The fate of Southland

Southland Tales (2006)

Richard Kelly made a strong impact with his debut film Donnie Darko. So I was waiting to see what he comes up with the next one. Southland Tales got it's first release in Cannes 2006, but because of bad reviews the director took it back to the editing room and re-edited it for over a year. At this point I wasn't really happy because usually a director who re-edits his own movie to suit the critics better is a sell off. Well the release of the movie slipped past me without noticing it, thou I remember reading one review of it which wasn't too kind for it. Until one day I saw it in the dicount bin of a local super market. Well I took it and it laid on my table for weeks and at some points I was even wondering should I watch it at all if it sucks too much. The cover of the movie didn't really help as there's Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, Sean William Scott and Sarah Michelle Gellar posing in it. Not exactly a great cast if you know what I mean. Today I had the time and the mood for it so I watched it. Wow is probably the best word to describe it, in both it's good meaning and it's bad. This is one of those movies you either love or hate. I would have loved it, but a few things were not right. First of all the cast, sure they did an ok job, especially Sean William Scott was a big positive surprise, but come on I bet he could have found better persons for the roles than these posers. There's lots of better actors and actresses on smaller roles, for example half of the cast of SNL and so on, but as there's so many characters none of them really got to shine out. So the acting wasn't really strong. Second thing that bothered me was that there was too many stories and different points squeezed into this film that it was at times really hard to follow. But this wasn't all the time bad as the third problem it had was that the "big story" was so stupid that those smaller details saved a lot. So on with the good things. I really loved the mood of the film, not as brilliant as in Donnie Darko, but it's there and you can feel it. It surely wasn't boring as it's almost like a way over 2 hour music video, at points this actually worked really well. The small stuff that's going on all the time in the background is actually quite brilliant at times. It also raised some really valid points about a future that might not be as distant as it looks in the movie. I also loved some of the quite dark humour it had and especially that car advertisement was a work of a genius. Like I said, it would be easy to give this one the full points or none at all, but I'm going for the just above average as I was quite entertained and I bet I'm going to watch this one again some day.
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And this is of course a good place to make a quick review of Richard Kelly's other film.



Donnie Darko (2001)

This will be quite short as this is one of my all time favourites. The mood is just unbeatable, a classic already and a must see for everyone.
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