Southland Tales

[Stefen]

 

Funny? Everything that was funny about it was unintentional.

[cinemanarchist]

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.

[Astrostic]

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.

[diggler]

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.

[Stefen]

I didn't see that part. I didn't watch the last 45 minutes or so.

[Kal]

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.

[grand theft sparrow]

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.

[modage]

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. 

[brockly]

i watched it last night and it was much worse than everyone said it was. dissapointed!

[Jeremy Blackman]

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?

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!

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?

[picolas]

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.

[pete]

that reminds me, when is the last time we've seen a truly pointed and funny satire?

[SiliasRuby]

that reminds me, when is the last time we've seen a truly pointed and funny satire?

bowfinger?

[Jeremy Blackman]

that reminds me, when is the last time we've seen a truly pointed and funny satire?

Probably Team America: World Police.

[Jeremy Blackman]

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.