Before seeing it on the shelf in Blockbuster, I had heard nothing about Richard Kelly’s film ‘Southland Tales’. Curious, I thought, considering that he was the brains behind the sublime Donnie Darko, one of those cult word of mouth successes that actually lived up to the hype.
Surely, this film should be good or at the very least interesting.
Wrong and wrong.
Unfortunately, no news turned out to be bad news.
The film is really a shambles from start to finish. It never really decides if it wants to be a futuristic farce or apocalyptic nightmare .
In the extras ‘making of’ documentary, Kelly said he wanted the violence to be realistic yet also funny. I don’t quite get how this might work and neither do they. This is just one example of the muddled thinking that runs throughout the movie.
There’s a cut and paste approach to the plot so that any real narrative flow is lost; not necessarily the end of the world if the ideas are good but it’s just an indigestible stew here. What it amounts to is a check list of big issues: pornography, war, big brother technology, state control, racism etc etc. We zap from one to the other while having to endure banal, pretentious dialogue.
Sarah Michelle Gellar is typical of the acting which is as wooden as the stakes she used to slay vampires as Buffy. It comes to something when you realise that the best thing about the movie is Justin Timberlake!
The weird and eccentric characters suggest that Kelly is aiming for Lynchian territory but, if so, this, I’m sorry to report, is his Dune.
