#southland tales film review

[thejewofkansas]

The Weekly Gravy #141

I’ll start the week off by watching some more shorts by the recently deceased Kenneth Anger: Rabbit’s Moon (1979) – A few years after the first version was released, Anger re-edited Rabbit’s Moon, speeding up the frame rate, changing the soundtrack from classic doo-wop to a 70s rock song called “Things That Go Bump in the Night,” changing the stylized zoom of the Moon to what appears to be stock…

[pablolf]

Any true critic knows, of course, there is no wrong and there is no right. This doesn’t stop us from writing as though these poles exist. The anxiety of influence is real for a critic: no matter how confident we may be in our opinions and discursive and fair in our aims, we are, like those in any other field, not immune from the methodological skepticism our peers sow in us. The act of criticism is creative and, when done right, artistically fulfilling for the writer and the reader, but it’s also essentially interpretive, and thus open to all manner of personal blind spots, misreadings, mood swings, and environmental circumstance. This is why films are worth revisiting and opinions are worth revising, if you’re so inclined. (Kael’s admittance that she never saw—never had to see—a movie more than once before forming her in-depth reviews has always struck me as little more than the wink of a prankster.) Because other writers’ reviews remain such an unavoidable part of my internal landscape, especially from my younger days as a more voracious reader of criticism, I often have a difficult time maintaining the kind of pure, personal response to a film I might prize. I restrict myself from reading anyone else’s writing on a particular movie before I pen my own review, but in the rearview mirror, I nevertheless balance my thoughts in relation to others’, wondering what they or I saw or didn’t see. As much as I would like to maintain a monolithic attitude about writing and opinion-making, it’s seductive to justify one’s taste by pointing to other respected voices who might have fallen in the same camp. Anxiety—of being misunderstood, mistaken, or misguided—is a powerful motivator in critical writing.

I Can’t Make You Love Me: Michael Koresky Revisits Southland Tales

[radiation]

It's weird because this movie was panned at the time but retrospective reviews have been *extremely* kind to it to the point where I can barely find reviews that aren't glowing nowadays. I'm talking about Richard Kelly's 2007 film Southland Tales.

People praise its prescience, its cultural critiques and condemnation of the Bush administration, but despite gesturing at those themes the movie honestly feels deeply fucking reactionary to me. Every single woman is a hysterical idiot, every leftist insincere and ineffectual. The main villain is a Jewish billionaire funding the leftists to stage a false flag police shooting, among other things. Soldiers and police meanwhile are routinely portrayed as strong and sympathetic, though.

It's also over two hours long, meandering and ugly. It's really bizarre to me that it's gained the momentum it has among people I usually consider to have good taste. No clue if it was intended to be the way it is or not, I think it might have actually been trying to critique 2000s American culture and politics but just suck at it. Among post-9/11 "America is fucked" works I wouldn't consider it to be politically far removed from like, Idiocracy or Team America: World Police

.

[observerpix]

The Best Worst Movie Ever

Hi! I don't know if I'm going to spend much time here, but I thought I would announce my time by sharing with you a review I wrote WAY back in 2008 about a movie that is still so wonderfully terrible, that I try to get everyone to watch it. Flashback Review! Southland Tales

There are many levels of bad movie. There are good bad movies that you love watching because you enjoy making fun of them. There are bad bad movies that you are so mad you wasted your time and money seeing that you are offended by the thought of them. Then there’s Southland Tales. It’s the kind of bad movie that you want every single one of your friends to see so that you can all discuss the atrocity to which you’ve just subjected yourselves.

I believe the only way to truly enjoy Southland Tales is to be tripping on some pretty good acid. Even then, though, I think you might get bored after about thirty minutes and resort to watching static on television.

It’s truly not a boring movie; that’s definitely not what’s wrong with the film. It’s got nuclear war, Big Brother, political corruption, crazy drugs, time travel, and little people in SWAT gear. What bored me is that I didn’t care what the hell anyone did or didn’t do.

In 2005, a nuclear bomb was dropped on Texas. This, of course, led to World War Three. Now, three years later, the government has reinstated the draft, issued nationwide identification cards, and controls the Internet. The Republican Party has a good chance of winning the election, and there’s an extremist Marxist group that doesn’t want that to happen.

Dwayne Johnson is Boxer Santeros, an action star who’s married to Madeline Frost (Mandy Moore), the daughter of Senator Bobby Frost (Holmes Osborne) who happens to be on the Republican ticket. Senator Frost’s wife is Nana Mae Frost (Miranda Richardson) who is not only the head of the NSA (I think), but she also runs the USIdent office, a Big Brother operation that controls the Internet and every other thing going on in America.

Still with me? I’m not done yet.

