Customer Reviews
This is the way Richard Kelly's film career ends.. 
2008-08-31
Richard Kelly is a modern day surrealist, plumbing the depths of his own subconsious for material. But surrealism is, of necessity, a counter-cultural endeavor. David Lynch has demonstrated that the surrealist filmaker still has a small niche in Hollywood, but only if he can maintain a bit of distance (from the establishment) and control (over the product). Here, Kelly has wedded himself to the Hollywood establishment in an earnest, uncritical and unrefined way. The actors don't seem to understand their roles, the script or the symbolism. Their performance is the absolute worst of Hollywood - a sort of plastic hyperrealism. And that would be great if this film were a joke at their expense. But Kelly's commentary suggests that this was meant to be a political film - about terrorism, civil liberties, and the right. If this was really his purpose, he has failed utterly.
My read on this film is that Kelly really had no idea what he was making, and didn't care much - he was just letting his mind go free. But pitching a script to Hollywood people means you have to make it "about" something. In the process of getting this movie greenlighted and then made, Kelly was forced to explain (and then mortgage) his dream to hundreds of different people. It is a safe bet that few of these people had ever heard of Robert Frost (let alone Phillip K. Dick), so Southland Tales became whatever they wanted it to be. For Sarah Michelle Gellar, a political film; for the Rock, a sci-fi thriller; and for John Larroquette, a job.
It is safe to say that this movie marks the end of Kelly's Hollywood career. My advice to him is: go indie. Oh, what could have been with a smaller budget and fewer stars! Still, there is enough going on here that its worth taking a look at. But this is barely a "movie" let alone a "film."
Not for those with ADD 
2008-08-14
You have to pay attention to catch all the intricate details of what is going on. That is difficult to do in the beginning because the narrator overwhelms you with background information about the politcal & economic state of things very quickly. You learn about the actual characters in the film more by observing their on screen behavior and settings than by being "told" their true motives and connections in a flat out obvious way.
The subplots converge at the end of the film. At its core it shows how subculture A connects with subculture B connects with subculture C and so on and yet how each individual simultaneously functions as a separate entity with their own personal motivations. If you are impatient only knowing bits and pieces of how who and what fits in with this and that throughout the movie you won't like it. If you are one of those people who needs the core of the film to be meagerly disguised by simplistic foreshadowing in the first 15 minutes this film is not for you.
We get to learn what makes the characters tick and what makes them human by observing them in action. We don't get many long soliliqueys about what their "thoughts" happen to be. Imagery in the sets/costumes and the actor's facial expressions/body language express more about the inner feelings of the characters than the dialogue. The cast gave excellent performances.
The sets in this move were very well done - be sure to check them out when you watch it the second time through.
Again, it's really about all the subplots of groups of people - how they occaisionally interwine and everything only makes perfect sense at the very end of the film. I enjoyed it thoroughly.
But what does it all mean? 
2008-08-12
Set in post-nuclear Southern California (the Southlands), this film tells the stories of a number of different characters - in particular, amnesiac actor Boxer Santaros (Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson), porn star Krysta Now (Sarah Michelle Geller), and twin police officers Roland and Ronald Taverner (Seann William Scott) - with the actions of all of these characters ultimately leading to the grand finale of the end of the world.
Many of the elements of this film will be familiar to those who have already seen "Donnie Darko"; once again Kelly deals with time travel, politics and the apocalypse. However, he did a lot better job of dealing with them in his first film. As many other reviewers have pointed out, "Southland Tales" is barely coherent. The individual scenes within the film aren't actually all that bad , and I enjoyed many of them while I was watching this film (the scene in which Justin Timberlake drunkenly lipsyncs his way through "All These Things That I've Done" made the film worth my time), but together a lot of it really doesn't make all that much sense. Some of what is going on is explained in the final half-hour of the film, and I was pretty proud of myself for being able to explain 75% of the plot. Nevertheless, I haven't the faintest idea what any of it means - although, for the record, that didn't actually bother me all that much. I did like this film, I just don't think it's great and I didn't like it enough to rewatch it in order to understand it better.
"Southland Tales" is worth watching once, if you happen to be a Richard Kelly fan, or a fan of one of the multitude of big name actors in this film (it still puzzles me how Kelly managed to convince so many top actors to appear in this film - even if you like it, you would have to agree that it's not exactly mainstream), and your expectations aren't too high. However, it's probably best to rent this one first and see if you like it, before you hand over the chunk of your hard-earned cash necessary to become the proud owner of this film on DVD.
