jürgen fauth’s muckworld

The only excuse I have for sitting through this straight-to-DVD clunker is the presence of Sarah Polley, who Marcy will see in absolutely anything. Ryan Phillippe, Piper Perabo and Stephen Rea are in it too, so how bad could it be?

Bad enough for the credits to misspell the star’s name: after an accident that left him dead for two minutes, Simon Cable (Ryan Phillipe [sic]) wakes up in a hospital with a case of that lazy old mindfuck standby, amnesia. He finds out that he’s got a wife who doesn’t love him (Perabo) and a lover who seems to (Polley) — but then things change again, because like Vonnegut’s Billy Pilgrim, he’s become unstuck in time, too.

The script, based on a play by Michael Cooney, dispenses the pieces of the puzzle at random, and it takes all of five minutes to suspect that it’s going to end like An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge. Still, we were willing to go along with it, but I’m here to report that while The I Inside just barely held our attention, it utterly failed to repay it. Which is a polite way of saying that it features the lamest WTF ending I’ve seen in a while. Avoid.

The I Inside. Roland Suso Richter, 2003. *

Jude Law looks a lot better when he’s lit by the Mediterranean sun, wearing a striped t-shirt, and steering a sail boat than in a suit and tie under phosphorescent lights in a London architect’s office. This is only one of the many lessons to be drawn from Anthony Mighella’s first feature as sole writer/director since Truly Madly Deeply (1991). He was better off adapting Ondaatje and Highsmith: the convoluted, contrived plot of this class struggle/domestic relationship psychobabble adultery crapfest is almost as lame as the dialogue. Juliette Binoche (hampered by a Sophie grade Eastern European accent) and Robin Wright Penn manage occasional moments of grace, but it’s Vera Farmiga, in her all-too brief scenes as a thieving King’s Cross hooker, who gives the hackneyed proceedings the only glimpses of real vitality.

Breaking and Entering. Anthony Minghella, 2006. *

• Rotten Tomatoes: 33%

Yet another Tribeca dud, Taxidermia is one of the most unpleasant movies I’ve ever sat through. György Pálfi (Hukkle) directed this Hungarian Grand Guignol grotesquery that riffs on exactly three ideas: pig fucking, speed eating, and self-taxidermy. Based on short stories by Lajos Parti Nagy, the movie presents the fable-like history of a freakish family. In the first section, a harelipped country pervert who can shoot fire from his dick is looking for ever-new kicks in well-lubricated glory holes and Hans Christian Andersen tales that turn into their porno versions. Imaginative camera work and extreme close-ups create an intense physicality, but they don’t lead to a place you want to follow: by the end of the segment, butchery, adultery, and shocking acts of bestiality and necrophilia sent waves of nervous giggles through the audience. The walk-outs started.

The remainder of the movie tells the stories of the pig-fucking pervert’s offspring. His son, born with a curly tail (ha ha!), becomes one of the Eastern Bloc’s most successful “sport eaters,” an obese guy in a wrestling leotard wolfing down chunky soups and Russian horse sausage from troughs. Between rounds, the competitors power-barf and chat about the groupies in the audience. Like an SNL sketch that stretches its conceit well past the breaking point, Taxidermia milks the “sport eating” joke for more than its worth: there’s the cross-swallow, the hollowed out red star filled with caviar, the threat of lock jaw. It’s as if Pálfi had decided to take the “mint leaf” sequence from Monty Python’s Meaning of Life and turn it into a feature film. There seems to be some satirical intent, but it’s not pointed enough to sting.

The third section is the most repulsive: close-ups of taxidermy in progress were never on my must-see list, and the skinning, gutting, and sawing is made worse by the fact that the pervert’s ghoulish grandson is operating on himself. And I haven’t even told you about the gutted fetus, to be filed under “sights that cannot be unseen.” Not every movie has to be a pleasant experience, but Taxidermia struck me as a pointless gross-out, inventive but without sufficient character or story to support its grotesque excesses.

Taxidermia. György Pálfi, 2006. *

• Filmbrain finds Taxidermia “a fascinating treatise on excess, desire, and the politics of the body.”
• The trailer:

Victor Nunez can’t catch a break–first, nobody wanted to distribute the third installment of his Florida Trilogy (preceded by Ruby in Paradise and Ulee’s Gold). Now that it’s finally out on DVD, we had to go and watch it as the last movie before taking off on vacation. By now, too many motoconcho rides, santo libres, and raptures of the deep later, memory just barely serves to recommend it. Sonny (Timothy Olyphant) is released from prison and returns to the Gulf Coast town where his best friend is a cop (Josh Brolin) married to his high school sweetheart Ann (Sarah Wynter.) The local gangsters Sonny took the fall for don’t want to pay up, and Ann is tempted to run away with Sonny…. A carefully observed small-town drama with a true indie feel; Nunez’ big, generous heart is as much is evidence as in the other two films.

