Southland Tales

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pianocrash
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Southland Tales

#1 Post by pianocrash » Sun May 21, 2006 2:27 pm


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Fletch F. Fletch
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#2 Post by Fletch F. Fletch » Mon May 22, 2006 9:46 am

A clip from the movie from Cannes Festival site.

Movie poster and stills.

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rumz
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#3 Post by rumz » Mon May 22, 2006 10:36 am

courtesy Mike D:
Anyway, back to Southland Tales. Part of the problem with trying to review this overstuffed folly, even in rushed, conversational capsule form, is that the amount of sheer unadulterated stuff Kelly throws at the screen precludes any kind of coherent synopsis. (In that respect -- but only that respect -- it reminds me a bit of Arnaud Desplechin's Kings & Queen, another movie most egghead American critics liked a lot more than I did.) You've got a crypto-fascist arm of the government called (I believe) USIdent; you've got radical neo-Marxist groups attempting to swing California in an upcoming election with the use of severed thumbs; you've got The Rock as a famous actor whose screenplay foretells the forthcoming apocalypse, and who begins to confuse himself with his fictional hero; you've got Wallace Shawn with bizarro hair as some kind of sinister energy mogul, plus Zelda Rubinstein as his...assistant? (nothing in this movie is that clear); you've got Seann William Scott as a beach cop who's replaced his identical twin brother for reasons that only become apparent in the film's third hour (by which time your brain has long since gone numb); you've got Miranda Richardson pulling pinched faces in front of a bank of video monitors, which appears to just be something that Kelly can randomly cut to for rhythmic purposes; you've got Kevin Smith overacting in a big stupid beard; you've got Sarah Michelle Gellar and three other hotties providing the newsflash that porn stars are stupid and shallow; you've got Justin Timberlake narrating events in the quavery voice of an 80-year-old woman...the absurdity just goes on and on, and yet everything remains disconnected and surface-level, weird-for-weird's-sake. Yes, Kelly addresses a handful of hot-button topics -- the growing infringement of civil liberties in the name of the war on terrorism; the increasingly symbiotic relationship between politics and entertainment -- but only the most shallow, simplistic, name-checking kind of way. Which would be forgivable if the movie were remotely funny, but it just plain isn't, despite the painfully labored efforts of the entire cast. Hence my previous reference to Hudson Hawk -- a much better movie, I have to say -- which is the last time I can remember seeing so much strained pseudo-satirical whimsy in one motion picture.

Incidentally, I have yet to see an actual printed review of Southland Tales that wouldn't qualify as a pan. The rave reviews I mentioned in my last entry, for the moment, remain only a rumor.

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#4 Post by rs98762001 » Mon May 22, 2006 1:16 pm

You gotta wonder with Kelly whether DONNIE DARKO was some sort of miraculous fluke.

I remember listening to his commentary on the DVD, and his literal interpretation of the movie jarred really bizarrely with what ended up onscreen. He gave a really dull, prosaic explanation for what I thought was intended to be a mysterious and open-ended film.

Everything since then - the execrable DOMINO, his awful screenplay for CAT'S CRADLE, now apparently SOUTHLAND TALES, not to mention his status within the Tarantino/Scott/Smith/Rodriguez clique - suggests there's a lot less to him than it initially seemed.

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John Cope
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#5 Post by John Cope » Mon May 22, 2006 1:24 pm

rs98762001 wrote:I remember listening to his commentary on the DVD, and his literal interpretation of the movie jarred really bizarrely with what ended up onscreen. He gave a really dull, prosaic explanation for what I thought was intended to be a mysterious and open-ended film.
Yes, I agree with you 100%. It was one of the most dispiriting experiences I've ever had with a commentary track, and I've gone through a lot of bad ones. It almost made me want to sell my DVD. Though I do disagree with you on Domino, which, believe it or not (and I've taken a lot of flack for this), I happen to love.

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#6 Post by rs98762001 » Mon May 22, 2006 1:32 pm

John Cope wrote:Yes, I agree with you 100%. It was one of the most dispiriting experiences I've ever had with a commentary track, and I've gone through a lot of bad ones. It almost made me want to sell my DVD. Though I do disagree with you on Domino, which, believe it or not (and I've taken a lot of flack for this), I happen to love.
Yikes. Well I guess someone somewhere had to love DOMINO. What is it that you love about it? I thought it was one of the most unwatchable films I've ever seen.

