Southland Tales

Southland Tales *

Directed by Richard Kelly
Written by Richard Kelly

Starring:
Dwayne Johnson as Boxer Santaros / Jericho Kane
Seann William Scott as Roland Taverner / Ronald Taverner
Sarah Michelle Gellar as Krysta Now / Krysta Kapowski
Mandy Moore as Madeline Frost-Santaros
Cheri Oteri as Zora Carmichaels
Holmes Osborne as Senator Bobby Frost
Will Sasso as Fortunio Balducci
Miranda Richardson as Nana Mae Van Adler-Frost
Jon Lovitz as Bart Bookman
Kevin Smith as Simon Thiery
Wallace Shawn as Baron Von Westphalen
Beth Grant as Dr. Inga Von Westphalen / Marion Card
John Larroquette as Vaughn Smallhouse
Nora Dunn as Cyndi Pinziki
Jill Ritchie as Shoshana Kapowski / Shoshana Cox
Justin Timberlake as Private Pilot Abilene

144 Minutes(Rated R for language, violence, sexual material and some drug content. )
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Southland Tales" is probably the biggest disaster to come out onto a big screen in some time, and reaches first place on the list of the most pretentious and self-indulgent films of 2007-reaching in second place in Noah Baumbach's "Margot at the Wedding," which oddly enough comes out the same weekend as this one. Richard Kelly, I felt, made an adequate debut with "Donnie Darko," a film that gets a bit more praise than it really deserves, and either the cult following from that film went to his head to the point where he felt like he could make whatever he wanted, or he really just could not pick one thing that he wanted to do in his second film, so he just decided to do it all. Either way, "Southland Tales" is two hours and twenty minutes of pure torture, and its cinematic masturbation at its worst. And it pains me to think that there is a cut out there that is just about a half hour longer-the version that the folks at Cannes booed to death. This is one of the worst movies of the year-a film where Kelly mixes up ambition with not knowing when to say "no" to yourself.

Assembling one of the worst casts in recent memory, "Southland Tales" is hard to really pinpoint a plot, but I'll do my best. We see some handheld video camera footage from 2004 Texas, where a giant cloud of smoke disrupts the joy and fun that everyone seems to be having. This began World War Three, and now in 2008, with the onset of the elections (Clinton version Frost, the latter being a work of fiction), we meet Boxer Santaros (Dwayne Johnson), an actor who was abducted once and had his memory erased. Once the husband of Madeline Frost-Santaros (Mandy Moore), the daughter of Senator Bobby Frost, Boxer now lives with a porn star named Krysta Now, played by Sarah Michelle Gellar, who has her own "The View" type talk show, and sings songs with titles like "Teen Horniness is Not a Crime." He doesn't remember his past, but the two of them have written a screenplay set in LA in the future where Boxer will not only play the lead, but also direct. Eventually he gets mixed in with a group of Neo-Marxists-played by SNL alumi Cheri Oteri, Amy Poehler, and Jon Lovitz-who have kidnapped the twin cop brother of Ronald Taverner, and had the brothers switch for a reason that I still don't really understand. In the mix is an Iraq war vet played by Justin Timberlake, who does some distracting narration where he reads from the Book of Revelations, and gets to break out into random singsong. This tells the story of Boxer and also about "how the world ends."

There was a point in "Southland Tales" where everything just became so confusing and so muddled and so self-important that I stopped caring about what was happening, and I stopped trying to even follow. Characters weaved in an out-and it pained to see fun faces like Wallace Shawn and Jon Lovitz who just didn't seem to fit at all-a time travel plot was introduced where some of the characters were versions of themselves a few seconds in the past. It tried to be everything-science fiction story, musical, political satire, action (with extremely poor special effects, as if they ran out of money). And in trying to be everything, Kelly managed to create a giant mess, one that he probably couldn't even fix with massive cuts. The script is poor, with bad dialogue that isn't delivered much better. When I saw 2003's "The Rundown" I said that The Rock (who gets rid of that nickname for this project and is just credited as Dwayne Johnson) had what it takes to be an action star, but certainly not as a dramatic actor. Sarah Michelle Gellar has never been good, so I wouldn't expect her to change her. Mandy Moore doesn't get to do much than cross her arms and look angry at her boyfriend, and those are just the leads.

I guess I am a little curious to what the full 160 minute cut of "Southland Tales" ended up being, but at the same time I have no interest in revisiting this trash ever again. The cut I saw was brutal enough. I wasn't a huge fan of "Donnie Darko," but that film had one idea and one concept, and it worked well at expanding that concept to make a satisfactory film. "Southland Tales" is a poor effort to try and gain the momentum from the first film, but Kelly seems to think that fans of that film will eat up whatever he makes. I think that one day Richard Kelly could make a film that I really like-he has the creativity, the ambition, and the originality inside of him to make something truly great. He just needs to stay focused-"Southland Tales" is too many little movies/genres all slapped together into one-something he seemed to try to make his "masterpiece." So I will chalk off "Southland Tales" as a sophomore effort-I'll Richard Kelly another chance. But this is certainly not his shining moment.

Now Playing:
Angelika Film Center
AMC Empire 25
AMC 19th Street