The new movie from Donnie Darko's writer/director Richard Kelly. Sounds like it going to be really cool. The website is a lot like Donnie Darko's but it's not finished yet.
So far the cast includes Seann William Scott, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Jason Lee, Janeane Garofalo, Kevin Smith, Tim Blake Nelson, and Amy Poehler. It's supposed to be a Musical/Comedy/Thriller/Drama. I'm really excited. Hopefully it will be amazing.
Johnson lands in Kelly's 'Southland'
Source: Hollywood Reporter
Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson will star opposite Seann William Scott and Sarah Michelle Gellar in Richard Kelly's "Southland Tales." Sean McKittrick will produce under the Darko Entertainment banner he co-founded with Kelly, along with Cherry Road Film principals Bo Hyde and Kendall Morgan.
"Southland" is an ensemble piece set in the futuristic landscape of Los Angeles on July 4, 2008, as it stands on the brink of social, economic and environmental disaster.
Johnson will star as Boxer Santaros, an action star stricken with amnesia whose life intertwines with Krysta Now (Gellar), an adult film star developing her own reality television project, and David Clark (Scott), a Hermosa Beach police officer who holds the key to a vast conspiracy.
Principal photography is slated to begin Aug. 1 in Los Angeles.
"The film is going to be a strange hybrid of the sensibilities of Andy Warhol and Philip K. Dick," Kelly said in a statement.
The executive producers are Matthew Rhodes and Judd Payne of Persistent Entertainment, Bill Johnson and Jim Seibel of Inferno Distribution and Oliver Hengst of Academy Film Gmbh.
Cherry Road Films is co-financing with Universal Pictures International, Inferno Distribution and Wild Bunch, with Universal distributing in most foreign territories through the UIP banner and Wild Bunch distributing in France, Benelux, Spain and Switzerland. UTA is representing on the domestic front.
Kelly is bringing in key crew he used in "Donnie Darko" for "Southland," including director of photography Steven Poster, production designer Alexander Hammond, costume designer April Ferry and editor Sam Bauer.
Also joining the project is Moby, who will compose the music.
Like he did for "Darko," Kelly is creating an elaborate Web site that will help breathe life into the world he is creating. Also, he is writing six separate 100-page graphic novels that will be released over a six-month period before the film's release.
I've been following this project for a while and now that I've read this news I really can't wait. Sarah Michelle Gellar as a adult film star and Seann William Scott as a police officer, count me in.
Quote from: MacGuffin"The film is going to be a strange hybrid of the sensibilities of Andy Warhol and Philip K. Dick," Kelly said in a statement.
haha, i'll bet thats just what studio executives want to hear....
also: if this cant give moby temporary cred again, nothing will.
Website, it's fucked up: http://www.southlandtales.com/
Quote from: Gamblor HatesMySpaceandUWebsite, it's fucked up: http://www.southlandtales.com/
left is more fun.
nothing happens at either left or right. is my browser effed up or am i?
Quote from: Ultrahipnothing happens at either left or right. is my browser effed up or am i?
left took me to a puzzle which turned into a weird clip upon assembly. right just went to a launching icon that never launched.
I love the feeling i get when i think of this film. I read the discription and go on the website and it's like waiting for Punch-Drunk Love all over again. That feeling of "What the fuck!! :crazyeyes: :yabbse-grin: " while watching those crazy scopitones. And then reading about Bessie and Knowing, it's like "Kelly, Are you Fucking with us Man!!!" Just thinking about all this sets my socks a flame!
Quote from: 72teethI love the feeling i get when i think of this film. I read the discription and go on the website and it's like waiting for Punch-Drunk Love all over again. That feeling of "What the fuck!! :crazyeyes: :yabbse-grin: " while watching those crazy scopitones. And then reading about Bessie and Knowing, it's like "Kelly, Are you Fucking with us Man!!!" Just thinking about all this sets my socks a flame!
are you richard kelly.
Has anyone else listened to 'Three Days' by Jane's Addiction? It's the song with "'Til the shadows and the lights were one", a big ten minute thing that I'll bet ends up in the movie. Should be neato.
I still haven't finished donnie darko. Watching it is like listening to some band you know you're SUPPOSED to like cause everyone else does. I hate this age frame. I'm gonna call it right now, this Kelly dude is a hack.
finish the movie before making an assumption.
ya hack.
looks like he's getting even more kubrickian.
http://www.richard-kelly.net/news/2005/6-16-2005.html
Yeah, those pics are pretty nice. This is gonna be one awseome flick....hoping.
http://www.treer-products.com/
Quote from: Ultrahip Lobster Supperhttp://www.treer-products.com/
what exactly is that supposed to be and how does it relate to teh film specifically?
that was shown at comic-con by richard kelly and kevin smith while promoting southland tales. it is a storyboard sequence from, i assume, the film.
as to what it's supposed to be...i have no idea.
Quint on AICN said it may or may not be a commercial in the movie.
hmmmmm :ponder:
No, I've decided that's not what it is.
Quote from: killafilmQuint on AICN said it may or may not be a commercial in the movie.
what does quint look lyke?
Not a clue.
Here's what he wrote.
QuoteIt looked like it was from a commercial of some sort... like a ROBOCOP type of commercial, you know? Like, it'll play in the movie as a bit of parody on the commercials we get in the real world. These were all shown as storyboards, not animatics. They weren't moving, just went from board to board.
Quote from: killafilmNot a clue.
Here's what he wrote.
QuoteIt looked like it was from a commercial of some sort... like a ROBOCOP type of commercial, you know? Like, it'll play in the movie as a bit of parody on the commercials we get in the real world. .
that seems to be the case
Before Southland Tales
Donnie Darko director scribes epic prequel graphic novels for upcoming film.
Richard Kelly, director of Donnie Darko, announced today that he would be writing a series of graphic novel prequels prior to the release of his next movie, Southland Tales. Beginning in the first quarter of 2006, six 100-page graphic novels, all written by Kelly, will be released. The comics lead directly into the film, which serves as the final act.
Darko Entertainment, Graphitti Designs and View Askew Productions are working together to publish the graphic novels. No artist has been announced.
If you're wondering why View Askew is involved, Kevin Smith is one of the stars of the film's ensemble cast. He plays Simon Theory, a legless Iraqi war vet. Joining Smith on screen are Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, Seann William Scott and Sarah Michelle Gellar.
Set in the future -- 2008 Los Angeles, to be exact -- Southland Tales examines an America about to collapse under social and economic hardships. It looks to be just as bizarre as Kelly's best known work, Donnie Darko.
"I am thrilled to have Kevin Smith as both an actor in Southland Tales as well as having his involvement in the prequel graphic novels for Southland Tales. The novels will give the die-hard fans more of an understanding of the back-story leading up the film's theatrical release," said Kelly.
Southland Tales is expect to begin principal photography on August 15, 2005.
Richard Kelly, you continue to disappoint me.
Richard Kelly, you continue to intrigue me.
(Sure some of his casting is suspect, but the premise, and the idea of using graphic novels as lead-ins to his films, are both really ... "genius" is overused ... but "creative" would be an understatement.)
Quote from: onomatavivaRichard Kelly, you continue to intrigue me.
(Sure some of his casting is suspect, but the premise, and the idea of using graphic novels as lead-ins to his films, are both really ... "genius" is overused ... but "creative" would be an understatement.)
more like "done before".
maybe, maybe i could understand one graphic novel that was up for grabs IF someone wanted to read it...
but SIX graphic novels that lead into the film? Thats just too much fluff for even the creator of Donnie Darko's fans to handle.
i thought they were just there in case anyone wanted to invest a little more into the film and make it a better experience, they're not mandatory into understanding it, are they?
Quote from: 72teeththey're not mandatory into understanding it, are they?
this part makes it seem like too much is weighing on them..
Quote from: MacGuffinThe comics lead directly into the film, which serves as the final act.
and truth is, if they are not necessary, then they are worthless. but if reading them will explain the movie to u, it's probably sumthing i'd read
after the release of the movie. sorta like the director's cut of DD. and even then i'd still prefer the movie without the extra explanation.
Does he even want people to understand his movie? I bet he'll offer a sneak peek at volume 1 in some issue of Cosmo Girl. Cause he's like that.
That's a dumb idea and I'm laughing here.
Quote from: PubrickQuote from: 72teeththey're not mandatory into understanding it, are they?
this part makes it seem like too much is weighing on them..
Quote from: MacGuffinThe comics lead directly into the film, which serves as the final act.
and truth is, if they are not necessary, then they are worthless. but if reading them will explain the movie to u, it's probably sumthing i'd read after the release of the movie. sorta like the director's cut of DD. and even then i'd still prefer the movie without the extra explanation.
Kevin Smith did this with Dogma... he had 4 issues of a Jay and Silent Bob comic that get them from the end of Mallrats, through Chasing Amy and into Dogma... yes, it was comedy so that's different, but this is probably the same kind of thing.
I just think it's a little backstory... like how you could watch the X-files movie having never seen the series, but the movie resolves things the series brings up.
I just don't think it's a big deal... neither brilliant nor annoying.
Quote from: PubrickQuote from: 72teeththey're not mandatory into understanding it, are they?
this part makes it seem like too much is weighing on them..
Quote from: MacGuffinThe comics lead directly into the film, which serves as the final act.
and truth is, if they are not necessary, then they are worthless. but if reading them will explain the movie to u, it's probably sumthing i'd read after the release of the movie. sorta like the director's cut of DD. and even then i'd still prefer the movie without the extra explanation.
Why can't this guy just make a mothafrickin' movie that is clear and understadable?
Quote from: POZERWhy can't this guy just make a mothafrickin' movie that is clear and understadable?
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nice :-D
Quote from: PubrickQuote from: 72teeththey're not mandatory into understanding it, are they?
this part makes it seem like too much is weighing on them..
Quote from: MacGuffinThe comics lead directly into the film, which serves as the final act.
and truth is, if they are not necessary, then they are worthless. but if reading them will explain the movie to u, it's probably sumthing i'd read after the release of the movie. sorta like the director's cut of DD. and even then i'd still prefer the movie without the extra explanation.
me three. i like the idea of the comic and film idea, as most filmmakers are inspired from reading comics when they were young, but to have a comic that gives needed puzzle pieces to unlock a cryptic film, too much work, and too much money for me pursue. i'm guess that each of the 100 page comics will prolly run around 19 dollars.
another film that has something to do with a comic seems more interesting, being released through WARP! films.
http://www.godwillforgivethem.com/
http://www.warprecords.com/?mart=WF002
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That can't be the real cast, can it?
Looks at imdb. OH GOD, IT IS!!!! WHY?!
Quote from: B.C. LongWHY?!
Go to Page 1 and read what roles they play.
I read the roles they play and I'm still worried.
It's one thing to be billed as "The Rock" when the movie is "Doom" or "The Scorpion King"... but when it's a legitimate movie by a legitimate director, DON'T USE YOUR STUPID WRESTLING NAME!
from the new EW...
Also on [Janeane Garofolo's] slate: a supporting role in Southland Tales, director Richard Kelly's long-delayed follow-up to 2001's Donnie Darko. "I play General Tina McArthur, and the movie is, in Dr. Stranglove-ian fashion, a comment on the military-industrial newstainment comlpex." Come again? "To try and explain to you, it would be like me trying to explain Donnie Darko. I don't know how."
heh, Southland Tales. More like BOREland Tales. Heh-heh... right guys?
Quote from: polkabluesbut when it's a legitimate movie by a legitimate director...
Well, that's arguable.
Quote from: matt35mmQuote from: polkabluesbut when it's a legitimate movie by a legitimate director...
Well, that's arguable.
Just because you don't agree with it doesn't necessarily make it arguable. You might be wildly off-base and not even realize it!
Arguable? More like BOREable... right dudes?
Quote from: polkabluesQuote from: matt35mmQuote from: polkabluesbut when it's a legitimate movie by a legitimate director...
Well, that's arguable.
Just because you don't agree with it doesn't necessarily make it arguable. You might be wildly off-base and not even realize it!
I don't disagree. I don't have much of an opinion of Kelly. I don't really care. It is arguable. I'm simply stating that, should one want to argue that point, he or she could do so.
But really I was just trying to make a joke more than anything.
Me too.
But seriously I do think this one will be good.
Me three.
But seriously, that cast.
'Southland' has room for 3 women
Source: Hollywood Reporter
Cheri Oteri, Amy Poehler and Jill Ritchie have signed on to join Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, Sarah Michelle Gellar and Seann William Scott in Richard Kelly's indie "Southland Tales." Miranda Richardson, John Larroquette, Jon Lovitz, Will Sasso, Wood Harris, Bai Ling, Joe Campana and Wallace Shawn also have joined the ensemble cast. The story is set in a futuristic Los Angeles as it teeters on the brink of social, economic and environmental disaster. Oteri will play a villainous lesbian bodybuilder, while Ritchie will play a porn star and the best friend of Gellar's character.
God dammit- this is getting ri-god-damn-diculous, you better fuckin' deliver Kelly...
Hmm......this is starting to feel like he has unrestrained control over his project, which will be unfathomably good or bad or just annoying.
That's the same thing I felt before "I Heart Huckabees" came out. It was restrained, but the movie still sucked.
hahaha, this looks like the gheyest cast ever....well, there still is boiler room
justin timberlake has just been added to the cast...
paris hilton too.
me too.
The Rock and Sarah Michelle on set:
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'Blight,' Cameras, Reaction: Film Set Irks True Transients
Source: Los Angeles Times
Those glancing from their office windows may have figured that Los Angeles' homelessness problem was growing faster than anyone thought.
Overnight, a vast homeless encampment popped up at one of downtown's busiest intersections.
There were tents, plastic tarps and old shopping carts stuffed with clothing, bottles and cans. They lined all four sides of the intersection of Hill and 4th streets, next to the city's high-rise district.
But this was one encampment where no homeless people were allowed.
The street scene was fake. A film crew built it as a backdrop for "Southland Tales," an independent feature-length thriller that depicts Los Angeles on the brink of social, environmental and economic disaster in 2008.
Actors portraying homeless people inhabited the encampment as action scenes were shot Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights. The movie stars Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, Seann William Scott and Sarah Michelle Gellar.
Security guards were posted to shoo away real street people who hoped to scavenge through the props for recyclables and usable clothing.
Some of the homeless were angry that actors were portraying them.
"I'm offended," said Charlie Jackson. "You've got people down there who are really homeless and they're paying actors to play them. They're importing people to be homeless. That's shameful.
"I'm sleeping right around the corner on the ground. They're not offering me a job. If they did, I'd take it."
Another homeless man, Jesse J. Richardson, agreed, scoffing at the make-believe encampment as he pulled a small wire cart filled with empty bottles.
"This is why homeless are homeless," he said of the employment issue. "And all of this — of course it's phony."
It seemed plenty real to other passersby, though.
"It looks like the homeless are moving on up. It used to be that you'd only see this sort of thing further east," said Rita Roth, a church worker who lives in Hollywood, surveying the tents and tarps on a grassy patch near a Red Line subway entrance on Hill Street.
"It looks authentic to me. There are homeless who hang out here every day," said Rosemead resident Amanda Garcia, who works as a law clerk in a nearby 36-story tower.
Another high-rise employee, accounting firm secretary Juanita Watson, said that at first she thought the encampment was disaster-related.
"I thought it might be hurricane evacuees," the Crenshaw district resident said as she inspected tents on 4th Street. "This stuff is too clean to be for L.A. homeless."
The movie's production company declined to comment about why actual transients weren't used in the filming. But one source close to the production suggested it had to do with union rules regarding the use of actors.
As many as 11,000 homeless people are thought to live in the downtown area, primarily in a 50 block area bounded by Alameda Street on the east, 7th Street on the south, Main Street on the west and 3rd Street on the north. Although many live in rehabilitated hotels and shelters, others sleep in tents and cardboard boxes on sidewalks.
The filming came amid controversy over an allegation by Los Angeles police that the county Sheriff's Department and several suburban police agencies have been observed "dumping" homeless people from their jurisdictions on downtown streets.
The film set was reminiscent of one that caused controversy in 2002 in the Art District near Little Tokyo. A crew shooting a TV show created a grimly realistic homeless encampment in front of a gallery the same night that a painter had scheduled a show designed to attract Westside art patrons.
Scenes shot at Hill and 4th included the crash of an ice cream truck and a car explosion, security guard Marc Torres said Saturday.
He said the film crew planned to dismantle the encampment today.
"Passersby think it's sort of funny that they brought the homeless here. I find it ironic and sad," Torres said.
As if on cue, passerby Kathy Tayeri paused on Hill Street to study the tents and tarps.
"Why did they go to all this trouble?" asked Tayeri, a Burbank waitress.
"The real McCoy is right down that block. And that block, and that block."
Quote from: MacGuffin"This is why homeless are homeless," he said of the employment issue.
because they can't get work as extras in Hollywood?
Quote from: MacGuffin"Why did they go to all this trouble?" asked Tayeri, a Burbank waitress.
"The real McCoy is right down that block. And that block, and that block."
umm... for one because homeless people are not exactly predictable. or insurable or responsible. i dont think you can just hang millions of dollars on expecting them to bend to the needs of your film. plus, it would seem that would be more exploitative. these people are ridiculous. why are they bringing in all these 'fake waitresses' for the diner scene when there are plenty of real waitresses right here? uhhh, cause its MOVIE.
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Sweet...and man, the Rock looks so clean, he seems like a cut out.
I would love it if people called me a cut out...
he looks like a fuckin' rock.
nah, more like solid as a rock
(https://xixax.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fimages.aintitcool.com%2Fimages2005%2Fsouthlandtales%2FKrystaNow.jpg&hash=71bb59057a60a16cdb0965a844647c6d1a67c717)
my rock just got solid...
Quote from: polkabluesIt's one thing to be billed as "The Rock" when the movie is "Doom" or "The Scorpion King"... but when it's a legitimate movie by a legitimate director, DON'T USE YOUR STUPID WRESTLING NAME!
for some reason im guessing the wwe has somethign to do with why he is still labeled the rock....i would imagine he is trying to lose that name but unforunately his contract wont let him...thats just a hunch
found this website through the southland tales official site (which i think is designed really bad - i'm hoping that it is for a reason.)
i'm on the fence with this film still.
http://www.krysta-now.com/
hahah, you always post links.
http://web.mit.edu/djh/Public/southlandtales/teaser1.mpg
real or fake? not that it necesarily offers any insight into the film.
i want those 30 seconds of my life back.
Quote from: Pubrick on November 15, 2005, 09:21:19 PM
i want those 30 seconds of my life back.
haha sorry...i was pissed after watching it myself. probably fan made, no?
Quote from: JimmyGator on November 15, 2005, 09:24:18 PM
haha sorry...i was pissed after watching it myself. probably fan made, no?
yes JimmyGator, probably fan made. by a jerk, most likely.
and no, i don't know how old he was when he made it.
Quote from: Pubrick on November 15, 2005, 09:29:35 PM
Quote from: JimmyGator on November 15, 2005, 09:24:18 PM
haha sorry...i was pissed after watching it myself. probably fan made, no?
yes JimmyGator, probably fan made. by a jerk, most likely.
and no, i don't know how old he was when he made it.
:doh: i just got owned.
i'll never win with you pubrick.
Quote from: JimmyGator on November 15, 2005, 09:33:50 PM
Quote from: Pubrick on November 15, 2005, 09:29:35 PM
Quote from: JimmyGator on November 15, 2005, 09:24:18 PM
haha sorry...i was pissed after watching it myself. probably fan made, no?
yes JimmyGator, probably fan made. by a jerk, most likely.
and no, i don't know how old he was when he made it.
:doh: i just got owned.
i'll never win with you pubrick.
I Found that out really quickly...
yup...me too...
A rough cut of this was was screened in LA recently.
Here's what Moby thinks:
"and i saw the current version of the new richard kelly movie, 'southland tales', and it's remarkable.
some people will love it, and some will hate it. it's not going to be a movie that allows for ambivalence or indifference.
and it's safe to say that almost no one who sees it will be able to say what it's about.
i love it, and i'm really happy to be working on it and helping out with the music."
(from his website)
Quote from: Ultrahip on January 11, 2006, 03:25:42 PM
it's safe to say that almost no one who sees it will be able to say what it's about.
I guess this kind of style will be heretofore known as "Kellyesque."
Quote from: Sal on January 11, 2006, 06:26:56 PM
I guess this kind of style will be heretofore known as "Kellyesque."
i think u mean henceforth. heretofore is everything up until now.
Syntactically owned.
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you must read "ohnotheydidnt" also and those two pics are on page 5
oh yeah, and this will be at Cannes on May 21
Quote from: edison on May 03, 2006, 12:33:17 AM
you must read "ohnotheydidnt" also and those two pics are on page 5
Nah, I saw them on another forum earlier today.
Quote from: Ginger on May 03, 2006, 12:36:56 AM
Quote from: edison on May 03, 2006, 12:33:17 AM
you must read "ohnotheydidnt" also and those two pics are on page 5
Nah, I saw them on another forum earlier today.
damn, almost had ya
Justin Timberlake kicks ass
SMG looks exactly like Sienna Miller in that fourth pic.
Not that I'm complaining. The world could use a few more Sienna Millers.
Quote from: polkablues on May 03, 2006, 07:17:49 PM
SMG looks exactly like Sienna Miller in that fourth pic.
Not that I'm complaining. The world could use a few more Sienna Millers.
Not if she is going to go out looking like this:
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Quote from: edison on May 03, 2006, 07:25:40 PM
Quote from: polkablues on May 03, 2006, 07:17:49 PM
SMG looks exactly like Sienna Miller in that fourth pic.
Not that I'm complaining. The world could use a few more Sienna Millers.
Not if she is going to go out looking lke this:
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I can't see any of your pictures, and maybe others can't either. Just thought I'd point that out. Photobucket works better.
Can you see them now?
Yes. Thank you very much.
SMG DOES look like Sienna Miller in that picture!
Richard Kelly: Not a Terrorist. Really.
Source: Jeff Wells, Hollywood Elsewhere
Southland Tales director-writer Richard Kelly's passport has been stuck "under review" for the past several days in Washington, D.C., because, I'm told, there's a guy named James Kelly on the government's terrorist watch list. The Donnie Darko director's full name is James Richard Kelly, hence the confusion. But c'mon...one guy may have done something criminal and the other's a friggin' cult director, for Chrissake. It's only a couple of weeks before the festival begins and the situation, says Kelly, has not only failed to improve but is "getting out of control ." So he's now seeking help from Senator Diane Feinstein's staff, who are in contact with State Department logjammers. To prove he's not a terrorist, Kelly's mother "is having to submit my Junior High School Yearbook, among other things," he said today. I suspect he's only half-joking when he says, "I might not make it to Cannes after all, and I might be stuck watching it on E!" Southland Tales is partly about police-state measures that the U.S. government imposes after a second 9/11-type disaster, and given this, says Kelly, "The paranoid conspiracy freak inside me is starting to think this has something to do with the film."
