Post by Return of the Thin Olive Duke on Sept 14, 2016 8:31:07 GMT -5
Southland Tales
Dir. Richard Kelly
Premiered November 14, 2007
Ladies and gentlemen, we have arrived.
I wish Southland Tales could be the worst movie of 2007. It can’t. It’s too interesting, too deliberate. This was no accident. But it’s fitting that a year that produced so many classic films, films that pushed the expectations of their audiences, also gave us this. Easily the most ambitious film of the year, Southland Tales is also the most pretentious, the most egotistical, and the most juvenile; a long, intricately constructed, nonsensical treatise on politics, technology, religion, and popular culture; put to the screen with an angry, hormonal seventh-grader’s concept of all of the above, and brought to life with an understanding of human behavior that makes Showgirls look like The Passion of Joan of Arc.
With this retrospective drawing to a close, I have revisited over a dozen great films from my youth, and discovered over a dozen more. But let me tell you, friends: most of all, I looked forward to this.
The premise of Southland Tales is explained in a ten-minute infodump at the beginning of the film, using a bizarre, vaguely television-like interface that rips off yet at the same time completely abandons the conceit of the introduction to Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers. In the distant future of 2005 (what?), terrorists of indeterminate Middle Eastern origin detonate two atomic bombs in Texas. In response, the United States expands the War on Terror, invading Syria, Iran, and North Korea, and starting World War III.
In order to eliminate the nation’s dependency on foreign oil, the German engineering firm Treer, led by the foppish genius Baron von Westphalen (Wallace Shawn), has harnessed the power of the world’s oceans to create a new energy source called fluid karma. With military conscription now in effect, many combat veterans are put to work guarding fluid karma stations, including Pilot Abilene (Justin Timberlake, who also narrates), who is stealing the fluid karma for use and sale as a psychedelic drug.
In response to the war, the Republican Party wins the 2006 midterm elections in a landslide (depicted in the prologue with a short clip of elephants having sex), and Republican senator Bobby Frost (Holmes Osborne) takes the initiative (and the road less traveled) by expanding the USA PATRIOT ACT to establish a new government agency known as USIDENT, led by his wife Nana Mae Frost (Miranda Richardson), which employs thousands of workers to spy on seemingly every person and place in America with live cameras. In 2008, Frost’s son-in-law, Hollywood action star Boxer Santaros (Dwayne Johnson) disappears for three days, emerging in the Mojave Desert with amnesia.
...And that’s the prologue!
Far from preventing terrorist activity in the homeland, USIDENT inspires a Los Angeles-based Marxist insurgency. One of the Marxists is Roland Taverner (Seann William Scott), who plots to impersonate his police officer brother Ronald (also Seann William Scott), faking a summary execution of an unarmed black man on video in the hope of inspiring the nation to overthrow the corrupt and bigoted police state. Because, as we all know from the film version of V for Vendetta, that is literally all it takes. Unfortunately, the plans go wrong when the setup is discovered by an actual racist cop (Jon Lovitz), who performs the execution for real.
In a sort of plan B, Krysta Now (Sarah Michelle Gellar), a porn actress, aspiring reality TV mogul, energy drink entrepreneur, and singer of the hit song “Teen Horniness Is Not a Crime,” who also possesses psychic powers, convinces the amnesiac Boxer Santaros that the two of them have co-written a screenplay fortelling the apocalypse, with Boxer intended to play the film’s hero, Jericho Cane. In a bizarre turn of events, Boxer’s USIDENT observer Starla (Michelle Durrett) becomes obsessed with him: believing that the script is real, that he is actually Jericho Cane, and that she is his in-universe love interest. She uses her position to stalk him and eventually attempts to force herself on him by holding a gun to her head.
As it turns out, the screenplay is real. The production of fluid karma is causing the earth’s rotation to slow down, driving the human race insane, opening a rift in the space-time continuum, and, possibly by the design of Baron Von Westphalen’s cryptic entourage (Beth Grant in old age makeup and a villainous German accent, Curtis Armstrong, Bai Ling, an epically bearded, one-legged Kevin Smith, and a Jane’s Addiction-quoting Zelda Rubenstein), setting a sequence of events into motion that will bring about the end of days exactly as foretold in the biblical Book of Revelation.
