Southland Tales. (15.)
Directed by Richard Kelly.
Starring Dwayne Johnson, Seann William Scott, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Mandy Moore, Cheri Oteri, Wallace Shawn, Amy Poehler, Nora Dunn, Bai Ling, Holmes Osbourne, Miranda Richardson, Jon Lovitz, John Larroquette and Justin Timberlake. Streaming on MUBI.com from April 5th as part of their Perfect Failures season. 145 mins.
As self-indulgent, megalomaniac, follow-ups to a classic debut feature go, Richard Kelly's Southland Tales is the most extreme example since Dennis Hopper's The Last Movie. It's part old testament, part Rocky Horror, part MTV Spring Break, part Fahrenheit 9/11, part bad David Lynch, at least three parts a rehash Katherine Bigelow's pre-millennial LA thriller Strange Days and a cheeky smidgen of the ending of Repo Man. But most of all, it's exactly no part Donnie Darko.
After the slow-burning success of his elegantly controlled debut movie about suburban time travel and alternative universes, writer/director Kelly (still barely in his thirties) has thrown all his toys into the pram with this sprawling, undisciplined sci-fi/ satire about the world ending in Los Angeles. Other than being very weird, it's as different from Donnie Darko as is possible to imagine.
The tone oscillates wildly: comedy, music videos, biblical prophesy and shoot outs all come tumbling haphazardly onto the screen. The feeling of random chaos is accentuated by Kelly populating his film with a ragtag band of former teen stars, pop singers, TV icons and any number of Saturday Night Live performers. When Christophe Lambert shows up it feels like this is less a cast, more a thespian equivalent of Bring Me Your Tired, Your Poor, Your Huddled Masses.
At the heart of it is Dwayne Johnson, dropping his wrestling moniker The Rock for the first time, who is absolutely ridiculous as a kind of Schwarzenegger figure; the action star who's married into a major political family. With his eerie frozen face and panic-filled eyes, he looks like Kryton from Red Dwarf but it's probably not a bad performance – it may be he's playing exactly the character as written.
The film is packed full of ideas, only a few of which are any good. Set around the 2008 Presidential election it lumbers itself with lots of political satire reflecting the civil liberties concerns around the Patriot Act and War on Terror. Even back then American politics was operating at a level of insanity that it looked on satire as a double dare ya. More interesting are the sci-fi strands involving perpetual motion machines and rips in the fabric of the fourth dimension but there always seems to be so much clutter in the film to fully explore anything satisfactorily.
The movie jumps in at Chapter IV (supposedly there are a set of graphic novels that flesh out the back story more fully) and right from the off it is clear that not only is there a hell of a lot going on here, but that Kelly has little or no idea on how to communicate them to an audience. So instead we have Justin Timberlake as his mop-up man, popping up to provide in his narration explanations of what the images have failed to communicate. Actually, it's nowhere near as incomprehensible as its reputation. The story can be followed easily enough.
It's a terrible mess and I wouldn't recommend it to anyone because most people will hate and resent it but I can't deny that I happily lapped up every silly second of it. I laughed with it and at it, and after a while I stopped distinguishing. It's never dull and somewhere in its compendium of conspiracies, prophecies, shoot outs and outlandish sci-fi there is a cross-pollination between the inspired ideas and the rubbish ideas and the result is a cheerfully nonsensical pleasure. Normally with bloated failures like this, the reaction is to wonder at what it could've been. With Southland Tales I think this is probably the optimal version, the mess and crappiness are integral to its vision. The mess is the message.
Directed by Richard Kelly.
Starring Dwayne Johnson, Seann William Scott, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Mandy Moore, Cheri Oteri, Wallace Shawn, Amy Poehler, Nora Dunn, Bai Ling, Holmes Osbourne, Miranda Richardson, Jon Lovitz, John Larroquette and Justin Timberlake. Streaming on MUBI.com from April 5th as part of their Perfect Failures season. 145 mins.
As self-indulgent, megalomaniac, follow-ups to a classic debut feature go, Richard Kelly's Southland Tales is the most extreme example since Dennis Hopper's The Last Movie. It's part old testament, part Rocky Horror, part MTV Spring Break, part Fahrenheit 9/11, part bad David Lynch, at least three parts a rehash Katherine Bigelow's pre-millennial LA thriller Strange Days and a cheeky smidgen of the ending of Repo Man. But most of all, it's exactly no part Donnie Darko.
After the slow-burning success of his elegantly controlled debut movie about suburban time travel and alternative universes, writer/director Kelly (still barely in his thirties) has thrown all his toys into the pram with this sprawling, undisciplined sci-fi/ satire about the world ending in Los Angeles. Other than being very weird, it's as different from Donnie Darko as is possible to imagine.
The tone oscillates wildly: comedy, music videos, biblical prophesy and shoot outs all come tumbling haphazardly onto the screen. The feeling of random chaos is accentuated by Kelly populating his film with a ragtag band of former teen stars, pop singers, TV icons and any number of Saturday Night Live performers. When Christophe Lambert shows up it feels like this is less a cast, more a thespian equivalent of Bring Me Your Tired, Your Poor, Your Huddled Masses.
At the heart of it is Dwayne Johnson, dropping his wrestling moniker The Rock for the first time, who is absolutely ridiculous as a kind of Schwarzenegger figure; the action star who's married into a major political family. With his eerie frozen face and panic-filled eyes, he looks like Kryton from Red Dwarf but it's probably not a bad performance – it may be he's playing exactly the character as written.
The film is packed full of ideas, only a few of which are any good. Set around the 2008 Presidential election it lumbers itself with lots of political satire reflecting the civil liberties concerns around the Patriot Act and War on Terror. Even back then American politics was operating at a level of insanity that it looked on satire as a double dare ya. More interesting are the sci-fi strands involving perpetual motion machines and rips in the fabric of the fourth dimension but there always seems to be so much clutter in the film to fully explore anything satisfactorily.
The movie jumps in at Chapter IV (supposedly there are a set of graphic novels that flesh out the back story more fully) and right from the off it is clear that not only is there a hell of a lot going on here, but that Kelly has little or no idea on how to communicate them to an audience. So instead we have Justin Timberlake as his mop-up man, popping up to provide in his narration explanations of what the images have failed to communicate. Actually, it's nowhere near as incomprehensible as its reputation. The story can be followed easily enough.
It's a terrible mess and I wouldn't recommend it to anyone because most people will hate and resent it but I can't deny that I happily lapped up every silly second of it. I laughed with it and at it, and after a while I stopped distinguishing. It's never dull and somewhere in its compendium of conspiracies, prophecies, shoot outs and outlandish sci-fi there is a cross-pollination between the inspired ideas and the rubbish ideas and the result is a cheerfully nonsensical pleasure. Normally with bloated failures like this, the reaction is to wonder at what it could've been. With Southland Tales I think this is probably the optimal version, the mess and crappiness are integral to its vision. The mess is the message.
