Inland Empire.

"I'm not sure what the ultimate importance of reading daily journalistic film criticism is, these days especially, but I think the case can be made that Manohla Dargis's piece on Lynch's Inland Empire is 'important' film criticism," Larry Gross has written to David Poland, and he, too, is "struck by the sense that this piece was one of her most significant at the NYT."

So what does she say. Well, for starters, Inland Empire is "one of the few films I've seen this year that deserves to be called art. Dark as pitch, as noir, as hate, by turns beautiful and ugly, funny and horrifying, the film is also as cracked as Mad magazine, though generally more difficult to parse." It "resembles" Mulholland Drive "like an evil twin." And: "The reeler it gets, the weirder it gets." And, truncating a bit here, "The easiest way into Inland Empire is through" its "cinematic spaces in which images flower and fester, and stories are born." And ultimately, a second viewing helps. A lot, evidently.

Updated through 12/12.

The Voice's J Hoberman finds Inland Empire to be "Lynch's most experimental film since Eraserhead. But unlike that brilliant debut (or its two masterful successors, Blue Velvet and Mulholland Dr), it lacks concentration. It's a miasma." But it's also "an experience. Either you give yourself over to it or you don't. And if you do, don't miss the end credits."

Back to Larry Gross and Movie City News: "It's hard to say that Inland Empire is a good or great film... but on the other hand, it seems easy to say that it has a kind of importance, a kind of interest, and poses a certain challenge to filmmakers that makes terms like good and not good seem somewhat irrelevant. In other words IE is strong enough a work that it starts to offer up - perhaps even demand - its own criteria for discussing it... it changes your conception of movies as you watch."

And of course, there's praise across the board for Laura Dern.

Earlier: "NYFF. Inland Empire."

Updates: Dave Kehr: "Shooting in an amateur video format may have freed Lynch up to indulge his improvisational urges (according to the publicity material, the picture never had a conventional screenplay), but it also encourages him to be sloppy in his choice of shots, and way too much of the movie consists of wide-angle lenses pushed too close to actors' faces, turning them into easy grotesques."

Catching up with Aaron Hillis's take in October for Premiere: "I implore courageous art-lovers to seek out this defiantly unique hellion... Inland Empire is interchangably terrifying, maddening, shockingly hilarious and perversely exciting, and that's just to those who end up disliking it."

Mark Asch follows up on his initial impressions for the L Magazine: "[C]alling it inscrutable is incomplete - that label conflates narrative and thematic cohesion. Thematically, Inland Empire is a fearsomely cohesive evolution of the feminist themes present throughout Lynch's filmography."

"Inland Empire finds a perfect match in harkening back to the avant-garde aesthetics of Eraserhead and Lynch's student short films at the same time it embraces the director's contemporary explorations of subjective storytelling," writes Daniel Kasman. "The number of digressions in the film is continually startling, but there is a total unity to the work and that is due not just to Lynch but to the outrageously powerful and courageous performance by Laura Dern."

"Inland Empire takes great pains and goes to great lengths to make a fool of you; at least Borat was quick about it," snaps Michelle Orange at the Reeler.

"Lynch's dedication to and practice of Transcendental Meditation inform the remarkable beauties of Inland Empire's final movement, which is not so much a descent into the void as it is a resurgence and reclamation of a particular kind of holy land - Mulholland Drive's despondent last-act plunge into Jungian viscera reconstituted and refocused through a hopeful DV prism," writes Keith Uhlich at the House Next Door. Also: Five Lynchian links.

"A fertile and overwhelming work of art," hails Jürgen Fauth.

And here we were all thinking that it's George W Bush who's the divider, not the uniter. No, it's Manohla Dargis, as Vince Keenan discovers. Maybe the red-blue division of the country really is cultural rather than political.

Updates, 12/7: Salon's Andrew O'Hehir: "Talking to Lynch (and also to Dern and costar Justin Theroux) reminded me that no single viewer's response is sufficient or explanatory when it comes to a movie like this. Lynch is trying to push beyond the boundaries of 99 percent of contemporary cinema, trying to reinvent, or at least re-access, the revolutionary cinema of his idols Bergman and Fellini. While I remain skeptical that there's much of an audience in 2006 for a film this deliberately abstruse, there can be no doubt about the nobility of the effort." The discussion covers discovering a film scene by scene - and coffee.

"Some might suggest he's going over the same terrain, but if so, it's a world that is bottomless and inexhaustible," writes Peter Keough in the Boston Phoenix. Laura Dern's "performance ranks as one of the best of the year. She's as an ideal guide to the most cryptic - and rewarding - film that's come out since the last time Lynch invited us into his empire." And Keough asks Lynch about that marketing stunt: "'You know in Hollywood,' he explains, 'in the very beginning days, the actors, directors and film community got together and they had a big dinner and they celebrated each other... A really beautiful thing. And they would recognize each other's talents and they would give awards to each other. Now it's turned into what it is. So I can't afford to do all the things, the traditional things, to help Laura get an award. But I got this idea to go out and help her with this cow. And signs.'"

"Lynch boasts of working in a new, less encumbered fashion, using a consumer-quality Sony PD-150 digicam. This was a bad decision. Frankly, it looks like crap," grumbles Armond White in the New York Press. "Lynch's retreat into the arcane of Inland Empire betrays the revolution he almost started.... Fact is, Inland Empire's conceptual obscurities are less enthralling than the latest [Brian] De Palma and [Matthew] Barney."

Reverse Shot's clarencecarter campaigns for Laura Dern: "Dedication to craft abounds in Inland Empire, and not to knock current Academy frontrunner, Helen Mirren, whose performance in The Queen is another kind of lesson in chops, but I've always held a bit more admiration for those who cut memorable performances out of whole cloth than those working from a real-life base. (This is why Heath Ledger received my vote for 2005.) What's miraculous about this supremely special, unique performance is that there's no anchor in sight for Dern's Nikka Grace except Dern herself."

At Netscape, Karina Longworth notes that Lynch's interest in the "9/11 truth movement," known to some as a loose and varied array of conspiracy theories, is not news - though the media is just now taking an interest.

Updates, 12/9: "How did Inland Empire's actors respond to this sort of work as opposed to traditional filmmaking?" asks Michael Joshua Rowin for Reverse Shot. And Lynch replies, "Well, at first, it's shocking, probably, for some of them to see what looks to be a toy camera coming at them. But little by little I think every one of them started to appreciate the way we can all work together, and at the end you see that camera as a gift rather than a curse."

Slant's Ed Gonzalez on the cheese and cow performance: "This may be the best for-your-consideration campaign anyone has ever mounted for an actor, because it's the only one that has come to us live (for most, via YouTube) and with a heart."

Online viewing tip. C Jerry Kutner reminds us at Bright Lights After Dark that we can watch Episode 1 of Rabbits.

Update, 12/12: "There are times when we might feel we've wandered into an art installation at a gallery instead of a movie, but Inland Empire is actually fairly simple and quite moving if you go with it," argues Hitchdan at Bright Lights After Dark.

Posted by dwhudson at December 6, 2006 8:38 AM