village voice > film > YEAR IN FILM: J. Hoberman's Top 10 Films of 2007 by J. Hoberman

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mike on Sat Jan 5, 2008, 14:30, says:

Southland Tales is a disaster, and a damningly dull one at that. Far be it from me to condemn it on the basis of bad taste or narrative experimentalism or flagrant risk-taking or allusionary recklessness or failed ambition, all of which are Pynchonian things I tend to go misty and swoony over in movies, from Freaks to I Am Cuba to Marketa Lazarova to Chimes at Midnight to The Mother and the Whore to Our Hitler to Once Upon a Time in America to whatever else. No, the problem with Kelly’s film is simple: it’s incoherent, not in a broad view, which is easy to take and sometimes easy to enjoy, but within virtually each and every scene. Most of the "plot" is told to us via the nearly context-less narration, affecting pretentious connections and significances to things and incidents and characters that otherwise demonstrate none. When that doesn’t do, Kelly throws in swatches of video-news exposition, which would be semi-fine if the narrative supposedly being revealed didn’t seem absolutely arbitrary, as if it were made up as it went along, by three or more writers who weren’t talking to each other. The scenes themselves are almost universally full of dead air, the actors standing around or sitting on couches with no apparent clue as to what the dramatic thrust of the set-up in question is supposed to be. The ideas Kelly is ostensibly dramatizing, or at least tossing in the air, are high-school-graffiti stupid: "neo-Marxism," a merely talked-about rip in "the fourth dimension!", the idea that Armageddon, or something, will befall us if "two identical souls shake hands," etc. Honestly, this is Ed Wood country. Some elements – the rise of porn actresses to primetime pundits, say – await a screenplay with some comic wit; others (a script written by an action star that predicts the future? yet another addictive designer drug that has no apparent affective properties at all except grogginess? a coterie of fey, evil scientists caked with makeup, bad wigs and space-age couture?) cannot be saved. The only sequence that has a cohesive energy to it, not surprisingly everyone’s favorite, is Justin Timberlake’s faux-music video fantasia with a Killers song; by even old music video standards it’s pretty uninspired, but in the middle of this shambles, it feels shockingly, pleasurably juiced and convincing.