He discusses working with Lynch in a recent interview here.
Update: David Lynch given lifetime award.
You have to dig directors whose films could never be remade. With a few exceptions like John Carpenter, people who rely on filming remakes to further their careers have little imagination or skill with a camera, not to say I’m any good with a camera either. A while back some guy told me an up&comer in L.A. was pushing for the rights to remake ‘Suspiria’. Damn am I glad that hasn’t happened. I think I can rest assured no yuppy could possibly, or even want to try, remaking something with balls and bite like ‘Lost Highway’. Why does no one seem to find confusing things amusing? I first saw that damn movie with three others and none of them paid any attention to the cool shit amidst all the distortion. It seems I’m rambling again, probably because the loud music in another window. Has Lynch’s latest already come out in Europe, I haven’t yet heard anything new about it? Last time I checked, Lynch’s webpage required some fee that I was too cheap to pay.
People who complain about Lynch’s films usually seem to want cinema to be one thing, ie: Hollywood-style with requisite three-act structure and a happy ending. This is as nonsensically restrictive as demanding that all music should take the form of songs or all poetry should rhyme. Fiction can be anything and has every right to be as pointless and confusing as our lives or our dreams. Audiences have no right to demand anything. Art isn’t entertainment, it’s art. And life doesn’t have a happy ending.
This page has release dates for Inland Empire:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inland_Empire_(film)
Looks like we’re getting it in March.