Generation Y's Brando? Or Montgomery Clift? By default?
Dear Richard Kelly,
For someone who has made two films, your casting skills are amazing, and I feel your '80s reference points (Zelda Rubinstein AND Booger? I kiss you). But letting your movies revolve around the moral dilemma of a time-travelling messiah will nullify everything you have to say about adolescence, Iraq, or anything else that actually exists. It doesn't help that you have little of note to say in the first place. I'd suggest that you try your hand at surrealism without explanatory sci-fi, but I doubt Hollywood will give you the chance anytime soon. Hopefully someone else will, cuz I'll be heartbroken if Southland Tales is the trippiest film about 00's America we get.
2 comments:
My critical faculties are non-existent these days so I typically grateful when the form fits the content, as it did here. But ultimately I'm not cool with Kelly's philosophical/political conclusions being anarchic.
Sci-Fi explanations here seemed like an abstraction, like fellow L.A. author Raymond Chandler's confident inability to explain his own mystery plots.
It was a lot like the long Superman screenplay I wrote in college (doubles-dopplegangers, cameras everwhere, and specatcle mutli-media apocalypse) Kelly could have broken the fourth wall more.
Tim Kinsella said "there's grass in the sidewalks cracks, there's politics in your porn, there's grass in the sidewalks cracks"
and Dwayne Johnson won the acting award here, with his nebbish panicky-fright movements and line readings. Jon Lovitz is a highlight and I can't tell you how excited I was to see John Larroquette show up for whatever reason.
The cast really was awesome, especially Lovitz and Larroquette.
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