“One could make a fairly substantial list of things in Inland Empire, as in all David Lynch‘s work, that are inanely repellent or outright dumb. Jean-Luc Godard, Andy Warhol and Andrei Tarkovsky are other filmmakers who veer wildly between genius and utter puerile shit, sometimes from minute to minute within a given work. Of course this gets into the whole issue of how certain forms of stupidity, sloppiness and impatience sometimes act as protective covering for genius… but that, as they say, is another subject.
“If Inland Empire is good-or-great, it may not be so much good-or-great-in-itself, but as a continuing harbinger of the possibility of another cinema to come.” — Screenwriter Larry Gross writing for MCN Voices and delivering an obviously vigorous tapdance/pretzel-like contortion in order to give Lynch’s long video-shot surrealist mind-bender a quasi-pass.
Gross was inspired by Manohla Dargis‘ N.Y. Times review of same, in which she calls Inland Empire “extraordinary, savagely uncompromised…and one of the few films I√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢ve seen this year that deserves to be called art. Dark as pitch, as noir, as hate, by turns beautiful and ugly, funny and horrifying, the film is also as cracked as Mad magazine, though generally more difficult to parse.”