So Boxer gets kidnapped and taken into the desert. Somehow, he gets back into California with a case of amnesia and has been shacking up with porn star Krista Now (Sarah Michelle Gellar). He and Krista write a screenplay that oddly emulates what’s going on in the world, and they get wrapped up in what I believe to be a conspiracy that involves the Marxist movement, a German who’s created a power station operated by ocean water (played by the hilarious Wallace Shawn), and some strange time-space continuum whatnot. Oh, and a drugged-up war veteran played by Justin Timberlake narrates.

The movie plays as if too many ideas crawled onto the page, and Richard Kelly didn’t want to let any of them go. There are scenes that actually had my attention. I thought, finally, this movie is going somewhere and getting interesting, but no. As soon as some semblance of a storyline would show itself, the film would stumble and fall right back into an immature statement about American politics and war.

Richard Kelly definitely has ideas buried in the muck that is Southland Tales. Peppering the film with news footage that looks like it was plucked directly from C-SPAN is perfect. He’s poking fun at our country’s need for sensory overload in every sense of the word. Having one of your main characters be a porn star who is trying her hand at singing, television, and her own energy drink is spectacular. But either he concentrated too much on jamming every concept in, or he didn’t let the actors in on the joke.

Mandy Moore is surprisingly interesting as the whiny senator’s daughter, but I know for a fact she can do better work. Christopher Lambert, Miranda Richardson, and hell, even John Laroquette should be ashamed of themselves. I wouldn’t think it was so sad to see them play such horrible characters if it didn’t look like they were trying so hard.

Dwayne Johnson is the only one who gives a convincing performance. And it’s really only because he’s playing a confused, half-wit of a man who can’t quite figure out what his purpose might be. He does know one thing, though. He’s a pimp, and pimps don’t commit suicide.

Yeah, I don’t know what it means either, but it was the funniest damn line in the entire movie.

[redrusty66]

Music CD and DVD/Blu-ray collection pickups  for September 2023.

Arrow Remaster release of Southland Tales. Scream factory remastered edition of Exorcist 3. Criterion Collection remaster of Silence Of The Lambs. Releases of Rec 3 Genesis, Demonic, Renfield, SISU, Snowflake, Haunt, Rebel Without A Cause, The Haunting Of Sharon Tate, Plus much more.

These are the Music CDs, DVD and Blu-rays that I bought and received in the month of September 2023 for my collection.

My IMDB : https://www.imdb.com/user/ur48636572/ My Letterboxed : https://letterboxd.com/Redrusty66/ My Poetry : https://allpoetry.com/Redrusty66

#horror  #Movies #collection #film #review #heavymeetal #update

[frankendykes-monster]

Southland Tales has the most fascinating bar graph of any film on Letterboxd and yet most of the top reviews are all five stars. Fascinating.

I still don't get what people see in Donnie Darko (2001) but given I've also seen Southland Tales (2006) I feel pretty vindicated about my thoughts on Donnie Darko.

[adamwatchesmovies]

Southland Tales (2006)

Southland Tales is an incoherent, dull, and frustrating mess that amounts to a big waste of your time. It's as if the first draft of two different films were stapled together, or it could be that writer/director Richard Kelly had so many "genius" ideas that he couldn't be persuaded to cut any of them. Some are actually genuinely interesting, but they're buried in a heap of dung that has no idea what it wants to be. A satirical dystopian comedy? an engaging high-concept science fiction film? a cautionary tale about censorship and totalitarian regime? Every potential avenue leads to nowhere.

The plot is an unintelligible mess that follows at least seven main characters. Set in a post-World War III United States, in the then-futuristic year 2008, action movie star Boxer Santaros (Dwayne Johnson) has been brainwashed and is being used in a smear campaign by a group of rebels to destabilize a presidential candidate. At the same time, the rebels are using one of two twin brothers, Ronald and Roland Taverner (Seann William Scott) to push their agenda further. Officer Roland has been kidnapped and his brother has taken his place. Pretending to be racist and trigger-happy he is caught on tape and will expose the corrupt police system. There is also a plot about a mysterious, seemingly infinite source of energy dubbed "Fluid Karma" that threatens to tear the fabric of time and space apart, but is necessary because of an energy crisis; a new policy that keeps a close eye on the citizens to the point of censoring the internet; another about a former adult film star (Sarah Michelle Gellar as Krysta Now) that wants to create her own Reality TV Show; conspiracy theories and back stabbings.

It’s not even a well-formed turd. We get a long introduction about how the United States was hit with nuclear missiles in 2005, but there are no food shortages, no radiation suits to combat the nuclear fallout, and not even a single mutant wandering around. There’s a fuel “crisis” but we're just told this. We never see people stealing gasoline or being forced to take alternative modes of transportation. You might think that this element is to lead the audience into the super-secret “Fluid Karma” subplot but it has so little to do with the actions of the principal characters that I think it was thrown in just to simulate depth.

