Southland Tales
This week the From Below Microcinema presents *Southland Tales *(2006) on TUESDAY, November 5th, at 7 pm.
Here is the link to reserve a seat. Doors will be at 6:50 and we’re starting the movie at 7:10!
What can be said about Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales? Made in the wake of his break out smash hit Donnie Darko, Kelly initially envisioned Southland Tales as a noir-tinged satire on Hollywood, but 9/11 and the subsequent US Government response, most notably the Patriot Act, sent the script spiraling into a vast web of government conspiracies, science-fiction tomfoolery, and jukebox musical derangements. The resulting film, a prescient recasting of The Book of Revelation for Bush-era anxieties that have only become further entrenched and mutated, could be said to be a bit of a mess. I mean, it was conceived at one point as “a nine-part “interactive experience”, with the first six parts published in six 100-page graphic novels that would be released in a six-month period up to the film’s release. The feature film comprises the final three parts of the experience.“ But seeing a movie that the director himself has said is “unfinished” and full of capital-I Ideas and capital-C Choices is why we go to the movies.
*Southland Tales *is simply one of the most rhizomatic and bewildering products of the last thirty years of mainstream filmmaking, and there’s no better way to spend Election Night than in the From Below with such rare company as Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, Justin Timberlake, and Wallace Shawn.