WATCHING:
Inland Empire
David Lynch, Director

Showcasing a stunning, understated performance by Laura Dern, director David Lynch perhaps “out-Lynches” himself.

What’s it about? As with many Lynch productions, that’s not easy to say. It’s a movie (or two) within a movie, and it’s hard to keep track of what pieces are from which layer.

It’s three hours long, but doesn’t drag, even though it is a very slow-placed movie for the most part (portions of frantic edits, surreal imagined (?) scenes supplement the slower, Lynch-like portions).

I just finished watching it a couple of hours ago; it’s still playing in my head, and predict it’ll play there for some time. That kind of sums up the movie for me.

All movies

Just some random notes related to some retail experiences I’ve had lately.

• Credit where credit is due: It’s a long story, but I ordered a CD (Best of Leo Kottke) from Amazon last month that never arrived – I’m 90% sure it’s the post office’s fault, but I went there to discuss such, well, the PO doesn’t know where it is. So a waited a bit to see if it would show up, and last Monday wrote Amazon about the issue. Tuesday morning when I checked my email, I had a response saying they (Amazon) would reship the CD for free; it should arrive Thursday. It arrived Wednesday. No hassle. Granted, this was a relatively low-cost item (not saying I ordered a PS3 console that didn’t arrive) and I do order from Amazon a lot, but still – nicely done.
   
• Big Brother: I was also shopping around for an external hard drive recently. Hit a few sites, checked out this or that drive. Now, when I go to certain (note: non-techie) sites, I get highly targeted ads displaying an ad for – for example – Pricegrabber.com (which helped my search) for the exact hard drives I was looking at there. I know the technology (FetchBack and others do this), but, whoa, spooky.
   
• Why are cables such a rip-off?: In connection with the hard drive search (above), I was looking for a longer USB cord than came with my potential choices. I wanted a 12′-15′ foot USB A/B cord. Best Buy: $29.74 (on sale; one option). Mononprice.com: $2.02. That’s right, I could buy 14 for less than the purchase of one at Best Buy. (Update: Ended up getting a USB2 M/F extension cord; 15 ft. for $4.14 including shipping at MonoPrice.com. Best Buy had only a 6-ft model of same; $22 [on sale] not counting shipping. Again, why the rip-off? Even if the MonoPrice.com cables are inferior [I haven’t had one of a dozen die, but let’s pretend], I could get 14 cables for the price of one so-called good cable Best Buy priced from MonoPrice.com. Really think 13 of 14 cables will die??)