For those who care--but many won't--that's how cult films work

Southland Tales clearly has the same distinctive mind behind it as Kelly's cult debut Donnie Darko, and above all a sense of impending apocalypse. Otherwise, the effect is very different, and after all the wait (during which Kelly may have wasted time doing a somewhat unnecessary Director's Cut of Darko), the result is nuttier, more complicated, a lot less solemn (though even more serious) and overall brilliantly unsuccessful, as only an overblown sophomore effort can be. This time Kelly depicts a world that is much larger and more absurd and he plunges deep, deep into current politics--with specific yet over-the-top reference to terrorism and government repression.

It's 2008, but forget 2001; instead, there was a series of nuclear attacks on Texas in 2005 that caused the USA to be totally retrofitted. The States are partitioned off now and you need a visa to get from one to another. The Internet is under total government control, an election is coming (no surprise there) and the Republicans have taken over California (no huge revelation there either): in fact, the movie's set-up seems unnecessarily hasty and sweeping and signals a gap between plan and follow-through that plagues the whole mad effort.

A whole lot else is going on besides. Sarah Michele Guller is an important TV personality, Krysta Now, whose programs combine porno, celebrity talk, and politics. Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson is Boxer Santaros, a movie star with right-wing connections who's been kidnapped by neo-Marxists and had his memory erased. He's also somebody else. Or thinks he is. Or other people do. Seann William Scott has a doppelganger, because a glitch has happened in the Fourth Dimension. Justin Timberlake is disfigured from the Iraq war and is trying to kill somebody. And that's only the beginning--or maybe part of the end.

All this is astoundingly ambitious, complicated, and curiously uninvolving compared to Donnie Darko, which aroused our sympathies for the soulful, melancholy young genius embodied memorably by Jake Gyllenhaal. "The Rock's" appealing too--though, not inappropriately for a movie that teeters constantly on the brink of Sci-Fi media parody, he tends to look like a cyborg. On some levels there's appeal also in three or four of the other chraacters in this shifting-focus ensemble piece. But while Jake carried the world's fate on his shoulders, "Rock" Johnson's watchword is "I'm a pimp, and a pimp never considers suicide." Hard to warm to that.

And though it's hard to care about any of the characters in Southland Tales or its put-on plotline(s), every scene has so much going on in it, so many farcical brilliant props scattered around, you can feel the strips of cult film forming as you watch. Most people aren't going to care. Some people already do care passionately. And eventually a lot more gradually will join the cult--while the majority will leave it alone. That's how cult films work.

_________________
©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.