Southland Fail

How do you follow up a film that garnered as much critical acclaim and cultish devotion as Donnie Darko? I imagine, writer/director, Richard Kelly thought long and hard about this particular problem. What I can’t imagine is how he thought Southland Tales was the answer.
If you’ve never heard of it don’t worry, to say it got a limited release is like saying the Dead Sea scrolls were temporarily misplaced. It was panned so hard that the studio decided to just cut their losses and fuck it off, but can it really be that bad? Well the short answer is yes. The long answer is fuck yes.
The plot is a mess of sci-fi and meta-physics, complete with time travel, religious prophesy and political satire. In an Orwellian Los Angeles a movie star with amnesia, a porn star, a local cop, some terrorists and a renewable energy magnate all hurtle towards one another while a drug addled, Iraq war veteran narrates the end of the world. While Donnie Darko was a nuanced and personal descent into madness and quantum theory, this is like someone threw all the ideas they had at the board and saw what stuck.
If you think the plot sounds messy it’s nothing compared to the casting, it’s like a who’s who of early noughties twats. Dwayne Johnson (I never had any fucking idea what the Rock was cooking) plays protagonist Boxer Santeras in such a way as to imply that his bad acting was intentional, while Sarah Michelle Gellar sullies her all American girl reputation by coming over all foul mouthed as porn star Krysta Now (I actually quite enjoyed those bits). Perhaps the most irritating performance is Justin ‘snake hips’ Timberlake playing the narrator. In his defence it’s not entirely his fault, his dialogue is so full of needlessly weird bullshit I don’t think any actor could make it sound convincing.
I think one scene that truly sums this film up is when, for no good reason, Timberlake suddenly starts lip sinking to a Killers track (bad enough in itself) only to be joined by a chorus line of show girls. The best moments in the movie are like David Lynch cast-offs, visually interesting but completely without depth. I loved Donnie Darko as a teenager, it spoke to my pretentious neo-goth alienation, but this doesn’t speak me on any level. I’ve yet to see Kelly’s latest feature (The Box (2009)) but it’d have to be spectacularly bad to beat this.