Lynch (2007)

Silly me, what was I thinking? I thought that by watching this bio-documentary I would learn about the life and work of the renegade film maker David Lynch (b. 1946). About the only things you learn are that he's a chain smoker, that he's practiced transcendental meditation every day for thirty years, and that he loves being on the other side of the camera where he's the star and center of attention. Watching this documentary is like watching one of his films. It's extremely creative and has little linear narrative. It's more like looking at an abstract painting or thinking of an interior dream scape — disjointed, disassociative, vivid, scary, and sometimes an unrelated stream of consciousness. In the last half of the film we watch while Lynch directs INLAND EMPIRE, a three-hour movie he shot with an off-the-rack Sony digital camera and made up as he went along. That film included life-sized rabbits that appeared in a living room dressed in suits and ties. Prostitutes danced the 60's Locomotion. Time morphed back and forth between past, present and future. Place moved between Poland and Hollywood. Lynch is either coy or just brutally honest when the only description he gives of INLAND EMPIRE (he insists that the title be capitalized) is that it's about "a woman in trouble." Lynch fans and film buffs will rave at this documentary; my wife quit watching half way through.