This is confirmed when Boxer confronts Westphalen’s entourage at his 4th of July party aboard a mega-zeppelin over Los Angeles: the powers that be attempted unsuccessfully to send monkeys into the hole in the fourth dimension, but concluded that only the soul of a human could survive time travel. For maximum dazzle, they decided to send the movie star Boxer, who for technical reasons has been dead all along. Westphalen is revealed to have been funding the Neo-Marxists, who destroy the mega-zeppelin and kill everyone aboard in the spirit of revolutionary violence.
Meanwhile, Roland, having escaped an assassination attempt by the police force UPU2, finds his twin brother Ronald, who has until now been kidnapped by an ice cream truck-dwelling arms dealer (Christopher Lambert). As it turns out, they’re not twins at all, but the same person duplicated by the hole in space-time, as well as the second coming of Christ. Their encounter opens the rift further, likely destroying the universe with their unwillingness to engage in self-sacrifice. The moral of the story: “pimps don’t commit suicide.”
Director Richard Kelly arrived on the scene in 2001, when his debut feature Donnie Darko rapidly gained a cult following among teenagers, and made him the hottest ticket in Hollywood. Kelly began writing the script for Southland Tales as soon as Donnie Darko was completed– originally intending it to be a low-concept satire of the film industry. After the September 11 attacks, however, Kelly began to incorporate his own concerns about war and the environment, his trademark obsessions with time travel and the apocalypse, and his rampantly hyperbolic outlook on partisan politics. It really feels like he made use of every stray idea he had. Unlike most filmmakers, he put them all in one film, expected everyone else to get it, and expected it to be a phenomenon on par with Star Wars or The Lord of the Rings. And it’s not like people expected any less; most of the cast, a who’s who of the A, B, and C-lists, signed onto the project based solely on Kelly’s reputation from Donnie Darko, without reading the script.
In that spirit, Kelly produced three graphic novel prequels to Southland Tales, intended to explain and expand upon many of the elements in the film. While critics have pointed out that requiring supplementary material to understand a film is fucking preposterous (which it is), most assumed that the comics actually did help the film make sense; in reality, only superficial elements of the film are explained; much of the rest either further confuses matters or outright contradicts the movie.
Amazingly for a fiasco of such epic scale, Southland Tales didn’t begin to run into trouble until post-production. Kelly submitted the film to Cannes in 2006 without finishing the special effects. You may be wondering then why I’m including it as a 2007 film; the answer is (a) I really wanted to talk about it, (b) it wasn’t technically finished yet, and (c) the film was so reviled at Cannes that Kelly cut the film down for time (though it still stands at an agonizing 144 minutes), pushing back wide release by over a year. Ultimately, it was released in just 63 theaters nationwide, grossing $374,743. Kelly was effectively blacklisted from Hollywood, and after fulfilling his pre-existing obligations (such as directing 2009’s The Box), he never worked again.
In reality, no amount of timeliness or availability could have saved it. I think I can say with no hyperbole whatsoever that Southland Tales is the greatest fiasco in the history of film, displaying a level of ambition, hubris, and toxic self-indulgence that makes Heaven’s Gate look like a teenage Indiana Jones fan film. I’m honestly shocked that it only cost $17 million to make. The insane amount of faith everyone seemed to have in Kelly gives the impression that he could have had as much money for this as he wanted, and it certainly seems like the kind of film that would waste untold sums on nothing in particular.
Nothing in the film makes sense. When villainous characters die, their downfall is suddenly treated as tragic. The film is full of obtuse double-crosses and shocking revelations– in one scene, literally every line of dialogue is a shocking revelation of zero consequence. Characters constantly provide exposition for plot elements they couldn’t possibly know about. A television ad for liquid karma seems to demonstrate that the energy source causes automobiles to become ferociously aroused and have sex with each other. Because. And the film constantly regurgitates T.S. Eliot’s quote “This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but with a whimper,” but changes it to “not with a whimper, but with a bang,” missing the point entirely.
