I watched Inland Empire (2006) the other day. Luckily, I had some help from IMDb FAQ, which contains “major spoilers”. I don't really think anything can spoil this movie. You're probably best off knowing as much as possible going in. You'd probably want to acquaint yourself with the Cliff's Notes too. In fact, it's one of those movies that will be “spoiled” if you haven't spent a few weeks preparing for it ahead of time.

I think it's Lynch's 8 1/2, except it's “4 7” (the name of the original, uncompleted movie that the movie within the movie is meant to be a remake of), because Lynch has made four or seven movies so far. Or four movies that people can understand, or seven if you include things like “Rabbits”.

It's interesting and extremely fast-paced if you assume that it could be an attempt to treat memories, fantasies, information and experience as one thing. For example, you could say that a person's identity is composed exclusively of what they remember. As an individual, you are the person who remembers a certain set of events. But how you remember them is also significant: why do you remember things? How do you reconcile unavoidable fantasies (imagined theories of what might happen, without which a human would be no different from a rabbit) with very imperfect memories and largely incomprehensible, chaotic information about reality?

I thought it was interesting that the movie opens with a scratchy 78 droning on about something called “Axxon n”, apparently a long-running Baltic radio drama. That's how we learn about reality. Noisy old recordings of unknown people talking about the long-running Baltic radio drama which is out there.

Labels: Movies

On the filming of Dr Strangelove, Ken Adam, in an interview in Christopher Frayling's Ken Adam and the Art of Production Design, remarks that Peter Sellers had a great deal of difficulty coming up with a characterisation for U.S. President “Merkin Muffley”. Adam claims Sellers felt lost unless he had something to parody, and nothing offered itself.

It's curious, because I have always found it to be one of his subtlest characters: the physical stiffness, the demeanour, and the accent of course. His accent was both catalyst and constraint.

I sometimes think people would be better off looking for someting to parody instead of trying to develop an original identity on their own.

Maybe they do!

Labels: Movies

I was surprised to see that “Breakast at Tiffany's” is considered an all-time great movie. I can remember seeing it on TV way back and thinking it was stupid, but there were lots of things that I thought were stupid when I was ten years old. Everyone's making a fuss, I thought, maybe I'm just too young to appreciate it. So I rented it recently.

It's still sort of silly. Back then I couldn't understand why the two characters are all bored and dull. If anything, I gave them the benefit of the doubt. I just accepted that they were pissy and weird the way adults are, with their unidentifiable problems. Now I see that they're just time-wasting nuisances. They're bored with themselves. Also, she throws her cat away. There's a whole bunch of junk about how she hasn't named the cat because bla bla bla, but evidently it's too much effort to look after a cat.

So obviously, what ever happened to Holly Golightly?

Supposedly some guy ran into her in Brooklyn in the 1970s. She was working in a basement tavern. At first she was kind of reluctant to admit that she was Holly Golightly, but after some prodding and a few drinks, she opened up.

Apparently she didn't go to Brazil or marry George Peppard, but went out to LA to try her luck. She was married to producer Wiktor Bychzslap for a while. You remember him, he made all these movies about motorcycle gangs, and was very close to Ed “Big Daddy” Roth of Ratfink fame. What a time that was! Wild hot-rod rides among the beatniks and hodads.

“Yes, interesting, but what was she like?” I asked my friend, impatient to discover the truth.

“She was nuts, a deadbeat, cadging drinks in a pathetic fashion, vomiting into one of several shopping bags that she carried. And that was on a good day.”

“Oh.”

“...eh, the worst thing is they were plastic shopping bags, like ones you get from the supermarket, with a lot of other junk in them. Creates a bad impression.”

“Like you just don't care any more, right.”

“Exactly.”

Labels: Movies

You know the problem with that Luxembourg comic strip “Tintin”? It was great, very, very fine, drawings and speech balloons and everything, Captain Haddock, excellent, but what it lacked was good old-fashioned adventure and pizzazz. In a word, it was boring. And (shudder) two-dimensional.

If it could somehow be made more palatable to the modern audience—more friendly, more wisecracky, more whimsical, with maybe some new characters—then maybe you'd have something. Maybe somebody cute? More arch?

Anyway, more like the original Saturday afternoon serials that Steven Spielberg gets everything confused with.

Labels: DreamWanks, Movies

I was wondering where the term “through line” comes from, because people keep using it as a sort of bludgeon with which to hew their critiques of inexplicable charcters in plays and movies.

I found a source in Daniel Meyer-Dinkgräfe's Approaches to Acting (2001), p. 41:

All elements of the pychotechnique assist the actor's energies to converge towards a holistic and organic expression of a character on the stage. Stanislavsky regards the holistic value of acting on two levels: on the level of action, he coined the phrase “through line of action”. On the level of speech, the equivalent to “through line of action” is called the “subtext”.

Holistic and organic. (....). Anyway, I think some actors might instinctively be doing something other than trying to analyse that. It's more likely that they are thinking of a particular state of mind, or trying to recreate one, and everything else comes from there.

It's really not helpful if you are writing a story about a character, or a story that merely includes characters, because you can observe people doing things in a certain way, and that's pretty much all there is. Anything you add to that just weakens the impression for many readers (or viewers).

Labels: Characters, Movies