More SOUTHLAND's reviews
"A selection of tales of the unexpected and unintelligible
Tools"
Source:Irish Independent
By Padraic McKiernon, Donal Lynch
Sunday December 09 2007
Southland Tales
Cert 16
Southland Tales brings to mind that quote from Dante's Inferno that calls on those entering to abandon all hope. Something similar is required for this Richard Kelly-directed feature starring Justin Timberlake and Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson. Well, at least the abandonment of any hope of understanding what the film is about.
Set against a backdrop of global war that's been sparked by a nuclear attack on Texas, the narrative revolves around an apocalyptic scenario. Cue a kaleidoscopic collision of subplots that include a missing Hollywood action hero feared kidnapped by neo-Marxist revolutionaries, a porn star trying to break into TV, and a veteran returned from Iraq suffering from visions. ;)Throw in allusions to the War on Terror, a sinister head of Homeland Security, played by Miranda Richardson
, and you have a congested collage of profound impenetrability. And that's without mentioning the arrival of the wacky Baron von Westphalen and his discovery of "fluid karma".
Southland Tales received scathing reviews in the US and was booed at Cannes, but there are diamonds in the dungheap. The ensemble cast are top-notch, while Kelly's Donnie Darko-inspired reputation as a cutting-edge director is confirmed by both the subject matter and some memorable visual set-ups.
Southland Tales is not for everyone, but if you want something unconventional you won't feel shortchanged.
SOURCE:RTE
Southland Tales
Director: Richard Kelly
Starring: Dwayne Johnson, Seann William Scott, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Jon Lovitz, Mandy Moore, Miranda Richardson, Kevin Smith, Justin Timberlake, Nora Dunn and Wallace Shawn.
Duration: 144 minutes
Certificate 16
Reviewer Rating
Rating 2
And you thought Richard Kelly's 'Donnie Darko' was confusing. Get ready to take a trip to Southland - a sprawling futuristic version of a Los Angeles on the cusp of social, political, economical and environmental disaster in the year 2008.
To get a feel for the bewildering complexities of Kelly's second feature, you need only afford yourself a brief description of its three central characters.
Boxer Santaros (Johnson) is a conservative-leaning Hollywood superstar who has just returned from the Arizona desert suffering from amnesia. Reported missing by his wife, he shacks up with Krysta Now (Gellar), a porn star intent on expanding her business portfolio by means of a reality TV show and energy drinks. She has co-written a screenplay with Santaros - predicting the end of the world in just three days' time - in which he will play the role of police officer, Jericho Kane.
Researching his role, Santaros tags along with LA cop Ronald Taverner's (Scott) amnesiac twin brother Roland, who is being manipulated as part of a neo-Marxist scheme to overthrow the Government - a Government which, following a nuclear attack in Texas in 2005, is in the midst of World War III.
Set to the backdrop of this ongoing war, the Government has stepped up the Patriot Act, which has encroached further on civil liberties, with the powers that be taking control of the internet and other media outlets. This results in a heightened threat to democracy and political stability, while the long-running conflict in Iraq has resulted in a fuel crisis.
Here begins another tale to this sprawling movie - that of Baron Von Westphalen (Shawn). Von Westphalen has become one of the world's most powerful men by creating an alternative, unending fuel source. Ultimately all these elements will fuse together to signal the end of the world on 4 July 2008.
In an odd way watching 'Southland Tales' feels similar to playing the video game 'Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas'. It constantly seems to expand and sprawl to the point that you don't exactly know what you should be following.
A rabbit hole of a movie, there is such a myriad of supporting characters, turns, twists and loopholes in Kelly's work that it demands your constant attention - and because of that 'Southland Tales' becomes extremely hard work.
Kelly has so much to say that he ends up putting his story across in a manner which is incomprehensible. He splices genres, even adding a bizarre musical element to this sci-fi/black comedy/thriller/apocalyptic drama, with Justin Timberlake lip-synching his way though The Killers' 'All These Things That I've Done' in what is the most random of random scenes over the film's 144 minutes.
From the off, each scene seems like it has just been dropped in arbitrarily and thus, piecing the elements together becomes a chore. Two hours in and you'll be restless, frustrated and - dare I say it - bored.
Yet, for all its narrative flaws, 'Southland Tales' still lingers in the memory long after you've left the cinema. As Kelly loosely pieces the puzzle together in the last five minutes you begin to appreciate how clever the whole story intended to be and commend Kelly's vision.
Kelly's choice of cast too should be praised, with the director casting the film with a host of pop icons pigeonholed by their past work. Given a new lease of life by the cult director, Buffy becomes a porn star; The Rock is stretched as a bumbling, often funny, manic actor; Stifler is a cop with amnesia; Mandy Moore is a cheating, bitchy wife and Timberlake is a drug dealing war veteran.
However, though 'Southland Tales' boasts such occasionally inspired moments, in all - as a work of cinema - it is a mess, lacking direction and a cohesive story. The ambitious Kelly has over-shot himself this time around. Here's hoping his next effort, the much anticipated 'The Box', isn't half as disappointing.
