Director: Richard Kelly
Writer(s): Richard Kelly

Cast:
Duane Johnson – Boxer Santaros
Seann William Scott –  Roland Taverner
Sarah Michelle Gellar – Krysta Now
Justin Timberlake – Pilot Abilene
Miranda Richardson – Nana Mae Frost

Preamble:
Richard Kelly turns in a pretty awful movie, which has a lot more in common with Donnie Darko than the fans of that train wreck will care to admit.

Plot Points:
Damn if I can sum this ridiculous plot up – but the basics are that Los Angeles was nuked in 2005, which brought about WW3 (plot point #1). In 2008, the current year of the film (despite the fact that it’s referred to as the future) America re-institutes the draft and takes control of all internet access and interstate travel.

The Meat:
To establish the problems with ‘Southland Tales’ more clearly it really is necessary to look at Richard Kelly’s debut effort, ‘Donnie Darko’. The film became a cult smash that allowed people to feel sophisticated for talking about how they liked a movie with a complicated plot, and made for good discussion as people talked about the ‘details’ in the story. As far as I can tell, this and ‘Boondock Saints’ occupy their own genre in this regard. We’ll call it the ‘movies that aren’t really very good but you can have a cool conversation at a college party if you say you like it a lot’ genre. I don’t have an acronym for this genre yet. The real problem, however, is that most people didn’t really understand the plot of ‘Donnie Darko’ until they researched it online. In addition, the movie never felt like the 1980’s period it supposedly inhabited.  The exceptions were a scene maybe where kids are hopping out of the back of a bus backed by an 80’s track – or maybe when the screen flashed the actual date to remind you. It was never the brilliant sci-fi it claimed to be, it never had the fascinating absurdity it wanted you to think it did, and frankly the plot didn’t make a lick of sense. It simply had tone, and that didn’t make up for the lousy storytelling. I generally ask that viewers not judge a work by the previous works of a creator, but in this case the pattern is so clear as to be integral to viewing the new work.

If you liked ‘Donnie Darko’, well then ‘Southland Tales’ is probably the movie for you. It intends to be absurdist satire, set in the current day to show us that our own reality is in fact absurdist satire of the things our nation claims to represent (so far so good). Morally corrupt censors stifle freedoms in the name of protecting us from ourselves. Liberal, angry, Marxists are petty, overdramatic, misinformed, and misdirected as they try to disrupt the election of the Republican Eliot/ Frost Presidential campaign (plot point #2).They’re attempting to disrupt the campaign by doing a frame-up of a movie star (Duane Johnson) who happens to be married to the daughter of the VP candidate (plot point #3). The movie star wakes up with amnesia and soon finds himself living with an ambitious porn star (Sarah Michelle Gellar), but despite her role in the frame-up she falls in whore-love with this alter ego of his (plot point #4). This causes an inane love triangle between him, his wife, and the girl he stayed with for about 3 days after waking up with no memories (plot point #3.5). There are several other side routes and narrative twists that would take a number of months to summarize, and aren’t nearly entertaining enough to care about. The primary remaining one, however, focuses on a rift in space-time which allows the third act to be realized. Said rift also brings in the elements of dual soul existence (plot point #247), and allows for a “natural” externalization of internal thought processes in the movie’s climax.

Despite all this, boredom is the main problem with this movie, which somehow manages to be chock full of ideas, revelations, and supposed ‘wow’ moments but does absolutely nothing to keep you from checking your watch repeatedly. “Less than the sum of its parts” is an understatement, as somehow Kelly threw eggs, flour, and sugar into a bowl and made a Studebaker. Duane Johnson and Seann William Scott are good, but I didn’t care about anyone’s characters including theirs. At least in satires that embrace their ridiculousness, the characters can become lovable. When you take yourself seriously while delivering dialogue that sounds lifted from the Naked Gun series, we have a mess with no connecting dots. The dialogue isn’t just marred by content though, because delivery is a huge problem as well. For some reason, almost every character takes an eternity saying things that really don’t have much weight. Characters don’t have conversations as much as they act out caricatures from political cartoons. So as a bonus to watching ‘Southland Tales’ and ‘V for Vendetta’ (which was at least entertaining), now we know why political cartoons are usually only one panel long. This was clearly a directorial decision. It could be argued for as a bold technique designed to make a punch-line with each exchange, but that only works if the jokes are funny (and they sometimes are, like when the liberals overuse the term fascist), the viewpoint is fresh, or the observations are astute. This flick might have been hilarious if it was released just as the Patriot Act was enacted, for example.