There are constant references to literary works, biblical quotes or scriptures tossed in with the kind of theoretical science fiction that Kelly previously explored in Donnie Darko. As icing on the cake, the film begins halfway through the story and not in the way you’ve seen before. Typically, a story will “hook” you by starting midway through an exciting action scene then flash back to show you how we got there. This story literally begins at part 4 of 6, the first three of which have been published in graphic novel form. Have you ever heard of a movie doing this? You have to do research in order to understand the film and we’re talking homework: 360 pages!

In the end, several plots have no bearing on the final “revelation” that is the conclusion of the film. Then, it just ends without telling you took place. You mean Parts 5 and 6 are actually going to be made? I just spent 2 hrs and 24 minutes getting pissed on, and I have to ask for more?

Southland Tales is moderately infamous. If you’re the kind of masochist that delights in watching the worst, most abysmal failures in Hollywood history just to make fun of them with your buddies on a Friday night like me, you’ll be thoroughly disappointed. There aren’t a lot of “so bad it’s good” moments, just one memorable quote and fewer iconic moments. The movie is exhausting, it sucks the life right out of you, leaving you desperate for any kind of genuine stimulation. With it’s inhumane running time, it takes so long to finish there’s just no way you will be able to gather the strength and mental energy to get up off your seat and find something better to throw in your DVD/Blu-ray player. Your only desire will be to turn off the TV, crawl into bed and die in your sleep. Southland Tales is without a doubt one of the dullest, most scatterbrained abstract films I’ve ever seen. You’d rather have a chimpanzee shave every hair on your body than flush your time down the toilet by watching this film. (On DVD, May 24, 2013)

[oneofusnet]

Digital Noise Episode 273: John Digs Evil Toys DIGITAL NOISE EPISODE 273: JOHN DIGS EVIL TOYS John and Chris take on a mighty stack of home releases, discussing insane woodland based yakuza vs zombie films, a criminally overlooked Korean classic, a reappraisal of one of the films often looked at as one of the worst ever, and Aaron comes on to talk two… Read More »Digital Noise Episode 273: John Digs Evil Toys read more on One of Us

[claudia1829things]

"GANGSTER SQUAD" (2013) Review

"GANGSTER SQUAD" (2013) Review Every now and then, Hollywood would release a movie with a story based upon a particular event or individual from Los Angeles' history. Movies such as "CHINATOWN", "L.A. CONFIDENTIAL", and "CHANGELING" are examples. Six years ago, Hollywood released a movie about a moment in Los Angeles' history called "GANGSTER SQUAD".

I must admit that I found myself surprised that the origin of the plot for "GANGSTER SQUAD" came from L.A. history. According to the book, "Tales from the Gangster Squad" by Paul Lieberman, Chief William Parker and the Los Angeles Police Department formed a group of officers and detective called the "Gangster Squad unit" in an effort to keep Los Angeles safe from gangster Mickey Cohen and his gang in the late 1940s and the 1950s. Screenwriter Will Beall took elements of Lieberman's book and wrote a movie about the L.A.P.D.'s efforts to fight organized crime in the Southland. The movie starts in 1949 Los Angeles, where Cohen has become the most powerful figure in the California criminal underworld. Cohen has plans to expand his enterprises across the Western United States via the gambling rackets. Because the gangster has eliminated witnesses and bribed both the courts and the police, Chief Parker and the L.A.P.D. have not been able to stop Cohen's rise. In a desperate move, Parker recruits the incorruptible and ruthless Sergeant John O'Mara to form a unit to wage guerilla warfare on Cohen's operations and drive the gangster out of Southern California. O'Hara, with the help of his very pregnant wife Connie, recruit the following men for his new unit: *Coleman Harris, a tough beat cop from the South Central Los Angeles neighborhood *Conway Keeler, a brainy wire-tapper *Max Kennard, a legendary veteran gangster killer and sharp-shooter Kennard's young partner, Navidad Ramirez tracks down the squad and O'Hara reluctantly allows him to join. The sergeant tries to recruit his close friend, Sergeant Jerry Wooters, but the latter declines his offer out of disillusionment with the recent war and the police force. But when Cohen's attempted hit on rival gang leader Jack Dragna results in the death of a young shoeshine boy, Wooters decides to accept O'Hara's offer to join the squad. Also, Wooters has become romantically involved with Cohen's etiquette coach and girlfriend, Grace Faraday. The squad's campaign of terror against Cohen encounter a good deal of road blocks, including an unsuccessful raid against Cohen's Burbank casino, the gangster's penchant for paranoia, Wooters' secret romance with Grace, Connie O'Hara's desire for her husband to leave the police force and a deadly trap set up by Cohen in Chinatown. Despite the setbacks, violence and death, the squad eventually persevere over Cohen. When I first saw the trailer for "GANGSTER SQUAD", I immediately viewed it as one of those splashy, yet cheesy crime dramas trying to cash in on the success of movies like "L.A. CONFIDENTIAL" and "THE UNTOUCHABLES" by setting it before the present time. After seeing the movie, I suspect that my assumption was correct. There were elements in the movie's story that I found unoriginal. Honestly. One could easily imagine "GANGSTER SQUAD" to be a post-World War II Los Angeles version of the 1987 movie, "THE UNTOUCHABLES". Well . . . almost. And there were moments when I found "GANGSTER SQUAD" rather cheesy. This was obvious in some of the dialogue that came out of the mouth of actor Sean Penn, who portrayed Mickey Cohen; and in the movie's narration spoken by Josh Brolin, who portrayed John O'Hara. And I might as well be honest. Penn's dialogue was not helped by the occasional hammy acting that also marred his performance. For a movie that is supposed to be based on a historical book, I could not regard it as historically correct . . . especially in regard to the fates of both Cohen and rival Jack Dragna. I am a fan of Nick Nolte's work, but I believe that he was a least two to three decades too old to be portraying Los Angeles Police Chief William Parker, who would have been in his mid-40s in 1949. Also, Parker did not become the city's police chief until 1950. "GANGSTER SQUAD" was not a perfect film, but I liked it very much. I enjoyed it. I found it very entertaining. And I found it gorgeous and colorful to look at. Thanks to production designer Maher Ahmad's work, the film beautifully re-created post-World War II Los Angeles at the end of the 1940s. I was especially impressed by Ahmad's elegant, yet colorful designs for the Slapsy Maxie's nightclub, Cohen's Spanish Colonial house and the Chinatown sequence. Ahmad's work was enhanced by Gene Serdena's set decorations, the movie's art direction team and especially Dion Beebe's photography. And Mary Zophres' costume designs were absolutely gorgeous. Just to give you a hint, take a look at one of her designs for actress Emma Stone:

