jürgen fauth’s muckworld

Billy Wilder’s timeless noir about the tragedy of fame attained and denied provides up-to-the-minute commentary on the Passion of Lindsay and her latest closeup, but that’s not the angle I’d like to pursue today. Instead, let me draw your attention to a connection that took me by complete surprise last night (yes, I screamed.) Compare and contrast:

Sunset Blvd.:

INLAND EMPIRE:

The film-within-a-film Gloria Swanson and William Holden are watching is a 1929 silent called Queen Kelly. The actress in the movie is in fact a younger Swanson, and Queen Kelly is directed by Erich von Stroheim, who also plays Norma Desmond’s storied butler Max in Sunset Blvd. It’s a delicious bit of recycled cinema that functions as inside joke and helps deepen Norma Desmond’s character.

Lynch’s reasons for quoting both movies halfway through INLAND EMPIRE are more obscure. Because the character, known as the Lost Girl (Karolina Gruszka), is speaking Polish, the caption from Queen Kelly is rendered in subtitles. Without knowing anything about its provenance, I found that it summed up the dark undercurrents of INLAND EMPIRE so well that I used it as a title for my original review.

On frieze.com, Kristin M. Jones writes that “[the Lost Girl] may represent the souls of ambitious actresses stolen by their dreams.” The intrepid interpreters on the INLAND EMPIRE forums believe that the scene is a good starting off point for theories about the film — after all, both Sunset Blvd. and INLAND EMPIRE concern Hollywood stars in spectacular houses with strange butlers, champagne and caviar, and movies that have the power to kill. Like Nikki Grace, Norma Desmond is “a woman in trouble.” Come to think of it, so is Linsday Lohan.

Sunset Blvd. Billy Wilder, 1950. *****

• INLAND EMPIRE on DVD
• Ten minutes of Queen Kelly on YouTube
• Sunset Boulevard on Wikipedia

“That’s a lot of entertainment for five grand!” Philip Marlowe’s talking about the questionable spectacle of a bunch of gangsters (including an uncredited Arnold Schwarzenegger) stripping to make a point, but it applies equally to Robert Altman’s time-traveling Chandler adaptation as a whole. Mumbling Elliott Gould is miles apart from Humphrey Bogart but drop dead cool in his own inimitable way, and all of 1970s Los Angeles emerges as his deceptively sunny antagonist.

The Long Goodbye. Robert Altman, 1973. ****

• Roger Ebert
• Terrence Rafferty revists The Long Goodbye
• Terrence Rafferty on the occasion of Altman’s 81st birthday
• Ill-Informed Gadfly
• Christopher Sieving at PopMatters
• The Long Goodbye at Wikipedia

The trailer:

Speaking of true friends and good writers: this week marks the release of Next Stop Hollywood: Short Stories Bound for the Screen, an anthology of cinematic shorts that features a story by my friend and fellow Center for Writers graduate John Minichillo. John’s story, inspired by Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral,” is called “Blind Man in the Halls of Justice.” Editor Steve Cohen pitches it as A Civil Action meets Scent of a Woman, but I see it as 12 Angry Men crossed with Half-Baked. Alexander Payne could do a fine job directing it.

The official site for Next Stop Hollywood hosts excerpts, information for writers who want to be in the next edition, and a list of great movies based on short stories, including Psycho, 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Killers, Freaks, and Animal House. (They should add Away from Her ASAP.) My copy’s on its way.

Breezy fun. For anybody with a passing interest in the lives of celebrities, the workings of the entertainment machine, and the conspicuous consumption of women, cars, and multimillion dollar houses formerly owned by Marlon Brando, this show is pure catnip. Over three short seasons, Vince and the boys have slowly revealed a little too much integrity to be entirely believable, but it doesn’t matter: the real star of the show is hopped-up super agent Ari Gold (Jeremy Piven). ***

[tags]tv, hollywood, celebrities, agents, 3 stars, hbo, california, los angeles, comedy, turtle, drama[/tags]

Fish in a barrel. Christopher Guest and gang turn their talents to Hollywood and the Oscar race, but come up with a less satisfying film than usual. Everybody in the industry gets lampooned, from directors, writers, actors to PR folks, and assorted hangers-on, including literally drooling movie critics (”I’ve seen a lot of movies, and I’ve loved them all!”) and some guy posting on the Internet. (Apparently Guest also keeps a special circle of hell warm for Charlie Rose.)  I particluarly liked Eugene Levy as worthless agent, Fred Willard as entertainment TV host, and Jennifer Coolidge as diaper heiress/producer. Parker Posey, Bob Balaban, and Harry Shearer are all reliably amusing. Catherine O’Hara, as a pathetically desperate aging actress, is at the center of the film, but seeing her ambitions frustrated isn’t half as much as fun as you’d think.

