Richard Kelly's Southland Tales

03/12/2007

Posted by Andrea Hubert

I've devised a very simple test to check if you're ready for Richard Kelly's Southland Tales. If you had to watch Donnie Darko more than twice to work out Kelly's weird time travel tunnel thing – you're not ready. And you probably never will be.

Southland Tales has been viewed as a contentious sophomore effort ever since the first version was savaged and booed by critics at Cannes last year. The new improved version, having been cut and remodelled more times than Victoria Beckham, is just as dense and impenetrable as the original, and just as mind blowing. Set in a futuristic Los Angeles, it weaves so many stories together, it's impossible to extract the strands and separate them into any semblance of a coherent plot - so the trick is not to bother. Instead, just let the wickedly creative vision of Richard Kelly wash over you like a giant toxic tsunami of film noir-esque weirdness, whilst enjoying a cast that takes some of Cinema Americana's finest creations (The Rock, Buffy, an ex-Mouseketeer, and Stiffler) and perverts them into something brand new.

It's 2008. Texas has been bombed into oblivion. In an apocalyptic California, cyberspace is under federal control of US IDENT, a think tank formed under the Patriot Act. A fuel shortage threatens to destroy the world until a mysterious German company arrives with an alternative product. Boxer Santaros (Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson) is a movie star with amnesia, twiddling his fingers and writing apocalyptic film scripts with porn-star-turned-reality-TV-star Krysta Now (Sarah Michelle Gellar) who’s in cahoots with a neo-Marxist group attempting to bring down the all powerful government (and if there's only one reason to see this film, it has to be watching Sarah Michelle Gellar say the words "If you want to fuck me, you can fuck me NOW"). Meanwhile, cop twins Roland and Ronald Taverner (Seann William Scott) are trying to find each other, and their memories. All explained by an animated overview and narrated by Justin Timberlake, who plays a drug-dealing war veteran with a penchant for musical numbers. And that's only a taster of the spider web that is Kelly's vision.

Kelly describes it as "a comedy about the end of the world". As pithy descriptions of impossible-to-describe films go, it's not half bad. Part thriller, part apocalyptic sci fi, part futuristic fairy tale, part musical, and so monumentally difficult to follow that it’s like taking acid with Lewis Carroll and Philip K Dick, whilst lost inside an eighties version of Space Invaders armed with a machine gun made of pudding. So to sum it up in a sentence that everyone can appreciate – it's like nothing you've ever seen before. Oh, and it's got Buffy the Vampire Slayer playing a porn star. Enough said.

Southland Tales is out on Friday December 7