If there was ever a movie tailor made for me, it would be Southland Tales. The Rock, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Justin Timberlake and Sean William Scott? YES and PLEASE. Honestly, if someone gave me $20 million dollars and told me to make a movie I am pretty sure I would call those four immediately (and maybe Mandy Moore if I needed another girl, who btw is in this movie too) and beg them to be in my movie. Yet, somehow someone managed to put those four (five) in a movie and it sucked. Bad.
I recently watched it for a second time to see if it was better and it wasn’t. It was still bad. Some people who saw this movie didn’t “get it”, didn’t get the point of the plot. I got it and I still hated it. It’s not a very good screenplay which actually doesn’t surprise me at all. Some people think that Richard Kelly is one of the best young screenwriters out there. Those people would be wrong. (For one, you can’t be considered a great screenwriter if you don’t understand how people talk.) Look at his history:
Donnie Darko: Beloved movie, which I think a lot of was due to people not “getting it” the first time they watched it. Like the Sixth Sense type of thing. This really had nothing to do with Richard Kelly because if you watch the director’s cut everything is explained a lot more clearly and some of the movie’s mystery disappears.
Domino: I actually read his draft of the script which had all of the characters from 90210 in it (the idea was that Domino, based on her history, should have been like a character in 90210 and not like she really was) and this was a pretty creative idea. Once that was taken away though, the movie doesn’t really have a great story to stand on. It has too many characters and too many intertwining plots to be what it aspires to me. It is my favorite of Richard Kelly’s movies though, but maybe that’s because it’s the one time Tony Scott’s crazy camerawork actually fit the material.
And finally, this movie. This movie is way too long, has way too many characters, has way too many plots and needs way too much narration to explain what is going on. Robert McKee, the screenplay guru, hates narration and in the movie Adaptation described it like this “God help you if you use voice-over in your work, my friends. God help you. That’s flaccid, sloppy writing. Any idiot can write a voice-over narration to explain the thoughts of a character.” Which is exactly the problem with this movie. For as visually stunning as this movie attempts to be, it doesn’t follow the one simple rule of film and screenwriting “show not tell”. If you got rid of Justin Timberlake’s character in this movie you would have no idea what is going on. This movie is BUILT on voice-over. It wouldn’t survive without it and that’s why it shouldn’t be a movie.
When the best way you can describe a movie is “this guy is found in the desert and he doesn’t remember anything so he hooks up with a porn star and there is this other guy and neo-Marxists and this drug/energy source called fluid karma and there are like all these crazy government rules and Republicans are bad and this kid who gets drafted and…”, it’s not a good movie. To describe this movie you need to say the word and about 40 times. I don’t really see how this movie got from pitch to production honestly. Just because Donnie Darko was a cult hit, doesn’t mean you give someone a ton of money and let them make whatever they want.
The crazy thing about Southland Tales is it might go from bad to okay if you cut about 40 minute off of it. Get rid of the Neo-Marxists for the most part, get rid of Justin Timberlake and make the movie almost completely about The Rock and Sean William Scott. Nothing else. Then you might have a good movie. Instead, Richard Kelly made this movie SHORTER than the cut he released at Cannes. Oof.
The sad thing about the whole deal is this is the movie that I want The Rock to be in. This is the kind of stuff that I want him doing. Crazy, creative stuff that could be awesome and allows him to show his full range of charisma, but after this epic fail he won’t do it. Not again. He knows where his bread is buttered and that’s at Disney so that’s where we’ll be seeing him for a long, long time. It’s kind of sad. For that, I will always hate you Richard Kelly.
PS: Sometimes I surprise myself with how much I actually know about screenwriting. I should probably get into that again since I am about a 500x better writer than I was five years ago.