Quote from: edison on May 03, 2006, 07:25:40 PM
Quote from: polkablues on May 03, 2006, 07:17:49 PM
SMG looks exactly like Sienna Miller in that fourth pic.
Not that I'm complaining. The world could use a few more Sienna Millers.
Not if she is going to go out looking lke this:
(https://xixax.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fimg306.imageshack.us%2Fimg306%2F6143%2Fx375z54pw.jpg&hash=e8cadc82bb3242b5aa189c66dc75d748ba84c8cb)
:yabbse-grin:
oh, shit, you are such a bitch!
Production Notes: have not read yet so beware of possible spoilers:
http://bossa.nerim.net/actualite/2006/southland%20tales/ecrans_southland/us_prod_notes_01_05_06.htm
A story about The Rock
"I had never made an art-house movie so no one, including me, had a clue what was going to happen."
What happened for The Rock was nothing short of a breakthrough in his already stellar movie career. The Rock's latest flick, the thriller "Southland Tales" is one of only three American films, 19 worldwide, that has been chosen to compete for the coveted Palme d'or or Golden Palm award at the prestigious and legendary Cannes film festival. The winner receives recognition as the festival's top film. "Southland Tales" is in unbelievable company. The other two American films chosen to compete are "Fast Food Nation" starring Patricia Arquette and Ethan Hawke and Sofia Coppola's "Marie Antoinette" starring Kirsten Dunst. The Rock says this award is the "Holy Grail of filmmaking, if you will. It's the top of the heap. Just being chosen means you have arrived as an actor!" The festival runs from May 17-28 in the south of France and Rock will be there to promote his film. Films are chosen to compete based strictly on their artistic merit.
"Southland Tales" was written and directed by Richard Kelly of "Donnie Darko" fame and also stars Sarah Michelle Gellar as The Rock's girlfriend, Mandy Moore as The Rock's wife, Justin Timberlake and Seann William Scott.
"My interpretation of the film," The Rock explains in an exclusive interview with WWE.com, "is that it's a love letter to Los Angeles following World War III. It's how the world and L.A. would react following the apocalypse." The Rock plays Boxer Santaros, a movie star who is kidnapped, left in the desert, suffers from amnesia, is a paranoid schizophrenic, and has the ability to see the future. "The movie is nothing like my other films," The Rock explains. "It has the feel of a 1940's movie, that type of mystique. It's a dark comedy, a musical, a thriller, a drama, all rolled into one."
The Rock beams with pride when discussing this movie and the honor of it being shown at The Cannes Film Festival. "It's what you work your whole career for," The Rock explains. "To do movies like this, to get the respect as a true actor, is what you strive for. I've had to climb so many mountains and break through so many barriers to get here. Fortunately, I had great material to work with, a director who believed in me, and an awesome cast of co-stars. We all worked our asses off to make this movie what it is." The Rock says we will know by the end of May how the film makes out at Cannes.
The Rock has two other blockbuster films in the works. The drama "Gridiron Gang" is due in theatres September 15 and he stars as a probation officer who works in a prison for kids. In June, The Rock begins filming the Disney comedy "Playbook." He plays a quarterback for the New England Patriots in a movie which has the full backing of the National Football League. "The Rock in a movie by Disney, did you ever think you'd see that day?", The Rock says laughing.
Believe it or not, despite his crazy schedule, The Rock still keeps up to date on all the shows in WWE. He says he's thrilled Rey Mysterio is World Heavyweight Champion. "I'm so proud of Rey. He's a great ambassador for the business and the SmackDown brand. I've never seen an athlete able to adjust his style to fit whoever he's working with in the ring."
WWE.com asked The Rock if fans will see him on RAW or SmackDown in the near future. He answered as only The Rock can, "Just as sure as I whoop ass and have a million dollar smile! Don't think I'm ever going away for good. I'll show up when you least expect it!"
And when that happens, rest assured, it will be nothing short of a BREAKTHROUGH!
According to The Wrestling Observer newsletter, The Rock will be credited as simply Dwayne Johnson in the upcoming release of "Southland Tales" (which debuts at the Cannes Film Festival at the end of May). In "Gridiron Gang," which is slated for a September release, he'll be credited as Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson.
Kelly's 'Southland' an apocalyptic vision
By Gregg Kilday, Hollywood Reporter
Richard Kelly, who developed a cult following with the strange tale of "Donnie Darko" in 2001, unleashes his imagination even further with his sophomore feature "Southland Tales." Set in an apocalyptic version of Los Angeles just two years in the future, the film stars Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson as an action film star, Sarah Michelle Gellar as a porno actress and Seann William Scott as a Hermosa Beach police officer, all caught up in a grand conspiracy as a shellshocked America celebrates the Fourth of July, 2008. The Hollywood Reporter film editor Gregg Kilday talked with Kelly about his vision of the end of the world.
The Hollywood Reporter: After "Donnie Darko," were you offered studio projects or were you determined to develop your own material?
Kelly: I definitely got offered plenty of stuff. I just really felt like I needed to dig my heels in and do my own thing. I wasn't in a position where I really needed money that much. I took some writing assignments as my way of paying the rent and holding out to make sure the next film I directed was one of my original scripts.
THR: How far back did you begin writing "Tales"?
Kelly: I wrote the first draft of this screenplay in the spring of 2001 after Sundance, when we had a dispiriting experience there when no one wanted to distribute "Donnie Darko." I was really depressed. I would argue any artist engages in his or her art as a way of curing their own depression. I wrote "Southland Tales" as a way of trying to cheer myself up. I wanted to write a black comedy about Los Angeles, and ultimately about the end of the world. It's evolved in many different incarnations, but the basic shell of that original screenplay is very evident in the finished film.
THR: When did you return to the project?
Kelly: I always constantly work on all my scripts. I've got five or six originals that I have in a drawer that I'll never relinquish control over. I'm constantly rewriting them, kind of the way one is constantly fixing up an old car. After 9/11, I became really serious about committing to direct the film. When Seann (William Scott) became attached, it came to life. I thought I'd written this black comedy about the end of the world, with a lot of absurdist set pieces. I felt as though I was being kind of a wimp and wasn't really going for it in terms of making it more of a political piece. I sort of really dug in -- dealt with issues of domestic surveillance and homeland security and alternative fuel. I just started to make it something more political -- but first and foremost a comedy. The original incarnation had all the set pieces. It had a mega-zeppelin. It had an ATM being dragged by an SUV through the streets. It had a conspiracy with twin brothers and an extortion attempt on a famous actor and a porn star. All those elements were in the original script, but they hadn't matured, they hadn't ripened the way a banana ripens, they were still very green. Those elements coalesced, and it became more political. The news kind of helped to rewrite the script, and the headlines have helped to validate the screenplay. There's a scene where Rebecca Del Rio sings the national anthem. It was her idea to do the first two lines in Spanish. We shot the film last August, and then there was all this stuff about the national anthem in the news. There are a lot of things in the film that seem to be happening right now. The movie was designed to strike a nerve. If you're going to make a political satire, and you don't strike a nerve, you sort of fail at your ambition. But my philosophy is, if it's political, at least make it funny.
THR: Pitching a political satire isn't the easiest way to secure financing.
Kelly: I think I'm pretty terrible at pitching my ideas. I chose to tell people, it was part comedy, part musical, part thriller, part sci-fi. Their heads started to spin around like Linda Blair in "The Exorcist." Cherry Road Films was the first company to commit to spending money. (Producer) Sean McKittrick got us with Ben Roberts at Universal International. We started piecing all the financing together and ended up with about seven different equity sources.
THR: Your stars all come out of mainstream movies -- they wouldn't appear to be the conventional choices to head such a potentially unconventional film.
Kelly: I very consciously tried to go after a lot of performers who I felt had really great, undiscovered talents. Let me rephrase that. I tried to go after performers who had unexposed gifts -- people who are pigeonholed. Someone like Seann William Scott, who'd only been given the opportunities to act in teen categories but who I thought had brilliant comedy timing. I saw Dwayne host "Saturday Night Live" and thought wow, he's very gifted. He had enormous potential. He's a great listener. He's been an actor his whole life working as a wrestler. I met with Sarah Michelle Gellar, knowing all the work she's done like "Buffy," and saw how funny she was when I met her. To me, as a filmmaker, if you get to work with these people and help them expose a different side of themselves, it's just a very rewarding process to go through with an actor. If someone said, name the top 50 funniest people working today, a lot of those people (cast in the movie) would be on this list. The tone of what I was hoping to accomplish in this black comedy was always very much gallows humor. If you're going to go through this story about the end of the world, let's make it a good time. Make it with a lot of actors who are incredibly funny people, and then let them actually play it straight.
THR: Why choose Moby to compose the score?
Kilday: Ultimately, I tried to make a very humane film. It's obviously vulgar, it's a very aggressive, confrontational film, but at the same time it was very important to me to try to root it in humanity. A very important element in preserving that was Moby and his score and working and collaborating with him even in preproduction. His music is heart-breaking and beautiful, and I wanted it to counterbalance the aggressive comedy.
THR: And you shot throughout L.A.?
Kelly: We shot in some of the most expensive and beautiful parts of the city. We really wanted to capture the city in a way that had not been done before. We wanted to have the movie live and breathe within the city so that you feel the city is a character in the film. We shot in Santa Monica and Manhattan Beach and Venice Beach and Hermosa Beach, all the beach communities. It was very expensive to do that, and that was part of the reason why we had to shoot the film in just 30 days. There were a lot of stunts and action and set pieces that required a lot of coordination. Philip K. Dick is probably one of the biggest inspirations for the film because he was always writing about Los Angeles in the near future to offer social commentary on where our world is going. There's a line in the movie where Sarah Michelle Gellar's character, Krysta Now, says, "Scientists are saying that the future is going to be far more futuristic than they originally predicted."
THR: What was your reaction to being invited to Cannes?
Kelly: I was very honored -- very moved and honored. Very proud of all the actors and the crew. We submitted a DVD of the film that was not a finished cut. It had maybe 20% of the visual effects finished, a temp AVID mix. It was in very rough shape, so I was not optimistic that we would get into the competition based on what we had to submit because we had not even finished the thing. When we got the news, it was overwhelming. And then it became, we've got to finish this sucker.
This was screened today. I just read through several reviews for it that call it muddled, pretentious, bizarre, uncompromising, convoluted, disjointed, postmodern. There are a ton of minor spoilers in the reviews.
Every review, even though they're mostly negative, makes me more excited about the movie.
Also, here: http://www.festival-cannes.fr/video/index.php?langue=6002&jour=21
There's a clip at the bottom.
well at least three of those adjectives aren't really a bad thing at all.
Quote from: Ginger on May 21, 2006, 12:21:21 PM
This was screened today. I just read through several reviews for it that call it muddled, pretentious, bizarre, uncompromising, convoluted, disjointed, postmodern. There are a ton of minor spoilers in the reviews.
Southland TalesBy Ray Bennett, Hollywood Reporter
Deep into Richard Kelly's miasmic 160-minute fantasy "Southland Tales," an actor who used to call himself "The Rock" places a gun at his temple and says, "I could pull the trigger right now and this whole nightmare will be over," and every impulse screams: "Do it!"
It comes too late, however, as the will to live is lost in the first reel when ex-Rock Dwayne Johnson, playing a $20-million-a-film movie star, tells of an infant that has not had a bowel movement in six days and warns that a thermonuclear baby fart could blow up the world.
Written and directed by Richard Kelly and employing most of the creative team of his 2001 film "Donnie Darko," the picture was conceived in tandem with three graphic novels that tell the story leading up to the end-of-the-world scenario depicted in "Southland Tales."
The film strives to rank alongside such classics as "Brazil" and "Blade Runner" but falls more into the category of "Mars Attacks!" and "1941," and boxoffice potential will rely on very tolerant young audiences.
Kelly, cinematographer Steven Poster, production designer Alexander Hammond and costumer April Ferry succeed in putting some impressive images on the screen as the city of Los Angeles sees its final days. But the English term "shambolic" best describes a slow-paced, bloated and self-indulgent picture that combines science fiction, sophomoric humor and grisly violence soaked in a music-video sensibility.
The opening sequence shows a nuclear mushroom cloud bursting over Abilene, Texas, but the after-effects aren't too bad because by 2008, the Venice natives in Los Angeles remain pretty much as they've always been.
A new fuel called "fluid karma," using hydroelectric power drawn from the ocean, promises to save the future, though scientists, corporations, the Pentagon and big government inevitably start to fight over it.
Several factions want in on the action, including a Marxist group, a porn actress bent on blackmail and assorted gun-toting freaks. Somewhere at the heart of things is the movie star who has written a screenplay detailing a geological phenomenon that he imagined but turns out to be actually happening. It has something to do with a breach in the space/time continuum, the usual stuff.
There's also a police officer who exists in two forms (both played by Seann William Scott), and it becomes important that the two incarnations meet. Or don't meet, something like that. Not that it matters. Sequences exist for themselves, and few would be missed, though one or two are quite entertaining. Justin Timberlake, who doesn't have much to do as some kind of soldier, features in a bizarre dance number to the fabulous Killers track "All These Things That I've Done" that has MTV rotation written all over it.
Familiar faces including John Larroquette, Jon Lovitz, Miranda Richardson and unbilled Janeane Garofalo pop up here and there to no great effect. Wallace Shawn and Zelda Rubinstein are on hand, as you would expect, as mad scientists.
Scott, Johnson and Sarah Michelle Gellar, as the porn star, do their best with the lame material, but it's uphill work. There was more fun and greater character development in "Starship Troopers."
SOUTHLAND TALES
Universal Pictures and Cherry Road Films
A Cherry Road/Darko Entertainment and MHF Zweite Academy Film production
Credits: Writer-director: Richard Kelly; Producers: Sean McKittrick, Bo Hyde, Kendall Morgan, Matthew Rhodes; Executive producers: Bill Johnson, Jim Seibel, Oliver Hengst, Katrina K. Hyde, Judd Payne, Tedd Hamm; Director of photography: Steven Poster; Production designer: Alexander Hammond; Editor: Sam Bauer; Music: Moby.
Cast: Boxer Santaros: Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson; Roland Taverner: Seann William Scott; Krysta: Sarah Michelle Gellar; Dr. Soberin Exx: Curtis Armstrong; Brandt Huntington: Joe Campana; Cyndi Pinziki: Nora Dunn; Starla Von Luft: Michele Durrett; Dr. Inga Von Westphalen/Marion Card: Beth Grant; Dion: Wood Harris; Vaughn Smallhouse: John Larrroquette; Serpentine: Bai Ling; Bart Bookman: Jon Lovitz; Madeline Frost Santaros: Mandy Moore; Sen. Bobby Frost: Holmes Osborne; Zora Carmichaels: Cheri Oteri; Veronica Mung/Dream: Amy Poehler; Martin Kefauver: Lou Taylor Pucci; Nana Mae Frost: Miranda Richardson; Shoshana: Jill Ritchie; Dr. Katarina Kuntzler: Zelda Rubinstein; Fortunio Balducci: Will Sasso; Baron Vin Westphalen: Wallace Shawn; Hideo Takehashi: Sab Shimono; Simon Theory: Kevin Smith.
No MPAA rating, running time 160 minutes.
Cannes Review: Southland Talesby James Rocchi, Cinematical
Since Donnie Darko insinuated itself into the canon of cult cinema with its much-buzzed Sundance premiere, a failed theatrical release and finally a strong following on DVD, the question has been what writer-director Richard Kelly would do next. Rumors swirled around Kelly's follow-up; it was over two-and-a-half hours long; it was a futuristic tale set in a fascist United States; actors like Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, Sarah Michelle Gellar and Kevin Smith were all signed on to play various roles. It was being backed by Universal, a big change from Darko's indie origins. Now, after a Cannes premiere, Southland Tales has gone from rumor to reality. And the rumors were far more exciting than the reality of the film.
Southland Tales does take place in the near-future -- 2008, to be precise. After a series of nuclear attacks on Texas, the United States is a quasi-police state. The Internet is under federal jurisdiction. All law enforcement has been consolidated into the National Security Agency -- federal, state, even street cops. A new energy source has been discovered, generated by a huge apparatus off the coast of L.A. and beamed wirelessly to homes, vehicles and more. And a 20-million-dollar-a-film action star (Johnson) has emerged from the desert with amnesia and is working on his next film about the end of the world, even as 'Neo-Marxist' agents work to destabilize the upcoming election.
If this seems like a lot to fit in a film, bear in mind that this only scratches the surface of all the things happening in Southland Tales; there's also an adult film star (Gellar) trying to turn herself into a consumer entertainment brand, a man (Seann William Scott) masquerading as his police officer twin brother, and a Iraq war veteran (Justin Timberlake) narrating everything with a God's-eye view through the sights of the machine gun he mans. There's a lot going on in Southland Tales; the problem is that it all goes nowhere. The occasional joke is buried under lead-footed pseudo-scientific gobbledygook; the glimmerings of satire are lost in a dim fog of overacting, or outshined by bizarre, banal directorial flourishes and flawed acting choices.
Part of the problem is that Kelly's approach undermines itself. You could make the argument that the only way to satirize modern life is through the lens of bad science fiction; the problem with that technique is that at the end of the day, you've still got a piece of bad science fiction. Kelly makes oblique references to the work of noted sci-fi paranoid Phillip K. Dick (after a policeman commits two murders, he mutter 'Flow my tears. ...", a direct reference to a title of one of Dick's short stories), whose work has been turned in films from Blade Runner to Total Recall. But a little of Dick-style weirdness goes a long way, and there's a lot of weirdness in Southland Tales -- mad scientists with bizarre haircuts, musical numbers, hallucinations, actors-turned-terrorists who work on their improv skills in the middle of a mission, levitating objects and severed thumbs as black-market voter fraud devices.
The inventions and plot ideas and new characters come as a barrage in Southland Tales, but they don't seem like part of any vision or storytelling method; instead, they seem like the rambling elaborations of a bad liar. When Kelly's finale starts recycling ideas from Donnie Darko -- temporal loops, the word "vessel," the image of a character with one wounded eye -- you stop feeling annoyed by the film and start feeling like you've been cheated: This is what we were waiting for? Sprawling, messy, willfully self-indulgent and incomprehensible, Southland Tales is the biggest sophomore slump for a seemingly indie-filmmaker since Kevin Smith's Mallrats -- and the scope of Southland Tales' failed ambitions and vain pretensions make its failure all the more depressing. I'm sure Kelly felt that he was making a movie about something; along the line, though, it's pretty obvious that he forgot all about the basics of making a movie.
http://www.nerve.com/nerveblog/cannes2006.aspx?blogid=106 :
Couldn't get a signal last night from the nearby hotel whose wifi I've been poaching, and I only have a few minutes to spare before my next screening, but I must quickly gawp in astonishment at the sophomore-jinx train wreck that is Richard Kelly's Southland Tales. Set in semi-post-apocalytpic 2008 Los Angeles, Kelly's followup to muddled cult favorite Donnie Darko aims for Pynchonesque black comedy but winds up more like a 12:52 a.m. Saturday Night Live sketch (the cast includes, in significant roles, Jon Lovitz, Nora Dunn, Cheri Oteri, and Amy Poehler) crossed with Hudson Hawk, only far more pretentious and interminable than either. This is a potential career killer, I suspect...though there was a tiny smattering of applause as the closing credits began, and I don't doubt that a movie as bizarre and uncompromising as this will manage to scrape up a handful of ardent fans.
Not sure where this one's from; I'm stealing it off another forum I belong to:
I have just emerged blinking and baffled from the screening of Richard Kelly's new film, Southland Tales.
His first film Donnie Darko was complex, but child's play in comparison with this convoluted, disjointed, postmodern noodle soup of a movie.
It is set in the near future in which Los Angeles has become a dystopia of police and military enforcement, with power held by the providers of a so-called miracle fuel source.
Characters jump in and out of focus with little sense of a structured plot or idea of what is happening in the great scheme of things.
It reminded me a little of the novels by Thomas Pynchon; surreal, mixing genres and styles, cut up and very "west coast USA".
The cast includes The Rock, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Sean William Scott and Justin Timberlake.
References to the Iraq war and its veterans, US paranoia over energy sources, capitalism, globalisation and Marxism are littered through out the film.
There are some amazing visual sequences and concepts - including snipers posted permanently throughout Los Angeles to monitor and stop civil disobedience and a great music montage involving Timberlake.
But the question you probably want answered is: Is it any good?
Twenty or 30 people left the film before the end - but that is not too unusual at screenings.
No-one booed or whistled and there was some applause when the credits rolled.
I don't think it is a great movie.
But like the soldiers in the film - I'm shell-shocked.
Same situation here, no idea where it's from:
The state of American society and politics has become an overriding theme at the 2006 Cannes International Film Festival, with no fewer than three major films dealing with that issue in the festival's first week.
On Thursday, Richard Linklater's Fast Food Nation exposed the corruption and criminal recklessness behind the US fast food culture, while Saturday An Inconvenient Truth, featuring former US vice president Al Gore, challenged America's ignorance of climate change and its systematic abuse of the environment.
Sunday's presentation, Southland Tales, by 31-year-old Richard Kelly, is the most spectacular and, no doubt, controversial film in many years to deal with what the director himself called "the sad situation we find ourselves in as a country."
Part sci-fi flick, part comedy, part musical, part thriller, Southland Tales features action mega-star Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, Sarah Michelle Gellar, formerly of Buffy and the Vampire Killers, and pop star Justin Timberlake in leading roles.
The youngest director competing for this year's Palme d'Or for best film, Kelly described his puzzling, often hallucinatory work as "a black comedy about the end of the world."
It takes place in the year 2008 after a terrorist nuclear attack on Texas. Its opening line is, "After the nuclear attack on Texas, things got real complicated."
Kelly, who rose to fame with his first film, the 2001 cult hit Donnie Darko, said after the screening of the film that he knew it would present difficulties for some people.
"I always thought the film was going to push buttons," he told journalists in Cannes. "And I think it's going to continue to do so."
Southland Tales takes on an ambitious array of issues, including the war in Iraq, the search for alternative fuels, government spying, the relationship between celebrities and politics, the Patriot Act and violent rebellion.
The film's baffling plot and its complexity were decided early on, Kelly said, to reflect the nature of America's problems.
"The film is meant to be a tapestry of ideas, all related to the biggest issues we're facing right now," he said. "It's meant to be a puzzle. There is no simple solution right now for our dilemma."
He defended himself against any possible claims that he was anti-American.
"I love my country. I'm a patriot," Kelly said. "The film is intended as a patriotic piece."
One of the film's accomplishment is its successful casting of known stars against type, with The Rock playing a man looking for his identity, Gellar cast as a very entrepreneurial porno actress and Timberlake in the role of a scarred and disturbed veteran of the Iraq war.