And where even schlock masters like Michael Bay use their films as flimsy excuses to present breathtaking imagery, Kelly’s cinematic instincts are totally absent in an astonishingly ugly spectacle. His attempt to convey the scorching sun of a Los Angeles heat wave results in his use not of a yellow or orange filter, but a white one, severely washing out every frame of film and making the beaches of Santa Monica Bay look like dawn on the Arctic. The filmmaker’s equally forced attempt to present the streetscape as dirty and decrepit also falls flat when they are spotlessly clean.
The film is not without its share of successes on the periphery. An improvised scene in which Amy Poehler and Wood Harris badly act out a fight is genuinely hilarious, but just as obviously free from Kelly’s inept writing; though he does get some early laughs in at the expense of the airheaded but clairvoyant Krysta Now, who even gets a line paying homage to Plan 9 from Outer Space.
The film’s other triumph is Dwayne Johnson’s performance as Boxer Santaros. Johnson, then yet to become a beloved fixture of Hollywood, recites his lines as if he is reading the script off-camera for the first time, stuttering and flinching through every scene, but all the while betraying the realization of how stupid this movie is and going along for the ride.
Dir. Richard Kelly
Premiered November 14, 2007
Ladies and gentlemen, we have found the ultimate sub-sub-subgenre of the 2000s: the wacky, overstuffed, incomprehensible pseudo-satire that is also a pretentious, inscrutable screed against the US Government. There are only three movies of this kind that I'm aware of. Two of them came out in 2007: this one, and... well, if you've seen it, you know what it's going to be. For the rest of you, stick around.
–Smokin' Aces review
–Smokin' Aces review
I wish Southland Tales could be the worst movie of 2007. It can’t. It’s too interesting, too deliberate. This was no accident. But it’s fitting that a year that produced so many classic films, films that pushed the expectations of their audiences, also gave us this. Easily the most ambitious film of the year, Southland Tales is also the most pretentious, the most egotistical, and the most juvenile; a long, intricately constructed, nonsensical treatise on politics, technology, religion, and popular culture; put to the screen with an angry, hormonal seventh-grader’s concept of all of the above, and brought to life with an understanding of human behavior that makes Showgirls look like The Passion of Joan of Arc.
With this retrospective drawing to a close, I have revisited over a dozen great films from my youth, and discovered over a dozen more. But let me tell you, friends: most of all, I looked forward to this.
The premise of Southland Tales is explained in a ten-minute infodump at the beginning of the film, using a bizarre, vaguely television-like interface that rips off yet at the same time completely abandons the conceit of the introduction to Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers. In the distant future of 2005 (what?), terrorists of indeterminate Middle Eastern origin detonate two atomic bombs in Texas. In response, the United States expands the War on Terror, invading Syria, Iran, and North Korea, and starting World War III.
In order to eliminate the nation’s dependency on foreign oil, the German engineering firm Treer, led by the foppish genius Baron von Westphalen (Wallace Shawn), has harnessed the power of the world’s oceans to create a new energy source called fluid karma. With military conscription now in effect, many combat veterans are put to work guarding fluid karma stations, including Pilot Abilene (Justin Timberlake, who also narrates), who is stealing the fluid karma for use and sale as a psychedelic drug.
In response to the war, the Republican Party wins the 2006 midterm elections in a landslide (depicted in the prologue with a short clip of elephants having sex), and Republican senator Bobby Frost (Holmes Osborne) takes the initiative (and the road less traveled) by expanding the USA PATRIOT ACT to establish a new government agency known as USIDENT, led by his wife Nana Mae Frost (Miranda Richardson), which employs thousands of workers to spy on seemingly every person and place in America with live cameras. In 2008, Frost’s son-in-law, Hollywood action star Boxer Santaros (Dwayne Johnson) disappears for three days, emerging in the Mojave Desert with amnesia.
...And that’s the prologue!
