SOUTHLAND TALES: DVD

SYNOPSIS:
In July 2008, with Texas wiped out three years prior by a nuclear attack, Los Angeles is a police state on the brink of social, economic and environmental disaster. Venice Beach is home to the neo-Marxist underground - always plotting. Krysta Now (Sarah Michelle Gellar) is a porn star developing her own tv show; Boxer Santaros (Dwayne Johnson) is an action star stricken with amnesia; Taverner (Seann William Scott) is a Hermosa Beach police officer whose personality seems to have split in two - and has the key to a vast conspiracy. Events culminate in a massive 4th of July celebrations. Sort of ....

Review by Andrew L. Urban:
Southland Tales is an innocuous title for what is a subversive and annihilistic satire on America, lurching from black comedy to farce, from dramatic insight to superficial jokes. It's as if filmmaker Richard Kelly (Donnie Darko) was given carte blanche to take a baseball bat to anything that moves in the American social wilderness. Ya gotta love the guy's bravura; he has managed to get a cast who unafraid of self mockery (their personas, that is) and led them through a screenplay that bucks and twists like a wild young bull at a western rodeo.

Dwayne Johnson bumbles into his character with abandon; Sarah Michelle Gellar plays her porn queen role to the hilt and Seann William Scott delivers the loosest performance of his career - and I mean that in a good way.

The layers and textures are many and rich, and it would take at least a couple of viewings to catch on to everything Kelly is attempting to cover here, but in some ways it's just as much fun to let go and flow with the rip ... as it were. There is an apocalyptic tone to the film which Kelly moves up a notch every few scenes, and the random killings, the crazed characters (Miranda Richardson does it again) and the mayhem of the structure is sure to invoke surprised laughter till the end. Best enjoyed with friends.

Published: May 1, 2008