Poor bastard’s been through the ringer in making Southland Tales, his long awaited follow up to Donnie Darko, which is one of the better movies ever made (if you’re not afraid of not knowing what the hell is going on the first 12 times you watch it).
The movie, set in 2008 in a post bomb America, has been called a willfully confusing apocalyptic sci-fi comedy epic, and was assembled with the damnedest cast I ever did see. Thats right, Jon Lovitz and John Larroquette, together in the same movie with The Rock and Sarah Michelle Gellar. It evidently features machine gun sniper-cum-omniscient narrator Justin Timberlake, backed by a chorus line, singing The Killers covers in front of skee-ball lanes. Its swipes at the security laden ’00s, and completely sucks, according to pretty much every review I’ve found.
How can this be? Is the film a victim of critital misunderstanding like its predecessor, which died at Sundance, and debuted (along with central theme of falling airplane parts) to distracted audiences in September 2001?
Its tough for me to say. Right now, it appears that Southland Tales is having a hard time finding distributors willing to show the 160 minute movie in its current incarnation, which is exactly what happened with Donnie Darko, resulting in studios editing the movie for its theatrical and first DVD release. Problem is, when the Director’s Cut came out, GAC and I agreed that it lost a lot of the ambiguity that made the first movie so great. Does Kelly work best with another hand in the soup?
I fear that this is indicative of a major problem infesting this dark year 2006, that of the piss poor follow up. We’ve seen it in music, with amazing first records from bands like Futureheads and Zutons giving way to damn near unlistenable second attempts. Is it unthinkable that this trend will follow into the movies I like?
Is it the government fucking with me? If not me, it certainly appears that somethings happening to Richard Kelly himself, because when he left the country to get to Cannes, his ass ended up in DHS purgatory when he had the gall to have a name like suspected turrurist James Richard Kelly (no doubt, giving this James Kelly a big sigh of relief, and a quick change of any air travel plans). Would the government be dastardly enough to not only hold a film director who just made a movie involving things like federal control of the internet, and “Homeland Security” run amok, but to brainwash every critic to pan the movie?
Well, thats silly. Just because thats what I’d do, doesn’t mean thats what GWB’d do. For the record, I’d also replace Richard with a cleverly disguised robot designed to explode at close contact with Paris Hilton, but thats a different story.
Alright, this has certainly taken a turn for the worse. Its difficult to write objectively about a movie that
a) I haven’t seen yet
b) Is follow up a seriously good movie like Donnie Darko
c) Is getting the jab from everybody who is paid to watch movies
What to do?
And its about damn time. GAC and I have been seeing Prisonerish elements to Lost for quite a while now, and were looking for a Unified Theory. Well, Joe Powell by way of Big Orange Michael found this on EW.com, where evidently somebody gets paid to come up with Lost theories.