Even though "GANGSTER SQUAD" seemed to be marred by cheesy dialogue, lack of originality and historical inaccuracy, I cannot deny that Will Beall wrote a very entertaining and exciting crime story. He did a pretty solid job of setting up the main narrative with Sergeant O'Hara's disruption of one of Mickey Cohen's illegitimate businesses - a whorehouse staffed by naive girls fresh off the bus or train and eager to make it big in the movies. This disruption catches Police Chief Bill Parker's attention, prompting him to recruit O'Hara to organize and lead the "Gangster Squad" unit against Cohen's operations. Beall also filled the story with exciting action sequences that included a nail-biting shootout in Chinatown, a forbidden romance between Jerry Wooters and Cohen's girlfriend Grace Faraday, strong characterizations and more importantly, a good solid narrative. Rueben Fleischer did a first-rate job in transferring Beall's script to the movie screen. And Fleischer did this with a great deal of flair and strong pacing. The cast for "GANGSTER SQUAD" proved to be first-rate. Josh Brolin led the cast as the strong-willed, yet emotional police detective Sergeant John O'Hara. Utilizing his talent for projecting a no-nonsense demeanor with flashes of humor, Brolin was very effective as leader of "Gangster Squad" unit. Brolin also managed to generate on-screen chemistry with other members of the cast - including Ryan Gosling, Anthony Mackie, Giovanni Ribisi and especially actress Mireille Enos, who beautifully portrayed O'Hara's equally strong-willed wife Connie. "GANGSTER SQUAD" marked the second time Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone worked together since they were co-stars in the 2011 comedy "CRAZY STUPID LOVE". And once again, they proved to be quite the effective screen team, as they burned up the screen as the cynical lovers Sergeant Jerry Wooster and mob moll Grace Faraday. I also enjoyed Anthony Mackie's colorful portrayal of tough beat cop Coleman Harris, who developed an aversion to Burbank, following the squad's unpleasant encounter with that city's law enforcement. Giovanni Ribisi gave a poignant performance as the squad's brainy wiretapper, Conwell Keeler. Both Robert Patrick and Michael Peña created a solid screen team as police sharpshooter Max Kennard and his clever protégé Navidad Ramirez. Although I found him slightly too old for the role, I must admit that I found Nick Nolte's portrayal of Police Chief William Parker rather entertaining in a garroulous way. And despite some of the cheesy dialogue he was forced to spew, I must say that Sean Penn struck me as an effective villain in his performance as the violent Mickey Cohen. Especially when the cheese and ham were missing from his lines. If you expect "GANGSTER SQUAD" to be a crime drama masterpiece, you will be disappointed. It is no masterpiece, I assure you. But . . . I thought it proved to be an entertaining, yet splashy crime thriller that recaptured the era of post-World War II Los Angeles. I guess one could thank Will Beall for his solid script, colorful direction by Rueben Fleischer, and an entertaining cast led by Josh Brolin, Ryan Gosling and Sean Penn.

