On "Southland Tales" and the Cult of the Overreaching Idiot Infant Auteur

There are exactly three things that make Richard Kelly's "Southland Tales" worth watching:

1) Sarah Michelle Gellar. As porn star political activist Krista Now, Gellar finally gets to flex all the funny-serious acting muscles that made her such a cult national treasure in "Buffy the Vampire Slayer." None of the dialogue in the movie makes any sense, and all of it is supposed to be simultaneously uproariously funny and meaningfully allegorical (just like the movie itself), and Gellar is the only person onscreen who seems to know exactly the right note to strike. What a pro this girl is! What a travesty that this is the only good movie role she's ever had!

2) Justin Timberlake singing The Killers. Playing an Iraq War veteran with scars that look more like Mike Tyson tattoos, Timberlake narrates the entire movie. The narration is god-awful exposition, like he's reading the italicized portions of Kelly's shitty, overwritten screenplay. If I tell you that Timberlake spends most of the movie hanging out on a gun turret on the Santa Monica Pier, I have to stress that he doesn't just hang out. He never moves. Whenever we see him, he always swivels the gun from right to left in the exact same motion - it might be the exact same shot, repeated over and over throughout the movie. (At least Ed Wood was using stock footage.) At some point in the movie - I feel like it was towards the end, although the movie never seems to actually begin - he suddenly isn't on the turret, but is instead in a video arcade, selling an existential injection drug called liquid karma to character we've never met before who will suddenly became the main character in the final five minutes. He gives then injects himself with the drug.

And then, in what may be a dream sequence but what feels much more alive than anything else in this mediocre acid trip of a movie, Timberlake lipsyncs to The Killers' unclassic single "All These Things That I've Done." He chugs a can of cheap booze and stumbles through the whole dance number, but it's delightfully choreographed stumbling, and we remember that Timberlake has been a performer his whole life. Descriptions of the movie inevitably make it sound more interesting than it actually is, because it sounds madcap but plays dreary and stonefaced. This is one of the few moments that seems to really hit on what Kelly was hoping for - it's the end of the world, and all I want to do is dance, dance, dance. And then, just as the song is cresting with dancing peroxide blondes, Timberlake gets a melancholy look on his face, and the film shifts to slow motion, and the Killers fade into Moby, and we're back into shitty existential land.

3) The look on the Rock's face when he watches Sarah Michelle Gellar dance. At the end of the film, there is quite a lot happening. Marx's vision of an underclass revolution has come true. The Messiah is rising into the air holding hands with his time travel duplicate, in an overturned ice cream truck. A mega-zeppelin is flying over Los Angeles. There are lots of fireworks. There is so much happening, and it is utterly impossible to care about any of it. But onboard the mega-zeppelin, apropos of nothing, Sarah Michelle Gellar and her porn star girlfriends step onstage and perform a dance number set to Moby. In the audience, the Rock, whose role in the movie never even makes sense to his character, looks at Gellar, the way that Gregory Peck used to look at Audrey Hepburn. He takes off his jacket, steps onstage, and wonderfully, they begin dancing together. It is an incandescent, beautiful moment.

"Southland Tales" is the latest entry in a new canon of young auteur post-masterwork shittiness. Put it next to "The Life Aquatic" and "The Fountain" - it resembles the former in its style (funny names! wide angles!), the latter in its define-the-universe time-tripping storyline. All three should stand as cautionary tales to young filmmakers everywhere. When you make a great movie - and "Donnie Darko," "The Royal Tenenbaums," and "Requiem for a Dream," back at the start of the decade, were great enough to get people talking about a new era in cinema - you will have alot of people willing to give you money and alot of good actors willing to work for you. But the people giving you money only want you for your golden-boy fame, and actors are exceedingly poor judges of which scripts can make a good movie, and no amount of money will save a shitty script, and guys, believe me, few scripts are as shitty as "Southland Tales," "The Life Aquatic," and "The Fountain."

The fact that all three have moments of searing brilliance is not an excuse. Moments like that deserve better movies. These films just do not cohere in any meaningful way - and they don't even try to. They are about incoherence. And you can find plenty of reviews online for all three by critics who try to make that incoherence sound genius. (Nathan Lee, formerly of The Village Voice, said that "Southland Tales" "looks and feels more like life in 2007 than Juno, In the Valley of Elah, and Michael Clayton combined." Only if you believe that life in 2007 is defined by "The Hills," by porno, and by the Ashlee Simpson dregs of pop culture - that is, if you still believe that life in Los Angeles has anything to do with life anywhere else. Here's a satire in which the main forces arrayed against the government are "Neo-Marxists." Ooo, topical! How do you claim to make any kind of satire of the modern age without a single Middle Eastern character, or indeed, any non-Caucasian actors besides The Rock?)

