First of all, I freely admit to being pretty much the only person I know who didn't go for Richard Kelly's 2001 debut film Donnie Darko. I found it a weak attempt at David Lynch-level pop surrealism aimed at self-serious teenagers. Years later, I agreed to watch it again, after reading all the notes on the film and after Kelly, with his "director's cut," bent over backwards to convince his audience that what he really made was a complicated science fiction movie, not a typically Lynchian drama about a lonely loser's fantasy life during the moments before his death. It made more sense, but for me it also took away what little heart the story actually had. Now that Kelly's long-awaited sophomore effort Southland Tales has hit the screen, I am more convinced than ever that the emperor's not wearing any clothes. Richard Kelly is a bad filmmaker.
Set in a sci fi version of 2008 Los Angeles, Southland Tales is a muddled mess, tying together a trillion different plot lines that revolve around the Republican vice presidential candidate and his family, a Hollywood movie star (Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson) who has gone missing, a national security tracking system that keeps tabs on everybody, a porn star (Sarah Michelle Gellar) who is trying to sell a script she wrote with The Rock, Seann William Scott playing two characters, a mysterious alternative fuel, neo-Marxists, World War III, the Apocalypse, the Second Coming, and legions of cheesy B actors and former "Saturday Night Live" stars. And Justin Timberlake.
It's ambitious, to say the least. Overly ambitious. WAY overly ambitious. While Kelly continues to ape Lynch's trademark weirdness - Wild at Heart, Lynch's only self-congratulatory film, is the main influence, but Mulholland Drive is there too (Kelly even uses Mulholland's Latin chanteuse Rebekah Del Rio in a similar scene), and actually there's quite a bit of Kathryn Bigelow's mediocre, undeservedly admired Strange Days in this movie too - the life Kelly's leading as a director is more akin to that of George Lucas: Lots of half-baked ideas, some terrible casting choices, and nobody to lean over his shoulder to tell him "Make some serious script revisions, or have somebody else write your screenplay." Kelly seems overwhelmingly convinced that he is a genius, as his pretentious storyline shows - only the last three "chapters" of an apparent six-chapter saga are presented in the film (hey, just like the first Star Wars movies!), with audiences expected to buy the first three chapters in graphic novel form - essentially forcing people to once again do lots of homework in order to fully "get" the movie, just as with Donnie Darko. Man, what an ego this guy's got. But I'm not buying it. Despite the heavy-handed use of Biblical references (gee, that's a new one) and classic poetry (particularly T.S. Eliot's The Hollow Men, which Kelly paraphrases), the low humor and flat dialogue in this tepid satire are what betray Kelly's true sensibilities: Look, there's Kevin Smith dressed up like an old man! Haw haw, John Larroquette from "Night Court" got his private parts tasered! Tee hee, The Rock just called that slutty Bai Ling a "bitch" and then she fell on the floor going "Ooh!" - that'll show her! This is an AWFUL film, devoid of any truth, emotion, intelligence or genuine creativity. (Kelly works hard to explain a lot of his story here, too, and guess what - in the end, it's kind of like Donnie Darko, with its parallel universes and temporal shifts and such.) The actors, most of whom are the sort who need a lot of direction to be good, recite their lines without feeling, as lost as the rest of us. (I assume Johnson, Scott and Gellar signed on for Kelly's hipster cred; the rest of the cast were surely just hungry for any work whatsoever.) Even the CG effects are poorly done! Even the cinematography's bad! I could go on, but what depresses me most is that there will doubtlessly be new fans who will defend all this shabbily-executed nonsense as "visionary," and the misguided cult of Richard Kelly will only grow.
Set in a sci fi version of 2008 Los Angeles, Southland Tales is a muddled mess, tying together a trillion different plot lines that revolve around the Republican vice presidential candidate and his family, a Hollywood movie star (Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson) who has gone missing, a national security tracking system that keeps tabs on everybody, a porn star (Sarah Michelle Gellar) who is trying to sell a script she wrote with The Rock, Seann William Scott playing two characters, a mysterious alternative fuel, neo-Marxists, World War III, the Apocalypse, the Second Coming, and legions of cheesy B actors and former "Saturday Night Live" stars. And Justin Timberlake.
It's ambitious, to say the least. Overly ambitious. WAY overly ambitious. While Kelly continues to ape Lynch's trademark weirdness - Wild at Heart, Lynch's only self-congratulatory film, is the main influence, but Mulholland Drive is there too (Kelly even uses Mulholland's Latin chanteuse Rebekah Del Rio in a similar scene), and actually there's quite a bit of Kathryn Bigelow's mediocre, undeservedly admired Strange Days in this movie too - the life Kelly's leading as a director is more akin to that of George Lucas: Lots of half-baked ideas, some terrible casting choices, and nobody to lean over his shoulder to tell him "Make some serious script revisions, or have somebody else write your screenplay." Kelly seems overwhelmingly convinced that he is a genius, as his pretentious storyline shows - only the last three "chapters" of an apparent six-chapter saga are presented in the film (hey, just like the first Star Wars movies!), with audiences expected to buy the first three chapters in graphic novel form - essentially forcing people to once again do lots of homework in order to fully "get" the movie, just as with Donnie Darko. Man, what an ego this guy's got. But I'm not buying it. Despite the heavy-handed use of Biblical references (gee, that's a new one) and classic poetry (particularly T.S. Eliot's The Hollow Men, which Kelly paraphrases), the low humor and flat dialogue in this tepid satire are what betray Kelly's true sensibilities: Look, there's Kevin Smith dressed up like an old man! Haw haw, John Larroquette from "Night Court" got his private parts tasered! Tee hee, The Rock just called that slutty Bai Ling a "bitch" and then she fell on the floor going "Ooh!" - that'll show her! This is an AWFUL film, devoid of any truth, emotion, intelligence or genuine creativity. (Kelly works hard to explain a lot of his story here, too, and guess what - in the end, it's kind of like Donnie Darko, with its parallel universes and temporal shifts and such.) The actors, most of whom are the sort who need a lot of direction to be good, recite their lines without feeling, as lost as the rest of us. (I assume Johnson, Scott and Gellar signed on for Kelly's hipster cred; the rest of the cast were surely just hungry for any work whatsoever.) Even the CG effects are poorly done! Even the cinematography's bad! I could go on, but what depresses me most is that there will doubtlessly be new fans who will defend all this shabbily-executed nonsense as "visionary," and the misguided cult of Richard Kelly will only grow.