[wonderfulworldofmichaelford]

100 Years review

Today I have a very special review, a review no one could have ever seen coming. You could even say that this review is ahead of its time… this is a review of a movie that, technically, should not be out for another hundred years. I am, of course, talking about the Robert Rodriguez film that is written by and stars John Malkovich, 100 Years. It is a film made with the help of Louis XIII Cognac, and the film’s creation was inspired by the hundred years it takes to make a bottle of said cognac. The film was locked in a vault and kept behind bulletproof glass, and said vault would only open on the day of the film’s premier in 2115. Very few alive could ever hope to see this film…

UNTIL TODAY!

You see, an anonymous leaker who was part of the filmmaking process uploaded the film to a file sharing website, and after watching it, I simply have to give my opinion on this movie. 100 years from now people will look back at this review and say “Oh man, Michael Ford totally called this. Why didn’t we listen to him?” And my descendant who will be running this blog and posting movie reviews, or maybe it will still be me as a supercomputer cyborg uploading movie reviews via my mind, will laugh. A link to the film will be provided at the end, but I may have to delete the link in the near future.

The plot is actually hinted at in the teaser trailers, which shows three very different futures that could come about, from a utopian society to a dystopian wasteland. The plot is very hard to explain without seeing it for yourself, but it concerns three separate timelines and the main character, played by John Malkovich, and his attempts to unify the timeline to create an entirely perfect world. It’s sort of like Southland Tales, but it makes marginally more sense. Can Malkovich do it, or is he going to end up destroying the universe?

Now, I have to say that Robert Rodriguez can be a good director when he sets his mind to it, and he mas made tons of great films, such as the Machete and Spy Kids movies and Desperado and Sin City. Those films all had unique visual styles, you could easily identify those films… this one though, ooh boy. I think it was pretty ambitious to try so many different kinds of styles, but I think it makes the film tonally all over the place. The use of Smell-O-Vision in particular is pretty egregious, as I did not have the scratch and sniff cards they’ll surely hand out at the theaters when this comes out, robbing me of the experience. The flash animation they used for some of the 2nd future sequences was also pretty awkward, and it seems for that section they got the audio director for Johnny Test in, because every single movement is followed by a whipcrack, including John Malkovich’s flopping penis. Oh yes, we’ll get to that shortly. Also, I have to say that the jungle sequence was rather lackluster, especially since all the monkeys in it were stock CGI images. Still though, there were SOME good sequences with good visual style. I think it was a rather bold and artsy move to have the end credits play over a black and white unsimulated bukkake involving the film’s entire cast and crew nutting all over the lead actress, who plays John Malkovich’s love interest (I’m leaving the name anonymous, if you want to know who it is, I will link the movie file at the end, but I’m sure this actress who has starred in such films as The Hunger Games and X-Men: First Class would not like this information getting out in her lifetime). I also particularly liked the scene which was animated like a comic book where John Malkovich used his prehensile armpit hair he got from a genetic modification serum to strangle a mutant camel, which was shot much like it was in comic book panels; this worked a lot better than it did in Ang Lee’s Hulk movie.

Still though, Malkovich’s performance is rather unconventional, to say the least. The fact he wrote his character to have a thirteen inch penis is rather telling of what the character will be like, and sadly, he remains pantsless for much of the movie. I believe this may be an homage to Marlon Brando refusing to wear pants on the set of Apocalypse Now… or was it The Godfather? Honestly, I’d believe it if someone told me Brando NEVER wore pants on set. Seems like something he’d do. Anyway, even if it is an homage, it is very odd and oblique one, and it does nothing to change the fact that John Malkovich really needs to do some manscaping. Guy has more bush than the White House in the early 2000s. I guess his character is okay and heroic, and Malkovich does a decent job, but his bizarre writing is really hard to describe. It’s like if David Lynch wrote Southland Tales after ingesting a dozen pixie sticks. It’s just… awkward.

The amount of camel-riding scenes is also absurd. There are at least twenty scenes in which characters ride camels, including a rather egregious scene where they ride camels through several movies, including Troll 2, Gigli, and Spy Kids 3D: Game Over. This last one is the only one portrayed in a positive light, and it even features a cameo from a CGI hologram tapdancing Ricardo Montalban, which I found exceedingly tasteless and rather jarring. The appearance of a hologram William Shatner to beat down the hologram Montalban while reciting the entire script of the second Star Trek film in reverse on fast forward was also rather unsettling. Though perhaps nothing is as unsettling as the villain of the film: a giant plastic statue of Iggy Azalea that randomly quotes passages of scripture with the words out of order and who farts dolphins. Her goal is to flood the universe with poorly rendered pictures of bagels, overthrow the government of every nation on Earth, and end all life as we know it. Much like the real life Azalea, this villain has no idea what she’s doing half the time, and mostly exists to look disturbing.

