Man, it's been a while since I've been so at odds with the majority of critics and filmgoers on any one movie. How can a movie that I enjoyed this much be so roundly hated?

I'm sure that this question still vexes Richard Kelly. I'm not surprised that he was shell shocked after the Cannes premiere. He must have been thinking exactly the same thing I was thinking while watching it:

How could they hate it THAT much!?!?

The toxic word of mouth on this film just plain baffles me.

Now, to be fair, I suspect that Kelly and I (to steal a phrase from TRUE ROMANCE), "park our cars in the same garage." Except, of course, that Kelly's garage is somewhere in a nice L.A. county neighborhood while mine...

...doesn't exist.

Richard Kelly and I are exactly the same age and this hit home when I saw that his DONNIE DARKO was very similar to a "novel" I had written during school hours back in 1993. My novel was set in 1989 and would have honestly been a lot more alien than DARKO, but very similar in terms of tone, setting and obvious debt owed to TWIN PEAKS.

Between the DARKO director's cut and the appalling DOMINO, I started to realize that Kelly and I were perhaps not so much alike as I first thought. Even during my darkest days of self abuse during the turn of the century, I still would not have dreamt up a masturbation fantasy quite as obvious and unpleasant as DOMINO. Well, I might have, but it would have been really different. B)

Anyway, it was with a mixture of curiosity and wariness that I approached SOUTHLAND TALES. Could it be that Richard Kelly was trying to reinvent DONNIE DARKO through a DOMINO filter? No, thanks.

I can't tell you how relieved I am to be wrong. Then again, I may be right, but Kelly brings back the intelligence and wit and pop culture roots that made DARKO so appealing. Yes, SOUTHLAND TALES is actually far more self-indulgent than DOMINO, but it also feels more honest. It has the trappings of a stoked fever dream, but it delves into Kelly's obsessions rather than pretending to be about anything else. I think that what upset me the most about DOMINO (aside from the horribly wrong-headed approach to Domino Harvey's life) is that it brought the ugly aesthetics without any kind of substance to make them palatable.

I could describe the plot, but that would be folly. Oh, sure, I'll be more than happy to discuss it with *SPOILER* warnings, but to lay it out would be unfair and just plain silly. You can go and read the plot synopsis over on Wikipedia, but it still won't convey the experience of watching this movie.

So, the only warning I can possibly offer is to point out the obvious:

A LOT of people hate this movie with a white hot passion and you may hate it too. I can sort of understand why someone would dislike it, but I honestly don't understand or relate to the pure bile.

Of course, part of the reason is that so much of this film is identical to a story I've been concocting for the last decade and a half and it's more than a little disheartening to see a story that I wish I had written be so passionately rejected. Had I made this film and endured the exact same response, I would have retired from filmmaking.

It's possible that Kelly made this film for an audience of one, but perhaps he can take heart in the fact that he now has at least an audience of two.

In the interest of full disclosure, I'd like to also mention that I'm fond of Bruce Wagner's WILD PALMS. It may be possible to guage your reaction to SOUTHLAND TALES based on how you felt about that.

==================

And to give you an idea of how much this film has warmed me up to Kelly, I actually plan to give DOMINO another chance.

Of course, I may require a steady supply of strong beverages to do so.

I had this to say about it elsewhere on Mobius (complete with WILD PALMS reference):

"I'm tempted to call Richard Kelly's SOUTHLAND TALES the iPod generation equivalent to SKIDOO, but that might dissuade the curious from seeing it (maybe it would attract them, too). Its furious ambition is almost completely muffled by the cutesy casting of B-listers, TV stars, and "personalities," and as in Preminger's film the humor falls completely flat as we try to sort out what's going on while Moby puts the soundtrack on shuffle; Justin Timberlake's relentless voiceover narration isn't much of an aid. (It all reminded me of the WILD PALMS TV miniseries.) But somewhere there is a pulse, one that beats for concern about America in the post 9/11 near future, and its use of an airship took me all the way back to DeMille and MADAM SATAN (1930). And we have The Rock married to Mandy Moore, whose harpy Republican mother is Miranda Richardson. That is something. "

All that and Christopher Lambert, too. (Not his Mobius-approved lookalike, Thomas Jane of THE MIST. Accept no substitutes. But they look to be the same age, actually, whatever the calendar truth.) Oh, and clips from KISS ME DEADLY, though the sensibility is closer to WILD PALMS and maybe REPO MAN.

Like I said, there's something there, and it may be that you found it, or it found you. I sensed it, but like a chest of gold that you just know is buried in your backyard I couldn't quite excavate it. What it lacks, and I think this is crucial, is a central character as compelling as Donnie Darko, a way into its not-quite-alternate universe (which all the attendant graphic novels may lay out more sensibly).

