Given that I'd had but three hours of sleep and travelled many miles, my choice of a matinee yesterday seemed preordained. And so it was that after a clever Brattle cell phone advisory featuring the Psycho shower scene and trailers for the restored print of The Rules of the Game and Filmbrain fave Linda Linda Linda that the cinetrix slipped down the rabbit hole and spent three hours in Inland Empire. As Harry Dean Stanton so rightly observed, "Someone's got to do it--Gable's dead."
Reader, I loved it. The elliptical patterns and the nested-doll plots all made perfect sense to me in my sleep-deprived state. And I usually hate Laura Dern and David Lynch in combination. Have ever since her face crumpled as she said "Jeffrey?" in the final reel of Blue Velvet years ago. But not this time.
My notes scribbled in the dark go something like this:
- Rear WIndow restoration kiss
- flashbubs
- Little Eva and the Kuleshov effect
- 2001 bedroom + HK ballad
Any questions?
Seriously, I can't remember a better, more gleeful and apt ending of a movie since, well, the last movie that ended with Nina Simone.
I meant to run down where and when I've seen the David Lynch movies I have to date, but holiday shopping beckons. Perhaps you can fill in the blanks in the comments?
