4 posts tagged “southland tales”
protocat: I saw Southland Tales recently!
protocat: I think I told you. :o
markpasc: woohoo!
markpasc: i'm not sure you told me you saw it. i know you wanted to see it.
protocat: Southland Tales was the best remake of Repo Man that John Waters and David Lynch could have done.
protocat: Plus the Strange Days cast.
protocat: It was a good reunion!
markpasc: omg do you know what i just saw this past week from Netflix? REPO MAN
protocat: ahahhaa I love Repo Man. That's one of my favorite films ever.
markpasc: and i was totally going to write about how it reminded me of Southland Tales
markpasc: in pretty much the same exact way you just said
When I said Southland Tales was beautifully flawed, I was thinking of what Nathan Rabin said when laying out his My Year of Flops series on The Onion AV Club.
To an extent “My Year Of Flops” is an extension of an A.V. Club sidebar called “10 Notorious Flops Worth Seeing”. The point of that piece was that movies that belly flop on a historic level often do so because they took huge, admirable risks that didn’t pay off. I want to defend movies that dare to dream big. I think it’s important to herald the ambition, conviction and audacity of truly epic failures while at the same time acknowledging their shortcomings.
So of course his review of Southland Tales is great.
Southland Tales is many things: a pop art glimpse into a looming apocalypse, a dark sci-fi comedy, pop-culture-damaged surrealism, and a passionate plea for the de-criminalization of teen horniness. It’s a film of rare courage and audacity, a one-of-a-kind trip through the looking glass and a surreal meditation on uncertain times and the sins of the Bush administration. It’s also a bloated, gargantuan mess—disjointed, leadenly paced, and filled with half-baked, undernourished ideas.
Southland Tales is the best Philip K. Dick movie this year, made only more accurate an adaptation by not actually being from any Philip K. Dick novel. It's more a pastiche of his work, and a film that revels in the same themes (and features two outright references). It's also just as messy and stoner-wise, and just as pulp as PKD's work, with the same taste in names, and a few bits of laughably bad dialogue that they pound through, thematically. One should probably expect all this of writer-director Richard Kelly, who previously wrote-directed Donnie Darko.
It's beautifully flawed, and you should probably go see it if you care, since it'll be completely gone from theaters in a couple of weeks. See also Victoria Large's review at notcoming.
