42Below Vodka came up with a rather ingenious way to promote their product. Rather than sticking to the silly beer commercials we’re accustomed to seeing during Monday Night Football, they paid forty-two directors to each make a forty-two second short relating to dreams, and, to our delight, they all seem to be at least a little weird.
David Lynch is a favorite of ours, and for a good reason. His forty-two second contribution is every bit as haunting as the rest of his work.
Floria Sigismondi, writer and director of The Runaways, has been getting a lot of attention recently, and after viewing her three-quarter of a minute segment, it’s easy to see why.
To see a few more shorts from this project (not all of them, unfortunately), visit the OneDreamRush YouTube page.
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“My response to viewers who are puzzled by the plots is, I don’t think you’re so puzzled as you may think. We all have a certain amount of intuition, and that is something that can be trusted and should be trusted… And so when you see something that’s abstract in a film, and you seem to be getting lost, the thing to do is to start talking to your friends, and they’ll say something and you’ll find yourself disagreeing with that, and realize that you really had formed opinions, and you had a scenario that made sense in your mind, and that’s valid. We know more than we think.”—direct advice from David Lynch on understanding his films
PLOT: INLAND EMPIRE shifts around on a dozen tectonic plates of varying levels of surreality, but the unstable base layer involves Laura Dern as actress Nikki Grace cast in a melodrama based on an unproduced Polish screenplay which was abandoned as cursed after its two leads were murdered. As she acts out the adulterous scenario, Grace becomes confused, coming to believe at times that she is the character in the screenplay. After consummating a relationship with her handsome co-star, that reality slips away and Dern is seen playing several different characters, wandering around in a series of loosely interconnected sketches that involve (among other stories) an abused woman confessing her hatred of men to a psychiatrist, the lives of a gaggle of lip-syncing prostitutes, infidelity dramas, and a sobbing woman watching a room full of bunnies in an absurdist television sitcom.
BACKGROUND:
The film began as a series of individual short films shot on digital video, as Lynch was exploring the new format. After Laura Dern suggested working on a project with the director, Lynch later noticed recurring themes in the shorts he was shooting, and decided to put them together into a feature film.
In his announcement for the movie and in interviews afterward, Lynch has said that he is done shooting on film and will work exclusively with digital video from now on, citing the greater freedom afforded by the format and going so far as to say that the idea of going back to film makes him feel “sick and weak.”
Lynch reported that he wrote the film scene by scene, working without a finished script and trusting that connections would appear.
The footage of the rabbits is recycled from a series of short films called “Rabbits” that was exclusively screened on davidlynch.com.
Lynch has said he decided to title the movie INLAND EMPIRE after hearing Dern say that her husband hailed from that Southern California enclave, simply because he liked the sound of the words.
Lynch invested his own money to get the film made. He also distributed the film himself, thus facing no pressure to make cuts to the finished product.
David Lynch himself sings on the soundtrack.
INDELIBLE IMAGE: The nattily-dressed, stiff and deliberately posed bunny-people from the series of short “Rabbit” films, who were so evocative that Lynch decided to give them a new home in INLAND EMPIRE.
WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: INLAND EMPIRE is David Lynch at his most deliberately unhinged, experimenting with how far he can stray from linear narrative while still producing a work that feels thematically whole, searching for the minimum number of recurring images and themes needed to stitch a piece together so that it tantalizingly approaches coherence without ever actually resolving.
FEATURING: Harry Dean Stanton, Jack Nance, Catherine Coulson
PLOT: A series of six short films spanning director David Lynch’s career from the
1960s through the 1990s. We track Lynch from his early years as a highly experimental student to a macabre master of the darkly surreal with these films that show a man who needed to grow and challenge himself as a creative force.
WHY IT’S ON THE BORDERLINE: As collections of short films go, this is one of the most mercurial and hard-to-peg I’ve ever seen. There’s really no denying the odd nature of Lynch’s efforts. The first film alone, a minute-long animated loop of six hideous plaster sculptures throwing up, stands as a timeless testament to Lynch’s nightmarish creative vision. And the gut-wrenching scope of his silent feature, entitled “The Grandmother”, is a window into the mind of a radically different artist than the one Lynch has become. But, honestly, the quality and sheer atmosphere present in most of Lynch’s features feels absent here, and there’s not enough memorable material to consider this a momentous release.
