Southland Tales.

"A doom-ridden pulp cabalist with a dark sense of purpose as well as humor, Richard Kelly shoots the moon with his rich, strange, and very funny sci-fi social satire, Southland Tales," writes J Hoberman in the Voice. "[F]lirting with sensory overload and predicated on a familiarity with American TV, political rhetoric, and religious cant, it's a movie without a recognizable genre or ready-made demographic.... Southland Tales is obsessed but not overweening, free-associational yet confident. After seeing it in Cannes, I wrote that 'there hasn't been anything comparable in American movies since Mulholland Drive' - a movie that Kelly references nearly as often as Kiss Me Deadly and The Manchurian Candidate."

Updated through 11/13.

"If Donnie Darko was Kelly's Eraserhead, then maybe Southland Tales is his Dune, an unfortunate folly before a more substantial, velveteen Blue period," suggests Ed Gonzalez in Slant. "Southland Tales is itself no more Lynchian than a big-bosomed Rebekah Del Rio singing the national anthem during the film's climax, and nowhere near as clever, irreverent, or purposeful as Mike Judge's similarly themed Idiocracy."

"[N]ow that this train wreck is here, the disaster that is Southland Tales raises some interesting issues." These are the ones DK Holm looks at for the Vancouver Voice: "The End of the Auteur Theory," "Novelty Casting," "Homage Frenzy," "Bad Influences," "The SNL Curse" and "The Sin of Pretentiousness."

Earlier: Reviews from Cannes and Fantastic Fest.

Update: The press notes "make for an amusing subway ride back to Vulture HQ, as we counted the number of times the notes tried to remind us that, whatever we thought of the movie, it was important to remember that the whole thing was Richard Kelly's idea, and the blame for Southland Tales falls squarely on him (and no one else)." Via Movie City News.

Update, 11/7: Michael Koresky at Reverse Shot:

The term "sophomore slump" doesn't even begin to describe the catastrophic lengths Kelly goes to prove himself (to himself and his hopefully loyal fans) with Southland Tales. Neither utterly disingenuous nor completely honest in its political aims, it falls somewhere in the lukewarm middle. Southland Tales may be closer to the disaster its noisy Cannes detractors had so fervently hissed about back in 2006... than the hellzapoppin American crassterpiece that J Hoberman and Amy Taubin have been championing since day two - yet neither response gets us anywhere with a film as wide-ranging, confused, and infantile as Southland Tales, which deserves a little more parsing out.... The film seems to embrace itself as a clever commentary on everything from partisan politics to global warming to star texts, and this is where it goes from charmlessly abnormal to downright irritating.

Update, 11/9: At Nerve, Peter Smith saw Southland Tales "last week, eager to love it, and I hated it. It is astoundingly misguided, a muddle of half-baked ideas, undeveloped characters and plots that go nowhere. I hated it so much that I almost think you should see it." At any rate, he interviews Kelly, who "took my hostile questioning without batting an eye."

Update, 11/10: The Guardian's Danny Leigh has a bone to pick with DK Holm: "[I]f Southland Tales is pretentious, well, it can join forces with Fassbinder, David Lynch, Zodiac, Apocalypse Now, Michael Haneke and Lynne Ramsay - with The Heartbreak Kid and 300 for the opposition. I know which side I'll be on when it kicks off - and I'll be quoting Baudrillard when it does."

Update, 11/12: "Kelly aims high and must have shot off his own ear, which is the only way to account for the dialogue," writes David Edelstein in New York. "Southland Tales doesn't go off the rails because it never has rails to go off."

Update, 11/13: "With so many different threads and so little driving the movie... Southland Tales basically adds up to the sum of its gags and ideas," writes Matt Singer at IFC News. "Southland Tales defies good and bad categorization because it's hard to tell at any moment whether Kelly even wants to be good, or minds being bad, or even cares which is which."

Posted by dwhudson at November 6, 2007 1:39 PM