Southland Tales played at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival where it bombed and was ultimately discarded by Universal, then again by Sony and has now landed at Samuel Goldwyn Films and will hit theaters on November 14th. When it played at Cannes it ran approximately 160 minutes long and now the version that will be released on the 14th (the version I saw) clocks in at 144 minutes and has a reported $1 million of additional special effects shots. I have read pretty much everything except for a glowing review of this film. Some people hated it (understandably) and some people have been on the fence, but no one has stood up and said it was a masterpiece, and hopefully no one does. However, I don’t think any of that is writer/director Richard Kelly’s fault as his follow-up to the cult classic Donnie Darko has sputtered on its way to the big screen.
First off, let me say Donnie Darko is not a good film. Sorry to all of you out there that like that film. I am not sure if you were dropping acid or watching it through your cloudy bong water, but it is just not a good film. However, you will happy to know that the Darko Bunny can be seen a few times in the film, most notably in a ton of flyers in the background of one scene. Luckily, Southland Tales is nothing like Donnie Darko. Then again, this movie is nothing like anything I have seen before and quite frankly the film is a mess, but it is only due to the fact that Kelly went ahead and created an entirely alternate present day and felt the need to give us an update from every corner of the globe.
The film opens in 2005 with nuclear explosions in Texas, what follows is the aftermath including political intrigue mixed with Bud Light, Hustler and Panasonic advertising campaigns, the start of World War III, the 2008 Presidential election, a missing man with amnesia in the desert and a porn star named Krysta Now (Sarah Michelle Gellar). Mix that in with the secret of Roland and Ronald Taverner (Seann William Scott), Curtis Armstrong as Doctor Soberin Exx who has come up with an alternative source of energy using the ocean’s waves, Cheri Oteri as a revolutionary in cahoots with Dream (Amy Poehler) and her boyfriend (can’t remember his name), Miranda Richardson as a power hungry wife to a presidential candidate, Nora Dunn as a Neo-Marxist extremist and finally Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson as Boxer Santos (a.k.a. Jericho Kane or the man in the desert I referred to earlier).
If the above paragraph doesn’t tell you what is wrong here then I am afraid I have nothing else for you… move along… However, if you can see that the problem is that this story is too fucking huge for even a 2 hour and 20 minute movie then congratulations… stick around because that is the case.
Kelly is planning a series of three prequel graphic novels based on this storyline of a world run amok resulting in a more restrictive Patriot Act, the monitoring of Internet use, a nationwide police force called UPU2, drug problems, testing on Iraq War soldiers, attempts to sabotage the upcoming election and a variety of other bad shit. The problem is that he went ahead and made three novels from parts 1-3 of this story and one movie out of parts 4-6. Some people will be perturbed that this is called Southland Tales when in fact this is really just one “tale”, but the issue is not the story itself in as much as it is the telling of this tale and the fact that its massive scope cannot fit into a movie 2, 3 or probably even 4 hours long. The reason this film is such a jumbled mess is because too much as thrown at you at once and once you finally get in the mix of things, while you understand what is going on, you are 100-percent certain you are still missing something.
All things considered, I actually didn’t hate this film. In fact I rather enjoyed it and want to visit it again to see if it is fully possible to grasp everything Kelly was going for with his story. I think it is all there, but the mass hysteria that is the first 15 minutes of this film kill any chance of really soaking everything in, leaving you wide-eyed and bamboozled. However, as confused as I may have been, I still wanted to watch.
Each scene manages to grasp your attention immediately because there is such urgency in each and every scene. You want to know what is going to happen next, primarily because Kelly throws a couple of curve balls early on in what was supposed to be a staged murder leading you to know that anything can happen. On top of that I think it has a kick ass final scene leaving the door wide open to interpretation once everyone in the room knows what the fuck actually is going on.
If Richard Kelly were a doctor and was prescribing Southland Tales to you it may sound like this, “Read two books of Revelations once a day, watch one hour of CNN twice a day, 5 hours of MTV (but hate it) once a day and spend at least an hour a day reading Karl Marx.” If you did those things, then just maybe you would get the mish-mash that is Southland Tales in one sitting.
Narrated from the perspective of ex-Iraq War soldier Pilot Abilene (Justin Timberlake), who even has a dance and song scene, this movie is definitely not for everyone, and I would venture a guess that the cult following for this one is going to be drastically smaller than the one for Donnie Darko. However, unlike Darko, I will be looking forward to a director’s cut DVD of this one as I am sure it will offer far more information for those that enjoyed themselves… Then again, this may be a movie that succeeds in the less-is-more department. We can only wait to find out.
