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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
After reading O'Hehir's description of the plot, the first movie that came to mind for me was "Buckaroo Banzai." I smell a cult movie... With Wallace Shawn in a key role, wearing makeup no less, I'm there. (Wallace Shawn is brilliant in everything he does.)
I re-watched "Donnie Darko" recently, and realized its total mish-mash of elements is why I love it. The science-fiction, time-travel story is sort of incidental to what really matters, the creepy tone and phantasmagoria of characters and quotable lines like "Sometimes I question your commitment to Sparkle Motion!" And oh yeah, that awesome rabbit face.
When they released the Director's Cut of "Donnie Darko," I dutifully headed to the movie theater to check it out. I was very disappointed -- it contained too much information, a bland conversation between Donnie and his shrink about the existence of God, and other bloated details that dulled the movie's intrigue. Whoever edited down the studio release sculpted "Donnie Darko" into a twisted glass of absinthe worth chugging again and again.
I meant to write one more sentence: It sounds like "Southland Tales" has been given a similar fine-tuning.
But based upon O'Hehir's description alone, this movie is clearly a piece of shit. After reveling in the theatrical version of "Donnie Darko", and then cringing at the "Director's Cut" because it was obvious that, for perhaps the firt time ever, the studio knew more than the director did, I am quite sure that this version of this film will be a horrifying time-waster.
It was about redemption. Sorry you missed that.
And Noah's films are like parlor stories. It's only when you're done watching them you realize how trite and mundane yet another story about divorce is.
This movie was completely pointless. If Rabbit Guy doesn't go back in time and save Donnie then Donnie doesn't cause Rabbit Guy's death later on. So what was the purpose of Rabbit Guy doing that? By his interference in past events he causes his own death which seems pretty stupid. I consider myself a pretty sophisticated moviegoer but why people think this is such a great film is beyond me.
Sorry I didn't miss it.
I get that not everybody has the same taste (and some seem convinced that theirs is superior to others based on opinions about one movie), but only in the film industry can you fail the first time out of the gate as spectacularly as this guy has failed and get a bigger and better second chance to fail all over again by spending even more money to do the exact same thing.
He's not a genius. He's not even a competent filmmaker. He doesn't even steal ideas as well as the Wachowskis, for instance. Which means, in what will seem like no time at all, we'll all be back here discussing his third movie, too.
Or was it a typo? Or was I playing with the idea of time and space and their expression through language?
Quick -- somebody get me a two-picture deal!
Donnie doesn't go back in time to save himself, he goes back in time to sacrifice himself. He has to set things right so that his younger sister doesn't get molested by Patrick Swayze.
... 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.)
Much of the initial coverage about Fort Hood turned out to be wrong. Is there anything wrong with that?
The accountability imposed by another country for the CIA's kidnapping and torture reveals much about our own.
Fox News' morning show plays to type, talking about whether Muslims in the Army should face "special debriefings"
The survivor and author is upset about comparisons some on the right are making to genocide
Once seen as a lunatic fringe, reactionary anti-women groups are courting respectability
Salon headlines in your mailbox