"When casting the film, I made a choice to find actors who had been pigeon-holed," Kelly said. "I was trying to put them in a new place. I love helping express something new about an actor."
For the Rock, who is known around the world as a musclebound action hero, this was precisely what he wanted.
"I am trying to grow as an actor, to learn more," he said. "For me, this was a great learning experience."
While Southland Tales provoked mixed opinions in Cannes, its scope, its audacity and its subject matter may sway festival jurors. In 2004, another audacious work about the United States, Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, a fierce attack on President George W. Bush, walked off with the festival's top prize.
Quotemad scientists with bizarre haircuts, musical numbers, hallucinations, actors-turned-terrorists who work on their improv skills in the middle of a mission, levitating objects and severed thumbs as black-market voter fraud devices.
How do you fuck that up?!?
I was hoping better for this movie, but really, is it THAT surprising? Am I the only one who though Darko was kind of a lucky shot? There are a million things in the movie that scream "Amateur", it just has some greatness running along with it that makes you say "You know, this guy could make something brilliant one day".
I definitely should judge after watching the movie, but to use "the road not taken" as this metaphor and literary reference, and to have a director at the press conference asking himself what the SUV symbolizes--they all make for some good early heckling.
Quote from: modage on May 22, 2006, 09:25:36 AM
CLIP FROM FILM: http://www.festival-cannes.org/video/video.asx?uid=74545
PRESS CONFERENCE & INTERVIEWS: http://www.festival-cannes.org/video/index.php?langue=6002
Yeah, I posted that link yesterday.
Another review:
ST has been vividly awaited with a mix of adolescent excitation and adult expectancy. The presence in Cannes of such a mad project, born from the pop culture matrix and the most obvious TV references, is somewhat intriguing. Keep in mind that most of ST actors come from SF teen soaps, summer-only drekk, MTV videos, or stand up comedies. Keep in mind that ST lurked for a long time in the Internet rumour-filled guts, known as the megalomaniac project of a 30 year old director, author of cult movie DD. Now backed by Universal, the prodigy shot his film in 30 days without any real budget. All this goes against everything the so-called world's biggest cinema festival stands for, a place where you shouldn't toy with the much revered « auteur » notion. Kelly has chosen a fairly parodic, and sometimes goofy, voice with ST, and you can guess it shouldn't amuse the snobbish movie lovers. Even if Cannes once gave its Palme to Wild at Heart...
Insolent director Kelly has nailed it perfectly : keeping his audience on the edge for 2:30, not knowing what to think. Good old critical criteria are useless when it comes to ST. It was pure joy to see the mass of professional critics scratching their collective head after the screening. ST opens with a Hiroshima-like explosion during a barbecue. The action takes place after the disaster, in the near future, when the fuel penury is handled by a godsend german company. It has created an infinite energy generator, which functionning may nonetheless alter the Earth rotation. Comportemental troubles start to appear, and they affect an action movie star (The unbelievable Rock, managing to keep his eyes wide open in plain nightmare), a pornstar (SMG, very convincing as a political sex guru), and an Iraq vet (SWS, the dumb stallion from American Pie). They all get somewhat involved in a conspiracy, aimed at a senatorial election. Everyone is wearing earplugs, surveillance monitors abound, paranoia is a widespread feeling, and not keeping your mouth shut might earn you a shotgun blast out of nowhere. Countdown to the Apocalypse is on, as a voice-over narrative reads messianic texts, talks about the Antichrist, before a mad impulse takes this action movie to the next musical level (soundtrack : Pixies, Moby, Jane's Addiction, Wagner...), before it takes ST back close to the space-time burst threatening to devour it.
ST is over-the-top, babylonian material, and it's cocky enough to create a brand new world while searching through our own world's garbage. It's political, it's a fictional, visual, formal guerilla aiming at the military and culteral supremacy of the world's most powerful country. Or, as SMG says, it's « a love and hate letter » from LA, the ultimate place where the Botox-civilization, as seen in Hollywood's own commercial movies, is being nurtured.
Kelly doesn't need to exagerate these things, he just has to keep on piling them up, he just has to reach for all the signs of the cultural contemporary void, and expose them before destroying them. For instance, the sun-loving Venice Beach's morphing into a church of chaos is just one of the many Kelly's tricks.
What if the most realistic film of this year's edition was this one ?
Just take a walk on the Croisette. Take a good look a this non-stop carnival, full of over-sanitized bimbos. Listen to the non-stop gibberish of TV crews coming from all over the world. And then try to measure the amazing synchronicity between what ST is trying to show, and what we call « reality » here in Cannes.
An epicenter for all the new century's torments, LA is seen through all new lenses in ST. It's not the LA you may have seen in Lynch's Mulholland Drive, or Mann's Collateral. It's a city with no limits and no coherence. It's a megalopolis, a beach, a desert, a wood, a street all at once, and then it's turning into an evolutive matrix as it spurts out a neverending stream of human materials, energies and products up for consumption.
Then what ?
ST is an artistic vision masquerading as a survival kit, using nausea as a tool.
Quote from: Ginger on May 21, 2006, 01:20:41 PM
No-one booed or whistled and there was some applause when the credits rolled.
We can all relax. It's better than DaVinci Code.
These reviews mean nothing. No one will ever make a movie pitched as part-comedy, part-thriller, part-musical, part-whatever else he said and get amazing reviews. Of course it was going to get "this is unfocused shit" reviews... it's SUPPOSED to be unfocused shit. Domino was unfocused shit and I loved every second of it. So if Richard Kelly is really just Tony Scott with Ridley's ambition, so be it. I prefer an ambitious misfire to an uninspired one.
A review from Cannes
SPOILERS
So I was in attendance last night at the Cannes premiere of Richard Kelly's Southland Tales. I have to start off by bragging a little. Coming to Cannes, after I found out that The Fountain wasn't in the Cannes lineup, Southland Tales was THE movie that I was coming for. I loved Donnie Darko. A lot. So I nearly pissed my tux when I found out that not only was I given a free invitation to the screening, but I had my seat 3 chairs to the right of Marilyn Manson, and I was in the row ahead of the attending cast, which included Kevin Smith, Cheri Oteri, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Dwayne Johnson (who deserves that name over The Rock after his performance in the film) and of course, Richard Kelly. Willem Defoe and Charlie Sheen were also there somewhere, but I didn't get to see them.
Enough about the attendance though. Southland Tales blew away Cannes. Every person I talked to after the screening had no doubt that it was the best film to screen in Cannes so far, which includes Fast Food Nation, Volver, and Wind That Shakes the Barley. It takes everything you saw in Darko, (Apocalypse, Messiah's, Time Travel) and multiplies it by 10. First thing, though, like Kelly said himself, this doesn't really make too much sense. It's messy, we only got parts 4-6 (with the graphic novels due this summer) and it makes Magnolia feel concise.
Early descriptions called this 30% musical, 30% sci-fi, 30 % Thriller, and 10 % mystery. This is not a musical. There is music playing throughout almost the entire thing (Moby's score is great, he really needs to stop with the pop albums and just do film scores for a living) but there is never any sort of musical number that helps to advance the story. Justin Timberlake (who is the film's narrator for most of the film) has an abrupt music video that plays about halfway through the film that is exhilarating in it's location and lyrics, as Justin repeats over and over again "I've got soul, but I'm not a soldier" (the singing isn't him by the way, it's a much deeper voice).
The film works best as a thriller, though, and that's what it will be remembered as. The opening sequence of the film is as scarily apocalyptic as anything that I've seen since Terminator 2, and sent chills running through my spine that didn't stop until about 15 minutes into Part IV of the film. As soon as you see what happens in Abilene, Texas on Fourth of July weekend 2005, you'll know that Richard Kelly isn't kidding. He might throw in funky-haired scientists, lesbian neo-marxists, and ditsy porn stars who think they have a say in important issues like the war in Iraq, abortion, and "teen horniness," but that's all for show.
What's really lying underneath all the style is a film that really shows the naivety of America, one that is blinded by black and white politics and the yearn to be a star. When the fate of the film is decided by a handshake, and Kelly's vision of the future comes full circle, we truly feel that, as Krysta Now gloriously claims in the film's first part, the future is far more futuristic than we ever imagined. This film is Kelly's Pulp Fiction, and it will be hard for him top it.
You must not have spoken to many film critics. Still, I hope you're right. I'm dying for this to be great.
from the Village Voice... pay attention to the last sentence of the article
Code Unknown
In the shadow of Da Vinci, Cannes '06's first great film: A visionary American comedy about the end of times
by J. Hoberman
May 23rd, 2006 2:17 PM
CANNES, FRANCE—The Da Vinci Code, which had its world premiere last week as the opening attraction at the Cannes Film Festival, was heralded with massive hype and greeted by crushing indifference. Even the stars seemed blasé. What was the Vatican on about, Ian McKellen wondered at the morning-after press conference: Hadn't the movie proved Jesus Christ wasn't gay?
More than that, though, The Da Vinci Code offers the comforting notion that history has a meaning. In that respect at least, this dull spectacle resembled a number of movies competing in Cannes's 59th edition. Two years after Michael Moore won the Palme d'Or with Fahrenheit 9/11, social agendas have returned—at least on-screen.
The undisputed favorite midway through the competition, Pedro Almodóvar's comedy Volver (which, for all the murder and incest, is his most mainstream movie ever) is strictly apolitical; the most accomplished competing film, Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Climates, is, like the Turkish director's previous Distant, a study in alienation. But all around these cluster movies concerning war, state terror, and as one title has it, The Rights of the Weakest. The strongest of the lot, Richard Kelly's phantasmagorical satire Southland Tales, even features a porn star version of The View covering all these issues, plus teenage sex.
Brit vet Ken Loach is represented by The Wind That Shakes the Barley, a beautifully shot if overweeningly schematic re-creation of the Irish Troubles, with unforced and undeniable relevance to the contemporary Middle East. The Caiman, Nanni Moretti's first offering in five years, is a disappointingly flat movie about (a movie about) Italy's barely defeated prime minister Silvio Berlusconi. Official but non-competing, America's unfairly defeated Al Gore materialized on the Croisette in tuxedo, with the drolly titled global-warming doc An Inconvenient Truth. Yet to screen: Sofia Coppola's visit to the glory days of the French Revolution with Kirsten Dunst as Austrian valley girl Marie Antoinette.
Fast Food Nation, directed by Richard Linklater from Eric Schlosser's 2001 bestselling exposé and timed to coincide with the centennial of Upton Sinclair's classic muckraker The Jungle, makes a valiant—if curiously anemic—attempt to use the scarcely fictionalized Mickey's franchise ("Home of the Big One") as a metaphor for American life. A Mickey's ad man (Greg Kinnear) learns that for all the engineered slogans, scientific packaging, and designed aromas, "there's shit in the meat." His mission to the mega–packing plant in Colorado intersects with the stories of Mexican illegal immigrants who get jobs there, as well as that of a Mickey's register girl turned eco-activist.
Linklater's panorama is overflowing with good intentions (and, while not Blood of the Beasts, is graphic enough to put you off beef, even before reaching the plant "killing floor"). What it lacks is satiric energy. The movie's most galvanizing scene is Bruce Willis's ferocious cameo as the voice of cynical realism—a Mickey's operative who makes fun of American 'fraidy cats and reminds Kinnear that "we all have to eat a little shit from time to time." As if sensing the shortage of red meat, Linklater provides his own auto-critique with a scene in which the student eco-activists attempt to liberate a pasture filled with contented cows. The animals won't budge. "Next time we'll have to bring a cattle prod," one kid concludes.
University militants figure even more heavily in Summer Palace, a fascinating mess by Chinese director Lou Ye, the romantic whose previous features include the vertiginous Suzhou River and delirious Purple Butterfly. The action spans a dozen or more years, opening in 1987 when Lou's passionate, philosophical heroine Yu Hong (beautiful, sullen Hao Lei) leaves her hometown on the North Korean border for Beijing University. Embracing confusion, she falls into a tormented love affair. Is Yu Hong having a breakdown? Or is China? As in the 1960s, students rush off to demonstrations hoping to get lucky. (The milieu feels authentic; Lou himself graduated Beijing University in 1989.) One waits in vain for the events at Tiananmen Square to erupt into the foreground. That they never do is a factor either of Lou's political caution or his devotion to Yu Hong's stubborn self-involvement.
At once leisurely and hectic, Summer Palace has its share of suicides, betrayals, and bicycle accidents. There's also more explicit sex in this melodrama than in any previous Chinese movie; more, most likely, than in the six runners-up combined. Freedom is definitely on the march. (And so is avant porn—ranging from the ragingly punitive Danish anti-porn anime Princess, which opened the Director's Fortnight, to an autobiographical feature by the erstwhile porn star known as HPG, considered by at least one Paris journalist to be the most interesting French film at Cannes, to John Cameron Mitchell's softheaded hardcore gloss on The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Shortbus.)
Given that one of Lou's major influences—Wong Kar-wai—is jury president and that a former leading lady—Zhang Ziyi—is also on the jury, as well as Lou's political boldness in making the first Chinese movie to depict Tiananmen '89, Summer Palace seems destined for some sort of award. Not so the most audacious, polarizing, and to my mind, enjoyable movie in the competition thus far: Southland Tales.
Kelly's second feature is as talented as—and even more ambitious than—his debut, the cult hit Donnie Darko. A high-voltage farrago of unsynopsizable plots and counterplots, Southland Tales unfolds—mid–presidential campaign—in an alternate, pre- and post-apocalyptic universe where Texas was nuked on July 5, 2005, and a German multinational has figured out how to produce energy from ocean water. The mode is high-octane sci-fi social satire; the cast is large and antic (with wrestler Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson as an anxious, amnesiac action hero and Sarah Michelle Gellar biting down hard on the role of socially conscious porn queen Krysta Now).
Essentially, Southland Tales is a big-budget, widescreen underground movie. ("Star-Spangled to Death," one colleague commented as we left the screening.) Filled with throwaway gags and trippy special effects, it's a comedy as well. Philip K. Dick is the presiding deity—the movie is thick with drugs, paranoia, and time-travel metaphysics—although Karl Marx (and his family) keep surfacing in various guises, including the last remnant of the Democratic Party. The film is a mishmash of literary citations, interpolated music videos, and movie references—most obviously to Robert Aldrich's Kiss Me Deadly—but it's even more concerned with evoking the ubiquitous media texture of contemporary American life.
At two hours and 40 minutes, Southland Tales flirts with the ineffable and also the unreleasable. There's no U.S. distributor; nor does the movie's humor, much of it predicated on a familiarity with American television, political rhetoric, and religious cant, seem designed to travel easily. Received with a lusty round of boos and a smattering of applause, Southland Tales provoked the festival's most negative press screening and hostile press conference since The Da Vinci Code. The first question suggested (incorrectly) that Kelly's movie had set a Cannes record for number of walkouts and asked the director how he felt.
Why was the Kelly Code too much to take? Sensory overload is certainly a factor, but unlike Da Vinci, Southland Tales actually is a visionary film about the end of times. There hasn't been anything comparable in American movies since Mulholland Drive.
Quote from: Astrostic on May 22, 2006, 02:38:52 PM
A review from Cannes
Justin Timberlake (who is the film's narrator for most of the film) has an abrupt music video that plays about halfway through the film that is exhilarating in it's location and lyrics, as Justin repeats over and over again "I've got soul, but I'm not a soldier" (the singing isn't him by the way, it's a much deeper voice).
It's by The Killers: All These Things That I've Done
I've got legs, but I'm not a legend.
Quote from: edison on May 25, 2006, 12:39:55 PM
Quote from: Astrostic on May 22, 2006, 02:38:52 PM
A review from Cannes
Justin Timberlake (who is the film's narrator for most of the film) has an abrupt music video that plays about halfway through the film that is exhilarating in it's location and lyrics, as Justin repeats over and over again "I've got soul, but I'm not a soldier" (the singing isn't him by the way, it's a much deeper voice).
It's by The Killers: All These Things That I've Done
Yeah, I meant to comment on how cheesy this sounds. Hope it turns out better than how it looks on paper.
On the Scene: Q&A with 'Southland's Richard Kelly at Cannes
Source: Entertainment Weekly
In a typical sequence from Southland Tales, writer-director Richard Kelly's sci-fi-ish follow-up to his cult smash Donnie Darko, Justin Timberlake lip-syncs to The Killers' "All These Things That I've Done" in a futuristic arcade, as a chorus line of peroxidized blondes lying in a line of Skee-Ball lanes kick up their heels behind him. Timberlake, as a sniper-narrator named Pilot Abilene, has a dark ring of blood around his shirt and a scar around one eye, and the musical number climaxes when he pours a beer over his head.
So the movie is out there, yeah. The rest of its 160 minutes features Sarah Michelle Gellar and Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, Seann William Scott, and several past and current members of Saturday Night Live in a willfully confusing apocalyptic sci-fi comedy epic that imagines life in 2008, not long after a nuclear weapon has exploded in Abilene, Texas.
The movie premiered here at the Cannes Film Festival last Sunday. It went over badly. People hate it. With a few exceptions, the reviews have been eviscerating, with what seems like an emphasis on the word "incomprehensible." The movie doesn't have domestic distribution yet, and, given its reception, Southland Tales seems unlikely to be shown in America in its present form.
Where does the guy who made Donnie Darko -- which had its own troubles making it to theaters after its rocky debut at Sundance in 2001 -- go from here? We asked him in Cannes.
What has your week been like?
It's the exact same thing that happened with Donnie Darko. The film follows the same formula as Darko, only on a bigger scope and scale. That was always the design of it: It was intended to be this epic L.A. story, and the complicated nature of the narrative -- the sense of it being science fiction, a very dense combination of politics and philosophy and science, delivered with a really kind of subversive sense of humor featuring pop stars -- was very intentional. So obviously we're pushing buttons, and provoking people, and that was our intention. That's what we wanted to do. The only thing that's disappointing or frustrating for me is just that I don't know that the film will be seen in the United States. Maybe it will, but potentially it could be shown with almost an hour of it missing. I don't quite know what that film is.
You surprised at the vitriol of the reaction?
No, actually, in retrospect, not at all. Again, it's exactly what happened with Donnie Darko. So it's like we're used to it. This time, we're just like, "Been there, done that." I just want to make sure that the film is given a chance to be analyzed properly and digested. Because the nature of the film is that it's incredibly complicated. Intentionally so, because that's the nature of our dilemma, which is really complicated too. If someone were to detonate a nuclear weapon in Texas, and we woke up after that event, we would have a chaotic, challenging puzzle ahead of us. And that's the movie. It's a chaotic puzzle.
So no distributor is going to release the version that played here?
That seems to be what I'm hearing, that seems to be the consensus among all the people I'm communicating with. I just don't exactly know what's going to happen after here. I don't know if this version will ever be seen again or what, but I'm proud of this version and I definitely stand by it, and I guess eventually on DVD there could be two versions. I don't know; we'll see what happens. We're still working it out.
Getting the film made in the first place was a struggle. It sounds like you're not anxious to repeat the experience on your next film.
I just don't know if I don't have the energy anymore. It took five years, and I don't want to take five years between each movie. I want to make more than six movies in my entire life. However long I live, I wanna be able to get as many movies out there as I can, and this whole five years thing, and having to fight and struggle for so long, I've kind of had it, I'm over it, you know?
So will your films get more commercial from now on?
I think they already are commercial. I think people might disagree with me, but I think that Donnie Darko is very commercial. It's done extremely well on DVD, and it could have done extremely well in theaters if it was marketed properly. Same with this film. I think this film has great commercial viability. I just wish there were maybe people who were a little less risk averse in the sense of giving it a chance to find an audience in its existing condition.
What do you say to Donnie Darko fans, to make them keep the faith?
Uh, that I tried. [Laughs] I tried. And hopefully they'll get a chance to see it at some point.
I'm hearing a lot of hating on this film from my cinephile friends, saying this is going to be like our generations' indie-autuer's Heaven's Gate or something. I just think it's a really cynical position to take that just because someone is clearly throwing all their creative juices unfiltered into something that it will necessarily be appalling. It's bound to be messy, yes, but so is Magnolia.
For me, all these endless little titbits of undeniably original stuff that I'm hearing about the film are making me so excited in a way that that I hardly ever am for a new movie. I wasn't a HUGE fan of Donnie Darko and it's not like I think Kelly is a genius or something, but it seems to me that it's kind of our DUTY as fans of interesting, intelligent, orignal cinema to get excited in theory about a project as huge and bizarre-sounding as this...
Quote from: MacGuffin on May 26, 2006, 06:39:48 PMWhat has your week been like?
It's the exact same thing that happened with Donnie Darko. The film follows the same formula as Darko, only on a bigger scope and scale. That was always the design of it: It was intended to be this epic L.A. story, and the complicated nature of the narrative -- the sense of it being science fiction, a very dense combination of politics and philosophy and science, delivered with a really kind of subversive sense of humor featuring pop stars -- was very intentional. So obviously we're pushing buttons, and provoking people, and that was our intention. That's what we wanted to do. The only thing that's disappointing or frustrating for me is just that I don't know that the film will be seen in the United States. Maybe it will, but potentially it could be shown with almost an hour of it missing. I don't quite know what that film is.
i think there's a disconnect between the question and answer here.
A Not-Too Positive Review from JoBlo...
http://www.joblo.com/reviews.php?mode=joblo_movies&id=1434
Sony travels to Kelly's 'Southland'
Source: Hollywood Reporter
"Donnie Darko" writer-director Richard Kelly's "Southland Tales," which ran into a critical buzzsaw when it debuted at May's Festival de Cannes, will be released domestically by Sony Pictures.
Set in a postapocalyptic Los Angeles circa 2008, "Southland" stars Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, Sarah Michelle Gellar and Seann William Scott.
Sony Home Entertainment has picked up the film for theatrical and home entertainment distribution, though it hasn't been decided which Sony label will handle the theatrical release.
"(Richard) is going to complete his edit, and when we see his cut, we'll figure out the distribution plan," SHE president Ben Feingold said. "But it will be theatrical."
The studio is providing suggestions to Kelly, but "it's his movie," Feingold said. "We'll have a point of view, but people like (Kelly's) sensibility."
According to the producers, the film fielded multiple offers in Cannes, though Sony execs didn't see the movie until after the festival. Producer Sean McKittrick said Kelly took the 160-minute "Southland" to Cannes as an unfinished film. "We're excited to be able to finish it properly," McKittrick said.
The filmmakers weren't surprised by the harsh reaction the movie received at Cannes, McKittrick said. "A lot of it was expected, to be honest," he said. "It is a very difficult film, and it's made to push buttons. We didn't expect some reviews to be so personal, but we didn't show it to the audience we made it for." Added producer Matthew Rhodes, "For us, Cannes was the greatest launching pad in the world to sell the domestic rights on this movie. And it was a great success for us as producers."
