*Note: Contains regional references. International readers be forewarned!

Now that ordinarily speaking ought to disqualify me from writing about it. But Inland Empire is a vintage case of the egg you don't need to eat all the way through to realise it's gone bad. I had a strong feeling while getting into this film that it would in all probability suck something fierce. Bhalla(aka Kikuchiyo) who has a lot more patience with films than I do had given up and warned me about its essentially craptastic nature. And yet, I thought, perhaps he'd been too hasty. Maybe the movie wouldn't be all that bad. I should learn to step back and smack myself HARD when I start thinking like this. I recall being in a similar mood when I forked out some 20 sing $s I could ill afford to buy Metal Machine Music by Lou Reed. 

Inland Empire is yet another oblique tribute to the Phallic Kingdom of Mallu porn (In Lund Empire Get it?) Unlike Malluholland Drive his previous MalPorn worship session, David Lynch's Inland Empire manages to hold viewer interest (or at least my interest - the bhalla claims to have passed out at the half hour mark) for at least 45 minutes.

It starts with random wankery - people jabbering away in Polish with no subtitles on offer and a weeping girl in a hotel room viewing what looks like amateur porn (AHA!).

And then some weird sitcom with people wearing rabbit masks cadged from Donnie Darko.

Anyway this silliness soon gives way to a reasonably coherent and engrossing narrative about a weird old woman who pays a visit to an actress called Nikki (OR IS SHE? It's one of the many pointless mysteries in the film that Lynch fans are obsessing over all over the interwebs even as you read this). The woman betrays a great knowledge about Nikki's immediate future — a future that Nikki is suddenly and unaccountably transported to.

In the course of filming, she figures that her current feature is a remake of some doomed project which ended in the death of the principal characters when first attempted — some bogey-ridden Polish folk tale. But by now Lynch's pretensions overwhelm the film and it descends into total surrealistic garbage. And just to show you how fvking brvtal!!! he is, some of the surrealistic garbage is in Polish. It's the sort of nonsense that will mainly appeal to the "IT'S FUKENNN TRIPPPY!!! MAN, I'M SOOOO STOOOONED MAAAAAN, ASSHOLES!!!" public. Or annoying literature/film students who'd rather star in coprophilic porno than consider the fact that Lynch is an incomprehensible hack using his reputation for obliqueness to make films that are essentially a cinematic cocktease.

In this film, the fairly lush look that was one of MDrive's redeeming factors is replaced by amateurish video camera footage, a deliberate attempt at capturing the casual hokeyness and surrealism of the average Indian TV soap opera (People who've seen the Sutadi Sittan in Annamalai know what I'm talking about). But Lynch's slaverying fanpeople probably will see a bold defiant artistic statement even if he films himself picking his nose and getting deloused for seven hours straight.

As for me, I believe Lynch is driven by the same impulses as the Mallu porn industry: a monomanical obsession with incorporating certain sequences while everything else is negotiable. The only difference being that the Mallu porno flicks are generally better paced and far more fun. Probably because they, in their own warped way, seek to entertain and bask in the masturbatory glow of masturbation rather than the masturbatory glow of critical acclaim.