Southland Tales

It kind of makes me feel a little sad that most of the things I thought were so great about Southland Tales are exactly the reasons that most people will hate it. It probably goes out of its way to explain the whole "thing" behind everything than Donnie Darko did, but there's no character in the movie who's anywhere even close to as relatable-to as Donnie was--there aren't any characters who are even supposed to be as relatable-to as Donnie was. And most people need that in a movie, I guess. I don't, for whatever reason.

Wherever I read it was right: Kelly's better when his cosmology is hidden or obscured. I liked that there were many aspects of the movie that weren't explained completely, but I also imagine that Kelly has it all packed away somewhere the exact explanation for everything, and I just wouldn't really be interested in all of that. The reason is something like this:

By ignoring conventional questions of explicability and coherence, Kelly isolates the fundamental building blocks of film and lets them work together on their own without the scaffolding beneath of them of plot and character. I mean, I guess there's plenty of plot in here, but the best parts are, for instance, Timberlake lip-synching to The Killers in some kind of arcade while hot chicks in vinyl nurse outfits dance around him, and he pours beer over his head, and that scene is mentioned in virtually every review as being a part that its worth seeing the movie for, and it doesn't seem to have anything to do with the rest of the movie. Or: the whole thing with the Star Spangled banner being sung first in Spanish and then English over a discordant quartet (was it the Kronos Quartet?) while the Zeppelin went all shiny and new into the LA skyline and fireworks went off everywhere. These scenes are absolutely perfect and are pure film, and for whatever reason I like that they're allowed to exist in relative isolation because of the general incoherence around everything.

Also, what I think Kelly is especially good at, maybe as good as anyone aside from Lynch, is presenting to form of something, such as the climax of this movie that is only really a climax because it has the feel of a climax. I mean, it is the climax, but because the overall story has been relatively shapeless before that, it's not exactly a climax that exists because of the story. Or something.

But what bothers me ultimately about Kelly is that he does have a very clear idea some ridiculously complex sci-fi/supernatural/spiritual plot behind everything and he wants you to spend a lot of time decoding everything until you unpack it all and understand everything. Which just seems kind of lame to me: story as puzzle. So in the end, Kelly's just as stuck under the tyranny of narrative as virtually every other filmmaker in America.