The best part of the movie is the score – done by Moby – which attempts to weave a thread through the entire 2 and a half hour running time. The Star Spangled Banner re-imagining towards the end is especially well done, and there are a few imaginative shots that stand out from what tended to be surprisingly boring visuals.

Rent Southland Tales if you want to see a few cool ideas and don’t mind sitting through a train wreck, or if you want to be able to say you liked something most people won’t. Otherwise avoid at all costs.

/B-list Star constellation
/Insignificant nose-thumbing.

Movie – 3/10
DVD – 4/10

Southland Tales Trailer: 

Director: Oliver Stone
Writer(s): Stanley Weiser

Cast:
George W. Bush – Josh Brolin
Laura Bush – Elizabeth Banks
George Herbert Walker Bush – James Cromwell
Barbara Bush – Ellen Burstyn
Karl Rove – Toby Jones
Condoleeza Rice – Thandie Newton
Colin Powell – Jeffrey Wright
Donald Rumsfeld – Scott Glenn
Tony Blair – Ioan Gruffudd

Preamble:
Should we try to flesh out a man whose actions seem so transparent to anyone who approaches them with a critical eye? Is it worth analyzing the steps taken by someone who makes his intentions and paths so clear?

Plot Points:
A somewhat fanciful biopic about lame duck United States President George W. Bush.

The Meat:
‘W’ is one of the more entertaining movie failures in recent memory. It has plenty of positives off the bat:

/The ideas for storytelling keep the pace lively
/the humor works consistently
/There are exceptional performances, most notably by Brolin as “W”.

Ironically, however, a movie that focuses on Bush’s inability to create his own path never quite decides what it wants to say about him that hasn’t been said before. Presumably, Stone didn’t want to make a judgment of Bush with this film. Instead he chose to formulate a comedic character study with an eye towards making him three dimensional. A firm voice, unfortunately, is precisely what’s missing. ‘W’ justifies this lack of a clear direction by showing us that the man it is presenting for character study suffers from exactly the same problem. ‘W’ gives us a Bush who stumbles from failed jobs to failed businesses and always comes back crawling to his disapproving father for help, unable to ever establish an identity that his proud family finds acceptable. He meets and quickly falls in love with his future wife; the combination of this and a decision to give up the hard drinking/partying lifestyle of his youth turns his life around. Is any of this something we didn’t know about Bush, though? The other areas where the film tries to expound on his life, such as in fleshing out the relationship between Bush and Bush Sr., are patently false in some scenes (the creation of the Willie Horton ad sticks out). If Stone’s idea was to make excuses for inaccuracy in the interest of giving us insight into Bush’s character that only makes the portrayal look more shallow and lazy

The vignettes move quickly but are really carried by Brolin’s exceptional performance as Bush. He’s eager to please, genuinely affable, burdened by his legacy and yet habitually dependent on it. Brolin achieves a rare feat, providing familiar sound bites and expressions but not falling into the trap of mere impression. Bush’s mannerisms and habits are completely rolled up into the character’s core and one can only imagine what he could have done with a meatier script. Instead we’re treated to a screenplay that never matches Brolin’s effort, and in places painfully repeats itself. Mama Bush’s late revelation that Bush doesn’t take criticism well, for example, is pretty useless considering an earlier scene showing him driving into a garage when Laura tells him he did something poorly. Bush’s dream about his father wanting to fist fight him is an awkward summary of everything we’ve learned during the rest of the movie. The visualization of Bush stepping onto a baseball field and imagining crowd roars is far more effective. The final baseball scene, in fact, is especially effective compared to Bush getting booed as he threw out the first pitch as the Washington Nationals’ 2008 opening day.

Make no mistake, ‘W’ is still worth seeing at least for the sake of satisfying curiosity. The supporting performances are very good, especially Toby Jones as Karl Rove and Jeffrey Wright as Colin Powell. Stone directs with a nice pace and his usual steady hand, and things are generally well edited. The demonstration of Powell having behind the scenes concerns about their actions would at least seem to jive with his post-administration comments about their work in Iraq. It was fun to see these kinds of debates and other conversations play out in full view. It’s political vicariousness at its best when it’s working well. It’s just too bad that the concerns about the film being rushed turned out to be so justified.

