21st
Rails & Tales
Saw “Southland Tales” at the Arclight last night. Whitney said she wanted to come, and then she saw the poster later that day in Pasadena and immediately texted me, “Why are we going to see that? It looks like Game Plan 2.” She asked me this question as the usher tore our tickets. He said, “Good question.”
We walked in as yet another helplessly peppy floor manager introduced “Southland Ties.” Yes, he said “Southland Ties.” Twice. The best possible prelude.
The film starts with handheld “home video” footage until (SPOILER ALERT) a nuke/terrible particleillusion mushroom cloud cuts things short. Whitney nudges me. “Turn off your cell phone.” She laughs. I laugh and respond, “This is the movie.”
She laughs for a second, and then the light in her eye slowly dims as it dawns on her that I am not kidding. She left for a half an hour and walked into “Beowulf.” She came back because that was terrible and there was no one to nudge knowingly.
As soon as the lights rose, my roommate Dan (seeing “Southland” for the second time in order to share the experience with Craig and myself) proclaims, “Isn’t that the worst movie you’ve ever seen?” He laughs, pure maniacal glee.
During the incredibly, mind-bogglingly terrible “movie,” I kept trying to remember funny bad parts (rather than just painfully unfunny terrible parts) to write down, but something even worse would come along and wipe the former nugget from memory.
I do recall the realization that Richard Kelly honestly cannot make a movie echoing in my besieged cranium. The first 45 minutes are a master class in how to utterly assault (sorry for the split infinitive, Prof. Levine) the senses as nonsensically as possible. No scene flows or links to the next scene. At all. One shot barely connects to the next. The only time anything feels right is when he shot-reverse shots, and even then angles and sizes don’t match, causing me a number of times to jump when a close-up of the Rock with the camera on the floor follows a straight-on close-up of Bai Ling (who may actually be mentally handicapped, and not just culturally confused).
Bad funny things I do remember: Thinking Richard Kelly made a perfect casting choice by getting Amy Poehler to play Amy Poehler. Every actor in that movie is a blank slate, an empty vessel, nothing is going on behind their eyes — ironic statement in a film about our bodies being vessels for the soul or just more awful decisions by Kelly? The interpretive dance of “WIld Things” manages to be a highlight. I have never, in my entire life, been happy to hear the Killers until Justin Timberlake’s requisite drug delusion scene because I was so sick of the terrible ’80s keyboards that reminded me of how much I liked “Brazil” and how much I’d rather be watching it. Banging my head against the seat at yet another mumble from Revelations. I think one character says “dawg” four times in one sentence; he does not utter three consecutive sentences without at least two utterances of said congenial term. The worst fireworks effects of all time. Justin Timberlake, in one sentence, tells us a big plot twist, with no motivation whatsoever in order to make the Rock being tasered seem right. In a cast of SNL cast-offs, the MAD TV gentleman does stick out like a sore thumb so he’s the mole. The sudden emergence of “pimp.” The even more sudden (and brief) emergence of Janeane Garofalo.
And, finally, the biggest laugh of the night: Justin Timberlake (in yet another voice-over): “He was my best friend.”
My roommates (and neighbor) think it might possibly be a joke on the scale of Andy Kaufman. He recycles a sizeable chunk of the SNL cast from the last two decades. Maybe the movie is a farce, a joke about cryptic, midnight-wannabe movies. But, soon after saying this, hang their heads and admit it’s not. It really is just stomach-churningly, head-cradingly, mouth-gapingly, mind-stupefyingly horrendous.
At least “Snakes on a Plane” made me laugh for more than 30 minutes.
(Again, Manhola Dargis endorsed this over “No Country.”)
