More on Southland Tales.

"What is Southland Tales? It's a romp, for starters, a genre pastiche, a blast of conscience," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times before recounting the film's nightmare reception in Cannes and springing to its defense:

American cinema is in the grip of a kind of moribund academicism, which helps explain why a fastidiously polished film like No Country for Old Men can receive such gushing praise from critics. Southland Tales isn't as smooth and tightly tuned as No Country, a film I admire with few reservations. Even so, I would rather watch a young filmmaker like [Richard] Kelly reach beyond the obvious, push past his and the audience's comfort zones, than follow the example of the Coens and elegantly art-direct yet one more murder for your viewing pleasure and mine. Certainly Southland Tales has more ideas, visual and intellectual, in a single scene than most American independent films have in their entirety, though that perhaps goes without saying.

Updated through 11/20.

Neither disaster nor masterpiece, Southland Tales again confirms that Mr Kelly, who made a startling feature debut with Donnie Darko, is one of the bright lights of his filmmaking generation.

"Here it is, at last: the worst film of the year," announces Michael Joshua Rowin in the L Magazine. "Don't worry, though - smart-aleck apologists (including certain senior NY-based critics who should know better) will inevitably praise Southland Tales as 'so off-the-wall it's subversive,' but Richard Kelly's sophomore film is really nothing but a train wreck."

"Like an angry hormonal teenager armed with a copy of Philip K Dick's Now Wait for Last Year and a $100 lifetime subscription to dailykos.com, wannabe enfant terrible Richard Kelly has emerged from his post-Donnie Darko silence with the sprawling, ungainly Southland Tales," counters Jeff Reichert at indieWIRE. "But while Southland seems intent on staking claim for itself as this generation's Blade Runner or Brazil, it stumbles on its way to greatness (far, far away from it, actually), instead playing like a terribly conceived single-theme-episode of Saturday Night Live co-hosted by Sarah Michelle Gellar and The Rock. Special musical guest: Moby."

"Sure, if you squint hard enough and engage your imagination, you may be able to construct a Southland Tales of the mind that's a lot more coherent than what's on screen, but it's not my job to review the movie that might have been," writes Jürgen Fauth. "As it stands, you'll probably leave the theater with a few new catch phrases about pimps, teen horniness, and the New York Times, a couple of belly laughs, and a nagging sense of disappointment."

Earlier: "Southland Tales" and reviews from Cannes and Fantastic Fest."

Updates: This new version "is a not inconsiderable improvement over the sprawling, sophomoric picture he brought to France," concedes Premiere's Glenn Kenny. "That said, the thing's still no damn good.... A good number of this film's defenders, incidentally, have been taking Kelly's cue and making noises that those who aren't with the program 'don't get it' or somehow resent it. The normally sensible J Hoberman of the Village Voice took the latter tack, which is disappointing - what's there to resent, really, about puling, know-somethingish post-adolescent angst? In any case, to paraphrase Robert Christgau, I dare you to spend money to find out which camp is right."

"Richard Kelly's Southland Tales is a mess, but it's a gonzo, unsettling, semi-coherent, barnstorming near-masterpiece that had me glued to my seat in anticipation of witnessing how far this multi-dimensional funhouse of madness could go," writes Brian Orndorf at Hollywood Bitchslap.

"Kelly must have had Karl Marx's remark - that 'history repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce' - in mind while writing because Southland Tales takes reality as far into absurdity as it will go without ever crossing the line into comedy," writes Carina Chocano in the Los Angeles Times. "If it had, it might have been as effective as Mike Judge's brilliant, buried Idiocracy. You get the sense that Kelly is too angry to really find any of it funny. It's easy to empathize with his position, not so easy to remain engrossed in a film that's occasionally inspired but ultimately manic and scattered."

"For all its headline-ripping, its political sophistication is roughly equivalent the kind you'd find in, well, a late-night discussion in a dorm room in possession of a Donnie Darko DVD," writes Mark Asch in Stop Smiling. "And, at around 140 minutes, it's incoherent. Not a 'mindfuck' like the eventually explicable Darko, but jumbled with allegiances, intersections, twists, switchbacks and characters whose presence in the scene seems a matter of contrivance for some uncertain purpose. It's as ultimately (and superfluously) sloppy as some Shaw Brothers adaptation of a wuxia novel."

