Review of Southland Tales (2007) by Shawn H — 17 Feb 2012

I have seen Southland Tales five times, which says something about how unique this film is because I think it is awful.

When I first saw Richard Kelly's debut film Donnie Darko, I thought it was fascinating yet incoherent. Future viewings proved this wrong and when I finally saw the later director's cut, it became obvious that the film would have been easier to follow had the director's original intentions been used. Southland Tales was also cut down, after a disastrous screening at Cannes, but it is hard to imagine the twenty minutes of missing footage adding anything to this mess.

Like most directors of so bad it's good movies, the key ingredient is Kelly's unbelievable narcissism. Kelly's movie wants to be a satire of post 9/11 politics in America and takes place in the then future of 2008. Along with this is a satire of Hollywood and while the film makes a few good points about the melding of News and entertainment, politics and celebrity, Kelly's ideas about the patriot act, the war on terror and US politics in general are unbelievable simplistic and puerile. To Kelly, his native California is the center of the universe and he is incapable of seeing the global implications of the politics of his film through anything but a Southern California mindset.

Maybe this was part of the point, but in order for a political satire to work, it has to have at least some relation to real world politics. In the world of this movie a nuclear strike in Texas has plunged the US into a state of emergency and this has resulted in a very close election where California is the state that it all hinges on. California? Why this would be true is never explained and the rest of this movie plays out satirizing political scenarios that do not actually exist. The one political joke that elicits a chuckle is the Democratic ticket, which we see on posters is Clinton / Lieberman but once again Kelly botches it. It would be so much funnier if the posters said Lieberman / Clinton.

The movie is enjoyable as a work of camp. In fact, many of the actors work very well with this material. Dwayne Johnson has never been better and neither has Sarah Michelle Geller. They both get the best intentional laughs of the movie really finding the humor with their campy dialogue and giving self aware performances. Justin Timberlake's musical sequence is also a show stopper, literally since there is no reason for it to be in the movie.

The rest of what makes the movie enjoyable are its constant WTF moments. Seann William Scott playing twins for no reason, John Lovitz as a crooked cop, lines like "I'm a pimp and pimps do not commit suicide", an alternative energy source invented by a guy named Baron Von Westphalen. Not to mention a group of "neo-marxist" who never show any kind of connection to the principles of Marx. Southland Tales is the work of a sometimes brilliant but intellectually immature filmmaker but unlike his morally repugnant third film The Box, Southland Tales is at least for connoisseurs of bad movies, a rocking good time.