Southland Tales



Written and directed
by Richard Kelly

The movie's title is kind of misleading, for few outside of California knows that the term “Southland” refers to the LA/San Diego area. To most people, it sounds like Dixie, and, that's where it starts, at a fourth of July party in Texas in the year 2005, where a nuclear bomb hits and we're sent reeling, (thanks to an animated narration by Justin Timberlake) into an alternate universe of the year 2008, which is a paranoid mixture of the present and the “Jetsons” cartoons.

Timberlake plays Private Pilot Abilene, who was in Iraq and accidentally injured Roland [or is it his twin brother Ronald?] Taverner(Seann William Scott), who is now a cop or a revolutionary or both, and Pilot himself is guarding the new perpetual motion tide energy machine created by the possibly evil Baron Von Westphalen (Wallace Shawn), his mother(Beth Grant) and some coked-up bimbo named Serpentine(Bai Ling), who are going to celebrate it's opening with a big party on their futuristic blimp.

But Pilot is a relatively minor character here, because this film is about Boxer Santaros(Dwayne “the Rock” Johnson), movie star and amnesiac prophet, who with the help of his pal Krysta (Sarah Michelle Gellar), porn star who naturally has a talk show on cable, has written a screenplay which predicted the entire mess, something his father-in-law Senator Bobby Frost(Holmes Osborne), the Republican Vice Presidential nominee, and his chief aide Vaughn Smallhouse(John Larroquette) no little or nothing about. However, since Frost's wife Nana Mae(Miranda Richardson)  runs cyberspace from her secret lair, she might know, however Boxer has gone missing, although he and Krysta are back in LA with a group of terrorists(Nora Dunn, Wood Harris, Curtis Armstrong, Beth Grant and some others) and is going out to research his movie by hanging out with a officer Roland [or is it his twin brother Ronald?] Taverner.

So we begin a futuristic version of James Joyce's “Ulysses” where Boxer's Leopold Bloom wanders around LA as people get murdered and the EVIL Conspiracy to Rule the World® does it's thing and we get closer to the apocalypse. Also, Justin Timberlake gets to a musical number just to remind everyone who he is.

Many years ago, there was a director named Robert Downey who did some really strange movies during the 1960s and '70s such as “Putney Swope” and “Greaser's Palace.” Today, he's better known as the father of a namesake son, but “Southland Tales” is of a piece with Downey's work. Granted, auteur Richard Kelly's previous work, “Donny Darko” has many elements which are recapitulated here, it's the meticulous incoherence of this film brings Downey to mind.

The film is weirdness for weirdness sake, and the cast of minor movie stars who think that this will give them better street creds just make this film seem even weirder. No wonder it's been sitting on a shelf for two years.




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