Southland Tales ***
Richard Kelly, 2007
US
@ Angelika Film Center
I was hoping this would open more widely so I wouldn't have to see it at the dank little hole that is the Angelika. Their cafe upstairs is nice enough but I've yet to find a decent theater in the three movies I've seen there. But since I didn't have anything to do on Sunday and I'd been waiting a year and a half to see this, I went ahead and crammed in to peer up at the tiny screen.
I feel like this most closely resembles a particularly deranged MAD TV sketch, two hours long, played totally straight with really high production values. Perhaps this feels most effective as an attempt to rediscover media-centric irony & satire with actual social commentary from a culture that's been mired in self-reference and knowing winks for so long that it doesn't even remember what the point was in the first place.
There are actually some similarities here to the execrable Domino, written by Richard Kelly and directed by Tony Scott. The climactic, terrorism-flavored explosion high above the glittering greed-based metropolis is probably the most noticeable. Also the abduction of celebrities (Ian Ziering and Brian Austin Green from 90210 go along for the ride in Domino) and frat boys as dei ex machina. [Max can feel free to comment on that pluralized latinization if he needs to.]
The artifice of the whole thing is foregrounded, particularly with the use of a lot of traditionally lowbrow stars in key roles. Even the titles are so garishly comix-futuristic that it's at once hard to take them seriously but also hard to dismiss them as a total joke, because they're kind of cool in a nerdy way. Too professional to be kitschy (is that even an option anymore with the democratization of professionalized tools of media production?), not flowery or "real" enough to be camp, it occupies a very strange (counter-)cultural space.
@ Village East Cinema, 12/17/07
On a second viewing, Southland Tales flows much better. I was able to pay more attention to the score, the various hidden jokes (eg the name of the arcade is "Fire," one of the hundreds of news headlines that comes up, dateline Kabul, is "Wannabe Terrorists Get Schooled in Destruction," there are posters featuring extremely Donnie Darko-esque rabbits in the neo-Marxist headquarters, etc. ad nauseam) though I failed to catch the Latin phrase on the side of the police car. It was also easier to fit relationships together. And although I appreciated it the first time through, this time I reacted more like I did when I read Slaughterhouse Five, like Kelly has possibly profound things to say or suggest about a deeply troubled world, but can only do so via seemingly ridiculous methods and genre.
I also wondered about the intended connection of the audience to the aura of the pop stars in the film. It seems to me that most of them got their starts or big moments in the late 90s. The Rock as a wrestler, Sarah Michelle Gellar as Buffy, Seann William Scott in American Pie, Cheri Oteri on Saturday Night Life (Amy Poehler a bit later, though), Will Sasso on Boy Meets World, and Moby (who did the score) released Play in that era. This group seems targeted pretty directly to the college kids (now graduated) who went crazy over Donnie Darko. It makes me wonder how I, a member of the target demographic, might experience the film differently from the critics currently championing it, all at least somewhat over the age of forty, such as Manohla Dargis, Amy Taubin, and J. Hoberman.
Steven Shaviro has posted a long and involved, extremely positive response at his blog. All have mentioned Inland Empire as one of the only movies working the same territory (Shaviro also mentions David Fincher, but I'm not sure I'd fully admit him to the club), so I'm pretty definitely going to have to get that from Netflix and commit to watching it two or three times. Everyone also makes a big point about Lynch's sound design, which is what I really loved about Eraserhead.
See also: IMDb | Southland Tales | Trailer | J. Hoberman review* | Manohla Dargis review | Steven Shaviro review
*Note that Metacritic, which gives the film a 43, rates Hoberman's glowing review a 70, and it's probably on his top ten list for the year. Then again, he's probably the toughest critic to summarize for a grade by a wide margin.
Richard Kelly, 2007
US
@ Angelika Film Center
I was hoping this would open more widely so I wouldn't have to see it at the dank little hole that is the Angelika. Their cafe upstairs is nice enough but I've yet to find a decent theater in the three movies I've seen there. But since I didn't have anything to do on Sunday and I'd been waiting a year and a half to see this, I went ahead and crammed in to peer up at the tiny screen.
I feel like this most closely resembles a particularly deranged MAD TV sketch, two hours long, played totally straight with really high production values. Perhaps this feels most effective as an attempt to rediscover media-centric irony & satire with actual social commentary from a culture that's been mired in self-reference and knowing winks for so long that it doesn't even remember what the point was in the first place.
There are actually some similarities here to the execrable Domino, written by Richard Kelly and directed by Tony Scott. The climactic, terrorism-flavored explosion high above the glittering greed-based metropolis is probably the most noticeable. Also the abduction of celebrities (Ian Ziering and Brian Austin Green from 90210 go along for the ride in Domino) and frat boys as dei ex machina. [Max can feel free to comment on that pluralized latinization if he needs to.]
The artifice of the whole thing is foregrounded, particularly with the use of a lot of traditionally lowbrow stars in key roles. Even the titles are so garishly comix-futuristic that it's at once hard to take them seriously but also hard to dismiss them as a total joke, because they're kind of cool in a nerdy way. Too professional to be kitschy (is that even an option anymore with the democratization of professionalized tools of media production?), not flowery or "real" enough to be camp, it occupies a very strange (counter-)cultural space.
@ Village East Cinema, 12/17/07
On a second viewing, Southland Tales flows much better. I was able to pay more attention to the score, the various hidden jokes (eg the name of the arcade is "Fire," one of the hundreds of news headlines that comes up, dateline Kabul, is "Wannabe Terrorists Get Schooled in Destruction," there are posters featuring extremely Donnie Darko-esque rabbits in the neo-Marxist headquarters, etc. ad nauseam) though I failed to catch the Latin phrase on the side of the police car. It was also easier to fit relationships together. And although I appreciated it the first time through, this time I reacted more like I did when I read Slaughterhouse Five, like Kelly has possibly profound things to say or suggest about a deeply troubled world, but can only do so via seemingly ridiculous methods and genre.
I also wondered about the intended connection of the audience to the aura of the pop stars in the film. It seems to me that most of them got their starts or big moments in the late 90s. The Rock as a wrestler, Sarah Michelle Gellar as Buffy, Seann William Scott in American Pie, Cheri Oteri on Saturday Night Life (Amy Poehler a bit later, though), Will Sasso on Boy Meets World, and Moby (who did the score) released Play in that era. This group seems targeted pretty directly to the college kids (now graduated) who went crazy over Donnie Darko. It makes me wonder how I, a member of the target demographic, might experience the film differently from the critics currently championing it, all at least somewhat over the age of forty, such as Manohla Dargis, Amy Taubin, and J. Hoberman.
Steven Shaviro has posted a long and involved, extremely positive response at his blog. All have mentioned Inland Empire as one of the only movies working the same territory (Shaviro also mentions David Fincher, but I'm not sure I'd fully admit him to the club), so I'm pretty definitely going to have to get that from Netflix and commit to watching it two or three times. Everyone also makes a big point about Lynch's sound design, which is what I really loved about Eraserhead.
See also: IMDb | Southland Tales | Trailer | J. Hoberman review* | Manohla Dargis review | Steven Shaviro review
*Note that Metacritic, which gives the film a 43, rates Hoberman's glowing review a 70, and it's probably on his top ten list for the year. Then again, he's probably the toughest critic to summarize for a grade by a wide margin.
Labels: 2007, 3 Stars, Richard Kelly, US
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