Hey, everyone. “Moriarty” here.
I’m glad Richard Kelly made SOUTHLAND TALES.
Don’t get me wrong. I hate the ever-lovin’ shit out of the movie, and I think it’s a colossal waste of time. But I’m glad he made it. Because from now on, no one’s going to allow him to make another one of these films again. They’ll hire him to write and direct, certainly, because he has genuine raw no-shit talent. And sooner or later, he’s going to put it all together and make something undeniable. And if ambition equaled success, this would be the year’s most successful film.
It’s every bit the failure that the early reports indicated. It’s the sort of film you only see once in a long while, a heavy-expectations over-indulgence that just misses in a fundamental way. There were other films this year that were equally ambitious, films like ACROSS THE UNIVERSE or I’M NOT THERE, films aiming at a sort of film-for-the-sake-of-film drunken abandon, and I think they hit the mark to varying degrees. But SOUTHLAND TALES is what happens when you can’t pull together your reading list into something more than the influences.
I gave the film every chance. I read the prequel graphic novels that he says are required for you have the full experience. I would disagree. The prequel comics exist in a sort of stutter mode where nothing really happens. Characters from the film appear, and there’s a lot of set-up to get you to the moment where the film begins, but the information you learn in the comic books doesn’t expand on the information in the movie... it just repeats it. Relationships are established and then established again in the movie, and nothing additional is really added to anyone or anything. The graphic novel treads water. Richard liberally sprinkles in phrases like “The Neo-Marxists” and “Liquid Karma,” peppers in some familiar ideas like time travel, and it all sounds like it should add up to something. But it doesn’t. If I literally explain the climax of the film, it would sound like I’m making fun of it. The film is so busy being crazy and eccentric that it fumbles the fundamentals of storytelling.
I don’t really know Richard Kelly the way some of the guys in the geek press seem to. I met him for the first time at Sundance, just before the first screening of DONNIE DARKO. I liked the film. I thought it was really interesting and promising. There were other films that year at Sundance that I found far more exciting, and by the time I left the festival, DARKO was not what I was really excited about. I heard that there were people poking around, thinking about distribution, and I heard they were testing some other cuts of the film. Harry came to town, and we saw a new post-Sundance cut. Then a few months later, we saw another cut. And that was pretty much the theatrical cut. And I thought that all the cuts were pretty much just pushing the same film into slightly different shapes. The film was the film was the film. I can’t imagine someone seeing the original Sundance cut and saying, “I hate this!” and then seeing the theatrical version and saying, “Oh, wait, no I don’t! This is awesome!” I know that Harry knows Richard fairly well, and he loves his work. I think the best thing I’ve ever read of his is the script for THE BOX, the film he’s shooting now. It’s the first time I think he’s just gotten down to the business of telling a story. And I think it’s going to be really good for him as a filmmaker.
I just think this one got away from him. We all grow up in love with DR. STRANGELOVE, and we all think it must be thrilling to make one of those great angry generation battle cry films, a sort of pop culture cartoon surreal assault. And we live in an age of information overload, so maybe you think the way to accurately lampoon the world outside your window is to make your movie so dense with characters and subplots and subtext as to be almost a wall. Make it all too much to digest in one viewing. It’s a fair idea, but you have to be a really nimble filmmaker to pull that off. And Richard’s work here is all a little too self-aware this time around, a little too willfully weird. Say what you will about DONNIE DARKO, but that is a sincere little film, heartfelt. Even if it doesn’t add up, it feels like it adds up. I can’t believe he has fourth-dimensional time travel technochatter play a part in his second film after how much it’s a part of DARKO. It seems to me not so much a continuation of an exploration of theme as a sort of narrative laziness. Time travel’s a nice way to explain a lot of random weirdness, but it seems pointless here. A device. Just something to make things weird, as opposed to any sort of thematic relevance.
I doubt Richard can even distill the film into one thematic idea, and that seems to me to be a huge failing. If you listen to his various DONNIE DARKO commentaries, he becomes less and less sure what his film is about as he re-edits it, an occupational hazard, this rabbit hole of the era of the director’s cut special collector’s edition anniversary remasters.
DR. STRANGELOVE isn’t just weird for the sake of weird. Far from it. It’s savage, and it’s well-observed, and it’s cartoonish in places and documentary-real in others. It is the greatest of all film satires, in my opinion, because it negotiates each of its radical shifts in tone with genuine grace. You never notice the film making these crazy right turns because it all seems to be of a piece. The insanity is what makes you believe it could be real. The more outrageous the moments, the more recognizable they are.
