Southland Tales
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Movie Reviews of Southland Tales
Movie Review: Great Movie with a ton of symbolism...
Summary: 5 Stars
While I won't spend an hour explaining this movie, I'll be short and to the point. While it was very hard to understand the movie, many people hate it because they don't understand it.
This movie has so much hidden meaning that watching it the second time around I began to pick up on so many things. Everything about it was amazing.
I suggest reading the analysis off [...]
It explains everything to you in detail that you might've not caught on to.
Movie Review: Richard Kelly Masterfully Illustrates The Apocalyptic Impact.......of the Sophomore Slump
Summary: 2 Stars
Richard Kelly's Donnie Darko may very well be my favorite film of all time. The narrative tells a poignant story that keeps you guessing the entire time, creative a really interactive experience. However, the thing that was great about "Darko" was the fact that the plot made sense and had an internal logic that followed it. And I quite simply love that movie with a burning passion. So when Richard Kelly's second major movie was released, I bought it on the day it came out. It took me a while to review it, because I wanted to digest it, see if I was missing some key point to the movie was would suddenly reveal that this two hour and twenty minute apocalyptic epic wasn't pure, unafraid non-sense. Well, if anyone finds that key point, let me know, because this movie is just that. Non-sense.
It's a bloated and convoluted narrative that will not make sense even after repeated watches. Even Justin Timberlake's voice-overs during tedious and frankly unnecessary expository scenes don't help. The acting, at least, is good, but that is a moot point as well because we aren't given the chance to care about these characters, because our brains are too busy reeling from the "WTF is going on" factor. The movie has some intrigue when Boxer Santaros (Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson) researches the role of a character in a screenplay he wrote by tagging along with Roland Taverner (Seann William Scott), but that quickly evaporates when you realize that this movie is basically just scenes. Aesthetically pleasing and well-shot scenes, but scenes that register no emotions and tell no story and aim for nothing other than to boggle your mind, and be pretentious while doing it. There are moments of what feels like poignancy, but it's achieved in a very false and underhanded way. Through music and scenes that on their own, in absolutely no context would evoke base emotion, Kelly tries to force these moments onto us, but to anyone who has seen this movie more than once, even those moments ring false.
In the end, "Southland Tales" is trying to say so much (in the most convoluted way possible, mind) that nothing registers and it ends up saying absolutely nothing. At least it was pretty to look at. But the movie, instead of leaving you with any bit of satisfaction, will leave you with a blank expression, wondering aloud what the hell you just watched.
I think this movie may have simply been an excuse to show two cars having sex and to have the "Pimps don't commit suicide" line.
3/10
Movie Review: This decades' "Brazil"
Summary: 5 Stars
Also easily the best film of the decade. 20,000 stars. Richard Kelly takes some second string stars and makes them palatable. Total Information Awareness. Fascist fun. Drugs, resistance, time travel, anarchy, this is so ambitious I don't care if it hits the mark, this is an unparalleled sketch of this modern world.Movie Review: An original auteur
Summary: 4 Stars
What could one add to the maelstrum of criticism already listed in these other reviews? All I have to say is that ST is one of the most original films to make it to celluloid in the past few years. No, its not Donnie Darko II - there will be no "Paint A Starry Night again man!" Kudos to a director who takes it for granted that I have a brain and the ability to use it. Is ST a comedy? Social or political commentary? Religious allegory? Semi-surreal Sci-Fi flick? Try all of the above. Tired of spoon-fed Hollywood pap? Ready for a flick that does other things than go "boom" or make like second-rate Jane Austin? Try Southland Tales and go with the flow...you might even like it.Movie Review: Haven't we been here before? A defence of 'Southland Tales'
Summary: 5 Stars
I want to preface this review with a humble mention of Suckerdwsp316's earlier offering. I almost replied positively to that, but I think Southland Tales deserves a little more defence out here. I won't be rehashing other reviews here, either. I won't be discussing what the movie is 'about', its plot or characters. While these are important factors, I think Southland Tales deserves a slightly more critical approach.