Really, I could go on forever, but I won’t. This film is an utterly, hilariously incoherent mess. I frankly don’t understand why Rodriguez and Malkovich thought this was a good film to seal away for future generations; we’re already leaving the world in a shitty enough state for the future, do we really need to leave behind our shitty movies too? This film is crap, but there are moments of brilliance and there is a tacky, trashy hilarity to it. Really, I recommend going to this link and watching it for yourself; I guarantee you’ll enjoy yourself at least a little.

[01sentencereviews]

Southland Tales (2006), Richard Kelly

This satire on America’s political system, media saturation, and mass surveillance (which was not nearly as widely known/recognized when this film was initially released) is a mess-and-a-fucking-half, depicting an overly-dramatized but knowingly silly and theatrical look at WWIII, alternative energy at the hands of pure evil, and the big bang, not whimper, which ends the world as we know it, and it’s overwhelming in eye-rolling in sloppily alluring ways, and it’s one of the movies that you finish, no matter how invested (or uninvested) you may have been throughout the over two hour runtime, that makes you go, “I’m glad that movie exists.”

Metacritic: 44, RT: 36%, IMDb: 5.5

[amoebo-id]

choice bits from his review on the film section of rateyourmusic.com

“Southland Tales, Miami Vice, and Inland Empire are all 10 years old now, and they still all feel New. Nobody's really taken on the digital expressionism of Miami Vice other than Mikey Mann in Blackhat, nobody's done for bit-rot-as-abject-terror what Lynch did in Inland Empire, and Southland Tales with all of its screens and graphix and UI, and shots of military personnel pacing on the beach next to laptops (mosaiced with graphix and UI) framing the content we see as well, has had more of an effect on video art than entertainment cinema. Which is not to say that Southland Tales is a good film just because it looks like art post-2010, but that it is as bold as those other two and prescient within a related but not directly linked field. There is something in it which speaks to high/low distinctions, which wants to define the future and also embody the time, and which hazards imagining the apocalypse as it might actually occur within our world- screens and military on a beach framed by scrolling headlines. Nobody would notice that the world had ended, and maybe it did and we didn't.

...

Southland Tales is just as broken and weird and horrible as everyone says, and it is probably not the masterpiece that its revisionists say that it is, but neither of these things matter to Southland Tales which is a very special broken weird horrible mess that means everything and nothing absolutely.”

i still havent even seen it but i take your posts as another strong rec

who put justin timberlake amy poehler and dwayne the rock in this movie

[greensparty]

BUFF Day 1

Green’s Party is proud to be covering the 2017 Boston Underground Film Festival, which kicked off last night!

Due to a prior engagement, I was not able to attend the Opening Night screening of Prevenge, but I will have a review of it at a later time. I heard it got quite a response from the audience. Then, they had a 10 year anniversary screening of Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales. I was going to attend that, but since I already saw it...and it’s 2.5 hours, I skipped it in favor of the Opening Night Party at ZuZu in Central Square. I caught up with some friends, filmmakers and attendees! Good time!

Tonight:

There’s a shorts package, then Hounds of Love. I plan to catch A Dark Song at 9:45pm. If I’m up for it, there’s an after-party at The Independent in Union Square, Somerville!

For info on BUFF: http://bostonunderground.org/

[bronzbabyy]

MOVIE REVIEW: Southland Tales

Southland Tales. As in Tales from Southern California, but a different California, where Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson is an action star turned prophet, Justin Timberlake is a veteran of Iraq, Sean-William Scott is actually a pair of twins, and Sarah Michelle-Gellar is a porn star named Krysta Now. “No-one rocks the cock like Krysta Now.” Or so we’re told. You never actually see her rocking the cock, and she is more than welcome.  

But the film doesn’t try and pander to the type of audience who want to see a flash of tits. Actually, it doesn’t pander to anyone. It is by far and away the most experimental film to come out of Hollywood recently, if you discount David Lynch.  

First of all, the film version of Southland Tales is actually chapters four, five and six. Hey if Star Wars did it… The first three chapters are found in the Southland Tales graphic novel, which actually makes more sense in itself and of the film as a whole, explaining the various theories behind the film, whereas the film itself drops the audience in the middle of a world that is far removed from the one we live in.

There is wi-fi energy known as Fluid Karma, a screenplay written while under the influence of drugs that foretells the End Of Days, and some freaky time travelling. So, everything you would expect from the brains behind Donnie Darko.

The film is a mess, but an interesting one. Part of the disconnected plot is concerned with the enigma that is the Book Of Revelations found in the Bible, and you could view this as its modern cinematic counterpart. Some view Revelations as a puzzle to be solved, containing a code to be dissected. Richard Kelly’s film is trying to push this, using the graphic novel and the film’s website to further the story and the puzzling plotlines within, quite literally forcing the audience to actively seek it out, or, as most people did, walk out of the cinema.

