STUDIO: Sony
RELEASE DATE: March 18, 2008
STARRING: Dwayne Johnson, Sean William Scott, Miranda Richardson, Jon Lovitz, Wallace Shawn, Bai Ling, Justin Timberlake, Mandy Moore, Amy Poehler, Nora Dunn, Cheri Oteri, Kevin Smith, Christopher Lambert, John Larroquette, Lou Taylor Pucci, and Holmes Osborne
WRITTEN BY: Richard Kelly
DIRECTED BY: Richard Kelly
FEATURES: "USIDent TV: Surveilling the Southland" Featurette
"This is the Way the World Ends" Animated Short

"Scientists are saying that the future is going to be far more futuristic than they originally predicted." - Krysta Now, Southland Tales

Southland Tales features, among many other things - Jon Lovitz as a homicidal racist cop; Sarah Michelle Gellar as a famous porn star; SNL vet Cheri Oteri choking Christopher "Highlander" Lambert with her bare hands; John Larroquette, Kevin Smith, and Justin Timberlake in the supporting cast and one of them singing "All The Things That I've Done" by The Killers. How could you NOT Be interested in that movie? What if I told you that it's a movie that makes its auteur's first film, Donnie Darko, look completely normal by comparison? That if you loved the way David Lynch's Mulholland Drive went completely off the rails in its glorious final act that I've got a movie for you? When you've grown tired of the predictable, mainstream offerings at the theater this time of year, your DVD store has the antidote. Southland Tales is the rare movie that ended and I wanted to watch it again immediately. Not so much because it's that great - although it may be, I'm not sure yet - but because it's so unlike anything I've seen in a very long time...maybe ever.

Recapping Southland Tales is like trying to pin down the plot of most of David Lynch's movies but with a much more unusual pop culture sensibility (just look again at the cast, easily the weirdest of 2007). How's this for a start? The movie is split up into three labeled and named chapters, IV, V, and VI, kind of like the original Star Wars Trilogy on crack. Don't worry. There won't be a "prequel trilogy" film. A little research reveals that the first three parts were actually published in graphic novel form. Is there a recap to what happened in print before the movie? Of course not. Do the three (or six) parts blend together into one vision? Just barely. The main plot of Southland Tales centers on an action star, Boxer Santaros (Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson"), an ex-porn star turned media icon, Krysta Now (Sarah Michelle Gellar), and twin brothers Roland and Ronald Taverner (Sean William Scott). Oh yeah, and it's also kind of about the end of the world which will "end not with a whimper but with a bang." That's about all I can tell you. The rest is a glorious jumble of ideas.

Richard Kelly is far more interested in themes - security, identity, celebrity, sexuality, capitalism, corruption, even music - than plot. Donnie Darko, his cult hit, was a movie that you could pretty safely piece together on repeat viewing, especially the director's cut. I'm not sure there's anything TO piece together in Southland Tales. It's about moments and ideas instead of character and plot. The film premiered at Cannes in 2006 and was loudly booed and put into development hell. After losing twenty minutes and adding 90 CGI shots, the flick was barely released almost 18 months later and the critical reaction was as widely mixed as any you'll ever find. Most critics couldn't stand the awkward dialogue and non-existent pacing, but some embraced the film for its experimentalism. The Village Voice and The New York Times placed it on their ten-best list at the end of the year. Where The Observer found the dialogue so awful that they wondered if Kelly had ever met a human being, The Voice noted that the film sounds incoherent because its creator has so much that he wants to say. Movies that divisive always build the biggest cults and the tribe of Southland Tales forms on your left. Like Donnie Darko, this movie isn't going away for a long time.

With that much controversy and behind-the-scenes action, you'd expect Sony to put together a kick-ass Special Edition, right? It looks like they're waiting for the cult to build because all you'll find are two lonely featurettes. It's hard to blame them for discarding a movie that didn't even make half a million dollars WORLDWIDE but Southland Tales will undeniably find a loyal audience on DVD. The special edition, where Kelly will likely cut the film into something even less comprehensible, is inevitable. It should be noted that Southland Tales does have one of the better video transfers that Sony has produced in a long time and the audio is nearly as good.

Southland Tales is a hard movie to defend from a rational standpoint. It makes no sense, has unbelievable dialogue and characters, and is more a mish-mash of ideas than an actual movie. It's that rare kind of film that some will love and many will hate for the EXACT same reason. The idea that we're hurtling toward the end of the world on a rock of competing ideas and nonsensical characters works for one guy and doesn't even qualify as a movie for the guy next to him. I would never tell you that you'll love or even be able to sit through a movie as strange as Southland Tales, but that's why you have to see it for yourself. Maybe even twice.