Kelly's fanbase of sci-fi and pop culture enthusiasts made his "Donnie Darko" a cult hit on DVD. Three graphic novels that serve as prequels to the film will be released this summer. The first one hit shelves Wednesday.
yay!
great, but no tentative date yet :yabbse-angry:
Inspired by the Stephen King serial novel Green Mile, writer-director Richard Kelly (Donnie Darko) embarked on the cross-media adventure of writing three 100-page graphic novels, each covering one day, as back story for his upcoming epic adventure Southland Tales, which covers days four, five and six. "If you read the books the movie will be that much more fun," he said. "This way you'll know the characters when you show up at the theater." (Having seen the fairly incomprehensible, multi-character film, the novels should explain a great deal!) Kevin Smith backed him on publishing the novels, which Kelly wrote like R-rated dialogue-heavy screenplays during production and hopes to break out of the comic book ghetto. "Graphic novels should be cinematic, like film," he said. He was finishing up the third novel just as he was fine-tuning his cut of Southland Tales. "I put as much care into Three as the film," he said. "I wanted it to end like a cliffhanger." It's brilliant that Kelly sold the $17-million movie to Sony Home Video, but what no one is admitting is that while the DVD release is assured, the theatrical handling of the film will depend on what cut he hands in: which will it be, Columbia, Screen Gems, TriStar or Sony Pictures Classics? Only Kelly's cut will tell that tale.
damn I saw the new post my Mac and I was hoping for a trailer :(
Richard Kelly Upset With Planned Movie Edits
Source: FemaleFirst.co.uk
Hollywood director Richard Kelly is furious after learning distributors plan to cut one hour of footage from his latest movie Southland Tales.
Kelly's follow-up to his cult hit Donnie Darko received a disastrous reception from critics at the Cannes Film Festival in France earlier this year (06).
And the 31-year-old now has no idea if American audiences will ever get to see the movie as he intended it to be seen.
He tells Hotdog magazine, "What's disappointing, frustrating is that now I don't know that Southland Tales will be seen in the United States.
"Maybe it will, but potentially it could be shown with almost an hour of it missing. I don't quite know what that film is.
"It was intended to be this epic LA story. I just don't know if I have the energy anymore.
"I tried. I tried. And hopefully they'll (the fans) get a chance to see it at some point".
Is there a set release date for this in the US or UK or are the studio just going to rape it and throw it out when they feel like it?
Despite the bad buzz it got at Cannes I'm still incredibly interested to see the full Richard Kelly version of the movie as it sounds (unusually for a film created in Hollywood) unlike anything else I've seen.
Anybody else still interested in this movie?
nah
Richard's statement on Southland Tales
I just wanted to give everyone an update on Southland Tales, as there was recently an article published in Hot Dog Magazine about the film being taken away from me and cut down by an hour. This interview took place during the Cannes Film Festival and WAS TAKEN OUT OF CONTEXT WITHOUT REFERENCING MANY POSITIVE DEVELOPMENTS THAT HAVE OCCURRED SINCE THEN.
As many of you know, the film has been bought by Sony and I have been finishing A SHORTER cut of Southland Tales under their supervision. It has been a great experience and I feel like the film is now in better shape than ever. The film will absolutely be released in theaters, and Sony is still deciding on an appropriate release date and strategy.
The second graphic novel of The Prequel Saga, "Southland Tales - Book II: Fingerprints, will be released on September 13th. Book III will likely come out in mid-October. If you like the books, I guarantee you will love the film, as it represents chapter IV-VI!
Thank you guys for your continued support, and please know that I am incredibly proud of this film and excited for it to be seen. What you will see in theaters will absolutely be my cut of the film!
Best,
Richard
ewwww.....january
Timberlake A Disfigured Iraq War Vet, Gellar A Porn Star In 'Tales'
'Donnie Darko' director re-editing 'Southland Tales,' which is spawning graphic-novel series.
Source: MTV
Trying to summarize the plot of "Southland Tales" is a bit like explaining string theory to your dog: More likely than not, you'll be met with a blank stare. Attempting to explain the story-behind-the-story of the upcoming flick, meanwhile, is more comparable to filing the proper forms at the DMV: No matter how you do it, you're still likely to end up with a headache.
So, for simplicity's sake, here are a few basic facts: The movie stars a ridiculous list of actors including Sarah Michelle Gellar, the Rock, Justin Timberlake, Mandy Moore, Seann William Scott and a dozen other recognizable names. It is Richard Kelly's follow-up to 2001's "Donnie Darko," one of the boldest debut films from a writer/director in recent memory. And, in a weird way, the first third of the movie is already out there for you to enjoy.
" 'Southland Tales' is basically a science-fiction fantasy about the near future," the 31-year-old auteur recently explained. "It's about what would happen to our country, potentially, if we were hit with another major terrorist attack. And it's trying to use comedy to project a political fantasy in the near future. [The film is] trying to engage young people to talk about alternative fuel, homeland security, the Patriot Act, foreign policy, the tabloid culture and a lot of other important issues."
In short, this ain't no "Garfield: A Tail of Two Kitties." Kelly compares his vision to that of complex films like "Brazil" and "Dr. Strangelove" and has concocted a bizarre mix of deadpan comedy, apocalyptic politicizing and musical numbers. Not surprisingly, he suffered a long and arduous road getting his movie made in a town known for celebrating the one-line synopsis.
"The Rock plays Boxer Santaros, a movie star stricken with amnesia," Kelly said. "Seann William Scott plays twins who are also mysteriously stricken with amnesia, and he finds himself with a psychic connection to this movie star. They both awaken in the Nevada desert. They're involved in this massive conspiracy involving a lot of characters, and one of the most pivotal is Krysta Now, a porn star played by Sarah Michelle Gellar. She is the femme fatale and the mysterious broker of this massive conspiracy involving an alternative-fuel corporation [and] a senator running for vice president."
On top of that is an impressive roster of comedians, all cast against type. "Once you can do comedy you can do anything," Kelly said. "You can dial them back and play it straight, and it's still funny, but it's about restraint. Jon Lovitz, we dyed his hair blond, and he plays this vicious cop character, a film-noir thug of a cop. Cheri Oteri plays a neo-Marxist freedom fighter who's a comedian, but she's angry at the world — she worked out for the role and got really buff. Amy Poehler plays a beatnik poet/performance artist, and Nora Dunn plays a porno director."
When Kelly shot the film more than a year ago, he encountered plenty of the problems that plague independently financed films. But landing big names wasn't one of them, thanks to his post-"Darko" buzz and a willingness to allow his actors to stretch. "We have Justin Timberlake in the film, playing a disfigured Iraq war veteran, and he's the heart and soul of it," Kelly said of the singer, who was eager to get past his pretty-boy image. "[Timberlake is] this doomsday prophet, and he's our narrator. And Mandy Moore plays the spoiled-brat daughter of a Texas senator. You see a lot of these actors taking their image and shaking it up, showing different parts of themselves. It's exciting to see them in roles you wouldn't expect."
But when, exactly, will we see these performances? It's a question that even Kelly can't answer. In May, a rambling, 160-minute cut debuted at the Cannes Film Festival and was received with the kinds of walkouts and bad reviews that could make a grown man cry.
"We made this movie for the people who loved 'Donnie Darko,' " Kelly insisted, downplaying the French response. "For people who read 'The Onion,' watch 'South Park' and listen to Green Day — very much the MTV audience. The fact that this film got [into Cannes] is a huge honor, and it is a statement that the film has something to say."
Sony Pictures would seem to agree, as it recently purchased the rights to the film and currently has Kelly slaving away on a brand-new, substantially shortened cut. "We're still finishing the film, and we'll be done with it in a couple of months," Kelly said. "I think at that point Sony [will decide] exactly when and how to release it."
In the meantime, however, Kelly and another cult figure, writer/director Kevin Smith, have concocted a unique way to simultaneously preserve the edited plot points and build anticipation. "I went to Kevin and pitched it to him," the "Southland" helmer said of the new graphic-novel series bearing the same name. "It's definitely an experiment, but we're excited."
The first graphic novel, "Two Roads Diverge," which introduced the film's major characters, was released this summer. The second, "Fingerprints," hit stores a few weeks ago.
"The film was always divided into three chapters, and as we got into it I started to get frustrated because I was like, 'Man, there is so much more I want to tell,' " said Kelly, who will soon release the third comic book with Smith, who also acts in the flick. "I started designing a back story as a way of figuring the story out in my own terms, and I thought, 'Well, let's just cross media and create chapters one, two and three as graphic novels and the film will be chapters four, five and six.' "
Once again, Kelly is going out on a limb with an idea that many in Hollywood might not understand. But it's rare to see a filmmaker give his audience credit for being smart enough to keep up.
"[We're] hoping people excited about the film will start reading the books and getting an awareness for the characters in the story, and then there will be a cliffhanger that will end in the movie theater," he explained. "We're hoping it might change the way people go see a film, in the sense that you'll already know the characters when you walk into the theater."
Maybe the French just didn't understand "Southland Tales" — or maybe, as some critics insist, none of us ever will. But good luck finding anybody who fully understood Kelly's debut the first time they saw it yet didn't grow to love its complexity after repeat viewings.
"It's like in 'Donnie Darko,' when she says, 'You're weird' and he says, 'I'm sorry,' and then she says, 'No, that was a compliment,' " Kelly grinned. "Everyone's weird, everyone's confused, everyone's screwed up in the head [in my audience]. I'm happy to be a part of it."
So, did anyone here pick up the graphic novels?
From Kelly's myspace blog:
Picture Lock
Current mood: energetic
Sorry for the radio silence. I have been incredibly busy finishing
Southland Tales and prepping The Box simultaneously. We are hoping to begin production in early March, 2007 in Virginia.
After almost a year of editing, we have finally locked picture on
Southland Tales!
2 hrs 17 min. The final cut is 27 minutes shorter than the
"work-in-progress" version that premiered at Cannes. I am very happy
with this edit, as we have done a significant amount of work to solve the
rubiks cube narrative. Justin Timberlake just recorded the final voice-over
this past sunday. We still have some visual effects work to do... but expect a release date and a trailer soon!
I hope everyone is enjoying Southland Tales - Book II: Fingerprints.
Book III is going to the printer in about a week, and I believe that it is
the best of the three (cerainly the longest). I can't believe it is almost
over... and that we have made it to the end with our sanity intact.
Well... perhaps not completely intact:)
I leave for Cape Canaveral tomorrow to attend my first space shuttle
launch.
Expect some big announcements soon!
RK
http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendID=87279726&blogID=201502851&MyToken=532fcdaf-fcb1-4429-84b5-e38030817120
Southland update
Source: JoBlo
If you're wondering why you haven't seen a trailer yet for Richard Kelly's SOUTHLAND TALES, it's because... there isn't one yet. Nor is there any distribution plan or release date in place yet, which will surely disappoint anyone anxiously waiting to see how Kelly follows his cult fave DONNIE DARKO.
Kelly gave an update at his MySpace blog, stating that the film awaits budget approval for completion, and that a soundtrack deal is in the works. He also recommends reading the online SOUTHLAND TALES "prequel saga" graphic novels for maximum enjoyment of the eventual film. In the meantime, Kelly isn't letting those hands get idle -- he's still working on the horror movie THE BOX and is hammering out another screenplay, a remake of a 1971 action film for a "big director" (speculation is that it's the car chase flick VANISHING POINT, which was already remade as a TV movie starring a pre-Aragorn Viggo Mortensen).
Southland Tales Teaser Trailer
Current mood: excited
Hello all,
I have been inundated with requests about the trailer for Southland
Tales... and I am sorry to say that it does not yet exist:( Sorry everyone...
but I promise we are getting closer!
We are still in the process of getting the budget approved to finish
all of the additional visual effects in the final cut. There were many missing
and incomplete visual effects in the Cannes version, so expect lots of
improvements! Fingers crossed that we get the additional money...
Release date has not been decided upon, as the distribution plans are
still in the works.
We are in advanced negotiations for a soundtrack deal for Southland
Tales, but until there is a locked release date... we won't know for sure.
The graphic novels are done... so I hope everyone is checking out The
Prequel Saga. I really believe that the people who read the books will
enjoy the film a lot more on their first viewing.
Casting is still underway on The Box... but we will not start filming
until later this year... as there is still work to be done in the Southland.
In the meantime... I have been hired by Fox to write a big action film
for [FAMOUS DIRECTOR]. It is a remake of a film released in 1971...
I've already started writing... and will have it finished in the next
9-10 weeks... right about the time I hope to have this whole Southland Tales
thing out of my system... once and for all... for the love of God... if
he is not dead, per The New York Times.
Best,
RK
Quote from: MacGuffin on February 15, 2007, 10:38:28 AM
In the meantime... I have been hired by Fox to write a big action film
for [FAMOUS DIRECTOR]. It is a remake of a film released in 1971...
Let's start taking bets. I'm going with either this (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0067525/) or this (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0066830/).
It's not the french connection. He said so on a reply to a person who posted on his blog
My money's on this (http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0067927/).
Quote from: jacksparrow on February 15, 2007, 03:24:53 PM
My money's on this (http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0067927/).
That's the the one I'm bettin on too.
Listed on imdb as a "comedy musical sci-fi thriller," Southland looks interesting to say the least. Set in Los Angeles, 2008, with the city on the brink of "social, economic and environmental disaster," it's got a cast that redefines "eclectic" (Justin Timberlake, John Larroquette, Mandy Moore, Jon Lovitz, Cheri Oteri...getting the idea?),and you can see just how eclectic in this cool new group of photos from the film over at iesb. There's shots from the movie, behind-the-scenes stuff, storyboards, paintings, sketches, all kinds of goodies. A majority of the photos are of Seann William Scott (who plays twin brother cops), The Rock and an almost disturbingly attractive Sarah Michelle Gellar, who plays a porn star in the film. Southland Tales has been picked up by Columbia Pictures, and Kelly is said to have made some pretty drastic cuts in preparation for a potential release soon.
http://iesb.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2106&Itemid=99
they may have to delay 2008 for this movie.
Richard Kelly Updates Southland Tales!
Source: IESB.net
Fans of Richard Kelly have been waiting patiently for his latest film, Southland Tales, to make it to the big screen. Kelly chimed in to update his legions of fans.
Richard Kelly sent in the following from his MySpace blog :
So we have finally gotten the greenlight from Sony for the additional round of visual effects for Southland Tales. This is VERY GOOD NEWS for the film!
We will now be able to finish the film properly. Phew!
The film will be completely finished for the first public screening sometime mid-summer.
Thank you everyone for your patience and I will let you know when the release date is decided upon and teaser trailer will be released (work
is about to begin on the marketing materials).
You can also access two clips from the Film Independent event from last month from www.richard-kelly.net - check out the new uploaded photos of second unit director Dee Robertson... when you watch the first clip... you will
understand.
They. Are. Watching. You.
Oteri Mulls Southland's Fate
Source: Sci-Fi Wire
Comic actress Cheri Oteri, who has a role in Richard Kelly's upcoming SF epic movie Southland Tales, wondered in an interview with SCI FI Wire if the musical-comedy thriller will ever see the light of day. The yet-to-be-released but much-maligned movie is being re-edited, and a recent deal with Sony Pictures may finally get the film a domestic release.
During interviews for Shrek the Third, in which she voices Sleeping Beauty, Oteri said that her character still appears in the latest version of Southland Tales, as does a character played by Oteri's Saturday Night Live co-star Amy Poehler.
"I did see it, but I don't know if you will," Oteri said. "It's kind of sci-fi and very, very dark, and Rich's mind is such a brilliant mind." Southland Tales, written and directed by Kelly (Donnie Darko), also stars Sarah Michelle Gellar and Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson.
It was reported this week that Sony Pictures has struck a deal with Inferno Productions, which owns the film, marking progress for the film's release. The movie was widely anticipated last year at the Cannes Film Festival, but was harshly panned, sending Kelly back to re-edit. "Sony bought it and is supposed to release it, but I really don't know," Oteri said.
Southland Tales is set in Los Angeles on the brink of an apocalypse during Independence Day 2008. Oteri said that she hopes the film gets released before 2008 actually arrives.
As for the film's famously opaque narrative, Oteri said that she understood the version of the film she saw. "Well, uh, yes, but I studied it a lot," she said. "A lot!"
Shrek the Third opens May 18; Poehler also voices a character in the animated sequel.
Sony unit ready to buy films in bulk
Global division to deal with unaffiliated partners
Source: Variety
In Cannes, a single acquisition often makes news.
But Sony Pictures Worldwide Acquisitions Group came here to buy in bulk.
Headed by Sony's former production prexy Peter Schlessel, the group doesn't just send its pickups into the consumer marketplace via Sony channels. In order to facilitate its plan to spearhead 12 to 14 domestic theatrical releases a year (and several times that on DVD), it often pays distribution fees to unaffiliated partners, or enters into 50-50 joint ventures.
For example, Newmarket will team 50-50 with the Sony group for "The Nines," a Hope Davis-Ryan Reynolds drama from GreeneStreet Films. Samuel Goldwyn is distribbing three titles. Among them: "Rise: Blood Hunter," a vampire actioner with Lucy Liu and Michael Chiklis that screened at Tribeca and will open June 1; and "Revolver," a Guy Ritchie-directed gangster thriller starring Jason Statham. Latter fizzled overseas but could appeal to U.S. action auds who devoured Statham's "Transporter" pics.
The third Goldwyn title will ring a bell for Cannes regulars. It's "Southland Tales," the Richard Kelly sci-fier that was hooted off the Croisette in 2006. Kelly pledged at the time to rework the film and he has, Schlessel said.
"It's a film that's intrinsically interesting to people," said Scott Shooman, exec director of acquisitions and production. "People will want to talk about it."
Laced with musical numbers, the film has a poppy cast including Justin Timberlake, Mandy Moore and Dwayne "the Rock" Johnson.
Several of the pic's principals have talked of a theatrical bow, but no plans are set, execs said.
Also due in theaters is "Paprika," Japanese anime title originally ticketed for DVD or a four-wall theaterical run, but due in theaters from Sony Pictures Classics on May 25.
Sony has long acquired titles as pure homevid plays, but the hybrid division took flight in January, after Schlessel's arrival in September. It was then named and positioned as a stand-alone division with ties to Sony's theatrical film, TV and home video operations.
In the months since, the company has been on a buying spree, picking up some 60 titles for release in 2007.
"Peter likes to come into my office and ask, 'So what did you buy today?'" Shooman said.
"We really feel like we have the capability to buy a movie a day," Schlessel said. "Given how the business is evolving, we are trying to make sure people have an open mind about how films are released. Everyone always wants to know, 'Will the movie come out theatrically?' But we're showing that you have to tailor a release to the film."
One difference between the company and other bidders on festival fare is that it has unlimited upward scalability. Some of its titles could be brought in and released wide through Sony or another major studio partner.
In that vein, the division earlier this month announced a co-venture with Inferno Films, a company known for international sales but also recently a force in financing and production of pics in the $10 million to $20 million range (e.g., "Just Friends" at New Line).
All the pics resulting from the pact are expected to bow theatrically. One of the first is "Daddy Day Care," due out Aug. 8 from Sony.
The acquisitions group also has ties to television, having secured international rights for Showtime's "Weeds" and international DVD and TV rights to the pay cabler's "The Tudors."
Moore Uncertain About Southland
Mandy Moore told SCI FI Wire that she's not sure what's happening with director Richard Kelly's apocalyptic SF film Southland Tales and added that she's not even sure she's still in the long-delayed project. Starring Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Seann William Scott, Miranda Richardson, Kevin Smith and singer-actress Moore, Southland Tales is set in near-future Los Angeles on the eve of an unnamed disaster.
"I have not seen any incarnation of that yet," Moore said in an interview while promoting her latest film, License to Wed. "I had a great time working on it. It was one of those things where I met with Richard maybe two weeks before they started shooting. I had just finished that movie American Dreamz at the time, so I was like, 'Um, yeah, sure, I'll jump into this one. Why not?' I play the Rock's wife in the movie, if I'm still in the movie at all. They had to cut it down so much, and maybe they just cut out my character altogether."
An early cut of Southland Tales screened at the Cannes Film Festival last year, drawing nearly unanimous pans. Since then, Kelly (Donnie Darko) has said he's recutting the film for release at a later date, but no release date has been set.
Whatever happens with the film and her role, Moore added, she had a good time making Southland Tales. "I loved working with Rock or Dwayne; I'm not sure what he prefers to be called now," she said. "Sarah Michelle Gellar was in the movie. It was just a fun, huge gigantic cast of characters there. I'm not in the sci-fi element of it, and I don't get to sing."
THE BOX, ETC....
Current mood: working
Friday, June 29, 2007
Hello all,
Now that the official announcement has been made, I can finally break
my silence... if just for a few kind words for anyone interested in what's
happening in my world!
We are gearing up to start production on The Box in November...
shooting in Richmond, VA... starring the one and only Ms. Cameron Diaz. I couldn't be more excited... and expect more casting announcements soon.
As for Southland Tales... we are about halfway through completing all
of the new visual effects. We have to deliver everything by the end of summer.
I have to tell everyone that the amount of visual effects work being
added to the film is SIGNIFICANT... and I am so grateful for the work being done by Thomas Tannenberger and his team at Gradient VFX in Venice Beach.
And I can confirm that a company has been hired by Sony to
begin work on a trailer. The release date will be announced very soon.
And for some reason... myspace is telling people that it is my
birthday! Thank you for the birthday wishes but I was born on March 28th... I am indeed an Aries. Sorry for the confusion!
Best,
RK
Fuck... no dates... everything is soooooon
I found this at Richard-Kelly.net
(https://xixax.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fimg75.imageshack.us%2Fimg75%2F502%2Fgunjiwstboardtw6.jpg&hash=b005abb998d75dab3a6da865f606c63d7aad04da)
fuck! date!
I thought this flick went to direct to video last year?
HACK.
Can someone really be considered a hack after just one movie? Are we just spoiled by so many spectacular debuts that when someone makes a movie that everybody likes but you, you can't allow for him/her to ever make a movie that you'd find worthwhile? Whatever happened to letting a director find his way over the course of several movies?
(https://xixax.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fimages-srv.leonardo.it%2Fprogettiweb%2Fstabiae78%2Fblog%2FPaulHaggis_Grani_7765834_400.jpg&hash=68ec94b34507a1eac44b98ea44c4f350d2662eb1)
Never mind.
I smell it will be released in 3 fucking theatres nationwide and for a week... damnit
the font looks a little dinky.
i saw a Jan issue of Film Comment with an article on the film and it had a pic of Sarah Michelle and i had to do a double take because i thought it was Sharon Stone circa Basic Instinct time - white coat and everything.
'Southland Tales' opens Nov. 9
Samuel Goldwyn Films to release Kelly feature
Source: VARIETY
Samuel Goldwyn Films will release writer-director Richard Kelly's "Southland Tales" in U.S. theaters on Nov. 9 in partnership with Destination Films and Sony Pictures Worldwide Acquisitions Group.
