DVD OF THE WEEK

Inland Empire ****
Dir: David Lynch. Starring: Laura Dern, Jeremy Irons, Justin Theroux

Looking back it seems a long time since David Lynch made a normal film. A normal film like, say, Eraserhead or Blue Velvet. Lynch is certainly one of the most extreme and unusual directors working today, his films existing as strange waking daydreams (or nightmares), and Inland Empire is his most baffling and striking work to date.
It's hard to know where to start with a film like this. A plot synopsis – even if that were possible – isn't much help. For the record, though, this involves Laura Dern who is offered the lead in a new movie and finds that life is imitating the scenes in the film. She also discovers that the film is a remake of a 'cursed” Polish film which was never finished because the two leads were murdered.
That actually sounds relatively sane and sensible but the film is anything but, quickly devolving into a series of hallucinogenic dream sequences and apparent non-sequiturs while Dern's character becomes inextricably confused with the one she plays in the film and the various ones in her imagination. Oh, and there is a continuing 'sitcom” featuring a family of 'rabbit-people”. Really.
And it's stunning. Almost every scene is powerful and engaging, reaching into the subconscious and triggering strange emotional responses. Even more than Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive this allows Lynch's surrealist roots come to the fore in a film that cannot be explained in any literal way but has to be experienced. And the more you surrender to the spell and allow yourself to go with the potent flow, the more it gets under your skin.

Michael Cera's naïve teenage character has graced many films since being launched in TV's Arrested Development. Youth in Revolt (***) sees him doing the same shtick again but subtly adding to it in a dual role that includes not only the lovelorn virgin but his imaginary alter-ego, Francois, a smooth Gallois-smoking 'bad boy” created to help win the rebel-loving girl of his dreams. And there are laughs, but surprisingly few. In the same way that Napoleon Dynamite totally alienated some people, this film left me cold – it seems undeveloped and full of easy gags, merely an off-kilter teenage fantasy. Perhaps I'm too old for it.

Despite their limitations, revenge flicks seem enduringly popular and every few years there is a rush of them. Recently we've had Taken (Liam Neeson), Gran Torino (Clint Eastwood), and Harry Brown (Michael Caine). Law Abiding Citizen (**) finds Gerard Butler – unhappy and in jail – launching a series of unlikely strikes against Jamie Foxx's arrogant lawyer after Fox plea-bargains one of the crims who has killed Butler's wife and daughter. It's pretty awful stuff, capped off by an ending that is, I guess, meant to make you ponder the two men's relative 'goodness” but just leaves you shaking your head at preposterous Hollywood stupidity.

It might have seemed like a good idea on paper: make a comedy where a serial killer is presented like a motivational speaker. How to Be a Serial Killer (**) proves that a blackly funny idea doesn't necessarily make for a good 90 minute movie, despite the odd smart line ('It's time to start listening to the voices in your head”). The serial killer mock doco has been done before not a few times, in films that have been funny, disturbing and – occasionally – even insightful, three qualities in short supply here.

Tormented (**) combines a bitchy high-school drama of nasty 'cool” kids and downtrodden outsiders with an English take on I Know What You Did Last Summer. The two mix when the fat bullied kid who has eventually committed suicide returns as a ghostly avenger and duly starts cutting a deadly swathe through the (obviously too old) good looking popular bullies. Half the cast of TV's Skins seems to have enrolled at this particular school, but it's all pretty predictable stuff, albeit competently made.