Very strange movie. Like a true Philip K. Dick adaptation. 2008-08-11
If you read Philip K. Dick, you know that there's a big difference between Philip K. Dick: Four Novels of the 1960s: The Man in the High Castle / The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch / Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? / Ubik or The Transmigration of Timothy Archer and the kind of movies that get made out of Philip K. Dick stories and novels (Blade Runner (Five-Disc Complete Collector's Edition) [Blu-ray] and Minority Report (Widescreen Two-Disc Special Edition) for example.) The heroes are just a little too heroic. The questions are just a little too easy to assimilate. The endings are...well, they actually have satisfactory endings. Love reading Philip K. Dick but I can count on one hand the number of times when I actually felt a book had an ending instead of just stopping somewhere after trying to wrestle the last 3 remaining plot threads into submission.
In the case of this movie, there's Philip K. Dick written all over it. Conspiracies within conspiracies. Everyone is on one side or the other and everyone is a double agent. Time travel is an excuse to mess up things. Coincidence happens but to no one's benefit and at the end most viewers are left with a "what? What was that?" That's not to say that it's not an enjoyable movie. It's just a movie that's endlessly looping and confusing. If you are a Philip K. Dick fan, it's the movie for you. If you aren't, then you might want to look elsewhere. But it is the one movie that really gets the Philip K. Dick universe right. The conspiracies are confusing. The people are more pathetic than evil. Even the big evil Big Brother company is run by morons and leches. And the heroic counterculture types are almost as scary. This has a great place in my heart as I once wrote a 40 page paper slamming on Dystopian fiction (Swastika Night being the worst offender) as didactic and not true to the human experience, contrasting it to The Man in the High Castle in which everything is awful, but no one is all seeing and all knowing.
Either way, it's a confusing mess of a movie. If that's not your thing, avoid. If you want to see something weird and different, by all means, check it out. And then for discussion question, extrapolate on why Justin Timberlake keeps taking these freaky roles.
What do you even do with this movie? 2008-07-21
Southland Tales is such a bizarre, gonzo trip into dystopic apocolypse lunatic comedy-musical-sci-fi-stoner-headtrip-thriller land, it seems beside the point to even try and register it as good or bad. The flaws are evident and intetional - most of the time, I'm fairly convinced the movie dares you to even try to like it. I'll try and make as quick of a synopsis of the plot as I can make - there was a nuclear attack in Texas, the world's at war, we're out of oil, there's a solution but it might throw the earth off its axis a bit and it's spearheaded by a crazy-looking freak played by Wallace Shawn who has a fondness for TV ads involving cars having sex (seriously). Also, there's the Boxing/movie star hunk who's the son-in-law of the Democratic vice-presidential candidate who's got amnesia and is shacking up with a porn superstar who's vaguely connected to a group of marxist rebels attempting to dissuade a congressional vote on... something... and also Seann William Scott is an infiltrating set of identical twins... who's also doing something. Oh, and Justin Timberlake narrates with cryptic quotes from the Book of Revelations. So, to put it mildly, the movie's plot is excessive, tough to swallow, and teeters back and forth from being completely over the top and just-sorta acceptable. And the casting - from The Rock, Cheri Oteri, Jon Lovitz, Amy Poehler, Mandy Moore, Nora Dunn, Sarah Michelle Gellar, and John Larroquette in main roles - is even more ridiculous. Still, with so much easy to dismiss the movie, it's hard to say it doesn't have drive, and just when the movie veers over the cliff, a scene of extraordinary humor or emotion pops up and surprises you. Sarah Michelle Gellar and Nora Dunn in particular are given scenes of just outrageous lines (says Gellar on her hot-topic porn talk show, "Violence is a big problem in today's society. That's the primary reason I won't do anal"), and their scenes are viciously entertaining. One extraordinary over the top scene finds Gellar, The Rock, and Moore trading one-ups in something that's like a soap opera gone drug-addled. And the scene to truly savor is the weirdest - a music video in an arcade hall in which Justin Timberlake's wounded, crazy drug addict war hero lipsynchs and parties to The Killer's "All These Things That I've Done." That scene takes the movie's drug-trip kitsch and makes it electrifying, letting Timberlake's scarred face and dark, desperate eyes somehow reveal a life within the confines of a crazy dance number. Such an aberration, it electrifies the movie around it as it veers away from rational explanation and silliness and back again in its 2 1/2 hours. I'd say this movie - ridiculous and wonderful in spurts - clocks in somewhere over the 50% mark, making the rewards slightly greater than the work you have to do to put up with the movie.
