Southland Tales
2006
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Director: Richard Kelly
Cast: Dwayne Johnson, Seann William Scott, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Mandy Moore, Justin Timberlake, Miranda Richardson, Wallace Shawn, Bai Ling, John Larroquette, Jon Lovitz
Richard Kelly's highly anticipated follow-up to Donnie Darko presents an astoundingly stupid and pretentious post-9/11 nightmare vision of the future when personal freedoms have been suppressed to a minimum and people have adopted silly names. The sprawling story has a prologue and three parts, obviously numbered from IV to VI, and it revolves around an amnesiac actor, his manipulative ex-porn star girfriend, a police officer, his mysterious twin brother, a group of Neo-Marxist terrorists, and a few dozen other irrelevant characters. There are some musical numbers and it's continuously narrated by a veteran of the Iraq war. If this sound complicated, nevermind, because the film is a hopelessly boring and incoherent mess. Kelly cut the film down to 144 minutes following the disastrous Cannes premiere, but there is no polishing this turd. The mostly B-list cast give their career-worst performances, with no little thanks to the clunky dialogue. The Angelo Badalamentiesque soundtrack was written by Moby.
