"Southland Tales" writer-director Richard Kelly set out to say a impressive funny adventure about an apocalypse close at hand. With boundless aspiration far exceeding his power to narrate a logical story, Kelly manages only an artistic apocalypse.
Irksomely self-important, by choice cryptic and littered, "Southland Tales" may strain the patience even of the cult crowd that adopted Kelly's 1st movie, "Donnie Darko," a cinematic riddle that looks positively mainstream side by side to this fiasco.
There are ingenious moments here and there. But taken altogether, you're left enquiring if the eclectic cast which lets in Sarah Michelle Gellar, Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson," Seann William Scott, Mandy Moore and Justin Timberlake had any hint what the story was about.
Kelly started writing "Southland Tales" in 2001, visualising a sci-fi black comedy about the destruction of world that unfolds over the Fourth of July in 2008.
It took him so long that actual time almost caught up with his alternative future, making its dizzy trapping and the cataclysmic results leading up to it that much heavier to swallow.
Kelly chopped 19 mins from the adaptation that disastrously premiered to scornful reviews at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival. The film has been dressed up with a few better optic effects, especially in what's intended to be the great climax implying a "mega-zeppelin" and a hovering ice-cream truck over downtown L.A.
Some of the pictures are amazing, but the attempt is totally in service of an uncomprehensible story told with the unbridled pretenses of a creative-writing graduate student who's taken out the world's greatest college lend.
Whatsoever internal logic the chronicle needs never made it out of Kelly's head. He doesn't even hassle to start up at the beginning, rather presenting the film as the 4th, 5th and 6th chapters of a six-part saga as George Lucas did with the master copy "Star Wars" trilogy. (Parts one, 2 and 3 of "Southland Tales" come in a pictorial novel Kelly released, in case you're curious.)
In his post-Cannes variant, Kelly added a prologue to "Southland Tales" that better explicates, although not by much, what came earlier.
The Fourth of July in 2005 brought terrorist atomic explosions to Texas, and in the 3 years after, U.S. has become a insane police state with trigger-happy guards everyplace, Orwellian surveillance and endless editions of brabbling underground factions.
The film rambles pointlessly from situation to situation and role to role, the actors including an amnesic action star (Johnson), a porn queen (Gellar), a cop (Scott) with a mysterious Gemini brother and a soldier (Timberlake) defaced by some mistily cited cataclysm in Fallujah.
Along with Moore, other important cast members include Wallace Shawn, Miranda Richardson, Bai Ling, Nora Dunn, Jon Lovitz, Christopher Lambert, John Larroquette, Amy Poehler, Cheri Oteri and Kelly's buddy Kevin Smith.
Folks run around the L.A. Region and carom off one another like billiard balls as all beingness is threatened by the concourse of a new power generator called fluid karma, a time-travel experiment and a party onboard a gaudy dirigible on its inaugural voyage.
When he's through with a character, Kelly's answer commonly is to have somebody else fire on them.
As another cop, Lovitz follows an unforeseen behave of gunfight by restfully muttering "Flow my tears," which has no circumstance or significance other than to show Kelly's comrade Philip K. Dick fans that he has read, or at least heard of, the sci-fi writer's novel "Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said."
Given the list of 10 producers and executive producers on the film, somebody, someplace along the line, should have had the common sense and courageousness to tell Kelly that he was spending their income on a chronicle for the people in the real life, not the people in his brain.
"Southland Tales," released by Samuel Goldwyn Films, is rated R for language, violence, sexual material and some drug content. Running time: 144 minutes. One star out of four.
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