Coastlines. Victor Nunez, 2002. ***

[tags]film, jurgen, 3 stars, victor nunez, florida, trilogy, gangsters, high school sweethearts, crime, love, adultery[/tags]

“Inland Empire makes perfect sense,” I wrote the last time, thinking I had the existential mysteries of Lynch’s film if not solved then at least sufficiently unpacked and domesticated. Happy to have found a sturdy story arc, I assumed I understood the film. Not so. We saw it again on Christmas, in a misguided attempt at hipster holiday cheer, and boy did it mess with me. The third time around, Inland Empire flummoxed and confused me, and I was overwhelmed worse than the first time. It also gave me a raging headache. Surely, this must be the year’s best film! Ow.

At the IFC Center, a short clip now precedes the movie, in which Justin Theroux reads a note from David Lynch: a quote from the Upanishads to the effect that all the world is a dream, and then he wishes us “a good experience.” And indeed, the film felt completely different every time I’ve seen it. My original review tried to approach it in terms of David Lynch’s oeuvre; the second time around, I looked for structure and began collecting clues that may or may not form a coherent story. This time, I saw shots, hints, cross-references, and entire scenes that somehow hadn’t registered before, and it made me reconsider Inland Empire as subjective experience.

Perhaps it’s too literal-minded, and maybe there are already a few dissertations about this, but especially in the light of Catching the Big Fish and my own limited experimentation, it seems useful to compare the experience of watching Inland Empire to the practice of Transcendental Meditation, of which Lynch is a adamant proponent. For anybody with any familiarity with TM, the parallels are right there on the surface: there is a lot of sitting and “diving within” in Inland Empire (see how that syllable just repeated three times?) and, more specifically, I see a similar technique at work.

The “transcending” in “transcendental meditation” refers to a particular kind of mental yoga that shuttles the mind back and forth between a completely relaxed state of pure consciousness and a more analytical day-to-day awareness. In TM, transcending is achieved through the repetition of a mantra. Inland Empire achieves a comparable effect through the back-and-forth between apparently disconnected shots–what Manohla and Marcy call the art-installation aspect of the movie. For long stretches of time, Inland Empire is just stuff on a screen, and you drift off toward a weird state between waking and dreaming, just letting it wash over you. The transcending pull back to a more conscious state of mind is achieved by the millions of clues Lynch litters all over the landscape, from “high on blue tomorrows,” “vier-sieben” to “it has something to do with the telling of time” and “the man in the green shirt.” (I began cataloging some of these in a previous entry, and hopefully somebody will soon set up a proper place for it online, much like the excellent site for Mulholland Drive–a wiki perhaps?)

But “figuring it out” is only half the point. The real purpose of the clues is to keep your mind engaged, suggest that there is a graspable story here (and indeed Inland Empire has a solid three act structure.) At the same time, the film continuously frustrates all attempts at “solving” it. The viewer constantly goes back and forth between “Eureka!” and “WTF?” This back and forth is very similar to transcending, an activity that takes the meditator to a unique place between waking and dreaming, a twilight region were identities, memory and imagination merge, and strange images arise from within. (Lynch describes it as a room with red curtains and black-and-white tile floor.)

Transcending is supposed to release deep-seated stress in the form of damage done to the nervous system in the past. In this between-state, old emotions are dredged up from the icky bottom of the subconscious. In the movie, these things include guilt over adultery, shame at selling one’s body or soul, grief over the loss of a child–perhaps even Polish carnies who can hypnotize people into murder by screwdriver. A transcending meditator who is unstressing will often weep, much like the woman watching mysterious images flutter by in a hotel room “in the Baltic region.” When the dive within is completed and another layer of past damage has been healed, there is a feeling of bliss and newfound peace, perhaps even a sense of a blessed light as if facing the beam of a movie projector, and one might sit, with a smile, just like Laura Dern on the other side of the room in the film’s last shot: “Sweet.”

Inland Empire. David Lynch, 2006. *****

• Inland Empire Reviews and Resources

[tags]inland empire, transcendental meditation, david lynch, justin theroux, christmas, ifc, nyc, laura dern, sweet, film, 5 stars, adultery, screwdrivers, upanishads, consciousness[/tags]