There’s an age-old argument about the difference between homage and theft, but I think the more important distinction is between graceful homage and ham-handed homage. I’ve praised Tarantino in the past for making his films (specifically the KILL BILL movies and DEATH PROOF) feel like you’re sitting through a QT Fest at the Alamo, like you’re watching these crazy batshit little films together. I love the way he pulls off that party vibe, and I think it’s not easy to get right. I think Richard tries to do that here with his influences, but he does it in some very strange and even clumsy ways. I love Philip K. Dick’s work, and I can tell that Richard genuinely loves it as well, and I think it might be a colossal fucking idea for someone to hire Richard to make THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE someday. But to actually have a policeman fire a gun and say “Flow my tears,” and then to include characters in your graphic novel explaining it like a footnote (“Oh, you sure do love Philip K. Dick.” “Yeah! He wrote FLOW MY TEARS, THE POLICEMAN SAID, didn’t he?”) is just first-year-film-student loony. There’s so much of this film that you should have cut. Even with as much as I don’t like this movie, I think there’s a cut of it that would work as a film. I think it’s about thirty five minutes shorter. There is a nararative buried in there. And the cast is certainly game for anything. I’ll say this for Richard... he must be genuinely great with actors, because his entire cast seems like they’re trying some outrageous, extreme things, and he not only indulges them, he encourages them.
Amy Poehler stands out in some of her scenes, and it’s impossible to watch the film without being acutely aware of Richard’s fetish for former SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE cast members, to the degree that I have to wonder is this like his BEVERLY HILLS 90210 fetish in DOMINO? Is that his thing now?.
The Rock deserves credit for just how weird he’s willing to be, and Sarah Michelle Gellar matches him as a Bizarro Barbie, the laser-focused Krysta Now. She’s a self-made celebrity in full bloom, and if there’s any one target that Kelly hits directly, it’s Krysta. I would suspect Kelly’s met this girl in real life, possibly many times over if he lives in LA. There are a lot of Krysta Nows out here. The Rock’s more of a cartoon, and as much as I’m ready to call him Dwayne Johnson, it’s more fun to call him The Rock as he tics and twitches and geeks it up. You can tell that he’s ready to destroy his onscreen image at a moment’s notice. He’s game. Kelly certainly can’t be faulted for taking a chance on him. I think he gives everything he possibly can. I think Justin Timberlake’s far less successful. His musical number is my least favorite moment in the film. In fact, taken on its own, the musical number sums up exactly why I don’t think the film works. It is a speed bump, a nothing in terms of impact on the film. It’s well shot. It’s well-staged. But it’s just a dead end as a choice. The scene lays there between a couple of other sequences, doesn’t inform either in any way.
Ultimately, I think it’s a cop-out when people dismiss this film by saying, “Oh, it’s too weird to describe.” The story does make a literal sense. Don’t trust anyone who tells you otherwise. It’s not like Richard Kelly writes scenes where people have hair made of pudding or horses suddenly drive fire trucks. It’s not nonsense. It’s just that he gives every single character these wacky names and dresses them like gay Munchkins or MAD MAX extras, these really extreme cartoonish polar niche groups. I think the reason some critics gave up trying to talk about the plot is because of how crazy it sounds.
So at the end of the film, Ronald and Roland come face to face and they cause a rift in the time-space fabric, and that makes the ice cream truck fly up in the air, where Martin finds himself in the perfect position to use that surface-to-air missle...
See what I mean? That is literally what happens at the end of the film. Martin stands up and fires the missle and it blows up the giant superblimp. I don’t think this is a film like David Lynch’s MULHOLLAND DRIVE where it leaves literal narrative behind in order to create a vocabulary of dream. I think this is a film with a narrative so jampacked with wacky that it doesn’t work. More than anything, as I watched it, I wondered how it would look if he could start all over now, knowing what he knows. I’ll bet you he’d shoot it differently, design it differently, and even fundamentally write it differently. Like I said... I’m excited about THE BOX.
I actually think I saw a film that successfully accomplished what SOUTHLAND TALES set out to do. I think someone made this satire and got it released, and it tanked. Like SOUTHLAND TALES, the film was long-delayed and tinkered with quite a bit before it hit theaters. It’s not an old film, certainly, but it’s not quite brand new. If you can guess which film I’m thinking of, I’ll give you... something. Some prize that I will announce here in the next week. First person to e-mail me the right answer wins.
In the meantime, I’m feeling a lot of Dick.
Errrr... wait. That sounds different than I thought it would. It’s just that I have noticed that this fall, there’s a name I’ve been hearing more than normal. Thanks to the Blu-Ray/HD release of BLADE RUNNER, in part, and the theatrical run, in part, and Philip K. Dick. Fine by me. I’m a longtime fan of his work, and he was one of the guys who influenced me most when I was just starting to write fiction back in the mid-80s. I think his relationship with Hollywood’s been a strange one. They love to make movies based on his stories. But... based loosely. Very loosely in some cases.
I was greatly encouraged by Linklater’s A SCANNER DARKLY, as faithful a version of one of his books as I’ve seen. Right now, another one of his books is in front of the camera somewehere. Another very faithful adaptation... and I’m going to be taking a look at it as one of my projects for the week, along with more reviews for you as I keep trying to catch up with the holiday deluge.
Drew McWeeny, Los Angeles
Drew McWeeny, Los Angeles
