Review of Southland Tales (2007) by Chads. — 20 Mar 2008

When an artist starts to believe his own press; the premature pronouncement by some overzealous fanboys(and a few critics) that the filmmaker is a genius(and yes, "Donnie Darko" was very accomplished for a first feature film), it's no wonder that the "genius" would attempt to match that initial success, and therefore overreach with a project as wildly ambitious as "Southland Tales".

As some of you may know, "Donnie Darko" was released into theaters the same week that the towers fell, and predictably, it tanked at the box office(people were too busy watching CNN) before DVD gave it a second life.

The filmmaker acknowledges the historical context behind the first running of "Donnie Darko" by providing "Southland Tales" with a post-9/11 backdrop. Texas gets nuked. "Southland Tales" is an alternative history of contemporary America.

The sci-fi this time seems forced(like M. Night Shylaman, who feels pressured to come up with twist endings), an attempt to catch lightning in a bottle a second-time around, when a pared-down "Southland Tales" might've worked beautifully as a straight-up political satire about our lives during wartime.

The neo-Marxist group resembles a twenty-first century version of the Weather Underground, or, because the group seems to be largely composed of females, "Southland Tales" might be making a reference to the militant feminist movement that's rendered in Lizzie Borden's "Born in Flames"("Southland Tales" has the look of "Strange Days", and Katherine Bigelow was a "newspaper editor" in that cinematic manifesto of female empowerment), but with a difference: Cyndi Pinziki(Nora Dunn) is an adult-film director and Krysta Now(Sarah Michelle Gellar, a porn star; which acknowledges the fluid nature of feminist ideology.

"Southland Tales" is very smart about how porn has infiltrated the mainstream. As for the sci-fi elements, the filmmaker's use of dopplegangers and California as a post-nuclear setting, calls forth to mind novelist Kim Stanley Robinson's "The Wild Shore".

The final fifteen minutes of "Southland Tales" while undeniably beautiful, doesn't really make a lick of sense. This filmmaker could've gone the Peter Bogdonavich route and delivered a safe follow-up, akin to "Daisy Miller"(the film that preceeded this adaptation of the Henry James novel was, of course, "The Last Picture Show"), but instead, he threw down the gauntlet and made this rambling mess of a picture, which begs to be loved and hated in equal measures.