sf indiefest

Castro Theater 2/8/2007 7PM

David Lynch’s mesmerizing, hallucinatory visit to the uncharted territories of the inland empire displays all of the master’s strengths, and yields great rewards to those who are willing to leave their egos at the door and go along for the ride. Filmed over a two-and-half-year period, Inland Empire may be his most extraordinary film project yet, a culmination of all of the themes touched on in his other masterpieces, Eraserhead, Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive. Here Lynch is at the top of his powers—Inland is beautiful and terrifying and and funny—an example of an artist peeling back the layers of his own psyche, and in the process, like Hitchcock did in Vertigo, creating great art out of revealing his obsessions. Storm

The movie tells the story of an actress, Nikki Grace (the extraordinary Laura Dern), who is signed to star in a movie that her neighbor (in a gloriously bizarre turn by Grace Zabriskie) warns her is based on a gypsy curse. The story unfolds like a Chinese box, a film, within a film that flows back and forth from Hollywood to Poland and from real to surreal. And then there are the giant talking rabbits. Lynch’s cinema works at a level below rational inquiry. It’s the stuff that dreams are made of. Laura Dern in INLAND EMPIRE