Movie – 5/10

‘W’ Trailer:

Review by Steve Broome
sbroome at coalminds dot com

Director: Tarsem Singh
Writer(s): Dan Gilroy/Nico Soultanakis/Tarsem Singh

Cast:
Catinca Untaru – Alexandria
Justine Waddell – Evelyn
Lee Pace – Roy Walker
Kim Uylenbroek – Chief Doctor

Preamble:
Tarsem Singh takes a stab at an elaborate fairy tale for adults, while crafting a pretty good character study of storytelling as an organism.

Plot Points:
A little girl hospitalized from a fall befriends a movie stuntman hospitalized by an accident on a film set.   The man begins telling the little girl an “epic story” and the line between reality and storytelling is blurred with increasing real world consequences.

The Meat:
Tarsem Singh first came into public notice with his 2000 sprawling surrealistic vision ‘The Cell.’  Noticeably heavy on imagery and sparse with dialogue and significant character development, his background as a music video director was painfully obvious. With ‘The Fall’ (presumably his next flick will be ‘The Ill’), he ventures closer towards having storytelling to match his visuals but still falls short in a few areas. 

When 5 year old Alexandria stumbles into Lee Pace’s room of a Los Angeles hospital, he is clearly depressed and embroiled in conflict with his Hollywood employers. To divert his attention, the man (Pace) begins telling the little girl (Alexandria) what he describes as an “epic” story of adventure and love.  Great, natural interaction between them provides some of the best dialogue between a child and adult in recent memory.

 

Alexandria

 

It’s especially fun watching realty bleed into the stories he tells.  A nurse doubles as a princess.  When Alexandria sneezes as a character does as well.    Pace even puts himself into the story as a protagonist, and fills his tale with the kind of clichéd plot devices found in both traditional fairy tales and old films (which are of course old fairy tales by modern movie standards).  His real life rival becomes a despicable villain (the aptly named Governor Odious), so no character development is really needed. The self-referencing works well. 

Most notable is the way turmoil and pain from Pace’s real life bleed into the story, darkening it to a point that is often beyond the little girl’s grasp.  Playfully she repeatedly tries to bring it back to something a little girl wants to hear, which takes his mind out of the shadows for a bit.  It’s an interesting take on the way a child’s imagination is able to rescue not just them from their problems, but others as well.  Her zeal becomes contagious, and art begins to imitate life. When an imaginary Princess is shot by one of Pace’s characters, the little girl yells that “she can’t die”. Pace obliges, returning her to life, but revealing some obsessive feelings of his own for the woman who has just broken his heart in reality.  The mulligan is provided by Pace’s self-centered, possessive fantasy about a ‘golden locket’ no one else could open until it was pierced by his bullet.  Notions like this are not something the little girl can really appreciate, but it seems to be fairly cathartic for Pace when he’s not indulging in huge amounts of morphine.

While the visuals and cinematography are beautiful,  it’s only fair that someone as obsessed with visuals as Singh is be put to the same tests we would a photographer. And frankly, he suffers from the same problems that plagued Hype Williams’ directorial effort in ‘Belly.’  Almost everything in the film is too centered and overly posed.  Very little of the movement seems natural, in a pretty maddening case of not being able to see the forest for the trees.  In addition, Singh’s obsession with male form and musculature leads to many absolutely ridiculous uses of slow motion that serve no purpose other than to make sure we see his work. This is also a problem when — much like Zhang Yimou did in ‘Curse of the Golden Flower’ — Singh forces certain tableau to the forefront when intimacy was probably a better idea.

Find Your Center

Again..

One More for the Road

It all works out pretty well though, because a living breathing fairy tale is as suited for that style as his mindscape was in his previous film. And the question of whether a story belongs to the intended audience (why tell a story to others if you don’t care what they think?), or the creator (it’s an artist’s job to create and let others react) is always a fun one to revisit.

Movie – 7/10
DVD – 5/10

‘The Fall’ Trailer:

Review by Steve Broome
sbroome at coalminds dot com