Southland Tales

Started by clerkguy23, June 07, 2004, 06:54:09 PM

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edison


matt35mm

Yes.  Thank you very much.

SMG DOES look like Sienna Miller in that picture!

MacGuffin

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."
"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol


Skeleton FilmWorks

bonanzataz

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:



:yabbse-grin:
oh, shit, you are such a bitch!
The corpses all hang headless and limp bodies with no surprises and the blood drains down like devil's rain we'll bathe tonight I want your skulls I need your skulls I want your skulls I need your skulls Demon I am and face I peel to see your skin turned inside out, 'cause gotta have you on my wall gotta have you on my wall, 'cause I want your skulls I need your skulls I want your skulls I need your skulls collect the heads of little girls and put 'em on my wall hack the heads off little girls and put 'em on my wall I want your skulls I need your skulls I want your skulls I need your skulls

edison

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.

MacGuffin

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.
"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol


Skeleton FilmWorks

I Don't Believe in Beatles

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.
"A film is - or should be - more like music than like fiction. It should be a progression of moods and feelings. The theme, what's behind the emotion, the meaning, all that comes later." --Stanley Kubrick

JG

well at least three of those adjectives aren't really a bad thing at all. 

MacGuffin

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 Tales
By 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 Tales
by 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.
"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol


Skeleton FilmWorks

I Don't Believe in Beatles

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.
"A film is - or should be - more like music than like fiction. It should be a progression of moods and feelings. The theme, what's behind the emotion, the meaning, all that comes later." --Stanley Kubrick

Gamblour.

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?!?
WWPTAD?

RegularKarate

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".

pete

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.
"Tragedy is a close-up; comedy, a long shot."
- Buster Keaton

I Don't Believe in Beatles

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.
"A film is - or should be - more like music than like fiction. It should be a progression of moods and feelings. The theme, what's behind the emotion, the meaning, all that comes later." --Stanley Kubrick

grand theft sparrow

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.