Southland Tales

There are plenty of bad movies out there.  But Southland Tales is a truly WTF viewing experience so incomprehensibly convoluted you're not quite sure what to think.  Director Richard Kelly's debut feature, Donnie Darko (2001) made him the darling of the indie circuit, gathering a cult of likeminded Lynchian followers who adored the film's esoteric aesthetic involving time-travel, teen angst and the apocalypse.  But it was six years before he got another shot to prove his first success was no fluke.  Unfortunately, it turns out, it was. 

Ostensibly a black comedy skewering the concepts of celebrity, politics and terrorism, Southland Tales features one of those IMDB cast lists that defies all probability, including Dwayne Johnson, Justin Timberlake, Mandy Moore, Sarah Michelle Geller and a handful of second tier SNL comedians.  There's a plot involving kidnapping, political subterfuge, porn stars and a tear in the space-time continuum, but Kelly uses it more like a dry erase board, removing and rearranging connections in a pretentiously stream of conscious fashion.

 

There are a few fun moments to pull out of this hectic grab bag of sound and fury, like the unexplained musical segment with Timberlake and the parade of familiar faces like John Larroquette, Christopher Lambert, Wallace Shaw and Poltergeist's Zelda Rubinstein.  It's obvious Kelly is enamored with the absurd, but hardly any of this plays as comedy, let alone satire...which requires an entirely different set of skills.  Southland Tales operates on an entirely unique cinematic wavelength; good, bad or indifferent. 

 

Arrow Video's two-disc limited edition Blu-ray features a new 2K restoration approved by Kelly and DP Steven Poster, including both the 145-minute theatrical cut and the 160-minute Cannes cut.  Additional extras include an audio commentary, new in-depth retrospective (that makes the feature much more interesting to watch afterwards), archival featurettes and collector's booklet.

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