While this cross-media, story/puzzle thing is a bold move, the film should stand on its own legs, which, sadly, it does not. It's weird and wonderful, annoying and infuriating, littered with great performances and godawful ones. It will no doubt follow Darko in becoming a cult film, especially on DVD.

We do not recommend seeing this film, but you need to see it. It is the road less travelled.

[topsolarpanels]

Donnie Darko director Richard Kelly: ‘Sometimes films need is high time to marinate’

The director of the cult favorite Donnie Darko was once hailed as the next David Lynch. Now, as fans rediscover his 2007 flop Southland Tales, he explains why patience is still a virtue and Trumps victory was a grotesque inevitability

Talking with the writer and director Richard Kelly, its easy to steer the conversation toward the end of the world. After all, Kelly developed a fervent cult following( and alienated it) through tales of prophesied apocalypse 2001 s cult curio Donnie Darko and 2007 s cult-classic-in-the-making Southland Tales. But its not the collapsing buildings or rivers of blood that fascinate Kelly; its what comes right before. The sneaking anxiety. The normalizing of madnes. The casual disregard for your neighbor. The glob in your throat that signifies your newfound understanding that this was inevitable.

If those impressions sounds familiar in our current Trump-addled dystopia, that was not Kellys intention. Southland Tales, a post-9/ 11 satire melded with a retelling of the Book of Revelation that also includes a complex theory of hour traveling, was never meant to feel like a pre-game show for the next decade of global misery.

The sprawling narrative set in an alternative 2008 in which a nuclear attack on Abilene, Texas, triggers a third world war revolves around an amnesiac action starring named Boxer Santaros( played by Dwayne The Rock Johnson) who falls in love with a porn starring/ talkshow host/ entrepreneur/ pop superstar/ psychic who goes by the professional name Krysta Now( Sarah Michelle Gellar ), who has written a screenplay about the end times.

Oh, and theres also a government agency dedicated to spying on Americans, an underground neo-Marxist cult, alternative solutions energy source that might be ripping a hole in the space-time continuum, a United States military been supported by Hustler and Bud Light, and a mind-altering medication that keeps American soldiers docile and dependent. Jon Lovitz plays a racist cop, Seann William Scott plays identical twin police officers, Amy Poehler shows up as an anarchist improv comic, Justin Timberlake plays a drug-addled war veteran and Wallace Shawn of The Princess Bride fame is the antichrist( or a reasonable fax ).

Its overwhelming to process, and reflects so much of the nervousnes of our age, even if it isnt always pleasant to watch. I actually wanted it to be something that you would get lost in and that would sustain multiple viewings, Kelly tells me over dinner in Los Angeles. When discussing the movie, his eyes widen and he projects an impish yet tentative enthusiasm as though hes feeling out whether youre going to receive his ideas without judgment. Now, that ambition can be a self-defeating prophecy, as we watched clearly.

Kelly seems wistful about the experience of making and releasing the film, which, after a disastrous Cannes screening at which the movie was booed heavily, virtually lost theatrical distribution. We were in Boston, in pre-production on[ his Southland Tales follow-up] The Box, the weekend Southland Tales opened in 50 -some theaters. The upcoming Monday was our first day of principal photography. We were scrambling for our first day. We had done the AFI Fest premiere and they rushed me back to Boston. And then, I remember that morning, were shooting Cameron[ Diaz] and Frank Langella, this really emotional scene in the Boston Public Library. Someone comes up to me and tells me per-screen medians on Southland Tales. It was such a bummer. A screening Kelly attended with the actor James Marsden was attended by only four other people. Roger Ebert likened the cinema to the third day of a pitch session on velocity. One of the rare positive reviews of the movie came from the New York Times critic Manohla Dargis, who called it funny, audacious, messy and feverishly inspired.

I definitely remain proud of the ambition of it. I feel like sometimes things just require is high time to marinate, he says. The cinema has started to find a new audience. At the time of our meeting, hes in between hosting screenings of Southland Tales thanks to a roadshow tour of the film sponsored by the Alamo Drafthouse chain of arthouse theaters. The newfound appreciation for Southland Tales by both audiences and emerging pockets of critics hasnt yet translated to tangible opportunities for Kelly. I dont ever want to feel defeated or that Ive let the system defeat me, he says.