Incidentally, has anyone seen Kelly's Director's Cut of DARKO? Does it significantly alter the film and, if so, positively or negatively?

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Fletch F. Fletch
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#7 Post by Fletch F. Fletch » Mon May 22, 2006 1:54 pm

rs98762001 wrote:Incidentally, has anyone seen Kelly's Director's Cut of DARKO? Does it significantly alter the film and, if so, positively or negatively?
It's discussed at some length, here.

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John Cope
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#8 Post by John Cope » Mon May 22, 2006 2:04 pm

To be honest, and as perverse as it sounds, the very fact that Domino is so aggressively unwatchable is part of its allure for me. I remember being astonished by it in the theater because I couldn't believe I was seeing something so intentionally designed to satisfy the tastes of the over stimulated without apology or qualification.

I think of it as the ultimate postmodern movie--the perfect complement for the IPod video system. It should be stuck in a time capsule and labeled "When Postmodernism Began to Deconstruct Itself". Movies like Mulholland Drive and In the Mood For Love have been compared to music and are said to have an effect on the shift in audiencing techniques. Well, Domino is the pop music equivalent to their respective ambient and classical. In all seriousness it feels designed to work on that damn Ipod video, which I see as a symbol of the degeneration of artistic engagement--i.e. one glance down is all it takes. The ending, with its layered and conflicting music and sound cues, all at equal volume, is a staggering thing to behold, as is the absurdly sentimental finale (the sameness of all feelings and experiences); oh, and how about those multiple lap dissolves over Delroy Lindo's car as he drives down the highway in simple establishing shots? Scott plays to a degraded sensibility and makes no effort to disguise his cynicism as he assumes, perhaps rightly, that this is where all sensation all the time has lead us.

I suppose I shouldn't be lauding this picture but it does exactly what it is meant to do and it perfectly embodies a time in cultural history. For that reason it is the apotheosis of garbage.

I should add that the only competition I'm aware of for this "achievement" is Zalman King's much despised Showtime series Chromiumblue.com. Here we have a rush of virtually indecipherable and certainly suffocating imagery passing for narrative: decontextualized nudity, stock footage and incidental score from Zalman's films and scenes cut together to music which feature title and artist credits in the lower left hand corner. Ultimately though this is a more important work than Domino because King is actually aiming for more than just cultural reflection. There is a framing narrative of sorts and it is a very perceptive device for providing whatever context there is for everything else. Though King prsents CB like some kind of extended hedonistic free for all, this framing narrative suggests that it is actually an elegy for what has been lost (see also his stylized pseudo-doc on the life of nightclub impresario Ivan Kane, Forty Deuce, for further evidence of King's understanding of the narrow rooms of solipsism modern life encourages).

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Barmy
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#9 Post by Barmy » Mon May 22, 2006 4:05 pm

Looks like Southland is DOA.

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Fletch F. Fletch
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#10 Post by Fletch F. Fletch » Tue May 23, 2006 4:27 pm

J. Hoberman digs it:
Not so the most audacious, polarizing, and to my mind, enjoyable movie in the competition thus far: Southland Tales.

Kelly's second feature is as talented as—and even more ambitious than—his debut, the cult hit Donnie Darko. A high-voltage farrago of unsynopsizable plots and counterplots, Southland Tales unfolds—mid–presidential campaign—in an alternate, pre- and post-apocalyptic universe where Texas was nuked on July 5, 2005, and a German multinational has figured out how to produce energy from ocean water. The mode is high-octane sci-fi social satire; the cast is large and antic (with wrestler Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson as an anxious, amnesiac action hero and Sarah Michelle Gellar biting down hard on the role of socially conscious porn queen Krysta Now).

Essentially, Southland Tales is a big-budget, widescreen underground movie. ("Star-Spangled to Death," one colleague commented as we left the screening.) Filled with throwaway gags and trippy special effects, it's a comedy as well. Philip K. Dick is the presiding deity—the movie is thick with drugs, paranoia, and time-travel metaphysics—although Karl Marx (and his family) keep surfacing in various guises, including the last remnant of the Democratic Party. The film is a mishmash of literary citations, interpolated music videos, and movie references—most obviously to Robert Aldrich's Kiss Me Deadly—but it's even more concerned with evoking the ubiquitous media texture of contemporary American life.