Pic, Kelly's follow-up to his cult hit "Donnie Darko," is set in Los Angeles on July 4, 2008, as the city stands on the brink of social, economic and environ-mental disaster.
Dwayne "the Rock" Johnson stars alongside Seann William Scott and Sarah Michelle Gellar in the sci-fi thriller.
Pic, which preemed at the Cannes Film Festival in 2006, also features thesps Justin Timberlake, Mandy Moore and Amy Poehler.
Kelly is skedded to appear at Comic-Con on Friday to greet fans and sign autographs.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Monday, July 23, 2007
Comic-Con This Weekend
Current mood: working
COMIC-CON
Hello all,
I will be down at Comic-Con to sign copies of the new Southland Tales
teaser poster. Expect a press-release to surface very very soon, announcing
the official release date of the film.
Comic-Con Info:
Friday, July 27, 2007
11:00 AM PST - 1:00 PM PST
Table AA 12 at the Sails Pavillion
Expect a trailer sometime in mid-August.
At last!
Thanks to everyone for their patience and support!
RK
Quote from: Astrostic on July 13, 2007, 03:28:07 PM
(https://xixax.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fimg75.imageshack.us%2Fimg75%2F502%2Fgunjiwstboardtw6.jpg&hash=b005abb998d75dab3a6da865f606c63d7aad04da)
:yabbse-thumbup:
..except for the fact that this poster says absoutely nothing about the movie except that Sarah Michelle Gellar is going to be looking very hot and The Rock is going be looking very spiffy. On second thought that's
maybe absolutely enough.
Kelly Talks Southland Changes
Richard Kelly, director of the upcoming SF epic movie Southland Tales, told SCI FI Wire that he has considerably altered the film from an early cut screened, to disastrous critical reception, at the Cannes Film Festival last year and confirmed that the movie now has a Nov. 9 release date. The movie wrapped production nearly two years ago.
"[We made] a lot of editorial changes in terms of restructuring the order of scenes," Kelly said in an interview at Comic-Con International in San Diego on July 27. "We re-recorded all of Justin Timberlake's voice-over, and we added, like, 90 new visual-effects shots. It was truly like a work of progress." Kelly added that the movie has been cut by 20-25 minutes from its initial cut, which was nearly three hours long.
Kelly (Donnie Darko) likened the early Cannes screening to the worst possible test screening. "Usually when you have a movie, at that point you take it to Sherman Oaks and show it to a bunch of teenagers at [a test] screening. We took it to the Cannes Film Festival and showed it to the toughest audience in the world. Was that a good idea? I don't know. But it happened, and you just sort of take the best from it."
The movie was nominated for the prestigious Palme d'Or at Cannes. "At the time, I was 31 years old, on my second film," he said. "It was like, that's a life-changing thing. And I'll never forget that. And I hope to go back to the festival with another film later in my career, but we won't take this to another film festival."
Southland Tales stars Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, Seann William Scott and Sarah Michelle Gellar in a multilayered story on the eve of an indeterminate apocalypse in a near-future Los Angeles.
As the film's release date nears, Kelly said, "I used the metaphor before that making this film has been like landing a jet during, like, a tornado. But at the end of the day, if I'm the pilot, I've got to make that smooth landing. And I feel like I'm just approaching the runway, and the weather's clear. They printed that [release date] on the poster, and that makes me very happy."
From Richard Kelly's myspace blog:
August 27, 2007 - Monday
THE LAST WEEK
Current mood: optimistic
Hi,
Sorry for not posting more frequently. We are in the final week of our
mix and Digital Intermediate on Southland Tales, so I have been working
long, long hours. The film is basically finished by the end of the day this
friday.
Sony is putting the finishing touches on the trailer... and it should
premiere sometime in the first week of September. I have seen it and I
can tell you that it is very action-packed, features three songs from the
soundtrack, the entire cast of characters and a lot of one-liners. Very
exciting! Can't wait for everyone to see it. Special thanks to Kelly
Carlton and everyone at Intralink (they are the company responsible for the
trailers for Batman Begins, The Da Vinci Code and many other blockbusters).
Expect more updates soon about the graphic novel compilation book and
our soundtrack deal.
We will be screening the film for the very first time in the coming
weeks... so stay tuned:)
Best,
RK
PS: Everyone keeps telling me about last week's episode of Entourage...
was it good? I heard it was really good. I love that show!
Currently watching :
Zodiac (Widescreen Edition)
Release date: By 24 July, 2007
Quote from: MacGuffin on August 30, 2007, 10:45:34 AM
PS: Everyone keeps telling me about last week's episode of Entourage...
was it good? I heard it was really good. I love that show!
INVALIDATED.
(https://xixax.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.cinematical.com%2Fmedia%2F2007%2F09%2Fsouthland-5-finish1.jpg&hash=ff51d019c4b387a923be110fcdcaf0af8cc7adaf)
yuck
something tells me the dark blue part was Kelly's original poster and then the rest is the movie co's idea.
I dont know, but thats horrible.
And where is the fucking trailer?
is it suppost to look like an upside down flag?
Quote from: 72teeth on September 12, 2007, 01:26:49 AM
is it suppost to look like an upside down flag?
probably a shitty attempt by the studio to retain some meaning from the blue part (which already has a flag) in their headshot gallery.
Quote from: kal on September 11, 2007, 11:20:51 PMAnd where is the fucking trailer?
in a washing machine together with kevin smith's dirty underwear.
Quote from: bigideas on September 11, 2007, 10:11:00 PM
something tells me the dark blue part was Kelly's original poster and then the rest is the movie co's idea.
really? richard kelly designs his own movie posters?
i think i just realized this. but its possible i realized this 2 years ago and forgot: this is the most offputting cast ever assembled.
Sean William Scott
The Rock
Sarah Michelle Gellar
Mandy Moore
who would want to see that movie?
this movie sucks.
Quote from: modage on September 12, 2007, 09:17:14 AM
i think i just realized this. but its possible i realized this 2 years ago and forgot: this is the most offputting cast ever assembled.
Sean William Scott
The Rock
Sarah Michelle Gellar
Mandy Moore
Kevin Smith
+ a bunch of has-beens and random ppl who need work
who would want to see that movie?
with the additions i made, and the exception of mandy moore, you're right.
you won't believe this but i was gonna post the exact same thing earlier today (including about realising this years ago) when i noticed that the three highlighted "stars" on the poster are just about the worst actors working today. this has asshole movie written all over it, but i think it'll suck even to them.
this is the Bobby of casts.
Quote from: pete on September 12, 2007, 04:59:13 AM
Quote from: bigideas on September 11, 2007, 10:11:00 PM
something tells me the dark blue part was Kelly's original poster and then the rest is the movie co's idea.
really? richard kelly designs his own movie posters?
can't say for sure.
i figured most directors - or at least writer/directors/autuers - designed or at least put some input into the poster.
FINAL RUNNING TIME
Hello all,
I just wanted to make a clarification to the individual named "Davey
Bizzle" who claims to have seen the final version of Southland Tales and posted a review of the film on AICN via Moriarty. The problem is... the version
he saw is nowhere near the final version, but and avid output from
December of 2006, which was basically the cut as it existed (at a running time of 2
hrs 17 min) before we began to add dozens of new visual effects shots and
additional content to fix the film.
This is the version that I showed Sony (and Universal International)
last December... and said... there are still a lot of problems that we need
to fix and can I have more visual effects money to fix them? Thankfully,
they said yes.
The final running time of Southland Tales is 2 hrs 24 min... and more
than EIGHT MONTHS of work has gone into improving the film after this
version viewed by Davey Bizzle.
The description "(Mostly) Finished" is a completely innacurate
description of what Mr. Bizzle saw.
Just trying to set the record straight... and I can't wait to screen
the finished version.
RK
I'm a fan of this guy and I'm still excited about this movie... but if he would finally have a finished version of this fucking film after 4 years of working on it, maybe he wouldnt need to clarify this bullshit and set the record straight... just show us the damn thing so we can decide if are a cool guy or you were just lucky to pull donnie darko out of your ass
this movie sucks.
Richard Kelly resurrects 'Southland'
'Donnie Darko' director knows from experience that a film can overcome a poor showing at Cannes.
Source: Los Angeles Times
TORONTO -- It was an offer he couldn't refuse. The Cannes Film Festival invited writer-director Richard Kelly to screen his second feature as part of its prestigious competition section. So Kelly took his "Southland Tales" to France in 2006, even though there was work still to be done on it.
The response? Disastrous. A "career killer," according to more than one industry watcher. Variety's review called it "pretentious, overreaching and fatally unfocused." The Village Voice said it was "a high-voltage farrago of unsynopsizable plots and counterplots" -- and that was one of the kind notices.
"Even with all that happened, I don't regret it," Kelly said recently of the experience. "Now that all the dust has settled, the movie is actually better off because of it. Honestly, it is. The hope is we can still somehow recover and the movie can find an audience."
Kelly will soon find out. He and his team, including producing partner Sean McKittrick, have been hard at work on revising the film nearly nonstop since that awful summer. "Southland Tales," which will be released Nov. 9, has been trimmed by approximately 20 minutes since Cannes and now has about 600 visual-effects shots, of which at least 100 are completely new.
"One of the biggest knocks on the movie was that it was too long," Kelly said. "I knew it was too long. But it's like a really elaborate puzzle. Like Jenga, you pull out enough blocks and it's still structurally sound; you pull out too many and it starts to collapse."
The now 2-hour, 24-minute story is purposefully byzantine for even the most attentive of viewers. Characters have multiple names and identities, plot strands ebb, flow and intersect. Add to that Kelly's casting choices -- drawing together such pop figureheads as Dwayne "the Rock" Johnson, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Justin Timberlake and Mandy Moore into a kaleidoscopic swirl -- and the experience of simply taking it all in, and it's pretty overwhelming.
The film is broken into three chapters, IV, V and VI. The first three chapters came out as graphic novels after Cannes, and Kelly admits they were the key, even for himself, for getting a handle on what was happening to the characters on screen.
"I couldn't get to a place, emotionally, as an artist, where I really felt I could finish this movie properly until I had the books done," he said. "I was a nervous wreck and I was depressed. I tried to do too much, and I failed. I felt I wasn't going to fulfill this movie, how great I had it in my mind. But once I finished the books, a big monkey was lifted off my back. I could really figure out how to solve the puzzle of the film. When we went to Cannes I hadn't finished with the books yet."
To that end, Kelly seriously revamped the first reel of the movie to include background information from the graphic novels and give the audience more of a running start on the film's densely packed narrative. Following the same opening scene, a Texas house party on July 4, 2005, that ends with mushroom clouds in the distance, the film now shifts into a dizzying animated sequence, referred to as the Doomsday Scenario Interface, which draws imagery from the graphic novels. Torrents of information are quickly revealed regarding the three years that follow, in which multiple wars are waged, an intense culture of government surveillance is created, alternative fuel sources are explored and Hillary Rodham Clinton runs for president on a ticket with Joe Lieberman. The world seems truly off its axis.
Kelly also re-recorded Timberlake's voice-over narration that runs throughout the film. Where the voice-over on the Cannes cut was more biting and sardonic, Kelly instructed Timberlake to watch "Apocalypse Now," so the voice-over now has the flat, hollowed-out lack of affect of Martin Sheen.
In trying to downplay their concerns over what might be called "the Cannes effect," McKittrick and Kelly are quick to point out that Kelly's first feature, "Donnie Darko," premiered at the Sundance Film Festival to similarly mixed results. After that film's initially disappointing theatrical release in fall of 2001, it went on to build an international cult following. Kelly and McKittrick are in no small part depending on that fan base, which Kelly has nurtured in the interim with regular MySpace posts, to turn out for "Southland Tales," regardless of what may have happened at Cannes.
"At the heart of it, our audience doesn't care," McKittrick said. "They panned us just as hard on 'Darko,' and our core audience knows that. And I think the general public isn't going to pay attention too much to Cannes reviews; that's more of an industry thing. I think it can actually fuel a fire, to be honest with you. It can get people excited to see it and make seeing it more rebellious in a way."
"The movie was made primarily for a younger audience," Kelly added, "people who watch 'South Park,' read the Onion, watch 'The Daily Show,' 'The Simpsons,' read graphic novels. And we were taking it to the toughest audience in the world, much older and kind of snobbier. But it was an honor to be there, to be included, so with the honor you take the punches to the face."
The rebooting of "Southland Tales" has given Kelly a clear-eyed perspective on what happened at Cannes and on himself as a filmmaker. The elongated journey to theaters now seems oddly appropriate for a film of such consciously unwieldy ambition and scope.
Finishing a recent late breakfast, Kelly stares at a half-eaten plate of food and absent-mindedly notes, "I always order more than I can eat." Immediately realizing the tantalizingly obvious metaphor, he hastens to add, "But I will finish it if you just give me time. I swear."
trailer's coming out this week.
trailer:
http://movies.yahoo.com/movie/1809233751/info
from the trailer page...
Genres: Musical/Performing Arts, Science Fiction/Fantasy and Thriller
Running Time: 2 hrs. 41 min.
aka. FLOP.
I thought it was 2:24... not much difference... but if the movie is bad those 15 minutes can be an eternity... and be bad for ticket sales.
This will get a lame limited release for sure and tank.
Trailer is not very good... I just saw it twice... the first time I was very excited and the second one I realized this will suck... too bad. It will join the Matrix sequels as one of the films I looked forward the most and disappointed me.
i cling to the hope that it's mostly awkward editing even though it probably isn't.. at the very least it will be a uniquely bad movie. maybe.
i didn't realize The Rock was so central :yabbse-sad:
Since the Cannes reviews, I've been hoping for it to be at least an admirable misfire, if it really was that bad. Based on Buffy's line about the future and how she delivered it, either the trailer didn't accurately capture the satirical tone Richard Kelly gave the movie, or it accurately captured that Kelly didn't quite get the satirical tone he wanted for the movie, so who knows? Whatever. I just want to see it finally. When you clear away the gushing love and excessive hatred towards Darko, it's a decent movie. But I just hope he's got more up his sleeve than just these sci-fi hybrids because I'm getting a Shyamalan vibe from him.
Oh I definitely think that this or any trailer can't be counted on to give you an accurate sense of the movie. Not that I know what the sense of this movie is, but I realized based on the info that we do have that it's too complicated and bizarre to sell to people in any clear way.
The strategy seems to be (and I wouldn't know how to do it any better) to get the cool shots and hip/funny lines into the trailer, and make sure that people know that famous people are in it. And I think that that's ALL we're going to get until the movie comes out.
I didn't really care for Donnie Darko (definitely don't have the excessive hatred that Sparrow mentioned, though) or this trailer, but I will reserve my judgment for if and when I see this movie.
Fuck all this, the trailer was a pants-creamer and I'll stand by that. Maybe the movie will suck, maybe it's the worst thing since a muffin with a small amount of blueberries in it, but I come on record by saying that I'm really looking forward to watch this. Some of the images were great, and I actually thought it has the potential to be both funny and actually have something to say. Plus I didn't know Miranda Richardson was in it (fuck YEAH!).
If this ends up sucking, I'll get so mad... :(
i don't get it.
the trailer didn't do anything for me. this looks like a michael bay movie on lsd.
Quote from: mogwai on September 21, 2007, 02:56:20 AM
this looks like a michael bay movie on lsd.
come on, it wasnt that bad. at least the first 40 seconds before the rock starts talking are good. i liked donnie darko, despite its ridiculous overpraise, so im looking forward to this. it looks like it has some interesting ideas/concepts. still, im hoping this sinks because of the casting, which is completely inexcusable no matter what logistics are behind it.
Why is like half the cast of SNL in this flick? And didn't they use "This is the way the worlds ends" tagline for Donnie Darko too? I don't think I've ever seen The Rock look so awkward. It's almost as if he doesn't know what to do.
Quote from: just sparrow on September 20, 2007, 03:26:20 PMI'm getting a Shyamalan vibe from him.
a youtuber summed it up best when they said "this is going to be so original! just like Donnie Darko"
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Fantastic Fest Interview: Richard Kelly, Writer-Director of 'Southland Tales'
Source: Cinematical
One of the surprises at this year's Fantastic Fest in Austin was the first public screening of the recut version of Southland Tales, which will be released in theaters starting in November. The film was written and directed by Richard Kelly, and a longer, unfinished version premiered at Cannes in 2006. Kelly is probably best known for his previous film, Donnie Darko, although since then he also wrote the script for Domino. Kelly attended the Fantastic Fest screening of Southland Tales, and Cinematical was able to sit down with him for a few minutes before he left Austin. (And yes, that's the actual Bone Shack sign from Planet Terror/Grindhouse that he's standing under, in the photo above.)
Cinematical: What made you decide to bring Southland Tales to Fantastic Fest?
Richard Kelly: It was Harry [Knowles, of AICN] -- Harry's been a great friend over the years. This is the first time anyone's seen the finished version, and we wanted to show it to the right audience, and at this festival people are very receptive to adventurous material. Harry had a great way of summing it up: he said it was a "science-fiction noir thriller." I love that description, because it crosses different genres. And for me, it's a comedy. We literally just finished it, and we weren't ready for Toronto -- we didn't know if Toronto was the best place, but Fantastic Fest felt right.
Cinematical: The version we saw here in Austin is the one that will be in theaters in November?
RK: Absolutely.
Cinematical: Southland Tales premiered at Cannes in 2006, and now it's September 2007 -- can you give us a quick timeline of what's been happening with the film since Cannes?
RK: Sony bought the movie out of Cannes, when we knew it still wasn't finished. What we brought to Cannes was a work in progress. I worked with Sony on the edit until December, and we were all happy with the edit. And I finished the graphic novels. We then realized we needed more visual effects to make the movie better, particularly for the animated prologue near the beginning -- the doomsday scenario interface, which shows what's happened in America over the three years since the nuclear attack. And we wanted to add more effects that would help transitions and backstory, show what was happening in the world through the news, and improve visual effects overall.
It ended up taking several months to close the deal to get the money from the studio, up until the end of March. We spent all spring and summer finishing the new visual effects and remixing the film -- 600 visual effect shots -- we were working nonstop. We just got the answer print from the lab at the end of last week.
Cinematical: How did you decide what to cut, and can you give us a summary of some of the scenes that were cut after the Cannes screening?
RK: There are a few things I miss, but I'm very happy with it. In the end, I only had to cut 19 minutes. I was scared for awhile that I would have to cut an hour ... but Sony was supportive, they got into understanding the architecture of the film and that it's really delicate. There's a subplot with Janeane Garafalo that I would love to restore in a longer version, with her character and with Kevin Smith. If you read the graphic novels, it's the stuff about the science of the machine and the wave generator, and the ocean tides having an effect on human behavior -- and more about the doomsday game that is being played, and the brother-and-sister type of relationship between Janeane Garafalo and Kevin Smith's characters. There's also a sequence we shot where Boxer [Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson's character] is on the beach and he takes the drug -- fluid karma -- and he sees into 1928, meets this fortune-teller woman. It's really trippy, even trippier crazier stuff, that people who really do like this film and get into it will appreciate. Maybe at some point down the road, I'll put together a slightly longer version.
Cinematical: What's the best way for a viewer to go into this movie, to enjoy it the most? Do you need to read the graphic novels first?
RK: You can go into it blind, or you can read the graphic novels. I think it's fun either way. If you read the graphic novels first, you can come into it like serialized fiction. You remember when Stephen King released The Green Mile books? I loved it the way he did that, the first day when the new novels came out -- I loved that experience. If you like the idea of being where you can't wait to get to the next chapter, you can read the books first, then show up to the movie where the story continues. Or you can go into it completely blind, and be overwhelmed, and then go read the books, and then be like, "Okay, okay, I get it" and then see the movie again. I was trying to give the audience an opportunity for an adventurous thrill ride.
Cinematical: Do you think Southland Tales is a movie that should be seen more than once?
RK: I think so. It's very much like Darko in that sense, they've got the same architecture. Everything is there for a reason -- in every shot there's a clue, all the design is very thought out, it's incredibly structurally intricate. We worked for a long time on it. Stuff like that, I think definitely warrants repeat viewings.
Cinematical: The cast is amazing. Every scene brings us another familiar face. Did you plan it that way, were you thinking about that as you developed the project?
RK: Yes. I wanted it to be a very fun movie to watch. It's a wild rollercoaster ride, and you want to be on that rollercoaster with a lot of familiar faces. I think they help ground the movie in pop culture and also in a familiarity. They're all funny, funny people -- Wallace Shawn, Christopher Lambert, John Larroquette, Zelda Rubenstein ...
Cinematical: And I didn't even recognize Kevin Smith, I felt so bad about that.
RK: Our makeup artist did a terrific job of aging him. I wanted the movie to have a pop vitality, and the cast was essential.
Cinematical: I liked the Kiss Me Deadly references in Southland Tales [two clips from the 1955 movie are shown at the beginning and end of Kelly's film].
RK: Oh, that's one of my favorite movies. I'll be happy if one day this movie could play on a double-bill with Kiss Me Deadly. It's a kind of sequel, in a way. And Dwayne (Johnson, aka The Rock) studied Ralph Meeker's performance. He watched the movie and he obviously isn't mimicking him or anything like that, but Mike Hammer, this tough-guy macho cop who's always sleeping with multiple women and throws the woman up against the wall and kisses her ... we tried to play off that throughout the movie. Kiss Me Deadly was a very political film noir for its time, and it was deemed by the Kefauver commission as the most dangerous film to American youth in its day. It was all about the Manhattan Project -- that glowing white box. It was a marvelous piece of satire, and it's been a big influence on me and on this film.
Cinematical: Do you see yourself doing more films with intricate stories like Donnie Darko and Southland Tales?
RK: I think everything I do will be intricate and elaborate, and I'm always going to be seduced by science fiction because I love it. My producing partner teases me, says, "Rich, why is there a time portal in every script you write?" You write what you love, and this is what I love.
But my next movie is a psychological thriller, it's PG-13, has a mainstream concept, and it's something the studio is much more comfortable in committing to right away, telling us they'll put it on 2500 screens.
Cinematical: Are you talking about The Box?
RK: Yes. I'm making my life a little bit easier with this next film.
Cinematical: What's the latest update with that project?
RK: Cameron Diaz is cast, and we're very close to announcing the other actors. But I can't say anything yet.
Quote from: MacGuffin on September 29, 2007, 10:00:58 PM
RK: Cameron Diaz is cast, and we're very close to announcing the other actors. But I can't say anything yet.
i predict halle berry, shia lebouf, jessica simpson, and pauly shore. with dane cook cameo.
indieWIRE ANNOUNCEMENT: "Southland Tales" Director Richard Kelly @ Apple Store SoHo
indieWIRE continues its monthly series with Apple Store - SoHo that presents indie film professionals discussing various aspects of the filmmaking process.