Okay -- first things first: I saw Donnie Darko well after the initial wave of bad reviews, well after it became a cult hit. I saw it simply because I'd heard it was a unique experience that left your brains in a puddle. I hate to say this but statements like that don't always move me; I've done the English Lit. thing, read some pretty unfriendly things (Joyce, Woolf, Stein, etc.etc.). But Donnie Darko convinced me that Kelly is a genius. No problem there whatsoever. Not was -- is.
So this is what I'm not getting: if a movie that bombed at first took a few years to be 'discovered' (and by some of you, no doubt) and then was recognised as a work of brilliance, why is everyone doing it all over again now? As I watched Southland Tales for the first time (just last night), I had this incredible feeling that I was riding the wave I missed with Donnie Darko. That someday, when people catch up, I could say to myself 'ah, I saw this coming'.
In their review, Suckerdwsp316 mentions other films that failed at the box office but became hits (blade runner, perfect example). I want to take this a bit further and reference James Joyce's Ulysses, which was banned for years for its crudeness/pornography and got panned by a who's who of the in-crowd of literature back in the 1920s. Without guidance and a real sense of patience, Ulysses is a trainwreck to read. It switches POV, voice, tense, style...you name it. And then, because writing the most difficult English novel wasn't enough for Joyce, he followed it up with Finnegans Wake, which makes Ulysses look almost linear.
'Southland Tales' may be considered Kelly's Finnegans Wake. One review elsewhere on the web stated that ST isn't 'about' chaos -- it *is* chaos. This is precisely what is said about Wake, and it's part of what makes it virtually unreadable. Thankfully, the film medium has a lot more to offer at 'first glance' than the written, and Southland Tales is entirely more accessible than Joyce's work. Whether you take it as a bad mish-mash of Saturday Night Live skits, a strange pastiche of weird sci-fi and socio-political commentary or as a wannabe-Darko, ST still allows itself to be judged as something more than utter chaos.
And if at this point you're thinking 'My God, this reviewer is some uppity academic artsy-fartsy wanker', I guess the only thing I can say in my defence is I didn't (and would hate to) watch this film alone, or even with another 'academic'. I *despise* 'art' that asks you to make more of what is there than actually is; Southland Tales does quite the opposite, and it's a clever trick that is almost as pretentious. You have something fairly simple told in a very convoluted, complex way. Again, here we have a parallel to Ulysses, which is about a guy who wanders around Dublin, masturbates a lot, drinks himself stupid and is fairly certain his wife is cheating on him.
Southland Tales isn't high art -- it's pop, it's crass, it's horribly post-modern, it's politically saturated. The miscasting is too obvious and it works (especially Mandy Moore and 'The Rock'), which raises questions of whether it's really 'mis'casting at all. Without Kelly's unique flare for bombast and wit, Southland Tales could easily have been (and to many viewers, was) a film student-level epic failure of clumsy ambition and unrealised concepts.
I'm not saying that this will be Donnie Darko 2.0, that people will suddenly start championing it after years of deriding it. This belated crusade didn't really happen with Finnegans Wake, either. But I am saying that just as the literary world is richer for James Joyce (even if you never read his stuff, it 'had' to be written), Richard Kelly fills a void no one really noticed until he was there filling it. He did it with Donnie Darko, and there's really no indication he hasn't done it with Southland Tales. Okay, I'll take a small subjective risk: I believe Southland Tales is better than Donnie Darko, and I suspect that Richard Kelly, who must be very conscious that ST is his hope that 'lightning strikes twice', knows it. Someday (if not already), people will be writing papers on Kelly's work, which isn't something you can say about a lot of 'other' one-star movies out there.
Having said all that, can I recommend 'Southland Tales'? Only if you saw Donnie Darko and liked it for whatever you thought it was, not for what everyone said it was. And if you haven't seen Donnie Darko, it's probably a gentler introduction to Richard Kelly's inimitable style.