October at paulcarvill.com, the home of Paul Carvill on the web 2007 at paulcarvill.com, the home of Paul Carvill on the web

As a consequence of having 2 wisdom teeth out, and an aching face, if not necessarily one that was swollen up like a sea cow, I found myself with half a day sitting around at home, popping nurofen like a crack addict.

So what better to do than finally watch David Lynch’s latest headf*ck “Inland Empire”. It’s altogether darker and more desolate than his last, “Mulholland Dr., but could be considered a companion piece of sorts. Lynch continues his fascination with the mechanics of filmmaking, the inference or divination of meaning through film’s limited language, and the dream we call the star system. He examines that dream closely enough to more accurately describe it as a nightmare, but is astute enough to acknowledge that it owes its continued existence to the belief, the dreaming, of others, of us.

Lynch’s films defy any quick or easy analysis. In part this is through the sheer twistedness of his imagination and his knack of further complicating matters by applying a fractured narrative, or non-narrative, style to the framework of his ideas, which at times resemble nothing like a framework but a lot like a horrific, disjointed series of off-kilter vignettes. They are connected to traditional narrative by the most tenuous of links – a familiar 50’s doowop soundtrack; basic continuity editing; beautiful and handsome actors.

This is one of the continuing reasons for our persistence with the films of David Lynch. The viewer may be at a loss to describe what is happening on screen, but what may or may not be happening, in whatever order, is so watchable. Laura Dern’s face carries a pair of eyes that could happily stare into infinity forever under the camera’s gaze. She may be mostly limited to melancholy or hysteria here, but melancholy, or indeed utter confusion, has never been so watchable. Likewise Harry Dean Stanton, here a venal, if not all there, producer, and Justin Theroux, a man swimming with so many seedy undercurrents its a wonder he hasn’t drowned already.

As with nearly all his films, this one will take another viewing to actually sink in and make sense. But for now I’ll say its a magnificent, hypnotic collage of horror and macabre laughs. What does it all mean? Who knows.

And watch out for the incongruous cameo from Julia Ormond, a camp few seconds from William H Macy, Laura Harring from Mulholland Dr, and, according to the credits, although I didn’t notice anywhere, “voice work” form Naomi Watts.

I was lucky enough to see a preview of the documentary “In the Shadow of the Moon, which will be showing at the London Film Festival in October. It was showing at the Rex cinema, a plush, velveteen theatre lurking at the bottom of some menacing red Lynchian corridors and stairs.

The film tells the story of the Apollo moon landings through the words and observations of many of the astonauts who carried out the missions. This might seem an odd choice of subject at this point in time, given the fact that we have never been back to the moon in the last 30 years, and the relative lack of manned space exploration being conducted now. But the success of Andrew Smith’s 2005 book “Moondust” proved the continuing interest in the Apollo space program. Is the success of that book and the appearance of this film purely coincidental? Did the book prompt the production of a film? Did the astronauts, or someone else, want control over their version of events?

If you have read Moondust then most of the details given here will be familiar to you – the political impetus to put a man on the moon before the Russians managed the same feat; the gung-ho nature of the test-pilots turned astronauts; NASA’s string and sticky tape approach to getting things built. For the uninitiated the film provides general background information on the missions, interspersing interviews with the likes of Buzz Aldrin and Charlie Duke with footage from the rockets, lunar module and the surface of the moon itself.

But the makers have also left out a wealth of insight that would appeal to a wide audience – the massive expense of an ostensibly scientific mission that had no clear goal beyond its own achievement; the sheer awe inspired by the enginneering feat that was the Saturn V rocket; the compromise of an ex-Nazi scientist, Wernher von Braun, who was the brains behind that rocket, and also the German V-2 combat rocket. Andrew Harrision’s book reaches much further into and around its subject, and in comparision that film tends to look rather shallow and anodyne.

One of the great pleasures in it, though, is to see with your own eyes the personalities of each astronaut – Mike Collins hot-dang astonishment, Alan Bean’s easy-going demeanour, Charlie Duke’s geniality, Buzz Aldrin’s agitatedness. Neil Armstrong, notoriously reclusive, is glaringly absent.

Also included is startling new NASA footage of the early launch rockets repeatedly exploding during tests, and a jaw-droppingly close escape by Neil Armstrong, when he ejects from an experimental aircraft about 1.5 sedons before it explodes in a ball of flames.

But whole the film includes a lot of the mission footage, it fails to truly capture the awe, the camaraderie or the fun had by this bunch of macho, right stuff -packing pilots. There is a 1989 film “For All Mankind” which seems to realise more successfully each of those astronauts experiences and meld them into one sublime whole. It helps that it has a majestic Brian Eno score, a futuristic yet humanistic soundtrack to yesterday’s space future if ever there was one.

In a summary of sorts, several astronauts describe how the felt on the return journey. Ed Mitchell feels ” a oneness with the universe”. He realised his body was formed from the same material as the stars past which he sailed, and had “clarity, an epiphany”. Charlie Duke realised that Jesus was around him, and worships him today. When Collins, orbiting in the command module, disappeared around the dark side of the moon, the remotest man who ever lived, he revelled in his splendid isolation and described what he felt as “exultation”. These are amazing, overwhelming and consistent feelings of change amongst the astronauts, but the film does not deliver enough force of emotion to make the audience believe in them too. For All Mankind, on the other hand, delivers so much by saying less and showing more.

“In the Shadow of the Moon” is a fine attempt to preserve the thoughts of the few men of the human race who have ever walked on another planet. But one that unfortunately is unable to encapsulate all that there is into its running time, For the real deal, get Andrew Harrision’s book “Moondust” and follow that up with Al Reinart’s film “For All Mankind”.