Reviews

Having been an avid watcher of The Divine David Presents, and having seen him perform live a number of times, I've always counted myself as one of David Hoyle's fans. His unsettling mixture of compassion, anger at the world's injustice, and a complementary willingness to laugh at cruelty made him a unique performer. But ten years' good work has been undone in an instant – though it felt like a small eternity – with this film. A stultifying 94-minutes of non-plot, non-acting, non-scripted tedium which was filmed on video over five days in a caravan park. Hoyle plays the eponymous character who has sex with his hunky young nephew Ashley (Ashley Ryder) and sometimes pimps him out to other men.

The film comprises mostly of Uncle David giving boring lectures on consumerism and heteronormativism to Ashley. There is a small break in the tedium when they dance around their caravan for a bit, and a nice 45-second interlude when the two characters charm some cows in a foggy field. But then we're back to Uncle David drivelling on for the third time about how people who go to work are drones and mortgages are bad. The film ends with its "shocking" climax, but it's shocking only in that it's dragged out for so long.

Seeing Hoyle live, he has a tremendous energy which somehow seems to evaporate when captured on cheap video. Even when he's smashing up some china figurines (daringly representing the Christian family) there's something quite soporific about his performance.

It's a good bit of marketing having Ryder as co-star though the man can barely act. Even a relatively simple line like "that blue's nice, it matches your top" – which is hardly "once more into the breach" – seems beyond him. Hoyle should have remembered the 27th Law of Showbiz: Porn stars and actors should never be confused. This is the law which explains why Ian McKellen was never asked to do World Soccer Orgy 3.

Although I thought it the most tedious film I've seen in years I'm sure others will warm to its critique of Western Society, its "transgressive" nature, and its shots of Ashley Ryder naked.

Oh, and one other thing. If, for some reason I can't fathom, you want to push up the film's IMDb star rating probably best not to give it ten stars as it looks a tad suspicious. Although I loathed the film I could imagine someone giving it a six or a seven. Possibly an eight. Maybe, God help us, a nine. But today's stats show that 7 out of 18 voters have given it the maximum rating believing that Uncle David is up there with The Passion of Joan of Arc, Bicycle Thieves, Vertigo, Citizen Kane, 2001: A Space Odyssey,Rosemary's Baby,….I could go on but I'd imagine you get the point.

Inland Empire begins with a great scene - one of the best Lynch has directed. Film star Laura Dern receives a mysterious guest (Grace Zabriskie) who starts to ask questions about Dern's latest film. It's as funny as it is unsettling and Zabriskie gives a truly amazing performance. Occasionally she'll hold words back as if stopping herself from giving away too much information, or perhaps saying something very unpleasant. For the next half hour we seem to get the basic plot - the Dern film is a remake of a Polish original which has some strange history, is perhaps cursed. It seems an intellectual occult thriller like, for example, Foucault's Pendulum.

But then the film becomes...well a word like 'fractured' undersells it. It's a collection of more or less random scenes which could unfold in any order and make as much - or as little - sense. There's a discredited theory which states that for a film to be successful you have to 'care' for the characters. Obviously you don't - but you do have to have some idea of their motivation, or the sense of what they're saying or how they feel about other characters. Even after two hours of the film Dern could walk into a room and you could have no idea who she is, where she is, why she's there or who the other people are (even though they, like Dern, have appeared before).

One very much proved theory is that there is nothing more boring than someone recounting their dreams. "Well I was in a plane except it wasn't really a plane...it was my kitchen! And then I picked up an apple and my Mum came in and said I should put it in the fridge, so I did but I then realised etc etc etc." Inland Empire is three hours of someone recounting a meaningless dream and it's boring. It's excruciating. I lost the will to live and died literally twice during its running time.

That's not to say the film doesn't have flashes of brilliance. No one does rooms like Lynch. He can make Deco furniture sinister, an emerald bedspread radiate pure evil. The rabbit sitcom room (oh, don't ask) is somehow like a vision of hell even though it's just...a room. And the vaguely industrial hum on most of the soundtrack is a great way of notching up the dread factor. But by the end I was thinking that if there was another shot of Dern running up some dark corridor to find something strange at its end (a roomful of whores, a fat-faced sweaty man, a cinema showing Inland Empire, a room with a man and a gun...the list is endless) I may start to cry.

I think the film may come into its own when it's released on DVD. Lynch has, in effect, supplied the audience with a movie's raw footage which we can import into iMovie and then cut into our own version. Simple maths shows there are many billions of ways of assembling as few as 50 shots, and Inland Empire has a lot more than 50 shots. Some people will recut the whole 3 hours, others will give us a more manageable 90 mins. Someone will just give us the uncut rabbit sitcom and nothing else. If I could face watching it again even I'd want to maybe give it a go.