WHEN: Friday, October 19th, 6:30 p.m. - 7:30 p.m
WHERE: Apple Store - SoHo, 103 Prince Street, NYC
COST: Free, No RSVP required. Seats are first come, first serve. Seating is limited.
"Donnie Darko" Director Richard Kelly will participate in a discussion and show scenes from his latest film, "Southland Tales," which features a large ensemble cast of characters, including Dwayne Johnson, Sarah Michelle Gellar and Roland Taverner. "Southland Tales" is set over the course of three days that culminate in a massive 4th of July celebration as a city stands on the brink of social, economic and environmental disaster. Samuel Goldwyn Films will release the film theatrically on November 9th. The event will be moderated by indieWIRE contributor and film critic Dennis Lim.
Southland Delayed To Nov. 14
Southland Tales director Richard Kelly wrote on his MySpace.com blog [see below] that his much-delayed SF epic movie will be delayed at least one more week, as Samuel Goldwyn Films is bumping its debut to Nov. 14 from the original Nov. 9.
The movie will then expand to more cities on Nov. 16, Kelly said, adding: "I know. ... Yet another delay. ... But they felt this was a strategic move that would help the film."
Meanwhile, Kelly said that he is already preparing to shoot his next movie, The Box, based on a short story by Richard Matheson, starting Nov. 17 in Boston. "Casting is underway, and the story just broke on Variety, so I am happy to confirm that Frank Langella will be playing the role of Arlington Steward in the film. Expect more casting announcements soon!"
Southland Tales will have a red-carpet world premiere at the Arclight Cinema in Hollywood as part of AFI Fest on Nov. 2. Kelly said the movie will hold preview screenings in select cities and universities (Harvard, Columbia and the University of Southern California) later this month and early next month.
RELEASE DATE CHANGED
Hey everyone...
I have been incredibly busy prepping THE BOX! We start shooting
November 17th in Boston... casting is underway and the story just broke on
Variety so I am happy to confirm that Frank Langella will be playing the role of
Arlington Steward in the film. Expect more casting announcements soon!
As for Southland Tales, the film will have its big red-carpet premiere
at the Arclight Cinema in Hollywood as part of AFI Fest on Friday,
November 2nd.
I also just got word from Goldwyn that they are bumping the release
date from Friday November 9th to Wednesday November 14th (LA/NY), to expand
to other cities on Friday November 16th. I know... yet another delay...
but they felt this was a strategic move that would help the film:)
But for those of you who want to see the film earlier there will be
many advance previews scheduled for select cities and universities (Harvard,
Columbia and USC screenings are being set for late October/early
November). I will try and get a full schedule to you guys soon!
Best,
RK
The European poster is much, much cooler: Check it out
http://www.empireonline.com/news/story.asp?NID=21256
Quote from: shnorff on October 21, 2007, 05:11:35 PM
The European poster is much, much cooler: Check it out
http://www.empireonline.com/news/story.asp?NID=21256
Except for the fact that Sarah Michelle Gellar looks like the mother in a Jennifer Lopez film, yes it is...
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Booed at Cannes, but Now the Real Test
By DENNIS LIM; New York Times
"IT'S about the end of Western civilization as we know it," the writer-director Richard Kelly said of his second feature, "Southland Tales," which finally arrives in theaters next month, six years after his first. "That's why it needed to be an epic. That's why it took so long."
Another reason it has been held up: When the film, Mr. Kelly's eagerly anticipated follow-up to his 2001 cult hit "Donnie Darko," had its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival last year, the critical reception — except for a few staunch defenders — ranged from negative to vicious.
"It was painful," Mr. Kelly said of the Cannes screenings, which were marred by walkouts and boos. "I just thought, 'Please let it be over.'" At his press conference, seemingly shellshocked, he fielded hostile questions and muttered that he hoped the film would not "bomb." In interviews at the time he expressed concern that he would basically have to mutilate his movie, which then ran nearly three hours, if he ever hoped to get it released.
In hindsight the reaction seems typical of the distorting atmosphere of Cannes. Within a week of the festival, said Sean McKittrick, Mr. Kelly's producer, they had three distribution offers. Sony ended up buying the movie and footing the bill for the re-editing, which proved far less intrusive than Mr. Kelly had expected.
"Part of me feels like I got away with murder," Mr. Kelly, 32, said in a recent interview in Manhattan. "It's a film some people might consider an inaccessible B movie, and it's been slaughtered at the biggest film festival in the world. They could have been like, 'You want more money now?'"
"Southland Tales," set to open Nov. 14, unfolds during the 2008 presidential campaign in a parallel-reality America. The country is reeling from a 2005 nuclear attack in Texas and apparently heading for an even bigger catastrophe. A cosmic phantasmagoria studded with pop-culture luminaries including Dwayne (the Rock) Johnson, Justin Timberlake and Sarah Michelle Gellar, the movie traces a tangled web of interlocking conspiracies. The result is something like a Comic Book of Revelation, an Armageddon countdown in a plastic-fantastic universe where celebrities are military pawns in the Iraq war, and the quest for alternative energy is linked to Nikola Tesla's tidal-wave generator and a breach in the space-time continuum.
The great appeal of Mr. Kelly's films — the reason they lend themselves to fanboy worship and scrutiny — is that they seem like parts of a bigger whole. An entire cosmology lies off screen, waiting to be unraveled. In "Donnie Darko," which mingles teenage angst and time-warp physics, the plot pivots on a book called "The Philosophy of Time Travel." Mr. Kelly wrote a few chapters of this imaginary tome, posted them on the film's Web site (southlandtales.com) and later folded excerpts into the director's cut.
"Southland" has even more extra-textual stuff. Early on, when comic book publishers proposed tie-ins, it occurred to Mr. Kelly that he could expand the narrative beyond his shooting budget. "I had this really elaborate back story inside me," he said. He decided to present the movie as Chapters 4, 5 and 6 and conceived of the first three chapters as graphic novels, which he produced in collaboration with an artist, Brett Weldele. (Already published separately, they will be available as a single volume next month.)
As "Southland Tales" was going down in flames at Cannes, Mr. Kelly was still sorting through the details of his back story. He wrote the first book before the shoot and completed the second just before Cannes. He wrote the third while re-editing the movie. Working on them simultaneously helped clarify the big picture. "I needed to solve the riddle in my own mind," he said.
Perhaps the most significant change in the new cut is a brisk prologue that charts the major developments in the film's post-nuclear America. Mr. Kelly added special effects ($1 million worth) and reordered and tightened scenes (it now runs 2 hours 24 minutes, 19 minutes shorter than the Cannes version). The major casualty, lopped off at the studio's urging, was a subplot with Janeane Garofalo as a general. He also rerecorded Mr. Timberlake's voice-over.
"I misdirected Justin," he said. "It was a little too sarcastic. When we did it again, I had him watch 'Apocalypse Now,' so he ended up doing it very deadpan, very dry," like Martin Sheen's narration in that film.
Mr. Kelly's new cut may be easier to follow, but he has not altered the movie's kaleidoscopic structure or diluted its psychedelic nature. In other words, it's still far from commercial.
"It's a challenge," said Meyer Gottlieb, president of Samuel Goldwyn Films, which is releasing it in partnership with Sony. "But that's one of the things I like about it." The distributors will be counting on the obsessive fan base for "Donnie Darko," which opened to mixed reviews and weak grosses but went on to a robust midnight-movie and home-video afterlife.
It can't hurt that even more than "Darko," "Southland," with its dizzying pile-up of references, invites repeat viewings. There are nods to Robert Aldrich's doomsday noir "Kiss Me Deadly" and David Lynch's Hollywood noir "Mulholland Drive." But literary allusions seem to outnumber cinematic ones.
Mr. Kelly cited as important influences Philip K. Dick, Kurt Vonnegut and Raymond Chandler. The film's antic absurdism and mad sprawl could be considered Pynchonesque. A recurring refrain inverts the conclusion of "The Hollow Men" by T. S. Eliot ("This is the way the world ends/not with a whimper but a bang"), and the title of the first "Southland" book, "Two Roads Diverge," comes from "The Road Not Taken" by Robert Frost. (The Republicans in the film have nominated the presidential ticket of Eliot-Frost.)
Karl Marx emerges as the movie's presiding spirit. Marx's hometown, Trier, Germany, and his wife's family name, von Westphalen, are reference points. The political left in the film has devolved into a violent resistance movement known as the neo-Marxists. "I'm making fun of myself, the angry liberal," Mr. Kelly said. "The joke is that things have gotten so bad that even neo-Marxists have been forced to bear arms."
Characters are as apt to quote Marx and the New Testament as they are to recite lyrics by Jane's Addiction, whose song "Three Days" is prominently featured. The music is as lovingly chosen as the '80s staples in "Donnie Darko." In a druggy fantasy sequence Mr. Timberlake's character, a disfigured war veteran, sneering and clutching a can of Budweiser, lip-syncs to the Killers' "All These Things That I've Done." "I heard that song and couldn't stop thinking about Iraq," Mr. Kelly said.
"Southland Tales" simulates the oversaturation of the 21st-century mediascape and delights in, even as it mocks, the vulgar absurdities of celebrity culture. Ms. Gellar's character, for example, is a multitasking, politically minded sex-film star — "Jenna Jameson meets Arianna Huffington," Mr. Kelly said — with a "View"-like talk show and a hit song called "Teen Horniness Is Not a Crime" (co-written by Mr. Kelly and to be released as a single).
"American pop culture is certainly embedded in the DNA of this film," Mr. Kelly said. In casting the ensemble, which also includes Seann William Scott and Mandy Moore, he undertook a kind of Warholian experiment. "I wanted to utilize not just the talent of the actors but their pop value," he said, likening the strategy to how Warhol "took the image of celebrity and corrupted it."
Beneath their slick, jokey surfaces, both his films are rooted in primal anxieties. "Donnie Darko" evoked the nuclear dread of an '80s childhood. "I remember going to bed at night and being afraid of the bomb," Mr. Kelly said. "Southland Tales," he added, originates in part from that "childlike fear" being reawakened after the Sept. 11 attacks.
Mr. Kelly's apocalyptic fever dreams, centered as they are on messianic figures, riff on the Christian notion of end times. This dovetails with the political critique of "Southland Tales." "Some might argue the motivation for Iraq is rooted in fundamental Christian ideology," he said. To his befuddlement "Donnie Darko" has attracted a sizable Catholic following. "I've heard that it reinforces Catholic values," he said.
Mr. Kelly, who grew up in Richmond, Va., had an agnostic upbringing. "My mother did try to be a good Texas Methodist," he said, taking her boys to church, but the influence of his father, a NASA scientist, won out. To research the biblical dimensions of "Southland Tales," he said, sheepishly, "I bought 'The Book of Revelation for Dummies.'"
Despite having directed only two features, Mr. Kelly wrote furiously through his 20s, "out of fear," he said, that he would later lose his nerve and inspiration. He now has "a drawerful of scripts," one of which will be the basis for his next feature, "The Box," a psychological thriller adapted from Richard Matheson's short story "Button, Button" that he is about to start shooting with Cameron Diaz. He's aiming for "something a studio can comfortably put on 3,000 screens," he said.
Mr. Kelly could have chosen a safer sophomore film, but he made "Southland Tales" to capitalize on a "window of opportunity," he said. "Who knows if I'll ever be able to take these kinds of risks again." "Donnie Darko" is set during the Bush-Dukakis contest of 1988; Mr. Kelly said that at the time of its release he had never voted in a general election. But he has since become politicized by the war and now considers "Southland Tales" an activist salvo.
Citing the viral popularity of "Donnie Darko," he said: "We're hoping with this to get kids turned on in a more political way. You can use subversive humor as your delivery mechanism. It's like, hey, none of this is real, yet, but it certainly could be."
"When the elections are lost again and again and again, someone's going to start selling automatic weapons out of their ice cream truck," he continued, referring to a sequence in the film. "I feel like maybe I'm being a neo-Marxist, but instead of selling guns I made this movie."
Gellar Defends Southland Tales
Sarah Michelle Gellar, who stars in Richard Kelly's upcoming SF epic film Southland Tales, told SCI FI Wire that the movie has changed since its disastrous debut at the Cannes Film Festival in 2006, but not that much.
"I think that's also a misconception, too, in terms of how many changes have been made," Gellar said in a telephone interview last week. "I really do think the movie sort of got an unfair rap from Cannes."
Gellar plays an entrepreneurial porn star named Krysta Now who befriends an amnesiac movie star played by Dwayne Johnson in the movie, which is set in near-future Los Angeles on the eve of an unspecified apocalypse.
Gellar said that the movie, which was blasted critically after an early version screened at Cannes, was really dealt with unfairly. "Looking back, we all sort of realized, the movie takes place in Los Angeles: It is a story about here, about us," Gellar said. "And we truly believe it should have been shown for the first time here. I think it was really the wrong audience. If you're at Cannes, they're looking for a different kind of movie. And that's not what this movie is."
Since then, director Kelly (Donnie Darko) has trimmed the film, added several scenes to clarify the complicated narrative and included new visual-effects shots, including a new ending. "I think those were edits that were always going to happen," Gellar said.
Gellar added that her own piece of the story remains uncut from the early version of the movie. As for how audiences will receive the quirky story—a mixture of drama, comedy, science fiction and musical numbers—Gellar said: "You know, at the end of the day, I hope people talk about it. That's the whole point of it. It's not a movie made for every audience. This isn't a film made to go across the board. And what I love about it is, I went and saw the new cut with, like, five people. And afterwards for about three hours we all talked about it, because everybody took different things out of it."
Gellar added: "Dwayne said something today that I loved. He's like, 'No matter what you take out of it, you're not wrong.' Because it's about the movie that each person sees." At the end, she said, "the true fans, the people that are the Donnie Darko fans, that are my fans, Dwayne's fans, I think they're going to enjoy it. And you know what? Those are the reasons I make movies." Southland Tales, which also stars Seann William Scott, opens in limited release on Nov. 14.
Quote from: MacGuffin on November 06, 2007, 01:18:48 AM
"Looking back, we all sort of realized, the movie takes place in Los Angeles: It is a story about here, about us," Gellar said. "And we truly believe it should have been shown for the first time here. I think it was really the wrong audience. If you're at Cannes, they're looking for a different kind of movie. And that's not what this movie is."
yeah, those wacky cannes audiences, SO INTOLERANT (http://imdb.com/Sections/Awards/Cannes_Film_Festival/1976) of movies that are quintessentially about a foreign city.
Quote from: MacGuffin on November 06, 2007, 01:18:48 AM
Gellar added: "the true fans, the people that are the Donnie Darko fans, that are my fans, Dwayne's fans, I think they're going to enjoy it.
so she thinks the "true fans" of donnie darko are also "true fans" of Scooby Doo, and fucking Wrestlemania? my god she is the stupidest actor in hollywood, and that's no easy feat.
oh right.. her husband.
Southland Has New Shots
Richard Kelly, director of the upcoming SF epic movie Southland Tales, told SCI FI Wire that he added about 100 visual-effects shots and several other scenes to clarify the movie's complex narrative.
"The whole prologue, the 'Doomsday Scenario' interface in the prologue, that was added," Kelly said in a telephone interview last week. "All of the news content—the state-of-the-world news in the film—was all added."
Much of the new content hadn't been completed when the movie screened at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival, garnering harsh reviews. "That wasn't ready for Cannes," Kelly said of the news bytes. "And then all the rioting and the burning buildings and the thousands of people in the streets [in the finale], all that stuff was [added]. [Before, the scene] was just empty. It was just like, there was supposed to be rioting, but the streets just looked empty. So it was unfinished. And [the changes mark a] significant improvement in all that stuff."
Southland Tales stars Sarah Michelle Gellar, Dwayne Johnson and Seann William Scott in a story about the apocalypse in a near-future Los Angeles. The movie mixes comedy, drama, science fiction and musical interludes.
Kelly said that he had planned to make the changes all along. "We ran out of time, and we ran out of money, because we were just fighting against a deadline for Cannes," he said. The filmmakers were invited to screen the movie at the famed film festival because it had been nominated for a coveted Palme D'Or award, but Kelly said that it wasn't ready for public viewing at the time. Southland Tales opens in limited release on Nov. 14.
The critics are ripping this up...so far only J. Hoberman at the Village Voice is completely for it. I'm still looking forward to it, but now my expectations are tempered.
i've already added it to my queue. sorry mr. kelly, but movies are $11.75 now and i just can't justify seeing this when i know it's going to suck.
Southland Prequel Films Possible?
Richard Kelly, who directed the upcoming SF epic movie Southland Tales, told SCI FI Wire that he set up some storylines in the prequel graphic novels that he wasn't able to pay off. Yet.
"Yeah," Kelly said in an interview in Beverly Hills, Calif., last week. "And that might be some stuff that I can—down the road in a director's cut—be able to restore a bit more of. But all the groundwork is there, and all the footage exists."
Southland Tales stars Sarah Michelle Gellar, Dwayne Johnson and Seann William Scott in a story about disparate characters who must deal with an impending apocalypse in a near-future Los Angeles.
Before the film was completed, Kelly wrote a trilogy of graphic novels that set up the movie's universe and backstory, subtitled "Two Roads Diverge," "Fingerprints" and "The Mechanicals."
The backstory involves a terrorist nuclear attack in Abilene, Texas; martial law; the campaign for the U.S. vice presidency; a nefarious German corporation; mega-zeppelins; the Book of Revelation and a miracle fuel/drug called "fluid karma." The books constitute chapters 1-3 of the story; the movie picks up where the graphic novels leave off, making up chapters 4-6.
"Well, you know, when I started it, I opened up Pandora's Box with these graphic novels," Kelly admitted. "I kind of set myself up for a gigantic challenge. And it's a cross-media experience. The books developing into the film."
Kelly added that he may even film more material related to the graphic novels and other elements of the complicated story. "We had always talked about doing the first three chapters maybe as an animated film at some point and actually filming the first three chapters," he said. "And then maybe then it can be fulfilled: The whole six chapters can be realized on the big screen. ... There's always that possibility."
Southland Tales opens Nov. 14 in limited release.
I really want to like Richard Kelly but he's making it difficult. I like Donnie Darko and will go see this because I'm still interested and, as much of a mess as it could be, it won't be as bad as Transformers, but really? Prequels? Quit while you're ahead, especially when you're making your third movie before your second one has been released.
This movie doesn't stand a chance, good or bad. Too many people have taken Cannes to heart and don't expect 30 minutes of cuts and cleaned up effects to make the difference, which it could. But it's all Kelly's fault that he's getting skewered. He's aware of popular culture and as a result, is undoubtedly aware of the "sophomore jinx." I don't care how awesome you think you are, following up a cult movie with a bigger budget cult movie is setting yourself up for that failure; even Lynch went more mainstream with his second movie. This thought HAD to have crossed his mind at least once as early as when he was still writing the first draft.
But he decided to go ahead anyway, thinking he'd beat it, forgetting that for every Raising Arizona, Rushmore, and Boogie Nights, there are several Poetic Justices, Mallrats, and She's the Ones. And speaking of Mallrats, Kelly is friends with Kevin Smith! He knew what he was getting himself into.
'Southland Tales' Director Richard Kelly Insists It's Just The End Of The World, Not His Film
Apocalyptic flick starring Justin Timberlake, Sarah Michelle Gellar overcomes rough start with new streamlined version.
Source: MTV
Nuclear bombs have gone off in Texas, igniting World War III across the globe. The United States passes totalitarian measures to keep its citizens in check through Orwellian surveillance. And somewhere in there, a figure arrives who may very well be the Antichrist.
"Donnie Darko" helmer Richard Kelly's "Southland Tales" is about the apocalypse, but you might forgive the director if he copped to feeling like he went through the filmmaking equivalent, beginning with a long-delayed start and cresting with a disastrous showing at Cannes more than a year ago. But if it's the end of the world as he knows it, well, Richard Kelly feels just fine.
"It was a tough road, [but] I ask for it. I'm a masochist," Kelly laughed. "[It's a] really challenging, crazy movie, and it's hard to get this stuff through the system. ... If you're going to try to make any kind of unusual film that's nonlinear, or that's political, or that delves into issues that people don't want to talk about or they're afraid to talk about, you're obviously going to encounter challenges and resistance and skepticism, and that's just the nature of the game. It's dangerous."
Since the Cannes showing — which Observer critic Jason Solomon said gave him the "sinking feeling that ['Southland Tales'] may be one of the worst films ever presented in [Cannes] competition" — Kelly has made many changes to the film, including, most drastically, cutting roughly 20 minutes. He has also reshaped the intro with a new voiceover from narrator Justin Timberlake.
But while some Internet pundits have called the Cannes screening, and the resulting bad press, a total wipeout, Kelly insists it was in fact the exact opposite, calling the year since vital to making the very best film possible.
"The movie was a very rough work-in-progress when we brought it to Cannes. We realized that even more so after the festival," he said. "It was my first trip, [and] it was rough. But that's OK. Those experiences, you can let it hurt you or you can use them and make yourself stronger. That's a challenge that is put upon any filmmaker. That's the way that it works. I always love a good challenge and I love a good fight, and that's what [this] is."
By Kelly's own admission, part of what makes "Southland Tales" initially off-putting to some audiences is its density, which castmember Sarah Michelle Gellar said means you probably need to watch the movie "five times" to completely understand it.
"We definitely designed it to be something that would be enhanced by repeat viewings, because it is a big puzzle," Kelly said. "[But] that was part of what we were working on [this past year]. We needed to push it in the direction of being a bit more accessible, and getting it just enough on the first viewing so it's not alienating. I don't think anyone can get absolutely everything in one viewing — there's just too much going on. But it's all there."
That meant streamlining the main narrative to focus more on the story's three main characters, a porn star (Gellar), an amnesiac actor (Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson) and a cop with nebulous intentions (Seann William Scott). That focus, absent from earlier cuts, paid off in a big way, Kelly said.
"We finally felt like we tamed the beast in a way that we know it holds up under the scrutiny of logic and multiple viewings," he insisted. With the movie now set for release after nearly two years of constant work in post-production, Kelly insisted he has "no regrets" about the bad press or the premiere at Cannes, or the way the film was hounded from the start.
"I'm just glad that we've gotten this movie to the finish line in one piece. I think if you can just cross the finish line in a sprint, and not wheezing and huffing and puffing, then you're going to be OK," he said, smiling.
"Look," he added. "It's the end of the world. I wanted it to be like this great big party!"
Quote from: IN SPAR_ROWS on November 09, 2007, 08:29:57 AM
for every Raising Arizona, Rushmore, and Boogie Nights, there are several Poetic Justices, Mallrats, and She's the Ones.
i'll take an ambitious failure over a commercial retreat any day.
that being said... this could be awful or great. i'll reserve judgement until i see it. i don't expect a gilliam film, which always met cannes walkouts, but it will most likely still be interesting. we'll see
Richard Kelly's Southland Tales
Source: ComingSoon
It's World War III in Los Angeles in Richard Kelly's new flick, Southland Tales.
