cadmandu

If you liked Mulholland Drive, Lost Highway, etc., you'll like Inland Empire. There are some similarities to those previous films, but Inland Empire is a new departure, or maybe a culmination, for David Lynch.

Anyone who thinks they can write a spoiler for this movie doesn't have a clue what they saw. This is not a plot driven movie in any sense. It's a film about the nuts and bolts of reality and the human mind -- among other things.

Laura Dern has finally been given a role to expand into, and she doesn't disappoint at all. Her white trash trailer wife monologues are stunning. There is also a street kid monologue (with subtitles!) towards the end of the film that is likewise a classic, and performed by a totally unknown Japanese girl.

I thought the ending credits sequence too precious; we get Laura Herring and the usual suspects trotted out. We learn that Naomi Watts did voice-overs. But this is classic Lynch that will have you pondering for a long time.

This is a fictionalized but meticulously filmed story of the Japanese experience of the battle at Iwo Jima. It is the complementary story to Clint Eastwood's other film about Iwo Jima, Flags of Our Fathers.

I wasn't going to write a review of this film at all, because there's not a whole lot to say about it. It's good. But it's also the most haunting film I've seen in a long time. The lunacy of war and aggression will stick with you long after you've left the theatre. You've been warned! Yes, there are a few historically inaccurate details (two G.I.'s lighting up cigarettes at night -- and then complaining that they'd be sitting ducks for Japanese snipers!) but overall this is a thorough film both in terms of the history of the conflict, and in the psychology of the Japanese people and military. Like the last Nazis waiting out the end in Hitler's bunker, these people can only come to the realisation that they've been duped into a war that they will not win.