GLENN KENNY'S REVIEW (posted 11/13/07)

Let's give some credit where credit is due: Richard Kelly's new edit of his 2006 film Southland Tales — a longer version of which debuted to much controversy in Cannes, setting off a series of defensive and not terribly convincing apologias from Mr. Kelly — is a not inconsiderable improvement over the sprawling, sophomoric picture he brought to France.

That said, the thing's still no damn good.

A not-quite-dystopian post-nuke sci-fi-ish satire whose multiple literary, cinematic, and musical allusions aren't so much woven into its fabric as they are projectile-vomited onto it, Southland Tales purports to cinematize a larger work — a graphic novel authored by Mr. Kelly — but only treats said graphic novel's final three sections in its two-hours-plus running time. Among the changes Kelly made in the wake of the film's disastrous Cannes bow are the additions of some (minimally) animated sequences synopsizing the graphic novel's earlier chapters, including the mysterious desert sojourn of action-movie hero Boxer Santaros (Johnson) who, in the film proper, later surfaces in Venice where he's taken under the wing of ambitious porn queen Krista Now (Gellar). Santaros isn't just a pawn in her game, though — his senator/presidential-candidate father-in-law, an Iraq war veteran and his befuddled twin, and a malevolent-seeming German corporation that's fueling the U.S.'s wars with a new ocean-based energy source also all have plans for Santaros, whose amnesiac befuddlement is such that more often than not this putative man of action is twiddling his fingers in stupefaction.

There's a lot of "stuff" here, and Kelly's biggest problem — he's got more than a few — is that he can't tell his good material from his bad. His constant toggling between snark and sincerity is clearly something he learned from graphic novels, and it's a risky business for even the deftest writers in that medium. In Southland Tales, you get lines like "His mission was to impersonate his twin brother. But his heart was filled with despair" followed shortly by "Scientists say the future is going to be more futuristic than previously believed." Only one of those two bits is intended to be funny; can you guess which?

Every time Kelly manages to build up a halfway decent head of comic froth — as in a fast-talking sequence wherein Boxer is reunited with his estranged wife (Moore, very funny) and in-laws — he blows it with some god-awful portent or "statement." You haven't lived until you've seen Justin Timberlake lip-sync a ridiculous Killers song, true, but watching it you might wish you'd never lived, period. When I first saw this picture I figured it as the bilious result of an imaginary drinking match between Philip K. Dick and Thomas Pynchon; second time around, it's clear that Kelly fancies himself some kind of cross between Stanley Kubrick and Alan Wolfe. Fat chance on either count, particularly the Kubrick — Kelly's camera placement and framing are at best textbook and at worst calamitously mediocre.

A good number of this film's defenders, incidentally, have been taking Kelly's cue and making noises that those who aren't with the program "don't get it" or somehow resent it. The normally sensible J. Hoberman of the Village Voice took the latter tack, which is disappointing — what's there to resent, really, about puling, know-somethingish post-adolescent angst? In any case, to paraphrase Robert Christgau, I dare you to spend money to find out which camp is right.

— Glenn Kenny