"Particularly in the film's spectacular final 20 minutes, Southland Tales contains some of the most purely beautiful digital effects that I've ever seen on a big screen," writes Karina Longworth at the SpoutBlog. "And the rest of it? It really comes down to what you're willing to let Kelly get away with.... Southland Tales may fail on a lot of levels, but it's fairly successful as an epic satire on the very notion of 'alternative' culture. In practice, the Darko faithful may be the only viewers who will have patience enough to deconstruct Kelly's vision, but I suspect that he's not playing to his base so much as trying to shake it."

"Re-edited to minimize such nuttier notions such as infant flatulence's triggering the Apocalypse, Richard Kelly's wildly ambitious and widely loathed Southland Tales now seems among the most believable works of film futurism ever made in this country. Indeed, sci-fi satire hasn't come so dangerously close to imagining reality since Terry Gilliam brought Brazil to a horrified Hollywood in 1985," writes Rob Nelson, who also interviews Kelly for the Boston Phoenix.

Updates, 11/15: "Kelly's partisans acknowledge that Southland Tales is 'messy,' but insist that its young (31) director is trying to 'say a lot' about politics and the culture," writes Scott Foundas in the LA Weekly. "Having seen the film again, in its re-cut version, I remain unconvinced. As I wrote from Cannes, Kelly seems to think that to merely mention Fallujah or global warming - or to name a bank after Karl Rove - is the same as actually having an opinion about them, and his all-you-can-eat buffet of cinematic in-references (to say nothing of his Bartlett's-style quoting of Eliot, Yeats and the Book of Revelation) operates on pretty much the same superficial level."

"By relying on mainstream codes to convey his ideas about civilization, Southland Tales becomes a mainstream creation, albeit a confusing one," writes Eric Kohn at the Reeler. "Southland Tales really needs to be seen to be believed, or at least admired for its ambition."

For Sam Adams, writing in the Philadelphia City Paper, Southland Tales "is a movie of limitless ambition and dazzling ineptitude, a movie of ideas with no ideas to speak of... [F]or all its artistic daring, the movie places very little at risk. Trolling through LA's underbelly with the windows rolled up, Southland is a spoiled suburbanite's Repo Man."

Interviews with Kelly: Mark Olsen (LAT) and Spencer Parsons (Austin Chronicle).

"[W]riting Southland Tales off would be too easy," argues Victoria Large at Not Coming to a Theater Near You. "So would defensively disregarding the film's faults in an attempt to salvage it as a kind of misunderstood masterpiece, the way that some critics inevitably do once a work has been sufficiently savaged by a majority of pundits. The truth about Southland Tales lies - as it often does with messy films like this one – somewhere between these two extremes."

Updates, 11/16: "It is indeed a muddled, overreaching, and astoundingly pretentious mess," writes Bradley Steinbacher in the Stranger. "But there's also a lot of talent on display, and few films are as likely to provoke, and even enrage, viewers this year."

"About a third of Southland retains Darko's foreboding tone, which Kelly handles masterfully," writes Keith Phipps at the AV Club. "The other two-thirds are given over to broad comedy and surprisingly obvious satire, all played to the hilt by a cast that never appears to be on the same page."

"It's fun for an Angeleno to watch the apocalypse playing out in familiar nearby locations," writes Andy Klein in the LA CityBeat. "And there are some strong bits within. But they get lost in the frantic rush of plot complications and the constant cultural references, many of which seem more 'clever' than helpful."

"I recommend that Kelly keep right on cutting until he whittles it down to a ukulele pick," suggests Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times.

"It's undeniable that Southland Tales is high-concept filmmaking," writes John Constantine for Nerve. "But a great high-concept movie can be summed up in a single sentence, and Southland Tales is too confused to be summed up in two hours and twenty minutes."

Updates, 11/20: "The best thing about Southland Tales is that it allows one to cherry-pick from a buffet of goony delights," writes Chris Barsanti in Film Journal International. "The worst thing about Southland Tales is that it seems ultimately no more than an agglomeration of such high-caloric, giddy treats; the buzz, once it becomes clear that little will cohere, eventually wears off."

"Southland Tales is a disaster, and a damningly dull one at that," writes Michael Atkinson. "[T]he problem with Kelly's film is simple: it's incoherent, not in a broad view, which is easy to take and sometimes easy to enjoy, but within virtually each and every scene."

Posted by dwhudson at November 14, 2007 1:13 AM