Far from preventing terrorist activity in the homeland, USIDENT inspires a Los Angeles-based Marxist insurgency. One of the Marxists is Roland Taverner (Seann William Scott), who plots to impersonate his police officer brother Ronald (also Seann William Scott), faking a summary execution of an unarmed black man on video in the hope of inspiring the nation to overthrow the corrupt and bigoted police state. Because, as we all know from the film version of V for Vendetta, that is literally all it takes. Unfortunately, the plans go wrong when the setup is discovered by an actual racist cop (Jon Lovitz), who performs the execution for real.
In a sort of plan B, Krysta Now (Sarah Michelle Gellar), a porn actress, aspiring reality TV mogul, energy drink entrepreneur, and singer of the hit song “Teen Horniness Is Not a Crime,” who also possesses psychic powers, convinces the amnesiac Boxer Santaros that the two of them have co-written a screenplay fortelling the apocalypse, with Boxer intended to play the film’s hero, Jericho Cane. In a bizarre turn of events, Boxer’s USIDENT observer Starla (Michelle Durrett) becomes obsessed with him: believing that the script is real, that he is actually Jericho Cane, and that she is his in-universe love interest. She uses her position to stalk him and eventually attempts to force herself on him by holding a gun to her head.
As it turns out, the screenplay is real. The production of fluid karma is causing the earth’s rotation to slow down, driving the human race insane, opening a rift in the space-time continuum, and, possibly by the design of Baron Von Westphalen’s cryptic entourage (Beth Grant in old age makeup and a villainous German accent, Curtis Armstrong, Bai Ling, an epically bearded, one-legged Kevin Smith, and a Jane’s Addiction-quoting Zelda Rubenstein), setting a sequence of events into motion that will bring about the end of days exactly as foretold in the biblical Book of Revelation.
This is confirmed when Boxer confronts Westphalen’s entourage at his 4th of July party aboard a mega-zeppelin over Los Angeles: the powers that be attempted unsuccessfully to send monkeys into the hole in the fourth dimension, but concluded that only the soul of a human could survive time travel. For maximum dazzle, they decided to send the movie star Boxer, who for technical reasons has been dead all along. Westphalen is revealed to have been funding the Neo-Marxists, who destroy the mega-zeppelin and kill everyone aboard in the spirit of revolutionary violence.
Meanwhile, Roland, having escaped an assassination attempt by the police force UPU2, finds his twin brother Ronald, who has until now been kidnapped by an ice cream truck-dwelling arms dealer (Christopher Lambert). As it turns out, they’re not twins at all, but the same person duplicated by the hole in space-time, as well as the second coming of Christ. Their encounter opens the rift further, likely destroying the universe with their unwillingness to engage in self-sacrifice. The moral of the story: “pimps don’t commit suicide.”
Director Richard Kelly arrived on the scene in 2001, when his debut feature Donnie Darko rapidly gained a cult following among teenagers, and made him the hottest ticket in Hollywood. Kelly began writing the script for Southland Tales as soon as Donnie Darko was completed– originally intending it to be a low-concept satire of the film industry. After the September 11 attacks, however, Kelly began to incorporate his own concerns about war and the environment, his trademark obsessions with time travel and the apocalypse, and his rampantly hyperbolic outlook on partisan politics. It really feels like he made use of every stray idea he had. Unlike most filmmakers, he put them all in one film, expected everyone else to get it, and expected it to be a phenomenon on par with Star Wars or The Lord of the Rings. And it’s not like people expected any less; most of the cast, a who’s who of the A, B, and C-lists, signed onto the project based solely on Kelly’s reputation from Donnie Darko, without reading the script.
In that spirit, Kelly produced three graphic novel prequels to Southland Tales, intended to explain and expand upon many of the elements in the film. While critics have pointed out that requiring supplementary material to understand a film is fucking preposterous (which it is), most assumed that the comics actually did help the film make sense; in reality, only superficial elements of the film are explained; much of the rest either further confuses matters or outright contradicts the movie.