People who defend these films - and that includes the directors - do not argue that they make sense, but rather, that the fact that they make no sense makes lots of sense, deep sense, absolute sense. Bullshit. People sometimes relate "The Fountain" to "2001," but "2001," as a narrative, is almost painfully straightforward. It's a long movie which should be boring, because almost nothing happens in it - lots of scenes watch people talking without really listening, as if observing an animal making animal noises. It's only at the end that "2001" turns into a head trip. "The Fountain," "The Life Aquatic," and "Southland Tales" are the wormhole sequence in "2001" without the actual movie behind it. In their mock-independent way, they represent the same filming instinct as Jerry Bruckheimer - "Let's just get to the good stuff already! Wormholes! Religious stuff! Weird mystery!" Remember at the end of "2001," when Dave Bowman watches himself age in an elaborately designed set? What better metaphor for these movies, which are all aesthetically beautiful and utterly mind-numbing.

Defending these movies because they have something on their mind does no one any good - not the directors, who get encouraged to think of themselves as hidden geniuses (it's the George W. Bush/Fidel Castro argument - "history will absolve me"); not the critics, who could be defending tiny movies that are actually good; not young people, who discover the movie on DVD and, in a fit of high-school drug-induced miasma, start thinking that the key to making a great work of art is thin plotting and TS Eliot quotes. Ever since the 1960s, and especially since the 1990s, the defining image of the film director is less and less that of Alfred Hitchcock - dressed like he has a job, always working, never forgetting that "cinema" is just a word for where people go to watch movies - and more and more that of Peter Fonda directing "Easy Rider" - a young director with great connections trying to make some deeper point about all of humanity, ideally using all male characters with maybe a few angelic whores thrown in.

I'm not saying that young film directors shouldn't reach for awesomeness. Todd Haynes took half a decade to make "I'm Not There," a movie far more overstuffed with ideas and embedded culture references than all three of the above movies combined, yet he never once forgot that he was making a movie about human beings with emotions. There are subjects, predicates, and objects in "I'm Not There." Things are done by people.

People never do stuff in "The Fountain," in "Life Aquatic," and certainly not in "Southland Tales." They talk about doing things. They discuss how many things were going on, before the movie started. In "Life Aquatic," people never stop talking about how great Steve Zissou used to be. In the three separate time periods of "The Fountain," the Spanish Inquisition has been going on, Rachel Weisz has been dying of cancer, and spaceman Hugh Jackman has been traveling through space in a gigantic bubble. In "Southland Tales," so many things happen before the movie that Richard Kelly wrote three prequel comics to fill in the backstory. However, at least one and maybe several of the elements of the backstory are structured in the film as a surprise. Although maybe I'm giving Kelly too much credit. Toward the end of the film, a few characters explain the backstory all in one quick jumble, and although it plays like a surprise, much of the movie is about explaining the movie, so maybe it's just reminding you to remember that you're watching.

Yes, "Southland Tales" is trying to strike a difficult tone - spoof satire apocalypse drama sci-fi messianic pulp noir thriller Marxist-Socialist revolution - but is it a tone that should ever be struck? There are some funny parts in the film, but so many of them are played so slowly, sometimes with slow-motion music scenes. Slow-motion music scenes are never going to be funny. They used to seem deep, back when Kelly shot this scene in "Donnie Darko." Now that everyone can make a movie, we all know how easy a scene like that actually is. Get a bunch of people. Move the camera around them. Set it to slow motion. Turn off the volume and throw in a Tears for Fears song. Depth!

This movie makes me angry. It makes me angry because the three things that I like about it - Sarah Michelle Gellar, Justin Timberlake's dance number, and the look on the Rock's face - are almost enough to make me want to like the movie. They are so good but so unearned. The dance number would be just as effective if it were as a two minute youtube video. Sarah Michelle Gellar's performance could be cut down to five minutes and packaged as a trailer, "Krista Now: Porn Star Activist!" and everyone would want to see that movie. The few things that are great about this film have nothing to do with it being a film. There's never a moment, like at the end of "There Will Be Blood," or hell, "Donnie Darko," where you can feel the full weight of all that has come before pressing through your eyes into your soul. There's no moment that makes you believe this movie actually happened.

"Southland Tales" isn't a film. It's a great soundtrack with some cool album artwork and a shitty name. Richard Kelly must be a genius, because a lobotomized chimpanzee couldn't make a movie this bad.