Southland Tales - C

In theaters. Rated R, 144 minutes. Trailer.

Where to begin. Writer/Director Richard Kelly's Southland Tales, the follow-up to the cult classic Donnie Darko, is the most creative film I've seen this year...and the most frustrating. The synopsis put out by the studio is almost comical: Set in Los Angeles in the year 2008 during a three day heat wave just before a huge 4th of July celebration, an action star stricken with amnesia meets up with an adult film star developing her own reality television project and a Hermosa Beach police officer who holds the key to a vast conspiracy." Kelly has created a universe all his own for this film, which soars in some places and falls flat in others. Click the link below for the rest of the review.

The line between genius and idiocy can be a thin one. At times I felt like the movie was a practical joke on the viewer to see if we were big enough suckers to actually like this. Other times the dark vision of Kelly took hold, together with the Moby soundtrack and the movie succeeded in a way only David Lynch films can. The film feels like an amalgamation of Children of Men, the Fifth Element, Donnie Darko, and Mulholland Drive. Not that its as good as any of those films, but it does owe a debt to them.

With most movies I see I try not to read reviews before I go or find out more than I have to about the plot. With this one, the opposite was true. Given the labryinthian Donnie Darko plot and super-confusing trailer, I visited the website and tried to read up on the plot. The story is presented as Chapters 4-6 in a story, with the Chapters 1-3 dealing with a nuclear attack in Abilene, Texas in 2005. Kelly has written 3 graphic novels to accompany the movie and flesh out the plot, but, unlike the 30 nineteen year olds I saw the film with, I don't have time to read them. The story starts and ends with Boxer Santaros (Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson), the movie star son-in-law of the Republican nominee for President. He has been kidnapped and his memory erased, waking up on Venice Beach and falling into the lap of porn star activist Krysta Now (Sarah Michelle Gellar) with whom he writes a screenplay that eerily predicts the future and the apocalypse. Sean William Scott plays Ronald/Roland Taverner, a cop with a twin 'brother' that figures into the apocalypse. The film is narrated by a soldier, Pilot Abilene (Justin Timberlake), that was wounded by friendly fire at Fallujah but now stands guard over Utopia, the new energy generation system. After the nuclear bombing in Abilene, the third World War began, forcing the US to search for alternative fuels, which they find with Baron Von Westphalen (Wallace Shawn). He has created an energy field powered by the tidal cycles that is called liquid karma. As a result of Utopia, the earth's rotation has been slowed down by a minute amount, but that slowdown has altered behavioral patterns and torn a hole in the time space continuum, which creates soul duplication and leads to the apocalypse. There is a major subplot involving the 'neomarxists' who rebel against the new Patriot Act created 'big brother' organization called USIdent, which knows and sees all. This element of the film was the weakest, and it didn't figure enough into the key plot points to waste time with it.

The other actors in the film are Amy Poehler, Kevin Smith, John Larroquette, Jon Lovitz, Cheri Oteri, and Mandy Moore. Kelly has said he deliberately cast this type of actor so that the viewer would carry their baggage about the actor to the movie and have it influence their views of the characters. That may be so, but it is hard to see Amy Poehler and Cheri Oteri as major cogs in a serious apocalyptic film.

The best parts of the film involve Pilot Abilene and the discussions about the apocalypse and the fourth dimension, etc. The drug sequence with Pilot Abilene singing the Killer's "All the things that I've done" is amazing, as are the points where Moby's moody score is allowed to take the stage as the montages pass through. Kelly's the only director out there that stands even the smallest sliver of a chance of taking the eccentric auteur mantle from Lynch. If he wants to do that, he'll have to make films that stand alone and are somewhat more accessible. I liked the film for its creativity and sheer originality, but I didn't like it because there were too many contrived and way too tangential moments. If you didn't like Donnie Darko, don't waste your time.

Bonus: I found this picture online of Tony Romo on his way to a Southland Tales screening in Dallas....not your usual jock movie.

This is a good Article discussing the film and its background.