At two hours and 40 minutes, Southland Tales flirts with the ineffable and also the unreleasable. There's no U.S. distributor; nor does the movie's humor, much of it predicated on a familiarity with American television, political rhetoric, and religious cant, seem designed to travel easily. Received with a lusty round of boos and a smattering of applause, Southland Tales provoked the festival's most negative press screening and hostile press conference since The Da Vinci Code. The first question suggested (incorrectly) that Kelly's movie had set a Cannes record for number of walkouts and asked the director how he felt.

Why was the Kelly Code too much to take? Sensory overload is certainly a factor, but unlike Da Vinci, Southland Tales actually is a visionary film about the end of times. There hasn't been anything comparable in American movies since Mulholland Drive.

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Barmy
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#11 Post by Barmy » Tue May 23, 2006 4:47 pm

He likes it BECAUSE it is a mess. Hoberman is known for that. Lame.

As a Domino fan, I will definitely go see it, but the bits I've seen online are boring and stupid.

And anyway, wasn't Antonioni booed?

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#12 Post by Noir of the Night » Tue May 23, 2006 6:39 pm

Yeah, if I'm not mistaken, L'Avventura was met with boos from the audience when it premiered at Cannes (I seem to remember reading tha Dreyer's Gertrud got a similar reaction).

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#13 Post by Napoleon » Wed May 24, 2006 8:25 am

Noir of the Night wrote:Yeah, if I'm not mistaken, L'Avventura was met with boos from the audience when it premiered at Cannes (I seem to remember reading tha Dreyer's Gertrud got a similar reaction).
And Crash (Cronenberg) and Brown Bunny.

A hostile premier is practically a seal of approval.

Unfortunately for Southland Tales critics are eloquently putting into words their reservations with the film, rather than threatening to burn down the cinema a la Rules of the Game. Which means that Southland is probably just a bit 'meh'

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Fletch F. Fletch
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#14 Post by Fletch F. Fletch » Wed May 24, 2006 9:12 am

Barmy wrote:He likes it BECAUSE it is a mess. Hoberman is known for that. Lame.
Actually, I think he likes it because of its political and social critique and because of its Midnight Movie qualities, which, incidentally, are the same things he liked about Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, another much maligned film that he championed.

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Barmy
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#15 Post by Barmy » Wed May 24, 2006 11:39 am

Hobie is a film maudit buff. If he likes it because of its "critique" then he should be shot.

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#16 Post by Antoine Doinel » Fri May 26, 2006 12:09 pm

Barmy wrote:He likes it BECAUSE it is a mess.
A mess of a film can still work. I enjoyed I Heart Huckabees even though it nearly spun right out of David O. Russell's hands and could easily be described as mess in its own right. But the energy, performances and humor were fantastic.

And speaking of messes, Domino really loses the plot in its second half and if Southland Tales is anywhere close to that in terms of scripting I can't imagine it being tolerable for 2 1/2 hours.

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John Cope
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#17 Post by John Cope » Wed May 31, 2006 4:03 am

According to The Voice it looks like Southland is heading for a recut. I guess we all knew that would happen:
Anticipating the question of re-editing, Kelly brings it up first. "I certainly would imagine that when this movie is seen in theaters it's going to be significantly different," he says, hinting that he'll have to keep the basics of the story line involving the three stars (the Rock's amnesiac action hero, Sarah Michelle Gellar's porn star–cum–TV host, and Seann William Scott's twin brother cops), but jettison almost everything else.

"I think I have no choice in the matter because I want this movie to be seen," he says. "But I want to make sure that we can hold on to the complicated structure because it's very, very thought-out. We spent years designing it, and I think upon first viewing it rushes over you and leaves you in a daze."
More here.

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#18 Post by flyonthewall2983 » Wed May 31, 2006 11:56 am

Sounds like this could be the right move. Undoubtedly though, most of the things that will be cut will make it onto the DVD (or the UE, SE, etc, etc) anyway.

