STUDIO: Sony
RELEASE DATE: November 18, 2008
STARRING: Dwayne Johnson, Seann William Scott, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Nora Dunn, Christopher Lambert, John Larroquette, Bai Ling, Jon Lovitz, Mandy Moore, Amy Poehler, Kevin Smith, and Justin Timberlake
WRITTEN BY: Richard Kelly
DIRECTED BY: Richard Kelly
FEATURES: "Usident TV: Surveilling the Southland" Featurette
"This is the Way the World Ends" Animated Short
Blu-Ray Exclusive: Commentary with Writer/Director Richard Kelly
Southland Tales: The Prequel Saga Graphic Novel Gallery

Is Southland Tales a movie that any critic can defend as being traditionally "good"? Of course not. It's a mess, but it's what I like to call a "glorious mess". "A balls-to-the-wall, completely unafraid, out of control mess". I thoroughly enjoy Southland Tales for one reason that I state over and over again for movies that like to think their quirky and weird but usually hold back into something predictable and fake - If you're going to go off the rails, go COMPLETELY off the rails. Southland Tales certainly does that. It's riveting in its weirdness. Where else will you find Sarah Michelle Gellar as a famous porn star, Jon Lovitz as a homicidal racist cop, SNL vet Cheri Oteri choking Christopher Lambert with her bare hands, Justin Timberlake singing The Killers' "All the Things That I've Done", and appearances by John Larroquette and Kevin Smith? NOWHERE. You haven't seen anything like Southland Tales in a very long time...maybe ever.

Richard Kelly is kind of like David Lynch with more of a pop-culture sensibility and less of a sexual obsessiveness. So how do you recap his work? Let's start with the fact that Southland Tales is actually kind of like the original Star Wars Trilogy in one movie. There are four chapters labeled IV, V, and VI. Don't worry. You didn't miss "Northland Tales". It turns out that there is a graphic novel that tells chapters I, II, and III. You have to love the balls (or at least I do) of a screenwriter willing to throw his audience right into what is essentially the middle of his story. It makes it clear that Tales is not about plot. It's a pop culture nightmare, a mood piece for the 21st Century. The main chunk of the film 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.

When Sony first released Southland Tales on the home market in a nearly bare-bones DVD, fans were disappointed. They corrected that grievous error with the BD release, right? Sorta. As made clear in the previous paragraph, the history of Southland Tales is a complex one with tons of edits and possible deleted scenes. You will hear some of that story in a great commentary from Kelly that's BD-exclusive and gain some insight into what came before with the graphic novel gallery but I still feel like there's a Special Edition somewhere down the road of Southland Tales. Then again, for a movie this weird, maybe its very existence on Blu-Ray is special enough. 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. Unlike undisputed great films like Wall-E or No Country For Old Men, no critic can 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.