Sarah Michelle Gellar in Southland Tales. Photograph: Publicity image from cinema company

Southland Tales discovering an audience nearly 10 years later would not mark the first time one of Kellys cinemas gained esteem upon second( or third) glance. Donnie Darko grossed a scant $517,375 when it was released a month after 9/11. When it observed a huge audience on video and DVD, Kelly became a hot commodity, an heir apparent to the surrealist tradition of directors like David Lynch. Sometimes, the wind is at your back. Sometimes, its at your front, Kelly says about the ups and downs of his career. Darko remains his greatest up, a cinema thats become a touchstone work for the generation that grew up with it. Darko was a disaster at Sundance too, he tells me. No one remembers that, but it was. Im grateful for any rosy light of hindsight. I remember it took us virtually six months to sell the movie. It nearly ran immediately to the Starz network. We had to beg them to put it in theaters. Christopher Nolan stepped in and persuaded Newmarket to put it in theaters.

After those issues, Kelly could have gone the expected route and taken on a big-budget studio tentpole. He could have directed the sequel, which he declined to do( it aimed up being terrible and running straight-out to DVD ). Instead, he choice this peculiar, dense story about the decline of American power.

President-elect Donald Trump was merely a reality show curiosity when Southland Tales was released, but his mixture of profane and pious could easily have constructed him a character in the film. I think that Donald Trump is this grotesque inevitability that has gotten this far because there was something really, really dangerous concealing beneath the surface, that has been concealing beneath the surface for many, many years. The Republican Kelly imagined in Southland Tales were the neocon religious zealots that seem almost quaint to modern eyes. They seemed like the ultimate boogeymen in 2007, but as Kelly points out , no one in the Bush family would even show up at the RNC[ Republican national convention ].

What Southland Tales conveyed better than most politically charged films of the Bush era was the sentiment that it would get worse, that something had been unleashed that could not be put back. At the time that we were building Southland Tales, it was Iraq war and Britney Spears. That dichotomy on your Tv screen. The branding and everything was happening. It seemed inevitable that everyone would start to co-opt branding. Social media hadnt actually exploded yet. To watch legislators running after each other on Twitter, its bizarre. To insure Elizabeth Warren quoting the monorail on the Simpsons. To see legislators co-opting this millennial social media branding, its a blur of the lines.

Each of his three cinemas reflects that sheepish rebellion that is part of his personality. Donnie Darko was a mostly passive protagonist struggling against both the oppressive system of high school and the levers of fate that he could only pull at the cinemas climax. Boxer Santaros is a pawn in a conflict between fascism and socialism, religion and science, and love and demise. Eventually, those characters succumb to a power greater than any on Earth, something unknowable. So does Kelly think all this is down to higher power pulling the strings?

I dont believe any of this happened by accident. Thats just depressing and absurd, in my opinion, he answers. I do think theres a design to things, and we can never hope to know it in any of our lifetimes. Proportion of the challenge is trying to make sense of it. Thats whats cathartic for me as an artist, to try to make sense of it.

Read more: www.theguardian.com

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An American Dream: the Education of William Bowman (2016)

I’m almost certain that no one reading this will have heard of An American Dream: the Education of William Bowman, but if I can deter even one person from seeing this film, I’ll be happy. It’s one of the most maddening, pretentious, scramble-brained plot salad movies I’ve ever seen.

When high-school football player William (Jake Croker) receives a concussion during practice, he has a vision of what the world has to offer him. What he sees is a terrifying America, a place full of gun nuts, religious hypocrites, fear-mongering cabals, sex-obsessed beautiful women, reality-TV-loving degenerates and dubious morals.

This is what I like to call an “And Then” story. “… and then, since William doesn’t have a job anymore, he becomes homeless. And then, a girl who hosts this reality-TV show where she picks up homeless guys has sex with him. And then, he gets mugged so he loses all his money again. And then ….” You get the idea. The plot bounces from one thinly-veiled criticism about America to the next. It doesn’t matter if they follow each other logically, if the satire is poignant or well done, it just keeps going. On and on, in a tale that’s as shallow as a puddle and as subtle as an atomic bomb.

Writer/Director Ken Finkleman is Canadian and he’s made a film entirely set in America (actually shot in Ontario), about American people, criticizing virtually every aspect of America life. I don’t think you can do that, not without proving that you have your head so far up your rear end that it snakes up your digestive system infinitely. You really have to think you’re the king of all intellectuals to criticize a country you don’t even live in the way this film does. If at least the satire was smart, but it isn’t. You’ve figured out everything this film has to say 15 minutes in. The only thing that prevents you from being bored is that the plot is absolutely insane.

There’s no way you can predict what An American Dream has in stores next, except when it’s so obvious you can’t believe the idiotic protagonist hasn’t figured it out yet. We’re talking about Branded or Southland Tales-level insanity. I could summarize entire scenes but you’d never believe that what I’m putting down isn’t a complete fabrication. 

I’m not going to give this film the lowest score possible. It’s not that this disaster, which I saw in a deserted theater, has anything redeeming, it’s that I REALLY don’t want you to see it. If I tell you it’s a 0-star movie, you’ll be curious. I don’t want you to see An American Dream: the Education of William Bowman. (Theatrical version on the big screen, April 27, 2017)