GARBAGE. Please watch anything except this movie! 
2008-07-19
SOUTHLAND TALES is an ensemble piece set in the futuristic landscape of Los Angeles as it stands on the brink of social economic and environmental disaster. Boxer Santaros (Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson) is an action star who's stricken with amnesia. His life intertwines with Krysta Now (Sarah Michelle Gellar) an adult film star developing her own reality television project and Ronald Taverner (Seann William Scott) a Hermosa Beach police officer who holds the key to a vast conspiracy.System Requirements:Running Time: 144 minutesFormat: DVD MOVIE Genre: ACTION/ADVENTURE/CRIME Rating: R UPC: 043396182837 Manufacturer No: 18283
Great Movie with a ton of symbolism... 2008-07-14
While I won't spend an hour explaining this movie, I'll be short and to the point. While it was very hard to understand the movie, many people hate it because they don't understand it.
This movie has so much hidden meaning that watching it the second time around I began to pick up on so many things. Everything about it was amazing.
I suggest reading the analysis off [...]
It explains everything to you in detail that you might've not caught on to.
Richard Kelly Masterfully Illustrates The Apocalyptic Impact.......of the Sophomore Slump 2008-07-08
Richard Kelly's Donnie Darko may very well be my favorite film of all time. The narrative tells a poignant story that keeps you guessing the entire time, creative a really interactive experience. However, the thing that was great about "Darko" was the fact that the plot made sense and had an internal logic that followed it. And I quite simply love that movie with a burning passion. So when Richard Kelly's second major movie was released, I bought it on the day it came out. It took me a while to review it, because I wanted to digest it, see if I was missing some key point to the movie was would suddenly reveal that this two hour and twenty minute apocalyptic epic wasn't pure, unafraid non-sense. Well, if anyone finds that key point, let me know, because this movie is just that. Non-sense.
It's a bloated and convoluted narrative that will not make sense even after repeated watches. Even Justin Timberlake's voice-overs during tedious and frankly unnecessary expository scenes don't help. The acting, at least, is good, but that is a moot point as well because we aren't given the chance to care about these characters, because our brains are too busy reeling from the "WTF is going on" factor. The movie has some intrigue when Boxer Santaros (Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson) researches the role of a character in a screenplay he wrote by tagging along with Roland Taverner (Seann William Scott), but that quickly evaporates when you realize that this movie is basically just scenes. Aesthetically pleasing and well-shot scenes, but scenes that register no emotions and tell no story and aim for nothing other than to boggle your mind, and be pretentious while doing it. There are moments of what feels like poignancy, but it's achieved in a very false and underhanded way. Through music and scenes that on their own, in absolutely no context would evoke base emotion, Kelly tries to force these moments onto us, but to anyone who has seen this movie more than once, even those moments ring false.
In the end, "Southland Tales" is trying to say so much (in the most convoluted way possible, mind) that nothing registers and it ends up saying absolutely nothing. At least it was pretty to look at. But the movie, instead of leaving you with any bit of satisfaction, will leave you with a blank expression, wondering aloud what the hell you just watched.
I think this movie may have simply been an excuse to show two cars having sex and to have the "Pimps don't commit suicide" line.
3/10
This decades' "Brazil" 2008-06-21
Also easily the best film of the decade. 20,000 stars. Richard Kelly takes some second string stars and makes them palatable. Total Information Awareness. Fascist fun. Drugs, resistance, time travel, anarchy, this is so ambitious I don't care if it hits the mark, this is an unparalleled sketch of this modern world.
An original auteur 
2008-06-20
What could one add to the maelstrum of criticism already listed in these other reviews? All I have to say is that ST is one of the most original films to make it to celluloid in the past few years. No, its not Donnie Darko II - there will be no "Paint A Starry Night again man!" Kudos to a director who takes it for granted that I have a brain and the ability to use it. Is ST a comedy? Social or political commentary? Religious allegory? Semi-surreal Sci-Fi flick? Try all of the above. Tired of spoon-fed Hollywood pap? Ready for a flick that does other things than go "boom" or make like second-rate Jane Austin? Try Southland Tales and go with the flow...you might even like it.
