Apologies....

... to the 1.5 people reading my blog out there.


I've been very busy the past couple weeks, namely graduating and work. The better of my two jobs entails film research, so for the past week or so I've been looking into "British Kitchen Sink Realism" (also referred to as British Realism or British New Wave), a brief film movement from the late 50's, early 60's, that foregrounds working class citizens - typically 20-somethings - struggling against the deeply entrenched class system in England. The directors are relatively unknown today - Karel Reisz, Tony Richardson, Bryan Forbes, Jack Clayton to name a few - with the exception of John Schlesinger, who continued to make movies until his death in 2003.

The titular "Kitchen Sink" is meant to be slightly ironic, deriving from the way kitchen sinks are typically viewed in British films before and after this movement: clean, pearly white porcelain that idealizes the bourgeois household - a kind of holy grail of success. This is precisely the portrayal of Britain that Tony Richardson - the father of the movement - intended to destroy with his first theatrical production Look Back In Anger, which was only later adapted to the film medium. It was a critical success to be sure, but certainly not fiscally. On and on the story goes. The establishment of Woodfall Films, the creation of some of the most highly acclaimed British films (The Loneliness of The Long Distance Runner, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, A Taste of Honey, Room at The Top, etc.), it's failures and subsequent demise.

All that said, I have yet to see any of these films. Ha ha! I'm still waiting on a few to arrive, at which point I'll start studying and writing on those. As a result of the research, I've posted a few more links on the side bar.

At any rate, lack of writing = No Good. Definitley go time.

Bubble: Already Forgotten

This film will be forgotten and overlooked. The characters, and the millions of people they represent, will also be forgotten and overlooked. Time has already proven both to be true.


Bubble, conceived, produced, and cast in the small town of Belpre, Ohio, follows the lives of three working class citizens trying to eek out living wages at depressingly dead-end jobs producing dolls. Kyle – an awkward, 20-something, high school dropout - molds the dolls from plastic and passes them off to the hulking, red hands of Martha, where she applies facial cosmetics for an undoubtedly diminutive wage. This, they do daily, passing the time with small talk in the breakroom and between shifts, sustaining off of fast food and soda. Much of Bubble is composed of what a typical TV show or film may refer to as “filler”, and is in fact the focus of the film. With foley, seemingly unprocessed sound, and being shot on HD with a hand-held camera, Soderbergh attempts to give that - yet again - documentary feel to his subjects, presenting them with candid grace.

Released in 2004, this was supposedly the first of 6 locally shot, small town films to be directed by Soderbergh and released through HD networks. What happened to this deal? No one seems to be too sure. Then again, Soderbergh is one of the more interesting exploiters of Hollywood cash, his career entirely composed of contradictions and surprises, so it’s no wonder the deal mysteriously vanished. His films post-Bubble have ranged from the third installment of the lucrative Ocean’s series to the absolute flop of The Good German. It’s a bummer, though, that this deal wasn’t seen through, as the films would most definitely create local film collectives around the country, while simultaneously providing a small economic boost for the communities as a whole. But, alas, it’s quite possible that Bubble simply did not do well enough in the boxoffice, on TV or DVD, as not even the progressive distribution idea didn’t provide a big enough push for the film (Grindhouse recently attempted the same with it’s trailer, also falling flat on it’s face).

This creative form of distribution logically follows the experimental nature of Bubble (that is, by Hollywood standards). Soderbergh does his best to properly represent this growing class of the borderline impoverished. For the most part, he does a fantastic job of remaining subtle and implicit, eliciting wonderfully ad hoc dialogue from his inexperienced cast with his well-worked script (by the talented Coleman Hough). The film works precisely because nothing substantial takes place for the first half of the film, that is, until Rose comes along.

The doll factory receives a large order from an ambiguous buyer, hiring Rose as a temporary to fill in the labor holes this creates. She’s introduced to her co-workers through her manager - who gives one of the best, most forgettably amazing two-appearance-roles to date, fitting the “I’m a gigantic middle-management toolbox” position better than any of the other alarmingly few American films that attempt to portray the lives of the lower-middle class.

Rose befriends both Martha and Kyle in a hurry, seeking companionship from Kyle, and debtless favors from the morally guided Martha. Martha becomes deeply jealous of Rose – the audience only made aware of this through ever-so-slight, off-kilter behavior – and as one conflict leads to another, murder ensues, at which point Bubble sells the appeal it garnered for cheap narrative convention. Bubble takes a unadventurous narrative function, displaces it in a relatively unexplored locale in smalltown Ohio, and captures it’s inhabitants with an unconventional style, in the hope of attracting the type of viewership that is accustom to this type of storytelling. The result is a pastiche of form and content rather than symbiosis, clutter instead of fusion. Thus, as the story goes – and has gone since the silent era, the earliest days of literature, and the ancient pictographs of days past - the remainder of the film is dedicated to the inevitable capture and incarceration of the culprit, leaving little to the imagination.

