SOUTHLAND TALES Will Be Told

It's really too bad it might not pan out the way most had hoped. The premise alone had my ass in a theatre seat.

Not quite universal

Taken from http://www.cinema-scope.com/cs27/spo...conspiracy.htm


CANNES 2006: Conspiracy of Dunces
By Mark Peranson
“There’s shit in the meat”—Fast Food Nation


* * *

“Why make it simple when you can make it complicated?”—Jacques Rivette, quoted by Pedro Costa

But as the saying goes, it only takes a few good men. Frémaux’s two most daring choices were the true stand-outs, and, inevitably, the films at the bottom of all critical polls. One bad review isn’t enough: at Cannes, when the press is united, the effect is akin to carpet-bombing. If, as the Hollywood Reporter supposedly opined halfway through the festival, this year’s competition approximated the sublime 2002 vintage, then this year’s demonlover is surely Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales. (I say “supposedly” because I survived the Fortnight without reading this particularly egregious example of Yankee war propaganda.) As universally reviled as a film can get without being directed by Vincent Gallo, Southland Tales, over the course of a week, took on film maudit status, as its few, ardent supporters became more vocal when faced with a storm of insults from a hoi polloi that, not content to pummel a poor director when he’s down, had to knee him and those who dared defend him in the groin for good measure.

A film in which toilets are a primary element of art direction, Southland Tales is sprawling, abrasive, loud, vulgar, and something to behold—in its current form, at least. Here, the shit is the meat: to quote the film, it’s one possible vision of what will happen when the shit hits the fan (after Texas is nuked, when the Apocalypse is triggered by a baby’s fart). There are innumerable interpretations or tentative analyses of Kelly’s Donnie Darko (2001) follow-up (the amount of films cited is Godardian), but with its crazy names and cuckoo conspiracies, it strikes me as positively Pynchonian performance art—the entire film an approximation of Tyrone Slothrop’s plunge into the crapper in Gravity’s Rainbow, emerging in a semi-fascist, semi-recognizable near-future America. Its obfuscated, noir-tinged narrative style is of the conspiratorial variety beloved of Jacques Rivette (who will surely love this movie: it’s the new Showgirls), with constant double-crosses and shadowy, under-elucidated plots manned by a bevy of oddballs, both government and private. Southland is also a film internet propre, constantly condensing space, zooming about like a hyperactive, pre-Ritalined (silver) surfer: it’s a perpetual motion machine. The way the story is told is inseparable from the content, as the conspiratorial narrative style is an integral element to Kelly’s anti-status quo provocation. Will the kids like it—dunno, don’t care—but, irregardless, why does it all need to make sense? Despite what you may have heard (and are hearing, and will hear), Southland Tales is very much releasable at its current length. Sure, it might drag a bit in the third hour, but what Rivette film doesn’t?

To paraphrase Rivette, Southland Tales says that Los Angeles Belongs to Us. If you want a plot summary, go read Variety, but let me just say that the semi-improvised film has, in no particular order: neo-Marxist revolutionaries led by Nora Dunn; an evil German corporation named Treer (after Lars von?) that has found a way to harness the ocean’s waves as an alternative fuel; The Rock (maybe a few of them); a porn star version of The View (one of a number of vehicles for Sarah Michelle Geller’s Krysta Now to spread out something more than her legs, another being her single “Teen Horniness Is Not a Crime”); half of the cast of Saturday Night Live; Justin Timberlake as a scarred Iraq War vet/drug dealer; and, of course, time travel. Oozing over the viewer like a wave of mutilation from the mind of a paranoid schizophrenic, perhaps young Kelly’s folly cuts too close to the bone: Americans can be touchy, especially when it’s pointed out that they’re currently leaning towards a fascist dictatorship.

It’s also hilarious: my personal favourite moment is in one of the many throwaway gags, a small excerpt of Cheri Oteri’s ludicrous brand of “shout comedy” appearing on one of innumerable television screens, though I could list dozens of other anarchic zingers. Touches like that I’m sure will have vanished from view by the time the film (currently without an American distributor, and being shopped around by…Wild Bunch) shows again in another form. (It was barely finished in time, and screened in a pretty damned great digital projection.) Surely the drastically recut version will reappear in Toronto in September, Brown Bunny-like, and will be roundly fellated. But in this age, where there’s always a director’s edition DVD or two on the horizon, there’s still hope that the full Southland Tales will be seen by more than just an international conspiracy of dunces in a dinky French fishing village.

Here's a few other good to glowing reviews:

http://www.villagevoice.com/film/062...,73309,20.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/22/mo...156644&ei=5070

(I'll post the related info because NYT requires a subscription)

--On Sunday afternoon the yells were for "Sarah! Sarah! Sarah!" and "Rock! Rock! Rock!" meaning Sarah Michelle Gellar and Dwayne Johnson, two of the stars of Richard Kelly's new film, "Southland Tales." This noisy reception was in stark contrast to the welcome that Mr. Kelly's long-anticipated follow-up to his 2001 cult favorite, "Donnie Darko," received during is first screening before a palpably hostile press.

A black comedy about Dystopia, America, "Southland Tales" opens with a line from T. S. Eliot's poem "The Hollow Man" ("This is the way the world ends") and a nuclear bomb exploding above a Fourth of July gathering. What follows is a sprawling, periodically dazzling, often funny pop-and-politics mash-up that finds a porn star (Ms. Gellar's character) united with an action star (Mr. Johnson's) to save a country awash in celebrity culture and neo-conservatism.

At the news conference, sitting next to the stars and his longtime producer, Sean McKittrick, an unsmiling Mr. Kelly seemed painfully aware of the critical reception, even going so far as to hope aloud that the film would not "bomb."

Given the critical reaction and the lack of an American distributor so far, this worry may be premature.

"It's a very sad situation we've found ourselves in as a country," Mr. Kelly said at one point. I'm not sure he was only speaking politically. MANOHLA DARGIS

http://www.aintitcool.com/display.cgi?id=23407

http://www.citypages.com/databank/27...ticle14394.asp



Most of the other incredibly positive reviews are European, seems like the critics across the Atlantic responded much more favorably to the film than those in this country.

I'm still holding out hope that it won't be a complete disaster.

See, a derisive treatment comparable, according to this reviewer, with the hubbub surrounding "Demonlover"? That says more to me that the rest of his peculiar review.