A Nameless Blog

Over the weekend, I volunteered for the Phoenix Film Foundation’s horror and sci-fi film fest.  The big event Sunday night was the “Super Secret Premiere” of Southland Tales.  The “super secret” part worked quite well — nobody had any idea what they were going to watch.  People were wondering aloud whether it’d be Alien vs. Predator or Saw IV, so I was pretty happy that it ended up being neither of them.  After the movie ended, though, I wondered whether I’d be better off if it had been Saw IV.

I say this because Southland Tales is the strangest piece of crap I’ve ever seen.  It’s a paranoid delusion with what appeared to be a ninety billion-dollar budget.  A bloated farce of a picture that couldn’t decide whether it was a farce.  It was so far up its own ass, it seemed to enjoy it.  It was slow and uninteresting, and I disagree with just about every argument and fear it presented.  Still, I think it’s important that every cinephile see it.  Everyone must subject themselves to Southland Tales, if only because there’s nothing else like it.

How weird is it?  Here’s a partial list of the cast: The Rock, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Mandy Moore, and Seann William Scott.  Okay… now add Cheri Oteri and Amy Poehler.  And Kevin Smith.  And Will Sasso from Mad TV.  And Nora Dunn, John Laroquette, Bai Ling, Jon Lovitz, and Justin Timberlake as the most distracting narrator in history.  Even the casting director couldn’t decide what kind of movie this would be.

Let me summarize it like this: it feels like a far-left, moralistic, Republican-hating college student had a fever dream about everything he could possibly dislike about America (from consumerism to pornography to… well, Republicans, obviously) and associated it with generous readings of the book of Revelation.

The premise is simple: after Texas gets nuked by… somebody, World War Three begins (thus ushering in the apocalypse).  Dubya’s Republican-controlled government reacts by ramping up the Patriot Act and turning the nation into a fractured collection of police states.  Some megalomaniacal baron played by Wallace Shawn (the nasally bald guy from The Princess Bride) develops unlimited wireless fuel that somehow also becomes a popular and dangerous recreational drug among the surviving former soldiers on whom the substance was tested.  Seriously.  What’s amazing is that every tiny detail in the plot is like that — incredibly overthought, yet brainless.  Sarah Michelle Gellar is a porn star with an issues-oriented talk show that’s so intentionally vapid that it gets swallowed by its own cheekiness.  Amy Poehler is a Marxist performance artist who dies while trying to fake her own death.  The Rock is a valiant former soldier who became a movie star and married a presidential candidate’s daughter

But then, big things about the movie are unforgivably underthought.  The movie’s supposed to take place in 2008, but it most charitably can be called an alternative-reality view of America had Republicans maintained control and became outright fascists.  Still, the style and technology suggest that it’s supposed to be far into the future.  Ignoring that isn’t too hard compared to the location — everything takes place in or near California and the only man who thinks he can save humanity (The Rock) is a blockheaded soldier/actor who wrote a screenplay that you’re meant to understand as simultaneously terrible and prophetic: trite and unreadable, but still the key to our salvation.

The movie is filled with these contradictions of tone and reason, which makes me wonder whether the director intended it to be not only ironic, but so ironic that nothing about it can possibly be taken seriously.  It presents itself as a tired condemnation of right-wing ideology, but relishes so much in the overblown conventions of dystopian film that it almost (almost) becomes a brilliant satire of the conventions of dystopian films.

What’s funny is, I can already hear the right-wing loudmouths decrying Southland Tales as dishonest and irresponsible, ignoring the inconsistent tone, awkward storytelling, and questionable casting.  In other words, they’ll do what conservatives tend to do for just about every controversy — they’ll be juuust on the side of correctness, but still miss the point completely.  If they get too loud with their outrage, I fear a liberal backlash that could mirror the right’s love of The Passion of the Christ.  The last thing we need is another group of uneducated ideologues falling in love with a movie simply because of the other side’s hatred for it.

I hope you understand my own hatred, confusion, and grudging respect for this film.  I haven’t seen another film that so obviously looks like it was made by committee.  It’s a damning diatribe against Dubya, a parody of our fears, a farce of that parody, a farce of that farce, a color-saturated modern rock opera, a black comedy that relies on slapstick and crude humor, and a ham-fisted Biblical allegory.  Oh, and it used actors from sketch comedy, pop music, teen movies, and action flicks, and had each one perform roughly within his accustomed type.  It wasn’t a movie — it was a clusterfuck.

Okay, now the part where I convince you all to watch this movie anyway.  The number-one reason to see it: it will give you a LOT to bitch about, and I would be happy to hear your bitchings.  The film threw so much shit at me, I can’t get it all with the few friends of mine who saw it.  Another reason: it’s legitimately pretty.  The images and effects are unlike any I’ve seen before.  It’s so pretty, I would sit through it again just to see a few memorable scenes.

As you can see, the movie has left me conflicted — it had a few elements that were so beautiful and unexpected, it made me angry that it was framed by the most ill-conceived and nonsensical story I’ve seen.  It’s fascinating for its failures and almost enjoyable in its excess.  Everyone should see this movie, but everyone should also hate it.  I don’t want it to do well in the box office, so please only see it if you have taste.

I’m serious.  See the movie when it comes out, but avoid paying for it if you can.  If you consider yourself a movie buff, you need to see it in a theater.  You might not know what to make of it, and you’ll probably hate it — but you’ll be glad you saw it.

-Darrell

This entry was posted on Monday, October 22nd, 2007 at 5:47 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.