Amazingly for a fiasco of such epic scale, Southland Tales didn’t begin to run into trouble until post-production. Kelly submitted the film to Cannes in 2006 without finishing the special effects. You may be wondering then why I’m including it as a 2007 film; the answer is (a) I really wanted to talk about it, (b) it wasn’t technically finished yet, and (c) the film was so reviled at Cannes that Kelly cut the film down for time (though it still stands at an agonizing 144 minutes), pushing back wide release by over a year. Ultimately, it was released in just 63 theaters nationwide, grossing $374,743. Kelly was effectively blacklisted from Hollywood, and after fulfilling his pre-existing obligations (such as directing 2009’s The Box), he never worked again.
In reality, no amount of timeliness or availability could have saved it. I think I can say with no hyperbole whatsoever that Southland Tales is the greatest fiasco in the history of film, displaying a level of ambition, hubris, and toxic self-indulgence that makes Heaven’s Gate look like a teenage Indiana Jones fan film. I’m honestly shocked that it only cost $17 million to make. The insane amount of faith everyone seemed to have in Kelly gives the impression that he could have had as much money for this as he wanted, and it certainly seems like the kind of film that would waste untold sums on nothing in particular.
Nothing in the film makes sense. When villainous characters die, their downfall is suddenly treated as tragic. The film is full of obtuse double-crosses and shocking revelations– in one scene, literally every line of dialogue is a shocking revelation of zero consequence. Characters constantly provide exposition for plot elements they couldn’t possibly know about. A television ad for liquid karma seems to demonstrate that the energy source causes automobiles to become ferociously aroused and have sex with each other. Because. And the film constantly regurgitates T.S. Eliot’s quote “This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but with a whimper,” but changes it to “not with a whimper, but with a bang,” missing the point entirely.
And where even schlock masters like Michael Bay use their films as flimsy excuses to present breathtaking imagery, Kelly’s cinematic instincts are totally absent in an astonishingly ugly spectacle. His attempt to convey the scorching sun of a Los Angeles heat wave results in his use not of a yellow or orange filter, but a white one, severely washing out every frame of film and making the beaches of Santa Monica Bay look like dawn on the Arctic. The filmmaker’s equally forced attempt to present the streetscape as dirty and decrepit also falls flat when they are spotlessly clean.
The film is not without its share of successes on the periphery. An improvised scene in which Amy Poehler and Wood Harris badly act out a fight is genuinely hilarious, but just as obviously free from Kelly’s inept writing; though he does get some early laughs in at the expense of the airheaded but clairvoyant Krysta Now, who even gets a line paying homage to Plan 9 from Outer Space.
The film’s other triumph is Dwayne Johnson’s performance as Boxer Santaros. Johnson, then yet to become a beloved fixture of Hollywood, recites his lines as if he is reading the script off-camera for the first time, stuttering and flinching through every scene, but all the while betraying the realization of how stupid this movie is and going along for the ride.
Southland Tales is a cinematic temper tantrum, the product of a mind so furious at the world and everyone in it that he is unable to fashion his contempt into entertainment or insight. If you were wondering why “pimps don’t commit suicide” is the moral of the story, Kelly later explained in the press that he intended “pimp” as superlative for American combat veterans– who at the time were the subject of much public concern due to a high suicide rate. It’s as insulting as it is obtuse, and by no means should you the viewer be expected to pick up on it. Trust me, this review only scratches the surface of this movie’s nonsense. In every respect, the more you learn about the film, the more ridiculous it is.
Signs This Was Made in 2007
There is literally no part of this film, big or small, that could possibly have been conceived at any other moment, but holy shit, let’s try:
Additional Notes
Next Time: Beowulf
Signs This Was Made in 2007
There is literally no part of this film, big or small, that could possibly have been conceived at any other moment, but holy shit, let’s try:
- Justin Timberlake’s random drug trip/Killers music video
- The use of “pimp” as a term of endearment
- The passing, inconsequential mockery of reality television
- The constant paranoia that the Bush Administration is about to declare a dictatorship
- The fear of a direct war against Syria and Iran (both of which the Project for a New American Century recommended invading at the time)
- The red herring of America’s “dependency” on Middle Eastern oil (see below)
- The constant namedropping of the Battle of Fallujah
- Cindy Pinzicki’s (Nora Dunn) monologue about the meaning of civil liberties that Republicans don’t understand before she goes on a Republican testicle-tasering rampage (don’t tase me, bro!).