COMMENTS: Much like a renowned painter or an extremely colorful luchador, a filmmaker’s work becomes more lionized as his fame grows, even his mistakes. David Lynch is a very famous filmmaker, so it’s only appropriate that this assortment of short subjects should come out to cement his status as an iconic artist and a true visionary in the world of the nightmarish and the utterly bizarre. But those die-hard fans of the man who seek a diamond in the rough here, a Pollack behind the frame of this small cache of movies, will likely find themselves disappointed, or at the very least conflicted.
If short films represent the transformation of a filmmaker as as he/she goes from one project to another, this gathering of shorts spanning Lynch’s career is a shadowy, rocky road. Half of these films don’t desire to be much more than insubstantial experiments, hokey dumping grounds for ideas that are really just there to try something out. They merely exist in a tangible form for the consumer because of the marketable name of Lynch, not because they actually have some sort of deliciously demented merit and are worth seeing for any length of time. And while the three that are good are indeed very good, it’s easy to put this one on the borderline with the vibes I get from the other three.
Art College in the early 1980’s was gloriously anti-academia. It was the type of atmosphere where even a hint of succumbing to systematic, structured, aesthetic thinking could lead to excommunication. You learned what you had to learn, or rather you learned what you were exposed to, and got the hell out to face the mercenary art scene while you worked random piss jobs. This was the calling and nature of your priesthood.
Although nothing, no one, was sacred, we did have artists, those prophetic voices, we intensely identified with. David Lynch was one of the new, exciting, unrelenting voices. He was one of our two Davidic prophets, the other being David Byrne, who ignited our excitement when he appeared in oversized suit, singing to a swaying lamp in front of projected poetry in Jonathan Demme’s Stop Making Sense.
When we saw Eraserhead (1977), we had braced ourselves beforehand. Of course, we had heard the rumors even before someone obtained a print for screening at The John Herron School of Art. Naturally, some of the VC (visual communications) students showed up, long enough to tear themselves away from their whipped cream dreams of illustrating X-Men comic books and listening to Duran Duran, to launch their all too predictable assaults. It would have been disappointing if they hadn’t. It only took a few moments for those monotonous, robotic voices belonging to the religious cult of linear thinking to spew their dull bitching. As always, they did it obnoxiously loud when their fragile, conformability zone had been threatened. It was slightly disappointing that there were no punches thrown, but it Continue reading DAVID LYNCH IS DEAD→
Here’s an alternative seasonal viewing list for the weird, that goes beyond the usual vampire/zombie/demon/slasher fare (although some favorite characters make appearances).
1. Matthew Barney’s Cremaster Cycle 3 (2002) . Only the third of Barney’s epic Cremaster Cycle, made over an eight year period, has made it’s way to any type of video release, which is criminally unfortunate. The Guggenheim Museum, who financed it, exhibits the Cycle and describes it as a “a self-enclosed aesthetic system consisting of five feature-length films that explore the processes of creation.” Trailers are available on the Cremaster website; www.cremaster.net. The third movie is available via Amazon and other outlets, albeit at expensive prices [Ed. Note: the version of Cremaster 3 that’s commercially available is not actually the full movie, but a 30 minute excerpt that’s still highly collectible as the only Cremaster footage released]. The Cremaster Cycle is complex, challenging, provocative and not for the attention span-challenged.
2.Guy Maddin‘s Dracula-Pages from a Virgin’s Diary (2002). Guy’s Dracula ballet, choreographed to Mahler. Just when you though nothing more could be done with this old, old story. Of course, we are talking Mr. Maddin here.
3. Ingmar Bergman’s Hour of the Wolf (1968).Bergman’s ode to German Expressionism has been labeled his sole horror film. Hour is a further continuation of frequent Bergman themes—the defeated artist, loss of God, nihilism—and stars Bergman regular Max Von Sydow. Some find this dull and slow, others find it mesmerizing and nightmarish.
4.Roman Polanski‘s The Tenant (1976) returned this consummate craftsman back to the territory of Repulsion and remains one of his best films. Polanski is now facing extradition charges for having sexual relations with a willing, underage girl thirty years Continue reading OCTOBER 31ST FRINGE VIEWING LIST→
Celebrating the cinematically surreal, bizarre, cult, oddball, fantastique, strange, psychedelic, and the just plain WEIRD!
When we saw 
[Ed. Note: the version of Cremaster 3 that’s commercially available is not actually the full movie, but a 30 minute excerpt that’s still highly collectible as the only Cremaster footage released]. The Cremaster Cycle is complex, challenging, provocative and not for the attention span-challenged.
2.