Dog shows, the folk music scene, and amateur theater were probably better fits for Guest’s improv comedy–the movie industry has been satirized and abused so much before, For Your Consideration seems a little tame and scattershot by comparison. There’s none of the bite of The Player, nor any of the ridicule disguised as love letter to the movies that makes Day for Night such a pleasure. Some good one liners, but you’ve probably seen the best ones already in the trailer. Opens on Friday.

For Your Consideration. Christopher Guest, 2006. **

[tags]christopher guest, film, 2 stars, hollywood, parker posey, eugene levy, bob balaban, harry shearer, fred willard, jennifer coolidge, catherine o’hara, comedy, oscars[/tags]

Had to watch this a few times after Inland Empire, just to regain a certain amount of sanity: it still makes a heck of a lot more sense than the latest three-hour freakout, especially if you take a look at some of the theories. Allen B Ruch’s “No Hay Banda” does a good job at teasing out some of what’s going on, and if that’s not enough, there’s an entire site dedicated to the film. I always thought that dreamlogic should stay dreamlogic, and while some of these theories go a long way toward making sense of Diane/Betty/Camilla/Rita (and even the Blue Box), Lynch included too many loose ends that will stick in your craw no matter how you try to resolve them. An astonishing movie that gets ever more astonishing the harder you try to unravel it. There’s a wholeness to it that I couldn’t see in Inland Empire after one viewing, and it looks stunning: it’d be a damn shame if Lynch really gave up film for DV.

Mulholland Dr., David Lynch, 2001. *****

[tags]mulholland drive, naomi watts, david lynch, hollywood, films, 5 stars, surreal, dreamlogic[/tags]

How do you review someone else’s bad dream? With a sprained ankle swollen to the size of a coconut, I found myself joining the other insomniacs and hardcore cinephiles at an ungodly hour to see David Lynch’s first movie in five years. His latest plumbing of the unconscious is three hours long and his first shot on crappy digital video, but not the first to play like “a wicked dream that seizes the heart,” nor is it the first featuring Laura Dern, shifting identities, and creepy characters doing truly creepy things. William H Macy announces: “Hollywood, California, where stars make dreams and dreams make stars!” After Justin Theroux, Jeremy Irons, Harry Dean Stanton deliver some hesitant exposition about a movie with a history of murder, a suburban BBQ party is overrun by Eastern European carnies, a Kafkaesque interrogator listens to Dern’s curse-word peppered confession, a gaggle of hookers dances the locomotion, and blood is vomited up on the Walk of Fame.

Inland Empire is so Lynchian that it often appears to veer into self-parody, but somehow this works for the film: like the bizarre sitcom where everybody wears a rabbit mask, the laugh track at the Walter Reade was disconcertingly out of whack. Three hours later, while the rest of America gathered for church, we were watching prostitutes lip synch Nina Simone’s “Sinner Man” while a pet monkey frolicked and a man in a red wool cap sawed a log. Remember: there are consequences to one’s actions.

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

• My review at worldfilm

[tags]david lynch, pet monkey, prostitutes, laura dern, 4 stars, film, surreal, bad dreams, murder, poland, harry dean stanton, justin theroux, jeremy irons, hollywood, nina simone, sprained ankle, nyff[/tags]

Otto Friedrich, who is also responsible for a delightful history of Berlin in the 1920s, takes on Hollywood in the 1940s. He’s got some great anecdotes about Gene Tierney, Charlie Chaplin, Ronald Reagan, Howard Hughes, Rita Hayworth, L.B. Mayer, Orson Welles, and of course his favorite Bert Brecht. I especially liked the sections dedicated to the German emigres; Heinrich and Thomas Mann reading laudatory speeches about each other at their birthdays etc. Like the decade it covers, the book finally gets bogged down in subcommittee hearings.