Tuesday, May 06, 2008
Southland Tales: The Ten Point DVD Review
- Never heard of it? That’s not surprising. Even though it came from the mind that brought us Donnie Darko (brilliant), Southland Tales got exceptionally poor reviews along with a limited release.
- It’s also a sprawling, messy, occasionally incomprehensible film that makes his previous work look like simplistic by comparison.
- It’s also, occasionally, one of the funniest looks at the apocalypse that you’re likely to come across.
- The acting (and there is at least a metric ton of famous folks going through this movie--some of them remarkably good actors) is a little out of step by design as is the slightly stilted script. When it works, it catches an edge of social commentary that is hard to ignore. When it doesn’t work, it jars you out of the “reality” of the movie almost painfully.
- Visually intriguing, filled with strange characters, and shot with a more careful eye than the messy feel might otherwise indicate.
- The barbs thrown at popular obsession with politics, idiotic and misguided “revolutionaries”, the mass media, entertainment, and some painfully real and moronic social commentary from TV talking heads, not to mention sly jabs at forced patriotism and government encroachment on freedom doesn’t always hit the targets. When it does, though, there are little tiny moments of perfection--witness especially scenes like the porn star talking heads discussing how the morning after pill becomes the morning before pill and a staged double murder that goes ludicrously wrong. Some of this stuff is really going to stick with you--if you can get past the rougher bits.
- Interspersed with ads, news clips, various forms of cartoons, and a few moments of merely watching TV, it might be the qualitative decline and pervasive nature of media that takes the biggest, most direct hits.
- Like DD, it’s obsessed with people who find themselves out of synch with their own lives. One particularly telling scene has a man staring into a mirror, watching his own movements which are happening in the mirror just a second behind his real movements.
- Yes, that was Colorado’s own Big Head Todd and the Monsters singing “Broken Hearted Saviour” that you heard for a few moments there. Good stuff.
- It’s a giant, ambitious mess--and I admire giant, ambitious messes. That doesn’t mean that it’s a success, though. Southland Tales isn’t the equal of Donnie Darko and most of the criticisms leveled at it are entirely earned. I don’t think it’s a complete failure, though--and, even with its shortcomings, I’ll be buying the DVD.
- Bonus Point: Don’t read that last as a blanket suggestion for everyone else to see it. No film short on coherent narrative or accessible message, gifted with awkward moments that don’t even seem like part of the rest of the film, and entirely indecipherable politics (when it seems to be trying to make a political point of some kind) is ever going to reach a big market. It takes a peculiar mind to appreciate this particular brand of surreal filmmaking.
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