... is such a glaringly obvious point of comparison I have no excuse for not noticing it. Anyway, thanks.

Critics have been all over the map on this movie; you can read the entries on the GreenCine Daily blog to get a good sense of the range. Maybe it's wimpy to straddle the fence, but that's where I find myself.

Just personally, I've had to work around my disappointment that Kelly isn't the director he seemed to be at first glance (I heartily agree that the director's cut of Donnie Darko is inferior to the original release) with my amazement of how much better Southland has become.

I've done my best to forget about the infamous Cannes screening that provoked hissing and booing. Consider that it started at 8:30 AM, that the film was clearly unfinished and ran almost 3 hours, and that probably half the audience was working on less than 5 hours of sleep. A movie has to be well-crafted and incredibly *commanding* to work in that situation. It was a tough, tough environment to unveil a clunky, naive, frustrating project that still needed a lot of TLC.

There seems to be a certain theme among more "intellectual" critics (I guess J. Hoberman, and probably Manohla Dargis) who are defending the film by saying or suggesting that its most awkward elements, like the incredibly terrible dialogue, are deliberate and in some way subversive. I'm not going too far down that road. It reminds me of some ridiculous essay somebody once wrote in Film Comment arguing that the badly synched dialogue in Dario Argento's films was some kind of postmodern displacement technique, where the author seemed unaware that nearly all Italian films at the time had dubbed dialogue, most of it pretty careless.

There are moments where Kelly is clearly spoofing action-movie dialogue, as in most of the Rock's speeches. In general, though, the purpose of the clunky, expositional dialogue and relentless voiceover is never clear. I can't tell whether Kelly is deliberately sabotaging all normal movie conventions or just managing them incompetently, and given that, it really doesn't matter which it is. (Did the person who wrote those terrific family scenes in Donnie Darko really write this?) When you watch, I don't know, a Kenneth Anger film or a '60s Godard film or a Peter Greenaway film, it never seems like they're trying to make a normal motion-picture entertainment and just can't do it.

Kelly isn't in their league, in various ways. He's so ambitious that I suspect he's trying to be all things to all viewers: a pop entertainment, a cult puzzle-movie, a self-subverting intellectual exercise. While I don't think Southland works too well on any of those levels, people will be marveling at this movie for years to come, and for many reasons.

Again, the principal problem most viewers will find in Southland is the absence of a central character whose fate you care two shits about. Certainly there are movies that don't require a compelling & sympathetic central character, and those include the kinds of movies that brainiacs like J. Hoberman (and, well, me) tend to like. But this kind of movie needs a hero. Kelly has taken the main thing that made Donnie Darko work and chucked it out. That's brave. And also dumb.

Hey, it looks terrific. And it's gone from being a potential career-ending disaster to something much more complicated and interesting. (Kelly is apparently already at work on a studio film called "The Box," with Cameron Diaz.)

Well, my late father (a linguist) would have agreed with you about "there's lots." But I believe it hits the ear as perfectly reasonable colloquial American English, which is the relevant standard here. Two positions with no middle ground, I suppose.

On Revolver: Sounds like this letter-writer hasn't seen it. It's nuts and won't make any money, but it's also a surprisingly ambitious attempt to blend Memento, The Matrix and the gangster-movie tradition. Might well do better among Yank viewers than Brits, partly because its streak of New Age psychology seems far more American than English. One could speculate that Mr Ritchie's wife played a role therein, but I have no idea whether that's true.

Looks like Fargo made about $51.7M -- isn't it bigger than O Brother?

I was comparing U.S. grosses, since the info is more easily gettable and comparable. Fargo grossed $24.6M domestically (or so says IMDB), and a lot more overseas after its parade of Oscars. It's not entirely clear to me, based on what I can find with a quick search, which of those two films made more money worldwide, but O Brother! commenced its global run, at least, with a big lead.