And not every critic hated it. It has fans. There were no walkouts at the showing I attended and two audience members clapped when it ended, I think because they liked it and not because it was finally over. :)

I'm so bummed... I really wanted to see this. It started, in my area, on the Friday before the Thanksgiving week and ended by Tuesday... to make room for THE MIST, HITMAN, etc., I guess. Not even a week-long run... I can't think of any film in recent memory where a studio picture didn't even get a full week run.

:(

While I wouldn't say I enjoyed it, I definitely wasn't bored by it. Most of the time I was just wondering where he was going with it... and when he got there, I was just left wondering not so much if he'd lost the map, but even started out with one.

Mostly it just came across as a cinematic memoir, a montage of his influences.

Although the Shock Treatment riff was sort of perplexing.

All in all, definitely not something I'll watch again to see if I can figure it all out, because I don't think that's really possible. One of the reasons I quit watching Lynch movies.

I'm not sure why people are getting so bent out of shape. Sure it's self-indulgent and a mess, but it's also more fun than any movie I've seen in a long while. Kelly really captures modern pop culture's toxic blend of sex, religion, politics, paranoia, celebrity, and consumerism.

If you have an opportunity to see this on a big screen, run out and catch it before the movie disappears from theaters.

I thought it sagged pretty badly here and there, but there was enough funny and weird and timely stuff to get me through. Kelly seems to have a bit of an obsession with Christ figures though, doesn't he? On the other hand, it made Venice Beach look a lot more interesting than I've ever thought it was before. This should be good fodder for the college bonghit crowd, and Lord knows they need new fodder.

WAKING LIFE's cashed, dude.

I'm surprised that the word here on SOUTHLAND TALES has been generally positive. On another film discussion group I participate in, it really seems to have divided people, with about a 4:1 ratio of hate to love. Personally, I thought it was a tedious mess with a few remarkable scenes. I liked "All These Things That I've Done," "Teen Horniness Is No Crime" and the commercial with the SUVs having sex. When I read J. Hoberman's review, I thought it sounded like a total blast; when I actually watched it, Kelly's attempts at wit almost all fell flat. His direction of actors wanders all over the place, as does the film's tone. IDIOCRACY is a lot less ambitious, but its dystopian satire is better thought-out and actually funny.

Now that you mention it, that was probably my biggest issue. His timing was flat when it came to what could have been big moments.

The squib bit and the vehicular homicide bit are two cases that come immediately to mind. The former could have been brutal and funny at the same time, but was played too coy. The latter telegraphed itself way to much ahead of time.

I think a lot of why instances like that didn't work is that he seemed too distant from the mayhem, both literally and figuratively.

Too much was conveyed in wide shots, and he lost a lot of the potential impact.

Does anyone know if this is playing in LA. I saw an add for it and the website said it started at the Arclight on November 14th and in Burbank on November 16th. I looked it up 5 days later to go see it and it was nowhere to be found. So, anyone know what the deal is. There's no way it was pulled from every LA theater in 5 days, is there?

Oh, and I don't care what anyone else thinks, I love Domino, seriously my favorite Tony Scott film.

I think it's playing at the Beverly Center.

It's down to just 1 theater in NY. I plan on seeing it Sunday.

More like BEYOND THE VALLEY OF THE DOLLS for The Millennium Crowd. :lol:

The opening sentence from RogerEbert.com site editor Jim Emerson's strongly negative review of Southland Tales made me laugh:

"Sometimes I doubt Richard Kelly's commitment to Sparkle Motion."


http://blogs.suntimes.com/scanners/2007/12...t_even_a_m.html

I did end up going to see this at The Beverly Center. It was interesting and I though Sarah Michelle Gellar was quite good in it. This is a very ambitious film which I found to have a real intellectual curiousity. That said, it was massively indulgent. The ton of cameos gets a little ridiculous. Most of these people barely have anything to do. Justin Timberlake and Christopher Lambert's characters seem to be there only to serve as narrative devices. In the end, I felt it was ambitious, messy, indulgent, sort of unfocused, but still very interesting and enjoyable.

Steven Shaviro sure liked it a lot.

I dunno, I kept thinking of things like WILD IN THE STREETS and THE PRESIDENT'S ANALYST.

Salon has provided the ultimate cheat sheet for decoding the plot of SOUTHLAND TALES:

http://www.salon.com/ent/movies/feature/20...tales_analysis/

Now that I have a grasp on the overall story within this film, I really do feel more than ever that Kelly took every single far out idea that he wanted to make a film about and tried to cram them into the same story.

Which, again, is a trick I considered trying last year prior to seeing this film. While I like the film just fine, the final result really is daunting to anyone considering this approach. On the other hand, the primary failure to communicate this story is entirely Kelly's. This makes the second film in a row in which he concocted a convoluted, far out plot and then opted not to share it with the audience within the framework of the film itself.

