Inland Empire (film) it "A dazzling and exquisitely original riddle as told by an enigma" and Jim Emerson (editor of RogerEbert.com) gave it 4 stars and praised it: "When people say "Inland Empire" is Lynch's "Sunset Boulevard", Lynch's "Persona" or Lynch's "8½", they're quite right, but it also explicitly invokes connections to Stanley Kubrick's "The Shining", Jean-Luc Godard's "Pierrot le Fou", Buñuel and Dalí's "Un Chien Andalou", Maya Deren's LA-experimental "Meshes of the Afternoon" (a Lynch favorite) and others". However, Carina Chocano of the "Los Angeles Times" wrote that "the film, which begins promisingly, disappears down so many rabbit holes (one of them
Vivadixiesubmarinetransmissionplot the tune's middle section when he called home to check his messages. The lyrics for "Spirit Ditch" include the line "horse-laughter is dragging pianos to the ocean", which was inspired by a scene from the Luis Buñuel film "Un chien andalou". Although he once explained the album's idiosyncratic sound by admitting "I didn't know what I was doing", Linkous purposely used found sounds throughout the recording of the album – these included sounds that he found on records, sounds that he recorded and, in one instance ("Ballad of a Cold Lost Marble"), the sound that a defective amplifier was making