Southland Tales
UK cinema release date: 7 December 2007
4.5 stars
Source:.musicomh
By the time Howard Hawks released his much-loved but notoriously confusing The Big Sleep on an unsuspecting public in 1946, he had already removed some 18 minutes of expositional scenes from his original version, now leaving entirely unresolved the question of whether the chauffeur Owen Taylor has turned up dead as a result of murder, suicide or accident.
This story may well come to mind as you watch Southland Tales, the latest film to be written and directed by Richard Kelly (of Donnie Darko fame). For like The Big Sleep, Southland Tales is an LA-set film noir (of sorts), labyrinthine in its impenetrability (only MUCH more so), and similarly re-edited and shorn by 20 minutes for public consumption (following the original cut's poor reception at Cannes). And here too it is difficult to distinguish murder from suicide from accident, not to mention life from death, past from future, and reality from illusion, in what must qualify as one of the most convoluted, head-spinning two-and-a-half hours of cinematic overdrive to have bewildered filmgoers since Tony Scott's widely underrated and sorely misunderstood Domino (2005)- also, through no coincidence, written by Richard Kelly - or David Lynch's sprawling LA enigma INLAND EMPIRE (2006).
Divided (like the first Star Wars trilogy) into Parts IV-VI, Southland Tales is set in an alternative universe (or two) in the three-days leading up to Independence Day, 2008, three years after a nuclear bomb was set off (presumably by terrorists) in the Texan town of Abilene – which also happens to be the name of the film's narrator, a one-time actor and scarred veteran of the Iraq War played by Justin Timberlake (and yes, he does at one point get to sing and dance). The main character (or is it characters?) is Boxer Santaros (Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson), an action movie star with links to the Republican Party, and with a bad case of amnesia after being mysteriously abducted to the Nevada desert and just as mysteriously returned to LA.
Unaware that his forgotten parents-in-law, clueless Republican VP candidate Bobby Frost (Holmes Osborne) and machiavellian NSA head Nana Mae Frost (Miranda Richardson), are desperately searching for him during their campaign against the liberal Proposition 69 (which would bring to an end their draconian inland security measures), Boxer has shacked up with Krysta (Sarah Michelle Gellar), a pornstar turned reality chatshow hostess, with whom he has co-written a madcap screenplay ("an epic Los Angeles crime saga") that is turning out to be alarmingly prophetic.
In preparation for his lead rôle as a paranoid schizophrenic cop with supernatural powers, Boxer rides along with LAPD Officer Roland Taverner (Seann William Scott), little realising that the real Roland Taverner has been kidnapped by a group of Neo-Marxist agitators who have recruited his identical twin brother Ronald Taverner to help fake footage of Boxer in incriminating circumstances with a view to blackmailing the Frosts. Not that the Neo-Marxists, themselves divided into factions, are entirely sure of what each other is doing, let alone of who Ronald really is.
Meanwhile, a shady group of scientists, led by Baron von Westphalen (Wallace Shawn), claims to have discovered a true alternative to the world's dwindling oil supplies – but is their Fluid Karma an infinitely powerful energy source, a mind-altering drug, or the primer that will ignite the end of the world? And in the culture wars that have polarised America, just whose side is the Baron on anyway?
That’s just a brief sketch of the plot: Southland Tales is a veritable encyclopaedia of weird, self-consciously referencing the mannered filmic worlds of Kiss Me Deadly, The Manchurian Candidate, Repo Man, Jacob's Ladder, The Big Lebowski, Lost Highway, Mulholland Dr. and Primer, as well as Philip K. Dick's oeuvre of mind-expansion and paranoia along with some of the stranger passages from the Book of Revelations.
There are also advertisements featuring SUVS that mount and hump one another like elephants, revolutionaries who spout poems on masturbation, television discussions of the peculiar effects of international date lines on contraceptives, and, in keeping with the film's gutter sensibilities and shit-hitting-the-fan themes, lots and lots of scenes involving toilets.
Part scabrous satire, part Chandleresque thriller, part Dickian sci-fi, part postmodern Apocalypse, part pop-culture paradoxography, Southland Tales concerns itself, much like Krysta's TV show, with issues as weighty as the War on Terror, homeland security, global warming and fundamentalism, and as light as "teen horniness" – while its criss-crossing storylines, multiple characters (several with their own multiple personalities), and carnivalesque irrationality ensure that it is so wildly open to interpretation that spoilers simply do not apply.
Sure, you might be left with the impression that only Kelly himself (and perhaps also the Baron) knows exactly what is going on, but Southland Talesdeserves to be embraced with open arms (and mind) in a season otherwise filled with bland Christmas movies. No doubt some will dismiss it as an overlong, incoherent mess, but others (myself included) will emerge, bleary-eyed and brain-battered, just wanting to see the whole thing all over again.
- Anton Bitel
PEACE
AVALON /NESSA