Unlike DONNIE DARKO which I felt was hampered by Kelly's slavish adherence to his "tangent universe" hokum, I really like the story of SOUTHLAND TALES and feel that the metaphysical gobbledy-gook finds a better match with these bigger than life characters in their over the top world.

Knowing Kelly's intentions (or possible intentions) makes the theatrical cut of the film much more rewarding. Someone on Kelly's fansite forwarded the notion that Krysta is the film's Christ figure (with Boxer being the false prophet?). If you buy into that (taking into account that Krysta has psychic ability like a low-level Bene Gesserit from DUNE and had a prophetic vision owing to her powers, being force-fed The Book of Revelation and ingesting an eighth of psychadelic 'shrooms) then almost everything the character does or says is amusing. Krysta really does seem like she's spreading a Christ-like philosophy owing to her reluctant enlightenment.

And, of course, it all comes through the filter of Krysta's nature as a porn star and a dizz bomb. Oh, that Richard Kelly. You know, if he had thought to really pursue that (or ANY of his ideas in this film), it could have been dangerous (in a good way).

Ah, well. I still like this movie way too much. It's a half baked epic from a talented young smart ass who was too lazy to shape this material into the masterpiece that it could have been.

I have many many problems with this film, but I am recommending it to everybody. The more that people see it, the more we all can make sense of it.

Probably the most pretentious part of the film was starting it at chapter four, and expecting us to read chapters one through three beforehand.



marc

I dunno. I kinda felt like most of what I've heard about the 'extra-textual' content is either inferable or borderline immaterial. I never felt exactly lost during the film - or particularly engaged - but do I really need to know that Timberlake and Scott were grooving on the Killers track immediately prior to their friendly fire run-in to respond to the sequence on its own terms within the film? Or, like the pages from Grandma Death's book on time travel in DONNIE DARKO, does the added context just diminish something which benefits chiefly from a certain inexplicability anyway?

EDIT: This is the new director's cut of this post with the "extra-textual" material back where it belongs. ;)

That's largely how I feel about DONNIE DARKO. Without the hoo-ha about tangent universes and "manipulated dead" working in tandem with "manipulated living," DARKO is a nice slice of Lynchian sensibility through a Generation X filter (whatever all that means). Mostly, I just think that the prosaic, mundane nature of the plot in DONNIE DARKO was far less interesting than Richard Kelly seemed to think it was so I guess there's a personal bias and a double standard on my part.

With SOUTHLAND TALES, I feel that a lot of the "extra-textual" info IS necessary into grasping the story. While the connection of The Killers track to Fallujah most definitely comes off as Kellyesque overkill, I really appreciate the entire backstory which ties the Treer corporation to the lineage of Karl Marx or the "rift" that exists not just in the space-time continuum, but between the Serpentine Dream Theory doctors and the baron himself. The notion that Simon Thiery and the doctors Exx WANT to let the chips fall where they may allow the convergence of extreme conservatism and extreme liberalism to bring about the destruction of our world is good stuff. Unfortunately, it exists only as subtext unless you have information from sources outside of the narrative. Much like Kelly's self-conscious reliance on consistent deus ex machinas to drive his narratives forward, this just smacks of lazy writing.

And needless to say, I really like the backstory on Krysta Now. I honestly had no friggin' idea what she was even doing in the movie until I read that. Now, my previous second least favorite scene (between Gellar and Nora Dunn) has become one that I enjoy quite a bit. Ditto the clips from Gellars "reality/chat" show.

To be fair, I never felt lost when initially watching the movie either, but that's because I made a conscious decision to shrug off the seeming incomprehensibility of it all and just go with the flow. Yes, we got the basic idea of what was going on, but this extra info gives life to scenes which previously seemed like bad ideas.

It doesn't make them good ideas per se, but it at least gives them a context where viewers who are willing to go the extra mile can sort of try to enjoy them on their intended level.

And besides, as with films of P.T. Anderson (whom Kelly clearly idolizes among many others), the pleasures of SOUTHLAND TALES come not from grasping the big picture so much as the little, droll moments within scenes like Cheri Oteri having to interrupt her swagger to do a little hop because she's too short to see who's on the other side of a door or my personal favorite, the scene in which the expression on the pyrotechnic guy from the back of a squad car shows him quickly realizing just how far in over his stoner head he really is.

Kelly has the most luck not so much skewering easy political targets as he does certain archetypes that he has almost certainly observed while spending time around Venice and Santa Monica. That's the good stuff right there.

Weird - where'd all that 'extra-textual' content attributed to me come from? Only the first paragraph's mine.

Wait a sec - is this the 'extended cut' of my comments?! Damn you Richard Kelly, you couldn't leave well enough alone, could you?! :P

HOLY COW!!!