The film takes place in a post-apocalyptic 2008. After an explosion goes off on July 4th, the U.S. goes into crisis mode. Small gangs form and take over the cities. In Los Angeles, a group of rebels set up a scientific experiment where they double up people's identity.
Their first victim is actor Boxer Santaros (Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson). Let's just say, the experiment with him didn't go the way it was supposed to. When he wakes up, he takes up the identity of Jericho Kane.
Roland Taverner/Ronald Taverner (Seann William Scott) is their second test – his went a little better; after brainwashing him, he thinks he's a twin and goes on the hunt for his long-lost brother, who they've kidnapped.
All along, there's a plan to leave the Earth in a blimp-like city by the creator of this technology, Baron Von Westphalen (Wallace Shawn).
If any of this makes sense – well, you're ahead of the game. Southland Tales is filled of twists and weird turns that will have you guessing to the end. And that's perfectly fine if you ask Richard Kelly, who's also created a graphic novel that tells the beginning of the story (or the first three chapters.) "The challenge has been to have the movie sustain itself for people who haven't read the graphic novel. I certainly know it's very complicated stuff and definitely understand after the first viewing how it can brush over you. The hope is that people will give it a chance on a second or third viewing, it'll all start to fit together and there's a real design to it; everything is essential."
The Rock still can't figure out what the movie is about. "I thought it was great; it's something I've never read before. I viewed it as a challenge. I met with Richard first and he pitched me the story, and showed me visuals of what the characters were going to look like. I had watched 'Donnie Darko' a few months ago, and was excited to do it. I view the film as a dark comedy, and I love seeing the underbelly world of Los Angeles; I see it as a love letter for Los Angeles. There is so much going on here."
Richard started writing the script before 9/11; but where did he come up with the concept for the movie? "The original inspiration for the film was the TS Elliot poem, "The Hollow Men." The last words of that are 'This is the way the world ends - not with a bang but a whimper.' And so let's do this crazy L.A. comedy, with a bunch of eccentric characters. And I had it ending with a big blimp and the riots. It was a big comedy about the city self-destructing. I wish the world could end immediately and I think of something on a science fiction level – it's gotta be the clash of the fourth dimension. The Rock says that to Bai Ling at the bar, and it comes back to the theory of a rift in the space time continuum. I was excited by the idea and wanted to explore it in this film."
With his character of Boxer Santaros, The Rock found a quirky movement with his hands which he came up with himself. "I just thought that was just a thing he would do; if I put myself in that situation, if I were so unaware. Here's this guy, this big movie star, but he has no idea – which I find interesting – that he has multiple personalities. I thought he would do this with himself, and Richard loved it."
Richard really wanted to take Southland Tales to the next level of science fiction - something much more than making a simple comedy. "I thought about all these ideas with Homeland Security and alternative fuel and I just made it more of a futuristic satire. The architecture was already there, and I have this writing and the city on fire, with all these crazy characters; if the ending was already there, let's make it more than L.A."
The supporting cast of the film includes Mandy Moore, Justin Timberlake, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Cheri O'Teri, Amy Poehler, John Lovitz, Kevin Smith, and many more. For Richard, it was all about getting that array of actors. "I wanted it to be that way because some of my favorite L.A. movies, it feels like there's a large tapestry of people who mysteriously meet in the city and they just have a few lines but they're memorable. I wanted to cast the film with my favorite comedic actors and parts of pop culture, who emerge from the creases of the city in a way."
The Rock was surrounded by a lot of comedians on set, yet most of his humor comes from playing his character straight. "A lot of times, with a role like this, the straighter you play it, the funnier it is. Not playing anything too broad, especially for Boxer. There's so much going on, and he's searching for the truth; he has no recollection of anything. So I think that great comedy comes into playing it very serious, and let other people go broad – which works for them."
With all the craziness happening in the flick, The Rock had a blast shooting it – especially with his female co-stars Mandy and Sarah. "I went to them and said, 'I think it'd be a good idea if we made out a couple of times. Not all at the same time, one at a time.' They didn't think it was such a good idea. Our schedules were so busy, and we put so much trust in Richard. There's a different vibe on set; there were so many eclectic actors who bring different strengths to the movie."
Southland Tales really shows off everything that's wrong with our world today, and that's starting with the insane way news channels like CNN inundate us with 5 different stories at one time. Richard calls it 'information overload.' "When you watch, you've got the news ticker, the headline, the sub-headline, and then Planet in Peril, and then you have four boxes with four people talking. Your brain melts just looking at your TV. And we were trying to mimic that with the news content we created. I can't take anymore. And it's sort of the world we live in and a reflection of the world we live in."
Is this the world we live in? Check out Southland Tales to find out; it hits theaters November 14th.
Quote from: ddiggler6280 on November 11, 2007, 01:13:28 AM
Quote from: IN SPAR_ROWS on November 09, 2007, 08:29:57 AM
for every Raising Arizona, Rushmore, and Boogie Nights, there are several Poetic Justices, Mallrats, and She's the Ones.
i'll take an ambitious failure over a commercial retreat any day.
did you just choose Poetic Justice, Mallrats, and She's the One over Raising Arizona, Rushmore, and Boogie Nights?
wait, did you just call the last three commercial retreats? if anything they succeeded because they took bigger risks.
Quote from: Pubrick on November 12, 2007, 11:10:51 AM
Quote from: ddiggler6280 on November 11, 2007, 01:13:28 AM
Quote from: IN SPAR_ROWS on November 09, 2007, 08:29:57 AM
for every Raising Arizona, Rushmore, and Boogie Nights, there are several Poetic Justices, Mallrats, and She's the Ones.
i'll take an ambitious failure over a commercial retreat any day.
did you just choose Poetic Justice, Mallrats, and She's the One over Raising Arizona, Rushmore, and Boogie Nights?
wait, did you just call the last three commercial retreats? if anything they succeeded because they took bigger risks.
not at all, i'm saying i would rather see kelly swing for the fences and fail than take the safe route with a boring movie.
wait.... what risks did mallrats take?
Quote from: ddiggler6280 on November 12, 2007, 10:34:39 PM
wait.... what risks did mallrats take?
you made it seem like you were disputing sparrow's comparison.
and i havn't said anything about mallrats taking risks. i meant the last three great films were riskier in comparison to little/no risk at all.
sorry for boring everyone, including myself, with this post.
Quote from: Pubrick on November 12, 2007, 10:52:32 PM
Quote from: ddiggler6280 on November 12, 2007, 10:34:39 PM
wait.... what risks did mallrats take?
you made it seem like you were disputing sparrow's comparison.
and i havn't said anything about mallrats taking risks. i meant the last three great films were riskier in comparison to little/no risk at all.
sorry for boring everyone, including myself, with this post.
well, those were unfair movies to diss in the first place. poetic justice has janet jackson and the song "again." brenda walsh is in mallrats. and she's the one. well. i guess that movie just sucked. make fun of that as much as you want.
EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW: RICHARD KELLY (SOUTHLAND TALES THEATRICAL RELEASE)
Source: CHUD
Whenever Richard Kelly's had anything to say about his long-anticipated sophomore feature, Southland Tales, I've been there to ask questions. The only difference with this final interview (i.e. unless I get roped into some DVD publicity) is that now I've a finished film to go with the questions.
And when you finally see Southland Tales (which opens in limited release on November 14, 2007) for yourself, you'll have lots of questions, too.
A pre-apocalyptic, pop-cultural melange featuring an amnesiac movie star (Dwayne Johnson), a twinned Los Angeles cop (Seann William Scott), an image-savvy porn star (Sarah Michelle Gellar) and character actors from all of your favorite 1980s movies, Kelly's follow-up to Donnie Darko requires a good deal of patience and attention, and, even then, it may confound more than inspire. Perhaps this is due to Kelly essentially jumping into the middle of his narrative (there's a three-part graphic novel prequel available for purchase right now); or maybe Kelly just likes the idea of keeping his audience scratching/punching their head.
Whatever his goal, there's no denying Southland Tales. One just wonders if there'll ever be any understanding it.
And sometimes, I wonder if that goes double for the ever-affable director.
Q: It has been a long journey. It's time to close the book on me interviewing you for this movie.
Richard Kelly: Yeah!
Q: One of the things that came to mind as I was processing the movie after the closing credits - and, to be honest, I'm still processing it (Kelly laughs) - was Jean-Luc Godard stating that each of his films is meant to be seen three times. Would you place that kind of stipulation on Southland Tales?
Kelly: Yeah. I'm still discovering things about it that even I didn't know was there. There's so much going on, and it's such an elaborate puzzle; it really floods your senses the first time. The second time, particularly in the first chapter, all the things that happen to set the story in motion... you start to realize why they're there, and why they're necessary. I hope it all becomes more cohesive on multiple viewings.
Q: Was there a particular moment in the editing where you began to feel yourself getting your arms around the material? Where you began to understand it?
Kelly: It was getting the graphic novels finished. I couldn't get a handle on nailing the cut until I finished the books. I had a cloud in my mind. The prequel was unfinished, so I couldn't properly finish the film until the books were done. It just took a lot of time.
Q: I have to give my colleague Devin credit for this. As we were walking out of the film, he noted that one of Seann William Scott's identities was shot in the eye. Then I started to think back on the movie, and realized, "Hey, there are some obvious echoes of Donnie Darko in here!"
Kelly: Yeah, a little bit. Sean [McKittrick, Kelly's producer] and I came up with that idea. He came up with the idea of one of the twins getting shot. And that's a pivotal moment in the film because if the twins don't find each other, then we won't be saved. Our salvation is within these two characters, and we almost lose it. When you see the film a second time, you start to notice how precarious and delicate it all is; we're this close to salvation, and we almost screw it up about a dozen times. The Neo-Marxists have the messiah held hostage, and they almost let him go. They really don't understand what they're dealing with. There's a lot of subtext in there.
Q: But those references... are those just superficial references to Darko, or do they mean something more? Are these universes connected.
Kelly: I don't know. I think maybe each film exists in its different dimension, but there seems to be a spiritual connection in a way. For example, Holmes Osorne is watching the presidential debate in Darko, and then he becomes the vice presidential candidate. They're all sort of dreams that are interconnected, I guess. I like to think of each film as being in an alternate universe, so people can become different actors. It's all running around in my head somewhere. (Laughs)
Q: Our generation is so locked into the popular culture. We consume it, and it becomes a part of who we are and, in some cases, how we view the universe. This film is a complete pop cultural fantasia. And the flood of stimuli comes not only from what is referenced in the narrative but also the various character actors you use, many of whom were in significant 1980s movies or TV shows. What exactly were you trying to evoke here?
Kelly: It is pop art. And it is this black comedy about the darkest subject matter you could possibly imagine. Nuclear bombs, global warming, rioting... all the madness in the film, I wanted it to be populated with the most charismatic, fun people that you'd want to invite over to your house for a party. Like the cast of Saturday Night Live: who wouldn't want to have a party with them? They're the funnest people ever. The Rock, Seann William Scott, Sarah Michelle Gellar and Justin Timberlake... who wouldn't want to invite them over to a party? I wanted the film to have that quality: a fun, energetic, shiny, Los Angeles veneer - while everything is falling down and collapsing. It's falling apart, but, man, it's a fun time. That's the whole point.
Q: My favorite pairing in the movie was Amy Poehler and Wood Harris.
Kelly: They're hilarious.
Q: It was intriguing because Amy is a UCB/SNL sketch comedy veteran, while Wood Harris... I usually associate him with The Wire.
Kelly: Wood is very talented. And their marital dispute; they improvised the whole thing, and I almost fell out of my director's chair. Amy's just a fun, outgoing person on set; but then we put that heavy prosthetic makeup on her, and she was so freaked out by it. She got out of the Teamsters van, and she was like Greta Garbo with her sunglasses and umbrella: "Leave me alone!" And then when I yelled action, she just unleashed with that tirade.
Q: And Wood Harris is great doing his third-rate George Jefferson.
Kelly: (Laughing) They came up with that. I think they were really angry with me because I had them in that prosthetic makeup, and they had to stay in it all day. It is not fun to be wearing that stuff. I think Amy was disturbed by what she looked like. She looked so different. Their facial features were so exaggerated. I felt bad for Amy. She had to lie down and play dead for that scene. So I had to go over, hold her hand and say, "Amy, I'll make this up to you. I promise the next time we work together there will be no prosthetic makeup."
Q: You have a habit of dropping Simpsons references into your movies, too. Like in the screenplay for Domino: I remember you telling me that Mena Suvari had a line that was a nod to Reverend Lovejoy's classifying "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida as "Rock and/or Roll". In this film, you have a character named Starla, which instantly brings to mind the tramp Milhouse's father was dating after the marriage broke up.
Kelly: Oh, that's right.
Q: You pepper these references throughout.
Kelly: There's a Ralph Wiggum in Southland Tales, too. On Martin Kefauver's Humvee dashboard, there's a little Ralph Wiggum doll. I actually called Matt Groening, and he personally gave me permission. He made the call to Fox.
Q: I guess it's appropriate. You're attempting these kinds of pop culturally infused satires, and The Simpsons is definitely the apotheosis of how we do satire nowadays.
Kelly: Yeah. It's just... the subject matter is so dark, I wanted to make it as accessible to mainstream America as possible, and that started with the actors that I chose to be involved in this. I tried to cast it in the least pretentious way possible, and, to me, comedians are the least pretentious... I mean, when you think of pretension, you think of someone without a sense of humor. So I wanted to get funny, funny people in there.
Q: To give it a self-deprecating air?
Kelly: Yes.
Q: As the world's going to shit.
Kelly: Yes.
Q: And even though we should be concerned about this...
Kelly: Yeah.
Q: It's interesting that this is the way our generation is processing the sorry state of the world right now. On one hand, we're very upset about it. But on the other, the only way we can really cope with it is to view it from a cynical, satirical distance. Could you see yourself being able to address the misery of what it is we've done to this world without smirking?
Kelly: Yeah. My thing is that comedy is the best medicine when you're talking about politics and religion. You can really infuriate people. I mean, I'm sure this film will infuriate people, but if you can use comedy as your delivery mechanism, it keeps the conversation civil. And that's the problem right now: the right and the left are not civil with each other. This [2008] election is going to be nastier than ever, and it's sad.
Q: There's very little honest discourse anymore. It's all inflamed. And most of the people dominating and directing the discourse... half the time I don't think they believe what they're saying.
Kelly: And it's working. The fear-mongering and the pushing of buttons... there's a lot of hate being thrown around unfortunately.
Q: I know you wanted to make Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle a while back. Is Southland Tales a sublimation of that, as yet, unrealized dream?
Kelly: Maybe. Vonnegut's a huge influence. I think of the concept of Ice-Nine that he came up with [in Cat's Cradle]. I guess Fluid Karma is something kind of similar. I mean, it's completely different from Ice-Nine, but it is a big, high-concept technology involving an environmental cataclysm in an attempt to generate a new fuel concept. You could argue that Fluid Karma has a thematic link to Ice-Nine, which was the coolest thing ever that Vonnegut came up with.
Q: You also work Philip K. Dick into this as well, which gets you into more serious, self-destructive areas. How do you reconcile these two writers' styles?
Kelly: Well, there's also Raymond Chandler in there, too. They all felt like they were of Los Angeles in a way. A lot of Philip K. Dick's stuff took place in either Los Angeles or Orange County. Vonnegut was a world traveller, and he was a legend in the sense that he fought in the war and saw atrocities and struggled with depression. And you think of Chandler, and just film noir... Ralph Meeker playing Mike Hammer in Kiss Me Deadly. Dwayne kind of studied Kiss Me Deadly. Those were all influences. Sometimes I joke that this movie is the sequel to Kiss Me Deadly. And that the spirit of Ralph Meeker has invaded Dwayne Johnson and made him schizophrenic. (Laughs)
Q: Harry Knowles noted that the celebrity-packed design of the film calls to mind movies like the '67 Casino Royale and Candy. Were those films an inspiration to you?
Kelly: I've got to take another look at Casino Royale, but, no. Kiss Me Deadly was really big. The Big Lebowski... I worship that film; I think it's the greatest thing the Coen Brothers have ever done. I saw it on cable again the other night, and it's even better than when it came out. If I, for the rest of my year, had to make comedies about eccentric Los Angeles people, I would. I'd be happy. I love L.A. I love the madness and eccentricity of underworld Los Angeles. There's nothing you can't find in this city.
Q: Speaking of the energy of Los Angeles, is The Box going to have any of that energy?
Kelly: No. It takes place in Richmond, Virginia in 1976, and we're shooting down at NASA in Langley, Virginia. We're shooting in Virginia for the last week, and we're recreating Richmond on interior stages in certain Boston locations; we're faking Boston for some of it.
Q: You felt like you needed a break from Los Angeles?
Kelly: Yeah. And it's inherent to the story. It's whatever serves each story. And I'll always hope to be able to shoot at least a portion of a film in wherever it's supposed to take place.
Q: The Box would seem to offer the opposite challenge from Southland Tales; I've only seen Richard Matheson's story dramatized once, and it was on the 1980s revival of The Twilight Zone.
Kelly: It's been a ton of work trying to get the rewrite done before the strike, but it's also been a challenge to fulfill what I think is the destiny of that short story. It was meant for something bigger. It's a great short story, and I'm excited to be able to try to [Kelly's iPhone vibrated the rest of the answer into the interference abyss].
Q: So back to L.A. with the next one?
Kelly: Who knows? I'm figuring it out right now. Maybe. I love this town, I really do. I can't get enough of it.
Southland Tales opens in limited release this Wednesday, November 14th.
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Richard Kelly's never-ending 'Tales'
"It's tough to ask for more money when your movie has been slaughtered at a major film festival," Kelly said.
By Mark Olsen, Los Angeles Times
IN the 18 months since its tumultuous unveiling at the Cannes Film Festival, "Southland Tales" has become more myth than movie.
Initial expectations for the film were at a high because it marked the second feature from writer-director Richard Kelly, the follow-up to his 2001 slow-building cult sensation "Donnie Darko." Following the disastrous, spirit-crushing reviews out of Cannes -- "overwrought but underwhelming" read a sample notice -- "Southland" seemed to vanish into thin air, becoming a thing of conjecture and rumor. When was it coming out? How much would be changed or cut? And, perhaps most of all, why had Kelly made such an outrageously audacious sci-fi/political thriller/satire in the first place?
"I'm a bit of a masochist," Kelly remarked recently while standing on a hotel balcony that provided a sweeping view of Los Angeles, the city from which "Southland Tales" draws its name, locations and wild, rupturing energy. "I had obviously bitten off more than I could chew, and the challenge since Cannes has been to not choke, to digest it and swallow it."
'Slaughtered' at Cannes
When the film finally hits theaters in Los Angeles and New York today (and select cities on Friday), shorn of roughly 20 minutes from the Cannes cut, it will be the version Kelly considers finished and complete. Though the film is being released under the Samuel Goldwyn Films banner, it was Sony (which initially picked up the film after Cannes) that earlier this year paid for Kelly to finish the film's visual effects.
"It's tough to ask for more money when your movie has been slaughtered at a major film festival," Kelly said. "But when Sony gave me that money I fell back in love with the movie again. I got to finally see it as I always wanted it."
"This is definitely 'Southland Tales,' " said Kelly's longtime producer, Sean McKittrick, looking to put aside any presumptions that this is a somehow a bowdlerized or abbreviated version of the film.
Much like "Donnie Darko," "Southland Tales" is a perfectly imperfect movie, one which is nearly impossible to describe in the neat, compact logline-ology of contemporary Hollywood. Set in 2008, following domestic nuclear attacks in 2005, the film's interwoven story strands include an amnesiac movie star, a gang of absurdist revolutionaries, a team of shady executives, a troubled vet, a crooked cop, kidnapped twins, various dignitaries, politicians and bureaucrats, and a porn starlet turned ambitious entrepreneur who delivers one of the film's signature lines: "Scientists are saying that the future is going to be far more futuristic than they originally predicted."
As movies directly dealing with the war in Iraq have been struggling to attract audiences, Kelly has created a film that deals with the strange vacuum of the home front, where there's the distinct feeling of dislocated anxiety. If audiences, particularly younger ones, don't seem inclined to show up for old-guard stars such as Robert Redford and Meryl Streep gabbing about foreign policy, Kelly's strategy is to load "Southland Tales" with current cultural figures such as Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Seann William Scott, Mandy Moore and Justin Timberlake, subversively hiding his idealism and anger beneath a veneer of pop confectionery.
An art film harboring blockbuster aspirations, "Southland Tales" utilizes the broad screens and booming sound systems of the multiplex to take its dystopian cultural critiques directly to the daydreaming nation that is perhaps least likely to seek out its head-spinning message of resistance.
"You go to a newsstand and it's Britney Spears and Iraq," Kelly explained. "And it's understandable to eventually feel like 'No more Iraq. Give me more Britney.' We live in a world of media overload, saturated with information, and the movie needed to feel like it had that stimuli."
The film's brazen mix of tones and styles -- which Kelly describes as "30% comedy, 30% thriller, 30% sci-fi and 10% musical, but I may have the percentages off" -- is a big part of what might potentially confound audiences, creating a sense of unease and dislocation as it frantically pops from moment to moment.
"When you watch it for the first time, each scene is a little like, 'OK, I don't quite know what's going on here,' " Kelly said, "and then there's a laugh or an action set-piece in pretty much every scene to get you through. So we were definitely aware of the fact that the first thing we needed to do was to entertain people. If the politics seep through afterward, that's great."
As to why he felt emboldened to make a film as ambitious and complicated as "Southland Tales," Kelly said, "It felt like I was making this movie as if it were my last, like I'll never get this chance again. So I just decided to go for it."
The 32-year-old Kelly has already been called a one-hit-wonder and a hack. He also has been hailed as nothing less than a genius. It is no wonder then that both "Southland Tales" and "Donnie Darko," as well as his script for the Tony Scott film "Domino," are obsessed with the construction of identity and the distinctions between persona and personality. Kelly's two efforts as a director also have a preoccupation with time travel and the existence of multidimensional reality.
"Nothing surprises me anymore that comes out of his mind," McKittrick said. "Nothing at all."
'First grown-up movie'
As "Southland Tales" finally opens, Kelly and McKittrick are to begin shooting "The Box," an adaptation of a Richard Matheson short story about a mysterious delivery, starring Cameron Diaz.
Kelly is quick to point out that he is not making his next film out of some "one for me, one for them" obligation, but it might yet answer the question of whether Kelly can make a more straightforward, commercial film.
"I feel like 'The Box' will be my first grown-up movie," Kelly said, "and 'Southland Tales' is my last film as the rebellious punk kid.
