It's Straaannnnggeee, what looooooooovvveee does!

The Lynch Mob (or 'Bomb' Squad?)

..with INLAND EMPIRE (the DVD), David Lynch gives us a double-album’s worth of film. Prolly better as two 120 minute blocks, it isn’t dissimilar to Tarantino’s KILL BILL 2-fer, but with Lynch you get a real paen to experimental or ‘underground’ American cinema, especially when it comes to the 70-minutes of ‘more things that happened’ DVD extra.

‘More things that happened’ basically works off two story strands. The first features an Eastern European super-model, who contemplates buying a watch off a dodgy Slavic who only wants to hold her hand…The second story features another male-Slavic crossover point, this time Laura Dern improves sad ‘confessional’ memories to what looks like a sloppy PI, goes through a great trippy reality-warp via creepy doorways and staircases and hallways and weird rabbits, only to confess some more, before we find our supermodel as an LA whore - actually a gaggle of whores who all have various states of herpes!

It’s Lynch. It’s experimental, and works more in the favour of yr hardcore American avant-garde set like yr Ken Angers and Brackages and Michael Snows, albeit with a slightly more ‘mersh bent, than anything else. The music is great, verging from yr usual ‘body-w/o-organs-gripping-drone' to some ‘hearing it from another room doof’ trip-hop to some lovely Cage-ian piano plonks, to the final dubby Blues-shuffle, that sounds like Lynch trying to do Horace Andy or Dawn Penn or something….

Yep it’s a double album of Lynch, some of it could be shorter, but when it hits ya, you know yr in safe hands.

(NOTE: The last few shots are very Kubrickian, made even more amazing by the fact it was done on a PD150!)

I'm still here

Meltzer :Here

Dylan : There

And it was on the 14^th Day of Teshrei in the year 5478 of the Holy Calendar that lapsed Hebrew tribal-member and all-round legend -

Richard Meltzer - wrote in his holy tome THE AESTHETICS OF ROCK (which may have been written under the addled influence of mind-expanders, just like those bananas in the Mid-East did once upon a time many moons ago), that Bob Dylan - ‘the voice of the disaffected 60s generation and every generation until Armageddon’ or something like that - rather than give us meaning in his music, actually FREES us from meaning (I will quote the exact page and lines when I get home)…And so I sit in the ‘Common Era’ or A.D (After Death of Hesoos) date of 14^th January 2008, in a $5.50 el-shnorrer session to see ‘the greatest film of the last three months’ as voted by every critic and semiotics student and cult of Humanities students preparing papers to justify their courses, ‘I’M NOT THERE’ take two-odd hours to tell me what Meltzer said nearly 40 years ago in less than one sentence! …So did I like this film?

Well, yes, it’s a kaleidoscope of bio-pic, post-modern hipster mix-mash of hip European directors like Godard and Fellini and Mark Lester and even Tarkofski, and well fill in the rest..The film blunders around a bit as the two ex-Aussies in it overact to buggery, and Christian Bale doesn’t get enough screen time, but it all looks nice and is so intricately pieced together that there’s really not too much to dislike. It makes Dylan an icon on top of an icon, it fiddles with Haynes’ ‘identity’ politics deal, and never once mentions or addresses his Judaism. I dunno, was Mel Gibson a silent investor in this venture? It’s basically SPINAL TAP, but about a ‘real’ person or something like that (am I making sense? It’s all so Deleuzian or something…)

..Then I sit down in front of the Cable-Babel TV and watch another cool film, ART SCHOOL CONFIDENTIAL, directed by Terry Zwigoff, who has now made three really good films, but hasn’t quite made a great one. ART SCHOOL CONFIDENTIAL is basically a loose remake (or re-imaging?) of Fritz Lang’s great SCARLETT STREET. It’s also a semi-autobiographical story about EIGHTBALL legend Dan Clowes (who wrote it), and his struggle to get laid and respected as an artist with TALENT and SKILL in art-school. It’s very funny, very honest, has a bit of thriller/giallo action to boot, and a really sheyner shicksa with a nice toochus.

For a shlepper like me, what more could I need?

(Actually I'm gonna waste more time watching 'The Lab with Leo Laporte which makes things like Blogging seem 'sexy'. NOTE: It still hasn't got ME laid!)