A DOZEN TAKES ON DAVID LYNCH'S INLAND EMPIRE

"I am not who you think I am..." (spoken in subtitled Polish). "...they don't change, but they reveal... in time they reveal what they really are... it's an old story..." (spoken in English).

Lynch's theme here, as it has been since Lost Highway, is the fluidity of individual identity, and the possibility that any single self is a chance affair of sums over histories (roughly the same concept in quantum physics that tells us parallel universes may in fact exist).

Laura Dern's finest performance to date, reminiscent of Gena Rowlands' in A Woman Under The Influence and Philip Seymour Hoffman's in Owning Mahoney: self-lacerating, nakedly revealing, sparing of neither herself nor her audience. It is a performance that enacts a pieta with no maternal figure to embrace the sufferer, offering up a transfiguration manifest in solitary pain and grief, not in joy.

Inland Empire is Lynch's first movie shot entirely in digital video; he has declared himself so satisfied with the result that he intends to work exclusively in that medium henceforth.

Justin Theroux is the new Dan Hedaya. It's all in the stare...

Eschewing a score by his usual collaborator Angelo Badalamente, Lynch has instead assembled his music here from works by Penderecki, Lutoslawski, Brubeck, et al, including Do The Locomotion as backbeat to an horrific dance number.

Leaning against a lamppost in Los Angeles is the same as leaning against a tree in Lodz.

Spicing the procedings are cameos by William Macy, Julia Ormond, Diane Ladd, Nastassja Kinski, and vocals by Naomi Watts.

One of the most exuberant credit rolls ever.

"He goes down like a two dollar whore...", and the rabbits are no help, no help at all.

"It's better not to know so much about what things mean"-- David Lynch....."What is the significance to the hat?" Gabriel Byrne asked Joel Coen during the filming of Miller's Crossing. Joel Coen replied, "The hat is very significant."....."Cinema is far too rich and capable to be merely left to the storytellers."-- Peter Greenaway.

And if anyone figure out what AxXoNN means, be in touch.