"I'd taken all these risks," Kelly said of his determination to see "Southland Tales" released, "gotten all these actors to work for me for next to nothing, and everyone put their faith in me, their time and their effort. I had to see it through to the end. I could not live with myself if I had not finished the film properly and gotten it into theaters. Even if it opens and closes in a week, I got it to the screen."
Before the film's first public screening in the city that inspired it, as part of AFI Fest, Kelly seemed genuinely overwhelmed, and a little relieved, to finally have "Southland Tales" ready for theaters. Concluding his introduction, as he began to step away from the microphone, he said, "What a long, strange trip it's been, but a trip well worth taking."
Seen it. And wow...
As every review and interview has stated, no medium is safe from reference. Book, movie, music, television, video game, history, religion... its all here. If for anything, see it to marvel at the worlds most clever and complex love letter... At its spine of reference is the book of revelation. Sometimes its more blatant, sometimes more obscure, but ever present. Having some knowledge of the good book doesn't make it any clearer, but a little wiki-ing it up wouldn't hurt... Its a huge risk of a movie and on that basis alone, i applaud. Im liking it more and more by the hour...
Its everything i expected it would be, just not as i expected it... if that makes any sense...
I should start off by giving the now-customary disclaimer: I am a huge fan of "Donnie Darko"; I saw it on 42nd street in NYC a week after 9/11, when the sour/burnt smell of the World Trade Center was still hanging in the air, and I remember emerging into the bright daylight shaken and somehow, simultaneously, calmed by the movie. I remember thinking immediately that it was a small masterpiece, and one of the most heartfelt, assured, and unique debut films by an American filmmaker in many, many years.
--End Disclaimer
I saw Southland Tales last night, ironically, in the same theater I first saw "Donnie Darko". It's AWFUL. Let me repeat that: it...is...AAAWWWFFFUUULLL. Terrible. Truly, truly terrible. It may rank as one of the worst movies I've ever seen, and I'm willing to put money on the prediction that it'll go down with "Howard the Duck", "Ishtar", and "Waterworld" as all-time magnificent disasters. It truly lowered my retrospective opinion of Donnie Darko – I think that the fact that Darko is good is some random fluke, because "Sountland Tales" is putrid and shitty. Every bad thing they are saying about it is true, and then some. They say that Kelly really is just a frat boy bork who got lucky with his first movie, and, now, I'm willing to believe them. I'd say, in 2 hours and 24 minutes, there's probably about 2 minutes in this movie that bely any sort of filmmaking or storytelling talent. Everything else is cheap-looking, ugly, amateurish, messy, incoherent, self-indulgent, slapped-together, random and silly. Do not go see it, wait for video, and, even then, it's probably not worth the time. A colossal, gargantuan, megalithic disappointment.
The SUV-fucking was funny, though.
It pained me to write that, but I feel like I have to prevent others from wasting their money. Sorry, Richard...
Could this be one of the worst movies ever made?
I'm going with yes.
What a piece of shit. Overblown and without direction. For all the shit Kelly talked about how awesome he was, he sure failed to deliver.
so is it still ok to like donnie darko? or is this as inane as roth's latest turd whereby it means you suck if your still a fan the guy's previous work.
edit:
ok, i just read 72teeth's review..
Quote from: 72teeth on November 19, 2007, 03:58:57 AM
Its a huge risk of a movie and on that basis alone, i applaud.
if this is the case, the h2 comparison was inapt.
I called it. Check my first post on page one. This dudes a hack. I still never got through Donnie Darko, and I don't think I'm missing much. I put it in the same category of movies as Boondock Saints and Juno. Movies shitty people cite to define their hipness.
good call asshole. i didn't know you hated donnie darko so. im still hoping this might be good, though i'll be expecting a really bad film :(
At the very least the film is one of a kind and perhaps that's a good thing. I actually had a great time watching it and I laughed my ass off but it's tough to say if I was laughing with it, or at it. To me this was like a really really pretentious version of Bad Boys 2...way too long and you wonder who at the studio said yes, let's release this as is, but I'm certainly glad they did.
I just downloaded this and I'm afraid to watch it :(
spoils
i CANNOT believe the amount of things that happen in this, visuals, plot devices, and specific lines, that also happened in Darko. it's like Kelly thought no one saw Darko and this was his chance to finally get those ideas out there. a rip in the fourth dimension that destroys the universe, a guy with a severe wound in his eye, "this is the way the world ends" x18, dancing on a dark stage contrasted with some kind of violent episode elsewhere, the influence of outside literature written specifically for the film, that bubbly world effect, other things i'm forgetting strewn everywhere.
i didn't sense a kevin smith influence when i saw darko the first time/was shocked by his appearance on the director's bad cut commentary, but his influence is RAMPANT here. nearly every scene has that feel of 'this is sooooo idiotic that it is therefore clever'. taser to the balls was actually pretty disturbing. there's no way that guy can have children now. and he would pass out.
another horrible thing: that gesture the rock does with his hands. NEVER. NOT ONCE. did i believe his character would do that. the rock didn't sell it. you know kelly was going "do the hand thing!" every time. the timberlake musical may have been the most embarassing part.
the ending is kind of ambiguous in a "did it or didn't it happen" kind of way, but i couldn't care. if the universe did end, it wasn't much of a universe anyway.
my theory is that darko was helped by the studio system.
this was a lot worse than everyone said it was... i'm so fucking disappointed... cause it could have been really great.
its just terribly bad...
Quote from: kal on March 14, 2008, 11:38:28 PM
this was a lot worse than everyone said it was...
kal didn't read the reviews..
Quote from: adolfwolfli on November 19, 2007, 08:21:53 AM
It may rank as one of the worst movies I've ever seen
Quote from: Stefen on March 08, 2008, 03:53:28 PM
Could this be one of the worst movies ever made?
I'm going with yes.
Quote from: picolas on March 14, 2008, 06:51:41 PM
spoils
i didn't sense a kevin smith influence when i saw darko the first time...but his influence is RAMPANT here.
I saw this a couple weeks into it's release, at a multiple screen art-house theater. It was on one of the smaller screens, and it was a Wednesday evening. I imagined the theater would be empty, but it was actually pretty full - even considering it was a small room.
Anyway, I usually try to sit relatively close to the screen at most movies to not be bothered by people getting up, coming in late, or generally stirring in their seat. I like to close out everything but the film, even if that means having to crane my neck just a bit.
This time, however, I had to sit in the very back and, for once, the audience was more enjoyable to watch than the film. My friend snuck in a bottle of Gin, and I'm usually against any sort of altered state when watching a film. Twenty minutes into the film, I changed my mind fast. An hour into the film, I was just bored, a bit drunk, and my head and stomach hurt. Anyway, back to the audience - a mix of elderly art-house patrons and young folks... all of which seemed even more restless than me. I don't think I've ever seen as many people give up on a film instead of sticking it out in my life... and I saw Irreversible in the theaters. The best was an old man who stood up, looked at his wife and loudly proclaimed "unbearable garbage.", then they left.
Was it unbearable garbage? I sat with it for a while, hoping to digest everything I saw and defend it's misunderstood audaciousness. A week later, I was no longer indecisive. It was garbage - perhaps not entirely unbearable, because I sat through the whole thing. Even worse, it was frustrating. Because it could have been audacious, and it really seemed to think it was. To be that tangential, and that absurd, you have to earn it... a film can be as wild, or as daring, as it wants - but you need to trust the director that you are in capable hands. Kelly didn't even bother to attempt to earn the audiences trust, he just assumed it was there because of Donnie Darko and the result feels pompous and insulting.
I hope The Box is a more restrained, conventional thriller - I really do. Because that seems to be what Kelly might excel, or at least be competent at... churning out decent Twilight Zone throwbacks. I enjoyed Donnie Darko, numerous times - but never got the impression that Kelly was Kid Wonder of modern cinema. Lucky McKee made a name for himself at, roughly, the same time... and earned a fair amount of insulated praise, but nothing near the attention heaped onto Kelly. It's a shame, too, because McKee is and will continue to be a much more exciting promise. McKee works in what are considered "genre" films, too, inverting conventions and expectations while still remaining a traditional storyteller, reverent to what makes an audience jump, or be involved with the characters and story. On further dissection, it might be a bit strenuous to compare the two directors, stylistically. But, at this moment, it seems apt - and I choose McKee.
Quote from: brockly on March 15, 2008, 02:06:51 AM
Quote from: kal on March 14, 2008, 11:38:28 PM
this was a lot worse than everyone said it was...
kal didn't read the reviews..
Quote from: adolfwolfli on November 19, 2007, 08:21:53 AM
It may rank as one of the worst movies I've ever seen
Quote from: Stefen on March 08, 2008, 03:53:28 PM
Could this be one of the worst movies ever made?
I'm going with yes.
Quote from: picolas on March 14, 2008, 06:51:41 PM
spoils
i didn't sense a kevin smith influence when i saw darko the first time...but his influence is RAMPANT here.
i did man, but those reviews are very generous... i know when i'm watching a bad movie and i usually watch it all anyways... i remember seeing the britney spears movie back in the day with my girlfriend and even that at least i sat through it... this shit i just turned it off cause i want to waste my time its more interesting to sit at the dmv and watch people standing there in a bad mood.
also, i was looking forward to this probably as much as TWBB... maybe cause i loved darko, i thought kelly was the new promising director and considering he is close to me in age I was excited about his career... well FUCK HIM
so you were "disappointed" that it wasn't only "one of the worst movies ever made", but unwatchable?
Quote from: picolas on March 15, 2008, 03:32:18 AM
so you were "disappointed" that it wasn't only "one of the worst movies ever made", but unwatchable?
correctomundo!
i definitely believe you guys but why did one of my favorite critics put this as his fav movie of 2007? ughhhh....
Quote from: nathan lee on southland talesMuddled. Self-involved. Overbearingly ambitious. Insufferable. Funny how the critical mud slung at Donnie Darko on release has the same consistency as the shit storm that raged against Southland Tales, yet another—how dare he!?—ultra-convoluted sci-fi satire from the incorrigibly precocious Richard Kelly. Darko's vindication started with a midnight run at the Pioneer Theater, and there are already signs of an incipient Southland cult emerging from the same neighborhood. Late into its run at an East Village multiplex (the final stop on its way to grossing a grand total of less than $300,000), a friend testified to the enthusiasm of the half-capacity crowd, and reported the appraisal of some giddy über- hipsters after the show: "OMG, best movie ever!" Maybe not ever, but I'll call it this year for wit, poignancy, honesty, and outrage, for the precise, inspired casting and the marvelous ensemble acting, but, above all, for committing to a resolutely contemporary address. Southland Tales looks and feels more like life in 2007 than Juno, In the Valley of Elah, and Michael Clayton combined.
see his full list here. (http://www.villagevoice.com/film/0801,lee,78741,20.html)
Nathan Lee on I Now Pronounce you Chuck and Larry:
"That shit is mad funny, yo."
i liked it
(ducks)
I more than liked it. I saw the longer cut in Cannes and thought it was great. I hate SNL humor (at least that of the last decade) and I thought this movie was very funny despite the comparisons (and the fact that most of the cast was from SNL). None of it makes sense or amounts to anything as profound as it tries to, but I think it makes fun of itself enough to let that slide. It presents the allure of spectacle in a way that I thought was very exciting and fresh when I saw it. Maybe the new cut massacred what I liked about it, I'll have to see it.
:saywhat:
Funny? Everything that was funny about it was unintentional.
Quote from: Astrostic on March 15, 2008, 11:22:58 PM
I more than liked it. I saw the longer cut in Cannes and thought it was great. I hate SNL humor (at least that of the last decade) and I thought this movie was very funny despite the comparisons (and the fact that most of the cast was from SNL). None of it makes sense or amounts to anything as profound as it tries to, but I think it makes fun of itself enough to let that slide. It presents the allure of spectacle in a way that I thought was very exciting and fresh when I saw it. Maybe the new cut massacred what I liked about it, I'll have to see it.
I was starting to feel like an outcast for liking this...thank you Astrostic. I feel that you are taking things too seriously if you can't be swept up in the fun and lunacy that is Southland Tales. I swear this movie is so bad it almost goes past bad, back to good, back to bad and transcends into some sort of alternate reality where good and bad don't matter...there is only THE ROCK, JON LOVITZ & CHRISTOPHER LAMBERT!! And no, teen horniness is NOT a crime.
Quote from: Stefen on March 15, 2008, 11:37:27 PM
:saywhat:
Funny? Everything that was funny about it was unintentional.
still funny. I can easily say that I like this as a guilty pleasure and not as a good example of satire, parody, farce, and every other form of comedy they attempt, but it doesn't mean that it didn't make me laugh. I don't even necessarily like Southland Tales as a comedy. I like it as a messy attempt at good art that held my interest and occasionally wowed me with a well done tracking shot or set piece or mix of music and image. Nothing to pick my brain to, but nothing that ever bored me either.
i gotta admit, i laughed at the end when the rock is on stage doing his little dance number, and holmes osbourne goes "what is this, an orgy or something?" it's such a throwaway line, but it encapsulates what i liked about the movie. for the whole movie, every character is playing it straight, and then that line comes out and you realize the whole thing is just one big joke.
at least, thats how i saw it. hopefully thats how kelly saw it. if it isn't.... well, shucks.
I didn't see that part. I didn't watch the last 45 minutes or so.
Quote from: Stefen on March 16, 2008, 12:23:38 PM
I didn't see that part. I didn't watch the last 45 minutes or so.
me neither. being in agreement with stefen scares me and makes me think i may be wrong about this movie.
mmm... no, it really sucks.
I did watch the last 45 minutes and it doesn't get better. I only kept going because I was curious to see how it ended. One of the few times I've regretted it.
This is like Domino in the sense that even the people who like it have to admit that it's awful, just your kind of awful. Domino was my kind of awful. Southland Tales is not.
Kelly's cribbing of David Lynch is more evident here than in Darko. There, it felt like homage; here, it's a bad impersonation. For God's sake, he put the woman who sang at Club Silencio in Mulholland Drive in this movie... come on!
I knew I was in trouble 20 minutes in when I see, all in the same shot: the old lady from Poltergeist, Booger from Revenge of the Nerds, Wallace Shawn, the Sparkle-Motion stage mother from Donnie Darko, and fucking Bai Ling!
I really like Donnie Darko but this was so bad, I'm afraid to watch it again to see if my opinion of it changed. But it's gonna be a huge cult hit. Huge. Expect it to play Landmark Theatres at midnight any day now.
I wouldn't count it as one of the worst movies ever, it's pretty fucking bad and really shouldn't have been. But I still would rather sit through a piece of shit like this, with high ambitions (even if they are unchecked by reason and ego-driven), over a piece of shit with no ambition at all.
i wonder how much of this narration is in the original script and how much was added to explain what the fuck is going on? regardless of what Kelly was trying to do here, this is one of the worst movies i have ever seen. stunningly misguided. i'm about halfway through.
i watched it last night and it was much worse than everyone said it was. dissapointed!
Just like some other people, I was inspired to log onto Xixax before the movie ended to express my horror at its infinite badness. I will spend the next day or two imagining how this film could possibly be worse, and I won't find an answer.
Okay, I just finished it.
Starting at about the 45 minute mark and all the way through to the end, I had an extended internal conflict about whether to turn it off, and for some reason I decided to keep watching.
I don't know where to start. It's unfunny where it tries to be funny, amazingly stupid where it tries to be poignant, and since it can't resolve those two sides with each other, it begins (and continues) its very long self-destruction. That's the only explanation I have.
And yet I have this suspicion that Richard Kelly knows how bad it is on the surface, but he's hiding some sort of secret meaning that would provide some explanation or defense. Does anyone have links to insightful interviews? Anything?
Oh, something just occurred to me. Perhaps this was an experiment by Kelly to see if he could actually get a movie like this produced and distributed, thus gaining more power and influence, because the joke's on them. No?
Quote from: hacksparrow on March 18, 2008, 08:30:34 PMKelly's cribbing of David Lynch is more evident here than in Darko. There, it felt like homage; here, it's a bad impersonation. For God's sake, he put the woman who sang at Club Silencio in Mulholland Drive in this movie... come on!
Absolutely. These kinds of homages are offensive not only in their laziness, but they're executed in such an inept and uninspired fashion that desecrates the original.
I'm tempted to conclude that Kelly wrote this film on a 48-hour meth binge and simply decided not to edit it.
Was anyone else annoyed by the casting choices? I don't know how to explain it, but there's just nothing there.
Perhaps the most obnoxious thing of all is that the movie deals with serious subjects, serious kinds of people. The dissidents are all intensely stupid and indiscriminately and pointlessly violent. The elites are equally stupid. What kind of stupid world is this, really?
spoils
the making-of on the dvd (i watched it free from work) is pretty insightful about kelly's attitude towards the film. he sees it as a satire. and a movie that "hopefully people who liked donnie darko" will like. i think he confused being really really stupid all the time with making some kind of point about something. and laziness with ambiguity. i would love to hear his defense of the dialogue in the final scene between the two cops. it's so deliberately vague no one could possibly have a grip on it but him. i forgot to mention how annoying and bizarre it was that the pucci character murders nearly everyone towards the end of the movie for no apparent reason.
that reminds me, when is the last time we've seen a truly pointed and funny satire?
Quote from: pete on April 28, 2008, 12:10:51 AM
that reminds me, when is the last time we've seen a truly pointed and funny satire?
bowfinger?
Quote from: pete on April 28, 2008, 12:10:51 AM
that reminds me, when is the last time we've seen a truly pointed and funny satire?
Probably Team America: World Police.
I did watch the featurette, and it didn't help much. Kelly is actually seriously trying to push a message. And I was baffled when people (including Kelly) kept describing it as a comedy. I don't think I ever considered laughing. Trying to think what was supposed to be funny... the SNL/MadTV alumni? The bit about the lady who's on bathroom surveillance duty? Her cheetos?
To make something clear that I said before, what's possibly most offensive about the film is that it defeats its own purpose by making all these things (puppeteers in the government, surveillance, etc.) seem absolutely ridiculous and sci-fi in a very foreign sort of way when these things are in fact real, not at all futuristic or outlandish like the freaking Baron character, for example. Do people in the far-off future of 2008 (another production mistake) wear space-age outfits? The surveillance facility is probably one of the stupidest things in the movie. Think about it. It's happening right now, and it probably looks nothing like that. All of this futurization/stylization makes these serious things that much easier to dismiss. Good job Richard Kelly, you just defeated yourself. Go watch Children of Men and see what you did wrong.
Thanks to a suggestion from
@WorldForgot I watched the Cannes cut. Definitely liked it more, and I think I came away with a better understanding and generally more on its wavelength. Viewing it with more distance from the Bush era is helpful in a way I can't quite explain. And think I meshed a little better with its Verhoeven Total Recall vibe.
The broad comedy still didn't work for me, but most other things did. I actually loved the ending. It kind of achieves the iconic feeling Kelly seems to be going for – perhaps even aided by the Neil Breen-style effects.
Moderate spoilersDwayne Johnson is the most interesting part of this movie for me. It's refreshing to see the normal human size version of him. He would obviously never do this movie today, but you can see how playing a messianic figure might have attracted him, even though the real chosen one turns out to be someone else. You can see his narcissism blooming here.
Side notes:
There must be a gun-related death every 5 minutes in this movie, right? The guard tower shootings were effectively unsettling, but elsewhere it felt like a shortcut for drama. Made me think of Dogme 95.
So that skinny white kid just casually murders hundreds of people before jumping to his death? Quite a choice.
Is the ATM-dragging sequence the progenitor of Fast Five's safe-dragging sequence?
Total Recall iz definitely the wavelength! Love that.
LOL -- hadn't thought of the Neil Breen connect. Cannes Cut has a nice homemade quality to it, in a way :lol:
It's crazy how much the last twelve-ish years have changed this movie -- especially in how it interacts with The Rock. It lends 'Boxer vs Jericho' a very interesting meta-bend if we're to think about whether Dwayne (and John Cena...) care that they are forever tethered to WWE and if there was another archetype in there vying to get out.
Something that I love about this movie maybe is how it gives underdog actors the chance to give layered performances by playing within their shtick.
For me some of the broad comedy that doesn't land mostly sits with the new-agey tech cult. Its communist 'dirt-bag left' types certainly land for me. And the Senator/Surveillance state deadpan definitely makes me laugh. Even though I first saw this movie in 2017, years after its release, it feels so clear that this movie only works AFTER the Rock has become huge. I don't know how that makes sense but it does. Nobody trusted The Rock, and when this released in its messiest form it felt like both Richard Kelly and the Rock were out of there depth, I bet. With the benefit of a post-Trump perspective.... and even a post-Obama perspective... I think it's a very fun, worthwhile sci-fi Los Angeles Apocalypse comedy. One of the best Philip K Dick love letters out there.
Quote from: WorldForgot on July 31, 2022, 09:25:51 PMSomething that I love about this movie maybe is how it gives underdog actors the chance to give layered performances by playing within their shtick.
What do you think about Sarah Michelle Gellar in this movie? I thought she was one of the most likeable characters, even if she was undercut by a few jokes.
The desperate snack-eating surveillance agent still landed with a thud for me. The various gun-pointing switchups in her final scene just made no sense.
It's also a little unclear to me why/how characters forget about the government snipers. We see this happen with two of the most savvy characters. In a way I like that, though; the police state has become so entrenched that it blends into the background and you forget there's an armed lifeguard in any public place.
Quote from: WorldForgot on July 31, 2022, 09:25:51 PMIts communist 'dirt-bag left' types certainly land for me.
Sure. Somewhat unrealistic that they're so well-funded, though.
Quote from: WorldForgot on July 31, 2022, 09:25:51 PMWith the benefit of a post-Trump perspective.... and even a post-Obama perspective... I think it's a very fun, worthwhile sci-fi Los Angeles Apocalypse comedy. One of the best Philip K Dick love letters out there.
This movie aging well was certainly not on my bingo card. But it has. A world in which the most powerful people in the world are a deranged tech billionaire and characters from Veep seems just about right.
I do like Sarah Michelle Gellar in this! I grew up a big fan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer so I appreciate any role that lets her be both femme fatale and counterculture porn popstar. When I think of this film's three leads it's clear to me how much this production would have had to push uphill in '06. Almost like the reputation of the cast was essential to what makes it work as much as for what tanked it on release.
That and the overproduced, misguided theatrical edit.
Idk if cheetos/chips surveillance agent works for me everytime. Sometimes, but probably not often. What does work is when her coworkers are talking about her. "Darla is on LAX toilet duty..." and they're concerned for her. There are throwaway moments like that that totally tie the movie together for me. Like the hired sound mixers enthused; "They're so good at improv ~ "
SOUTHLAND TALES screening on DCP (https://www.americancinematheque.com/now-showing/southland-tales-8-26-22/)
Friday Aug 26th, The AERO THEATRE in Santa Monica will be showing the Cannes Cut with Richard Kelly in attendance.