Sorry about that!! I decided to respond on the fly somewhere between getting out of the shower and getting dressed to go out. This is what happens when I decide to sit and post on the internet instead of, ya know, getting ready to leave like I should have been doing.

Sorry about that. Heh, I'm honestly not even sure how I managed to make that mistake. Consider it fixed.

:lol:

Yet my post will remain as a silent, stinging reminder of your carelessness.

You know, sometimes I doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion.

I'm glad that some love is starting to pour SOUTHLAND TALES way as it's a totally worthy follow-up to DONNIE DARKO...The film works PERFECTLY in context of say the work of CRAIG BALDWIN, than McG, but then again...!!

Of course the film was to fail, anything truly SUBVERSIVE inevitably will in a totally saturated, capitalist structure - I mean the only way to kill something in today's culture is to deny it a market/audience - or more accurately let the market decide what's best (yes and no...)..!

I think Kelly will emerge as one of the great 'new' American directors of the 00s, I mean can you really place any other American directors working in genre this decade up there? Nathali? Aronofsky? Zac Snider? Eli Roth?@#!! None come even close on an aesthetic and intellectual level, not even the guy who writes Buffy or the doodz who do 'Lost'!

BIG SPOILERS for both of Richard Kelly's films.


I have not read the comic books or visited any of the related websites. In my opinion, I think they're all red herrings, entertaining but non-essential, in the same manner that "The Philosophy of Time Travel" is an engaging but ultimately needless sidebar to DONNIE DARKO.


At its core, DONNIE DARKO is a retelling of Ambrose Bierce's AN OCCURRENCE AT OWL CREEK BRIDGE, only instead of a condemned soldier fantasizing of escape to home and wife, it is a troubled teen who, in the seconds he has to conetemplate his death, purges his guilt for the tumult he's created by fantasizing that it's all for the best, and he will be vindicated by his family and peers. The haunting, Kieslowski-esque "Mad World" montage serves the latter purpose - even Patrick Swayze's false healer/pedophile character can sense the loss, because while his career is ruined in Donnie's alternate reality, it brings a closure to his double life that he will still have to face in a Donnie-less world.

In this manner, I interpret SOUTHLAND TALES as another extended fantasy, albeit not a "deathbed" one. To me, almost all of the sprawling tale is a somewhat drug-induced construct of Justin Timberlake's wounded war vet narrator Pilot Abilene, who is wrestling with how to deal with the injuries done to him, both by his best friend in combat, and by his country as a whole. [Key to my reading is that aside from tertiary contact with minor characters, and his firing the fatal shot that kills Starla -an imaginary act in this interpretation, obviously - Abilene has no interaction with the ostensible leads of the story.]

Pilot Abilene is angry with the friend who scarred him, the politicians who sent him to kill, the revolutionaries who failed to stop it, the celebrities who sold the war to him, etc. So he begins to split these people as if they were all "good cop/bad cop" (literally for Scott's and later Johnson's character). It's not unheard of: my mother had a very bitter divorce from my father, and to hear her speak of my father as a youth, which she does with great delight, versus my father in the present, which is fraught with anger, you would think that two different people were being discussed. This cognitive dissonace, this disconnect, allows Abilene to explore and empathize with their redeeming qualities. By letting his imagination run wild, he finally begins to see that all causes can be corrupted, good souls make bad compromises - the duality of humanity is inescapable. And he sees how to reconcile those two halves, in the almost literal manner of his former best friend. Yes, the friendly fire incident left him ugly and wounded, but it also got him out of the war zone, where he would have likely perished, and back to a semi-comfortable life in America. The "end of the world" is not a literal one, but of the fogged, drugged world of hurt and anger he inhabits - the "bang" is the necessary rush of pain when the drugs are gone and he is fully conscious of everything that's happening.

And now that Abilene can see that his friend can be both sinner and saint, as can his country, he can forgive them both and start his life anew. I have to think this is an autobiographical read on Kelly's behalf too, seeing as how, for example, Dwayne Johnson and Sarah Michelle Gellar are (to the best of my knowledge) registered Republicans; as if to say he once judged them by their politics, but now can see they had a sincere belief in the same manner he had one that was in opposition, and that all of them found flaws in those systems of belief. I'm also rather fond of the possible "shoot" aspect of the tensions between Amy Poehler and Cheri Oteri's characters - i.e. "Yelling doesn't make it funny" (a put-down of Oteri's shrill characters during her "SNL" tenure?).

Any meat to these thoughts?

That's what I liked about SOUTHLAND TALES, love it or hate it, it gave you something to chew on. Sometimes being an ambitious failure is better than being a mediocre good.

It's definitley all over the place, a big sprawling mess of great ideas (lookin' for a script doctor in Richard Kellly's alternate identity evil twin universe.) I enjoyed it, I think it could have been pared down, but then again, it is what it is.

Probably need to do some more chewing and gurgitating. :)