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Len
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#19 Post by Len » Wed May 31, 2006 6:20 pm

Oh well, I guess we'll still end up seeing the "Cannes-cut" at some point on dvd. Even if it's a huge mess, I really want to see it, as I'm really liking Hoberman's description of it. Sounds interesting, and colossal failures are always more interesting than one more director playing it safe (I'm sure Kelly could've easily done something like Darko again).

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#20 Post by Fletch F. Fletch » Wed Jun 21, 2006 1:20 pm

Amy Taubin throws in her two cents over at Sight & Sound:
"It's about how a bunch of teenagers are dying because we don't have an alternative fuel source," said Richard Kelly of 'Southland Tales', his hallucinatory, media-saturated, apocalyptic, broken-hearted, future/present follow-up to 'Donnie Darko' - which has just a ghost of a chance of being shown theatrically in its two-hour 43-minute Cannes version. As oneiric and overwhelming as two memorial films of Cannes past - David Lynch's 'Mulholland Dr.' and Wong Kar-Wai's '2046' - and a lot funnier, 'Southland Tales' attributes the war in Iraq and the devastation of the planet to the greed and increasing desperation of Big Oil and to the all-encompassing (at least in the US) media culture, of which the film is unabashedly a part. Kelly's mash-up owes as much to 'It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World' as to 'Kiss Me Deadly' and the aforementioned Lynch Hollywood dystopia, as well as recalling two American underground film-makers - Ken Jacobs and Manuel De Landa - whose work Kelly has probably never seen. Most visionary in its refusal of self-contained narrative form, it embeds the entwined trajectories of three characters (played by stars Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson, Seann William Scott and Sarah Michelle Gellar) in a web of music videos, car commercials, inane talk shows and 'SNL' skits, and truncates the whole chaotic mess with a big bang that spells the end of the world as we know it. Or does it?

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Fletch F. Fletch
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#21 Post by Fletch F. Fletch » Wed Jun 28, 2006 12:59 pm

A very eloquent defence of the version screened at Cannes and the critical backlash over at CineScope:

[quote]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 “supposedlyâ€

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#22 Post by Jean-Luc Garbo » Wed Jun 28, 2006 8:05 pm

Fletch, from what I've read in that article (I love the Pixies allusion thrown in there btw), it sounds like Domino was a dry run for Southland Tales. I think throwing Rivette in there may be a tad precious, but I know where it's going nonetheless. I love Donnie Darko and I watched Domino twice so I'm ready for anything - whenever it is we do get to see it. :x

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#23 Post by sevenarts » Wed Jun 28, 2006 8:14 pm

I dunno, from the sounds of it this will at least be a wildly ambitious and entertaining mess. I hope the full cut does make it to theaters.

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Fletch F. Fletch
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#24 Post by Fletch F. Fletch » Thu Jun 29, 2006 9:04 am

AMB wrote:Fletch, from what I've read in that article (I love the Pixies allusion thrown in there btw), it sounds like Domino was a dry run for Southland Tales. I think throwing Rivette in there may be a tad precious, but I know where it's going nonetheless. I love Donnie Darko and I watched Domino twice so I'm ready for anything - whenever it is we do get to see it. :x
Yeah, there were rumors that it was going to be screened at the Toronto Film Festival this year but they announced the lineup and I don't believe it's on there. Apparently, Sony has picked up distribution here in North America so all Kelly has to do is go back in and re-edit... I sure do hope that he includes the Cannes cut on DVD.

And I think you're right on the money with Domino being a dry run for Southland. It was like he was thinking about a lot of themes and ideas for that film while writing Domino.

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#25 Post by Antoine Doinel » Thu Jun 29, 2006 9:32 am

MovieCityNews is reporting that not only is North America getting a new director's cut but that Kelly is already in pre-production on a sequel:
All Domestic Rights To Southland Tales Bought By Sony Home Entertainment Chief Ben Feingold... Film Will Be Released In Finished Version, Not The One Shown At Cannes, But Not As Edited By The Studio, But By Richard Kelly, Who Is Already In Early Preproduction On Part II... Unclear If A Sony Arm Will Release Or If Theatrical Will Go To An Associated Company, Like Samuel Goldwyn... Kelly Strongly Argues That The Film Cost $16.9 Million And Not More, As Rumored By People Associated With The Film

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