“Nothing an eight ball, a porn star and a tattoo parlor can’t handle.”

The dreaded sophomore slump. How do you follow up your first film (Donnie Darko), ‘a multilayered psychological science fiction thriller about time travel, a tangent universe and a giant bunny called Frank!’ A film that won loads of awards, lauded with critical praise and developed a rabid cult fan base! Well, you follow it up with a comedy about the apocalypse naturally!

Where to begin. An amnesiac schizophrenic action film star who thinks he’s written a screenplay about a cop who figures out the rotation of the world is slowing at a rate of .0000006 miles per hour? A porn star with psychic powers who is involved in the blackmailing of a powerful republican senators family? A supposedly neo-marxist twin posing as his twin bother cop, whose reflection in the mirror is consistently out of step with him? In the words of the director, Southland Tales is an ‘insane apocalyptic tapestry’, weaving together such contemporary themes as our obsession with celebrity and over-reaction to terror, reliance on fossil fuels, as well as the Book of Revelation & the second coming of Christ. All in an alternate version of the future.

You have to give Richard Kelly credit, for his long awaited follow up to Donnie Darko, he certainly came out swinging for the fence. This is no ‘paint by numbers’ Hollywood effort.

While Southland Tales is more than a ‘bit’ mad (no doubt many people will turn it off after the first few minutes) Richard Kelly’s script does a great job of capturing the madness of the times. It manically satirises political extremism, the absurdity of modern celebrity culture, aggressive American foreign policy and the erosion of civil liberties to name a few. Much like looking at how the world seems today, watching Southland Tales, the viewer never really understands just what’s going on! The film feels like the love-child of Dr. Strangelove and Mulholland Drive. Richard Kelly certainly strives to achieve the levels of reflective black comedy of Stanley Kubrick’s satirical classic and he certainly has a knack for David Lynch’s surrealism, but he just seems to try cram too much into a single film.

This brings me to the biggest flaw of the entire endeavour. If Southland Tales feels half baked, that’s because we’ve only been shown half of it. Southland Tales only depicts the last 3 chapters in Kelly’s 6 chapter project (the other 3 chapters having been released in graphic novel form only). Asking the audience to try interpret a pretty weird film after effectively depriving them of the entire first half, is a big ask and it has to make you wonder, what were they thinking!

It’s a shame really, because despite the lack of true understanding as to what was going on, I personally found Southland Tales compulsive viewing. Apart from the desire to try figure out, just what was going on, most of the cast put in good performances (particular praise has to be given to Seann William Scott, who finally casts aside his ‘Stifler’ persona) and some of the satire is extremely accurate and funny (news programming sponsored by Bud Light & Hustler). By showing us an extreme version of the modern world, Kelly raises just as many questions about the world we live in today, as he does about the plot. No mean feat.

Southland Tales is definitely a ‘thinker’. If you don’t dismiss it right off, it’s a film you might well watch again, spend the next few days pondering or discussing with your friends, appreciating it more and more as the plot details being to click into place. It’s no masterpiece, but sometimes its better to watch a film that makes you think about the way the world is, rather than one that tries to tell you.

SpittinFlicks.com is a new Film Forum and Film Reviews site that is trying to bring together a community of film lovers.

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