Southland Tales (2007)
Directed by Richard Kelly
Set in the futuristic landscape of Los Angeles on July 4, 2008, as it stands on the brink of social, economic and environmental disaster. Boxer Santaros is an action star who's stricken with amnesia. His life intertwines with Krysta Now, an adult film star developing her own reality television project, and Ronald Taverner, a Hermosa Beach police officer who holds the key to a vast conspiracy.
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He even breaks the fourth wall to rips off “The Big Lebowski” with embarrassing results, providing a musical number that’s almost scene for scene similar to the aforementioned, with none of the charm of whimsy.
Thatâ??s just a brief sketch of the plot: Southland Tales is a veritable encyclopaedia of weird, self-consciously referencing the mannered filmic worlds of Kiss Me Deadly, The Manchurian Candidate, Repo Man, Jacob's Ladder, The Big Lebowski, Lost Highway, Mulholland Dr. and Primer, as well as Philip K. Dick's oeuvre of mind-expansion and paranoia along with some of the stranger passages from the Book of Revelations.
Kelly opens his mouth wide to reveal his undigested references: Aside from his in-syndication cast and his soundtrack choices (a score by Moby, with crossover hits from Blur and the Pixies), he blurts out name-drops to Elton John, Philip K. Dick, Kiss Me Deadly and The Big Lebowski.
Thatâ??s just a brief sketch of the plot: Southland Tales is a veritable encyclopaedia of weird, self-consciously referencing the mannered filmic worlds of Kiss Me Deadly, The Manchurian Candidate, Repo Man, Jacob's Ladder, The Big Lebowski, Lost Highway, Mulholland Dr. and Primer, as well as Philip K. Dick's oeuvre of mind-expansion and paranoia along with some of the stranger passages from the Book of Revelations.
Where You've Seen the Woman at the End Who Sings the National Anthem: That's Rebekah Del Rio, the woman who sang "Crying" in Spanish in Mulholland Drive, this movie's smarter parent.
If this ends up closer to Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back than to Mulholland Dr. (or even to Skidoo), it still has the galvanic pulse of a filmmaker trying things out, failing, and trying again.
Far from the next Mulholland Drive that J. Hoberman proclaimed it from Cannes, Southland Tales is genuinely poor.
In the spirit of erstwhile teen-apocalypse king Gregg Araki (whose Nowhere belongs on Southland’s giant map of influences), Kelly compels unlikely sympathy for American Idle.
After I saw the first cut of Kelly's "Southland Tales" at Cannes 2005, I was dazed, confused, bewildered, bored, affronted and deafened by the boos all around me, at the most disastrous Cannes press screening since, yes, " The Brown Bunny ."