Ray Pride

Even if you admire this movie, you will probably hate it as well. Watching "Inland Empire," I loathed about half of the experience. David Lynch's grubby, caustic, sometimes savage three-hour digital-video meditation on the essential madness of role-playing, with Laura Dern playing three and perhaps more roles, including that of an actress playing in a remake of a Polish movie where the lead actors were murdered; a madwoman who confesses terrible crimes in torrential monologues; and perhaps a reality that was at first indicated as a film-within-the-film. A screenwriter friend was reminded of a line from Rilke--"Dying of not dying." It's a resonant phrase for the pains the brilliant Dern endures. Her multiple personalities cannot escape the Borgesian perplex of reality and unreality that twists upon itself. Turn a corner, whether in Krakow or a stretch of Hollywood Boulevard across from the L. Ron Hubbard Life Center, and reality transforms. Characters walk in and out of rooms and into meta-narratives atop narratives. Do they have autonomous lives? Are they resisting Lynch's impositions over the multi-year, free-associative production of the movie? It's a movie more to think about afterwards; the watching tests endurance. For a fascinating take, look for Manohla Dargis' sturdily constructed case for the movie at newyorktimes.com. 179m, 30 seconds.

"Inland Empire" opens Friday at the Music Box. Call for information on possible personal appearances.

(2007-01-23)

Also by Ray Pride

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So, a dozen people want to kill Jeremy Piven. That's in Joe Carnahan's "Smokin' Aces," where his character Buddy "Aces" Israel, a sleazy magician and leading luminary in Vegas' entertainment zirconium firmament who's made a compact with the feds after his long-gestating Vegas blood has gone wrong
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Tip of the Week
Most of the short films put out by SAIC grad, 36-year-old Apichatpong ("Call Me Joe") Weerasethakul, are on a shorts program at Chicago Filmmakers this weekend: many of his ideas about duration (with intermittent surprises) and binary narratives or bifurcation of storytelling are well in evidence, later refined in dazzling, dawdling movies like "Tropical Malady," (2004) "Blissfully Yours," (2002) and this year's "Syndromes and a Century"
(2007-01-16)

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While promos for "Alpha Dog" may suggest a drive-by mashup of white gangsta wannabes and the seamier predilections of Larry Clark, it's actually pretty terrific: a loopy, loping Altmanesque picaresque about a terrible crime committed by clueless teenagers
(2007-01-09)

Tip of the Week
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Tip of the Week
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