Yesterday was a pretty awesome film day for me at the Siskel … first I saw Red Desert, then took a break for dinner and went back and saw INLAND EMPIRE. I wish I did that kind of thing more often. Saturate myself.

The Antonioni film is difficult, to say the least; everything about it is so alienating that it’s kind of like being on another planet for two hours. It just wouldn’t have the same impact were you to watch it on TV. On film on a really big screen with good sound you can at least allow yourself to be partially hypnotized by it. To be honest there were a few moments in the first half when I almost nodded off, but in a weird way that’s a complement. My own personal dream-world would have intersected with the dream-world of the film. What I liked about the film is a disquieting tension that exists between its rigorous, meticulously controlled aesthetics and the frequently semi-chaotic, inscrutable behavior of the characters.  That weird tension is part of what makes it feel so peculiar I think. I think this film pushes that kind of experiment about as far as it could go. His later films called for a somewhat different approach.

Seeing the Lynch film again (this was my third time) was both exhilarating and exhausting; when the end credits finally came up it felt abrupt, but over the course of its three hours the movie goes to so many places. It’s some kind of complete, self-contained world, with its own logic. It makes “sense” to me, but not in a way I can explain. In other words, I understand how it works but not why it works. Who else has ever made a film like it?

We went for dinner at the Elephant & Castle at Wabash/Lake. Blah. Way overpriced. But it was convenient. The Boddington’s tasted good however.

My life between 8.00 and 3.30 Monday through Friday seems so dull and so utterly removed from my life the rest of the time. Yet it’s hard to decide which feels more “real.”