So it was fairly alarming when Lynch announced that he was through with film and transitioning to digital cameras when he made INLAND EMPIRE in 2006. It was even more alarming because the technology was so new and lo-res, and he was applying it to a three-hour, highly abstract story about a movie actress who fractures into multiple parts, each rooted in a different stereotype women were too often expected to play throughout cinema's 100-year history (housewife, hooker, victim). INLAND EMPIRE also may be a metaphor for the phases one goes through while working toward transcendence via meditation. It also has big rabbits.
Lynch liked the way the pixilated, blurry, digital images brought out the abstractions in his movie, but, really, INLAND EMPIRE is great in spite of the way it was shot. You have to move past the bad-quality picture to dig into the creepy atmosphere, puzzling narrative, haunting sounds, and fearless performances that define Lynch's best works. INLAND EMPIRE delivers on all of these, and Laura Dern, who helped get the movie rolling when she agreed to perform a 70-minute monologue Lynch didn't originally see as part of a larger piece, gives a career performance. That's saying a lot, because she's had a career of some of cinema and TV's best performances.
INLAND EMPIRE is a natural for inclusion in the Criterion Collection, which has already brought a number of Lynch's shot-on-film films to deluxe, hi-def home video. The way INLAND was shot makes it both less essential for a hi-def presentation and more intriguing to review. How good could this movie actually look on Blu-ray? Will the extra fidelity be a help or a hinderance?
For Criterion's Blu-ray, Lynch chose an "upscale made using the GaiaHD algorithm and footage that had first been downscaled back to SD in order to throw away false detail introduced during the original HD conversion and allow the most effective use of the AI upscale," according to Criterion's literature. Only the techies know what this means in plain English, but to my non-techy eyes, Criterion's Blu-ray looks much better than the 2007 DVD, although that disc did set the bar pretty low by using so much edge enhancement the "Studio Canal" logo at the beginning of the film looks like a still from Atari's Space Invaders. The Criterion edition does away with such unnatural enhancements, and though it reveals how unstable edges are, it's still preferable. Detail is better, and so is contrast. The image is slightly brighter than it was on the old DVD, so details that disappeared into nothingness, as the rabbits often did in their dark little room, are now much more visible. Don't kid yourself. INLAND EMPIRE on Blu-ray still looks like INLAND EMPIRE (messy), but it is much more watchable than it was on DVD.
For that 2007 release, INLAND EMPIRE appeared as a double-disc loaded with extras that included a feature film's worth of additional footage, a short film called "Ballerina", a 30-minute INLAND EMPIRE-focused sequel to the lo-res LYNCH (one) documentary, a 41-minute video of Lynch discussing topics related to the film in front of a red curtain ("Stories"), and an amusingly eccentric cooking show in which he makes quinoa ("Quinoa"). Sadly, Criterion's Blu-ray loses "Stories" and "Quinoa", but it gains a 15-minute audio excerpt from Lynch's autobiography Room to Dream that covers some of the same ground as "Stories" and "Quinoa" and LYNCH (one), which shows Lynch doing such Lynchy things as photographing abandoned factories, championing transcendental meditation, smoking, reminiscing about Philadelphia, smoking, working in his shop, providing weather forecasts, smoking, and smoking.
The one all-new featurette stars Kyle "Coop/Jeffrey Beaumont/Muad'dib" MacLachlan as chat-show host with Laura Dern as his one and only guest. They talk about her experience making the movie and their mutual experience working with Lynch and each other. It's an absolute delight. Both actors are charming, clearly have a lot of history with and love for each other, and get pretty deep into the director's methods of working with actors. As is always the case whenever an actor describes working with David Lynch, both regularly lapse into drawling Lynch impersonations, and it's interesting to see how often Dern voices the seemingly perpetually affable Lynch as semi-pissed off. We get to see him full-blown pissed during the LYNCH docs, although he implies that he was acting out for the cameras in an excerpt from Richard A. Barney's David Lynch: Interviews included in the booklet. Dern and MacLachlan have nothing but glowing things to say about the director, and I'm pleased to say the same about Criterion's INLAND EMPIRE Blu-ray.
