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:
