so much to say about this one but let me just say, for here and now, that watching this will make Megalopolis make a lot more sense. watch as pre-drink or as after party to FFCâs camp-psychedelic Driver driven sci-fi extravaganza.
this is kind of a half-rec because I didn't enjoy it per se but as an experience, it was overwhelming. I wouldn't call it good but I'd call it a fascinating mess I can't make sense of, felt to me like an octogenarian southland tales while also visually all over the place. incredibly dense, deeply half-baked, incredibly odd and oddly hopeful! kinda hard to classify really
watched in a theater the other week. so dense. a fragmented psychiatric nightmare with themes that spin with the centrifugal force strong enough to pull your soul out of your body as you stand in the middle of it, inland empire is a very individual experience that you can tell lynch used as a collage to express ideas heâd been trying to hone in on for many years already. shot entirely on digital handicam, giving it the feeling of a dream transmission being broadcast directly into your head, highlighted by the handicam grain and the washed out colors from the ai upscale, the movie is woven together like a disjointed and disturbing web akin to both a wired cyberscapeâs and an arachnidâs. lynchâs experimentation with form allows the filmâs sequences to shine in tandem with one another through a disjointed structure and nonlinear narrative, with sequences cutting into each other like popup ads. through this structure it conveys a deep-seeded desire to express the convergence of life and technology in a way. accentuated by many themes weâve encountered before in lynchâs work, such as exploring a strange and malicious side of hollywood akin to mulholland drive or the lost girl motif as in darkened room, itâs really the filmâs tagline which succinctly encapsulates everything i gathered from my second watch: âa woman in trouble.â nikki grace, famed actress, is placed in the role of susan blue, and soon their lives and consciousnesses begin to converge as they uncover the paralleled life and death of a lost polish girl, a mysterious one that cursed the prospective screenplay.
circles/repetition symbolic for karmic rebirth. phones and electromagnetic references (axxon/axon) as indicators of human connection. industrial factories and trains as  symbols of pregnancy alongside many euphemisms for back-alley abortions. the price of fame and fading into obscurity. lost in the wires of radio, tv, and film, inland empire is a symbolic labyrinth waiting to be uncovered, and a solid contender for the greatest film ever made.
look at me and tell me if youâve known me before.
I saw this recently at The Roxy with my friend Ben and it hit so hard. I really liked this one in high school but seeing it for the first time in maybe 10 years, I was kind of shocked by how great it was. To enjoy Lost Highway, you have to shut your brain off and just submit to the movie. At the end, two characters drive out to the desert in the middle of the night looking for a burning cabin theyâve seen in visions and then have sex on the sand, illuminated by the headlights of their parked car. This Mortal Coilâs version of âSong To The Sirenâ plays. We were in the front row it was crazy.
lecinemaclub.com posts a free new movie to stream on their website every Friday. so good. It gives me the joy that early Mubi days did. Extremely limited content, hand-picked, and available for a short time. I also love their online journal, especially the filmmaker's film lists. Everyone from Lynne Ramsay, Jonah Hill, John Carpenter, Dasha Nekrasova, Wim Wenders, Yorgos Lanthimos, and Alex Garland, talk about 5 films they love in a short sweet and aesthetically pleasing list format.
Great price for high quality, niche as hell content. Dense, but infrequent (quarterly), so you can savour it a long time. Plus, so far itâs always come with a surprise gift! The âWeatherâ edition came with a waterproof sleeve thatâs the perfect size for all my books/ notebooks and I use it literally every day to protect them in my big chaotic duffle bag. And finally itâs just a gorgeous piece of bound print, good enough for the bookshelf.
Got this tip many years ago while reading Bonjour Tristesse. There's a great line where she describes alternating between sips of scalding black coffee and biting a sweet juicy orange.