Southland Tales

2008 is the Horny Teen Age, apparently

Southland Tales (2006)

Starring: Dwayne Johnson, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Seann William Scott, Justin Timberlake, Amy Sedaris, Miranda Richardson

The Gist: Summarising this film is like someone coming up to you and saying “You know that show Lost? I’ve never seen it, what’s it about? Oh I only have time for you to say four words though cause then I have to go down this mysterious hatch.” But here’s my gold star answer for what Lost and Southland Tales are really about: lots of confusing nothing. The reason I bring up Lost is because around the time this film came out I read an article about the JJ Abrams-isation of popular culture. It basically spoke about how films and TV shows can’t be just that single entity anymore, they need layers of extraneous mythology whether it’s graphic novels or secret websites or whatever. The amount of interest I had in reading the surrounding graphic novels after seeing this pile of “huh?” doesn’t need any extra anything though cause it’s absolute zero.

And then what happens?: Many many things. Parts of the US have been exploded. The Rock is a missing veteran who is engaged to Mandy Moore, but he’s got amnesia/is being kept prisoner (maybe) by Sarah Michelle Gellar. She’s Krista Now, a former porn star turned-revolutionary who’s starting a pop career, trying to get production for some film and also launching an energy drink. Meanwhile you’ve got two Stiflers running around competing in a “who-looks-more-confused-to-be-here” contest. Then they get on a big zeppelin and The Rock, Moore and Gellar sing a song. In the end I think a flying ice-cream truck explodes them all.

See it for: If I had to pick a moment it would be the panel show that Gellar hosts with some other porn stars where they talk about current affairs. And her single “Teen Horniness is Not a Crime” (listen to that here). It contains the following lyrics: An overcrowded nation/Leads to sex frustration/All your legislation/Can’t stop teens’ masturbation. In fact all the parts with her are good, which makes it that much more frustrating that the rest of the film lets her down.

Other insane lyric I wanted to headline this review with: Teen horniness is not a crime/Observe the nerds who shot up Columbine.

Level of Crazy: 10. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still bonkers, so watch it. Then we can talk about it.

Southland Tales: A Brilliant Mistake

Take a plot inspired by two great Philip K Dick works FLOW MY TEARS, THE POLICEMAN SAID and NOW WAIT FOR LAST YEAR add a dash of Roeg’s THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH, a healthy dose of Alex Cox’s REPO MAN, spice it with pseudo-science fiction comedy and melodrama (trying to channel the Cohen Brothers) then add the final ingredient, THE ADVENTURES OF BUCKAROO BANZAI ACROSS THE 8TH DIMENSION and what do you get? You get this fustercluck!

Kelly’s sophomore effort is a real disappointment but I just admire the effort; this is a brilliant mistake, as Elvis Costello would say. The film’s first fault is with its structure. The film begins like the introduction to a video game with abundant exposition that transitions into small vignettes, with separate scenes spliced together to make an incoherent mess. The second fault is in character development. Kelly introduces too many characters and the story bounces around from one to the other leaving the viewer apathetic to any dramatic revelation. The acting is also cardboard and static with Dwayne Johnson having the emotional range of a Rock…it’s really cringe inducing. The whole movie plays like a badly written Saturday Night Live skit that just drags on for 2 hours and 15 minutes; it’s just not worth the five minutes of humor and wit. Kelly is adapting a Richard Matheson novel (my favorite writer after PKD) for his next film so I hope he’s over the sophomore jinx. Final Grade: (D)

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Recommendations: The Birds, Breathless (Jean-Luc Godard, 1960), Funny Games

All reviews copyright Korova, Ltd. Visit Alex at his Home Theatre Blog, http://korovatheatrepresents.blogspot.com/

Last updated: 2010-02-25 07:35:13 by AlexDelarge

Southland Tales

Some movies are like watching the Hindenburg burn. I’m not talking about movies you expect to be bad (remakes, sequels, anything with a colon in the title), but about movies you had hopes for which sadden you (like Bonfire of the Vanities, the last twenty or so Woody Allen movies, everything Sam Mendes has made). Southland Tales is terrible. It is not good but for… anything, nor is it bad save for [insert what you like]. It is a mistake that could only be made in movies; the end result of an onslaught of sycophancy that must have been mind-bending to behold. Seriously – to those on set – was Richard Kelly drunk when he made this? Or is he just stupid?

This movie should be Dr. Strangelove. I don’t believe Kelly ever saw the wood for the trees clear enough to think of it that way, but think:Strangelove and at least you have a place to start. It’s a political satire set in the near future. There has been a terrorist incident in Texas and, as a consequence, the right-wing government has initiated a civil rights crackdown. A group of liberal insurgents, calling themselves the Neo-Marxists, are fighting an underground war against the regime. Both sides have an interest in a movie star who has recently reappeared after a presumed kidnapping. The movie star believes he is a prophet sent to foretell the end of the world…

Let’s begin with what Kelly did wrong: casting The Rock as “the movie star”. Now I like The Rock. He seems like a thoroughly decent human being. But he’s not an actor. I presume Richard Kelly thought: I know he’s not an actor, but that’s the point!, I’m satirizing how Hollywood would cast this role!… But that’s a stupid way of thinking. It’s pretty much the same for every role in Southland Tales: Sarah Michelle Gellar as a vapid Valley Girl porn star (because that’s, like, totally riffing on her public persona!); Sean William Scott as a racist cop (because, like, he’s Stifler, and only Hollywood would think he could do the stretch!)… Kelly wants to show us how clever he is by latching onto pop-culture semiotic talismans rather than casting correctly, and he buries his movie in the process. NB: You cannot satirize the medium of a satire (i.e. big budget action movies) at the same time as satirizing U.S. politics. This is a classic clever-clever director error: you make your message too complicated.

The only scene that works, tellingly, works because of someone else’s best efforts. There is a cracking karaoke number where Justin Timberlake (playing… God knows who) lip-syncs to The Killers’ “All These Things I’ve Done” (chorus: I got soul, but I’m not a soldier) and for a moment the movie is what it wants to be: lean, witty, dazzled by violence, but sickened by it too, a cry against making war look good, made in the full knowledge that – to the Grand Theft Auto generation – violence will always look cool. Is the scene actually good? It’s meant to be a Busby Berkley number, but it looks like they shot it for nine bucks. Timberlake doesn’t look comfortable with irony. He doesn’t even swig beer convincingly. But the song works.

I didn’t like Kelly’s debut, Donnie Darko, for the genre-splicing. I couldn’t go along with those who thought that movie deep. All the worm-holes and the stuff-you’ve-gotta- watch-twice-for struck me as a distraction. What Kelly did well was to get inside a teenager’s head. He had a similar opportunity with Southland Tales. He could have talked about the War on Terror in a way that dealt with human truths. But his smarty-pants side got the best of him. Southland Tales signifies nothing. It’s a movie that wants to speak sincerely in quotation marks; too chicken to get angry, not witty enough to make you laugh. Movies like this won’t get us out of Iraq.