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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Brilliant Nonsense, 11 Oct 2008
This film has really stuck with me. At first I didn't want to see it because the cast sounded awful (Buffy, a wrestler, that guy from American Pie, Justin Timberlake) but it blew me away. Absolutely bizarre, totally pretentious and tremendous fun. It aims for big, big things and doesn't quite pull it off. But I love it for being so obstinate and audacious in a world of boring, predictable films!!
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28 of 32 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Will Blow Your Mind... If You Want It To, 4 Jan 2008
Southland Tales is a film that i have always had faith in. Since i heard about its conception in late 2005 and having just watched Richard Kellys other film and debut Donnie Darko, I was eager to see what the mind behind this amazing film would do next. Despite its infamous reception at the Cannes film festival in 2006 i was determined to judge it myself. Critical reception of the films early release was almost entirely negative. Critics complainet the film was overlong, confusing and hopeless. A year later in December 2007 the film was finally released in the UK with an added 90 effects shots and an inflated budget. The film had also been trimmed and restructured, with a new animated opening known as the "Doomsday Scenario Interface" shedding light on the films backstory previously kept in the dark to viewers of the innitial, unfinished cut. What i must say about the film is i could see why most people would have a problem with it. Kelly has filled the film with ideas, comments on almost every aspect of our culture, genre hops and casting against type (i will come back to that last one later).
The film opens with a cheerful barbecue in Abilene, Texas. Shot on home video camera by a kid the timer informs us that it is the 4th of July 2005. That camera takes us through a happy american independance day party. Fireworks crackle, children laugh and play and adults chat eagerly. Suddenly the festivities are shattered by a massive nuclear mushroom cloud tearing out of the horizon as the people look on in horror. An animated slideshow called the "Doomsday Scenario Interface" then appears. We learn that the nuclear atttack we witnessed was one of two, the other in El Paso. The interface slides through dates as a solem voiced man describes americas descent into war and paranoia. We are told that the patriot act has formed a think-tank known as USIdent, taking control of the police and monitoring everything. We also discover that the war that broke out as a result of the nuclear attacks has restricted American access to oil. The film then cuts to Los Angeles where a man named Boxer Santaros has woken up on a beach. The man narrating the film is then shown to be "Pilot Abilene", a disfigured gulf war veteran played by a wonderfully creepy Justin Timberlake. He narrates the film from his post atop a large gun. The film also follows a man named Roland Taverner played by Sean William Scott. Teverner is trying to find his identical twin brother. Other characters include a psycic ex porn star played by Sarah Michelle Gellar, Christopher Lambert as an arms dealer selling guns from an icecream truck and Wallace Shawn as a mad german scientist known as Baron Von Westphalen.
I will not bore you with a detailed description of the entire plot as we will be here all year. Other concerns of the film are a massive machine called Utopia III, designed to produce an energy source from the ocean called Fluid Karma, a Time-Travel conspiracy and a Neo-Marxist revolution against the police state, ph and lest we forget THE END OF THE WORLD!
Kelly made a great move in casting actors against type, almost every character in the film is recognisable and the cast consist of comedy actors and singers etc. An example being the casting of John Lovitz (Saturday Night Live, Rat Race) As a racist, murdering police officer.
Standout elements of this film are:
suprising performances from its cast (Justin Timberlake in particular who i now respect as an actor)
beautiful atmospheric music from Moby
a dreamlike finale
a wonderfully shot musical sequence
I deepy urge you to ignore negative responses to this film and pass your own judgement, as a wise man once said "Don't knock it 'till youv'e tried it", don't worry if it doesn't make sense to you the first time round it is truly made to be watched more than once. Watch it and be amazed if you aren't amazed then rest knowing you jsut watched the most original film we have had for a very long time.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
A flawed, but beautiful, mess., 2 Aug 2008
Whilst many of the reviews I'd seen for this film were resoundingly negative, I was a big fan of Donnie Darko and I noticed that many of the people who liked it referred to other artists I liked such as Philip.K. Dick and David Lynch when discussing this film. So I took a gamble and ordered it.
And indeed, the reviews here on Amazon are right. Yes, all of them. This isn't just a Marmite movie, which people either love or hate, it's a movie that has so many strengths and weaknesses that it's possible to have any, and all, opinions about it simultaneously.
The cast have received unfair criticism. While I've never been a fan of either the Rock or Seann William Scott, they turn in solid, affecting performances as do other "lightweight" actors like Sarah Michelle Gellar, Justin Timberlake and a wonderfully creepy Jon Lovitz. Similarly, the cinematography and direction are excellent - every shot is wonderfully framed. However, even here limitations in Kelly's style are evident - there are several examples of the "slow motion / wandering" camera that he used to great effect in Darko, and uses again here. It IS great, but one has to wonder how limited his directorial vocabulary if his style is already so evident after only two films. The musical interludes, are again, as in Darko, beautifully filmed and the score is a mood-enhancing, integral part of the movie. And the SFX are excellent.
So a joy to look at, with an interesting cast on top form. However, where the film falls down is the script. It's ambitious, yes, which is always a bonus. And there are some nice allusions to literature and music. But overall it has a hotchpotch of a plot that seems to have been so big and sprawling that it got away from Kelly and he was unable to get far enough away from the film to see it as a whole, resulting in an incoherent mess that has no meaning, which then tries to hide behind this lack of meaning by pretending it's some kind of cinematic collage, claiming that, "Ah, but the meaning is here - it's just opaque. Just try and see it, if you are bright enough."
Unfortunately, as others have said there is a very strong element of Emperor's New Clothes, here - even Mulholland Drive and PKD's novels had SOME sense of meaning to them. Unfortunately, there isn't one to this film. Indeed, even in the sole DVD Extra, a "Making of featurette", several of the stars claim that they have no idea what the film is about, Lovitz seeming to think that as his individual scenes made sense that there must be some hidden meaning to the film as a whole that he can not grasp. And this is where the film falls down. Someone in the production should have sat Kelly down and actually asked him what he was trying to do with Southland Tales. Instead, everyone seems to have just assumed that he knew what he was doing and that there was some hidden meaning to it all. There isn't.
So worth seeing, then but certainly not the work of genius that many have tried to claim.
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