It’s the lack of narrative direction that made Bubble so interesting in the first place, and this is shattered through generic convention. Sodeberg has, essentially, through imperial mandate, made a film about a people whose jobs he, “…cannot imagine doing [himself]” (DVD special features).

Luckily, the first half of the film resonates across the American class-scape, and the consistent realist style thoroughly engages the viewer to the point of forgiving the second half of the film. At the same time, we can all be glad that Bubble has already made the inevitable plunge into the awkward space of non-memory. In this sense, the film – and the public at large – remains true to the meandering characters of Bubble, and the people it represents.

Inland Empire: Experiential Cinema

Staggering beauty infused with insane terror, reflexivity contrasted against intensely driven characters, reality paired against levels of fantasy: Inland Empire has the imprints of a master’s touch, everything Lynch has aspired to through Transcendental Meditation, spirituality, and his pursuit of film as the highest form of Art.

Hints of Lynch's past films linger in Inland Empire, like the many traces of the Mystery genre that provide the plot driving force of all his films. The innocent introductions of Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks, and Wild At Heart invite the most conservative filmgoer to enter his work through conventional beginnings, speckled with punctuations of the insane, only to be exposed to the full onslaught of Lynch's psyche much later than expected. Most likely unconscious, Lynch shatters expectations and completely destroys the very idea of genre through abrupt shift in tonal qualities, an example of which is physically manifested by The Blue Box in Mulholland Drive. Once opened, there is no turning back for both the character and the spectator.

Both Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire share much in terms of "plot", but when considering style, Inland Empire demonstrates a maturity that shies in comparison to the rest of his work, but not at the expense of his impromptu, almost youthful buoyancy. The most obvious stylistic departure can be found in the very existence of reflexivity in Inland Empire. Camera lenses, projectors, and plot construction discussions are liberally peppered throughout the film, exposing Lynch's new hope – and cynicism – with the medium of film, or more specifically, video.

Inland Empire is the first video project in Lynch's oeuvre. In every recent interview I've seen with Lynch, there has been a repetitive mention of how "liberating" video is, and how he will never return to film. Anyone who reads these interviews – as I was – will most likely find this the regretful last words of an absolutist. After viewing this film, though, I truly hope he never returns for the following reason: as an auteur, Lynch is more versatile and free to express himself in his ostensibly stream of consciousness filmmaking style. Without gigantic 35mm film rigs to haul around, big budgets, or large crews, video bodes well with Lynch’s content and thoroughly compliments his style.

Inland Empire exploits the simplest of plots in a big way. By stripping away typical storytelling conventions, he simply throws results into the viewers face. Sure, there’s a semblance of a story, but this only provides the thinnest through-line to hang Lynch’s style and subplots off of. For better or worse – this line snaps about 20 minutes into the film, and never ties itself back together. Laura Dern in the most unmotivated, yet acutely affective role of her career, portrays Hollywood celebrity, Nikki Grace. Boosting her career to an even bigger stardom, she manages to snag a leading role in an upcoming Hollywood film with co-star Devon Berk (Justin Theroux). In the most evocative turning point in Inland Empire, they rehearse the blockbuster script with the film’s director, and are informed that the last two times this script was attempted, both lead actors were killed – both times. They joke and beat around the bush, and then dive right into a read-through. Close-ups of Devon and Nikki fill the screen - the hand-held camera providing that loose, documentary feel - emotionally tearing at each other with poetic lines of dialogue. The sequence peaks with Nikki trying to subdue an escaped tear that discreetly rolls down her cheek . As always in Lynch’s films, moments like these tend to verge on the melodramatic (music serves as the backbone), but Lynch manages to bring a very real poignancy to the scenes through intense direction – to both his actors and technical style. We hear a crash on the set behind them, halting their performance. Regrouping, they attempt to proceed with the scene again. A crash strikes once more. Each character silently waits for someone to take action, staring with profound concentration for a few moments, and Devon is off to investigate the still echoing noise. Whispers and distant taps amplify the viewers suggestive powers tenfold, the sounds resonating through mysteriously empty frames that both constrict and liberate our senses. This is a key moment where fantasy and reality first collide.

It’s at this point that the mysteriously cryptic script begins to take on a life of it’s own. Nikki’s character in this script, and Nikki in Inland Empire are weaved in and out of each other in a pastiche of scenes as disparate and far ranging as musical and horror. It is at this moment the film becomes completely incomprehensible and – partly thanks to this – comes to be deeply frightening.

There are always those people who will say, after all’s said and done, “Wait, what happened?” This is a futile and pointless question, although very tempting to ask. So tempting, in fact, that on the DVD of Lynch’s last film, Mulholland Drive, there are a list of 10 questions to help guide the viewer to “figure the story out.” This cute, mystery-solving (and thus, spoiling) feature, when applied to Inland Empire, will only result in annoyance and aggravation.

My advice? Don’t study it. Don’t attempt to understand it. Don’t try to make connections. Just experience it and let it wash over, at least once. And if that human instinct for understanding sneaks up on you, then, by all means, watch it again, pick it apart, and get frustrated.