Southland Tales

[Astrostic]

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.

[Ultrahip]

You must not have spoken to many film critics. Still, I hope you're right. I'm dying for this to be great.

[grand theft sparrow]

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.

[edison]

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

[Pwaybloe]

I've got legs, but I'm not a legend.

[Pozer]

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.

[MacGuffin]

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.

[children with angels]

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...

[©brad]

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.

i think there's a disconnect between the question and answer here.

[modage]

A Not-Too Positive Review from JoBlo...

http://www.joblo.com/reviews.php?mode=joblo_movies&id=1434

[MacGuffin]

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.

[modage]

yay!

[Kal]

great, but no tentative date yet 

[MacGuffin]

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.

[Kal]

damn I saw the new post my Mac and I was hoping for a trailer