Philadelphia Weekly

New Releases

Southland Tales
Directed by Richard Kelly
C
Reviewed by Matt Prigge
Opens Fri., Nov. 16

For a while there it looked like we wouldn't get to see Richard Kelly's follow-up to Donnie Darko until its alternate future had actually passed.

The scandal of Cannes '06 and now 20 minutes shorter than its original 167, Southland Tales is set in an alternate 2008, which diverted from our reality in 2005 when terrorists nuked Abilene, Texas. Long story short, the draft was reinstated, the war eventually spread into Syria and a new, even more civil rights-gouging version of the Patriot Act was born--this one targeting cyberspace too.

When we catch up--following a protracted digital intro tacked onto its theatrical cut--the apocalypse is near, particularly in Los Angeles. There, the film's obscenely sprawling cast of SNL vets and second-rate comic actors resides, putting on a politically charged but terminally goofball version of Short Cuts.

The Rock--sorry, Dwayne Johnson--plays an amnesiac action star who's shacked up with Sarah Michelle Gellar, playing a socially conscious porn star whose chestnuts include: "Violence is a real problem. That's why I don't do anal." Neo-Marxists--Cheri Oteri among them--buy arms from Christopher Lambert in an ice cream truck. The ever-rising cost of oil has been solved by Wallace Shawn in geisha makeup. There's also Kevin Smith in funky gray hair (stop acting!), a commercial showing copulating SUVs, music videos with Fallujah vet Justin Timberlake and buzz phrases like "global deceleration," "fluid karma" and "serpentine dream theory."

If this sounds less like a movie review than a list, that's because there's little to review. It's just stuff comin' at ya, done in a pale mimicry of Thomas Pynchon. This isn't the Richard Kelly of the overrated Donnie Darko, but the Richard Kelly of the Domino script, which so aggressively chucked ideas (good and bad) at the screen that the thing nearly toppled over.

Here Kelly is free of the added burden of Tony Scott's direction, but his batting average is about the same. Some jokes are solid: The '08 Democratic nominees are Clinton and Lieberman, while political ads feature gun-toting cowboys bellowing, "You think your personal privacy is more important than protecting my family from terrorists?" Most are dire (Seann William Scott as telekinetic twins!), unfunny and relevant only in the most superficial way possible.

Southland Tales is demanding, but mostly because of its lack of organization and thought. Unlike with other Hollywood mindfucks like Mulholland Dr., you don't get the sense that repeated viewings will yield more insights or make the jumbled, impenetrable plot any clearer. What you see is what you get.

Taking a break from hotshot directing gigs like Annapolis and Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift, the Taiwan-born Justin Lin set Finishing the Game in 1973, just after the death of Bruce Lee. A fictitious parody of a real-life incident, the film finds hopelessly Z-grade execs trying to craft a feature-length film out of the 12 minutes Lee shot before keeling over. The real version, released five years after the fact, featured everything from done-up impersonators, plot contrivances that repeatedly put Lee's character in disguise and clout-establishing actors (Gig Young, Dean Jagger).

But Lin's film is not about the production--and as it's based on a spoof of cheap martial arts, that's probably a good thing. Instead Lin focuses entirely on the casting of Lee's stand-in, searched for via a massive, hapless cattle call. The expected wacky sub-Christopher Guest characters show up: a shy, unfailingly nice middle-America type; an Indian-born doctor who's quit his practice for acting; a Caucasian who claims to be half-Chinese; even a prolific Lee ripoff artist whose resume includes films like Fist of Fuhrer.

Was Lin's purpose to show how Hollywood's reception of Asians hasn't evolved much in two and a half decades? Possibly, though Finishing the Game takes more of a distanced, "gee-weren't-people-stupid-back-then?" stance, offering few modern-day comparisons and little cultural satire.

Lin squeezes in a few decent jabs at Hollywood's shunning of non-Caucasian actors, but he can barely sustain the succinct running time (the credits begin at 76 minutes) with a host of uninteresting characters, halfassed spoofs of TV shows and jokes that don't even deserve to be labeled "lazy." The Indian guy who forsook the medical field? He turns out to be a terrible actor! The half-Chinese guy talks of racial discrimination and thinks he can pass for Bruce Lee, even though he's clearly a white dude! (Wasn't that a Seinfeld bit?)

Meanwhile, there are probably a couple people who still bust a gut at giant lapels and coif flips. Finishing the Game is for them.

Not Reviewed

Beowulf
A retelling of the classic story, with Ray Winstone, Anthony Hopkins and Angelina Jolie in soul-sucking CGI. (Opens Fri., Nov. 16.)

Love in the Time of Cholera
A retelling of the classic story by Gabriel Garc�a M�rquez. (Opens Fri., Nov. 16.)