Additional Notes
- Compared with literally everything else, this is a minor nitpick, but even in a war with three major oil-producing countries, the effect on our energy consumption would be minimal. Even before the shale oil boom of the early 2010s, most American oil was produced domestically, and the majority of imported oil came from neighboring Canada. The myth of our dependency was big at the time, however, as a supposed rationale for invading Iraq (in reality, the war had far more to do with several old draft dodgers having a midlife crisis and wanting to play soldier).
- In the middle of the third act, Kelly re-enacts the famous character-establishing long take from Donnie Darko aboard Baron von Westphalen’s megazeppelin, this time set to Black Rebel Motorcycle Club’s “Howl” (say what you will about the film, the soundtrack is unimpeachable). This way, we can understand the characters’ relationships to each other for the rest of the movie. Unfortunately, the movie is almost over.
- There is a bizarre fixation with flashing plastic balls in this film. While quoting Jane’s Addiction, Zelda Rubenstein holds a blue one. Later, Pilot Abilene is shown in possession of a red one marked with a produce label. Finally, Boxer finds an orange one sitting atop the megazeppelin’s emergency pistol (?) and takes it with him.
- The film also has a bizarre fixation with feces. There is an extended philosophical argument early on over whether animals enjoy defecating. Several mooks are killed while sitting on toilets, either real or giant novelty (one of them is Eli Roth). Roland Taverner frets that he hasn’t had a bowel movement in six days. There’s a long rant about how politicians “think their shit doesn’t smell.” There’s a shootout at a bar called the Poop Deck.
- President George W. Bush has a cameo in an archival speech, selectively edited to make it sound like he is endorsing slavery.
- The sixteen minutes Kelly cut out of the film comprise a subplot starring Jeanine Garofalo as a character called “Lieutenant General Teena MacArthur.” It is unclear what her part in the film consisted of, but she is briefly shown partying with Pilot Abilene at the apocalypse party.
- Speaking of the apocalypse party, an omniscient loudspeaker announcer is heard over Downtown Los Angeles, saying lines like “Have a nice apocalypse” and “nobody rocks the cock like Krysta Now!” It is unknown where this is coming from, who is speaking, or how he knows anything that’s going on.
- Fortunio Balducci’s (Will Sasso) ridicule of Krysta Now’s show Now, where pornstars discuss major events seems like it’s going to result in an ironic payoff, but it doesn’t.
- Much of the film is consumed with filler scenes in which Nana Mae Frost watches an entire room full of television screens showing news, cartoons, televangelists, and random nonsense in a fashion somewhat reminiscent of Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers, a film that I didn’t like but which got its (admittedly stupid) point across much more effectively. A recurring incident involves a news chyron reading “MARTIN KEFAUVER/EATRMAURVEINFK/FREAK MAN VIRTUE” over and over. The Mr. Kefauver in question is a random character who only appears in the film’s second half. After getting drafted, he plans to flee to Mexico with Roland, but the ATM won’t read his USIDENT card. Instead of, you know, trying again, he and Roland take the ATM with them.
- Speaking of USIDENT, much (relatively speaking) is made in the film concerning the use of fingerprints as a form of ID, leading severed fingers to become a black market commodity. Aside from allegations that the Marxists want them to commit voter fraud, it’s unclear why severed fingers would otherwise be useful in such a situation, nor is it clear why Baron von Westphalen, in a scene unrelated to anything else, angrily has the Japanese Prime Minister’s entire hand cut off.
- Boxer is covered in tattoos symbolizing all the world’s major religions, and when the apocalypse begins, his Jesus tattoo starts bleeding. Because.
- Incidentally “the Southland” is indeed a colloqual term for Greater Los Angeles, mainly used by gregarious meteorologists.
- The logo for Treer, and the film, is a cartogram of the 2004 United States Presidential Election.
Next Time: Beowulf
