Wave of Mutilation

Richard Kelly may be cinema's first accidental genius. Donnie Darko is a genuinely mysterious film with some haunting visuals. It's brilliance lies in its mystery-- you can't really tell what's going on, but you're given just enough to put theories together. So what does Kelly do? He creates a director's cut that explains more, and ruins the pace and the mystery that made the film magical in the first place.

This prologue explains the main problem I have with Southland Tales. It's ambitious, inspired, and genuinely funny. The film quotes T.S. Eliot, Robert Frost, and Philip K. Dick, but its main influence lies in metafiction, namely Thomas Pynchon and David Foster Wallace. References pile on top of each other, authors are misquoted, characters break into song and dance, the world is familiar and alien at the same time. But the difficulty with metafiction is that the audience is going to get lost, they're not going to catch all the references, and they're going to be confused and frustrated. This is unavoidable. An audience is only willing to go as far as it trusts that the author knows what's going on and is going to be able to pull it all together. Richard Kelly hasn't earned that trust from me, and he doesn't change that in this film.

So does Richard Kelly know what he's making when he makes a film? Are the parts that I love about Southland Tales merely accidents? Was Donnie Darko's success more a result of limited time and budget, and less the result of a confident new voice in cinema? Unfortunately, that's my suspicion.

That being said, there are a lot of things to like about Southland Tales. I think the decision to use actors with a lot of baggage is an inspired one, and I love The Rock as an anti-action hero. The addition of former SNL cast members makes the world feel a little off, a little alien. I admire the way the film refuses to explain too much. In a way it feels like Buckaroo Banzai-- like the second film in a trilogy where the first and the third were never made. It reminds me a lot of David Lynch, Ridley Scott, and Terry Gilliam. And it successfully creates a kind of Pynchonian world where Karl Marx or the Marx Brothers could be around the next corner.

This makes it even more disappointing when Kelly fails to bring it all together in a satisfying way. What passes for satire seems really facile, and every time the film tries to make a political point it falls flat. The ending disintegrates into an underwhelming mess of Christ figures. I think the biggest misstep is the lack of a theme tying it all together. Gravity's Rainbow has cold war paranoia, Infinite Jest has addiction, Southland Tales has no discernible theme and that's why it doesn't work as metafiction.

Still it's fun to watch, and I've spent two weeks unpacking it in my head after one viewing. That's more than most films give me, even it if may not be on purpose.

#7 - Bringing Up Baby

If you think classic hollywood comedies are simple, you need to see Bringing Up Baby. The first time you see it you won't notice how complicated the whole thing is because it moves so fast. Jokes, pratfalls, and visual gags hit and combine and overlap and never let up, so much so that you're likely to miss a few because you laugh over them. This is the signature style of the comedies of director Howard Hawks. The secret ingredient that sets Bringing Up Baby apart from Hawks' other comedies is the combination of two of the most charismatic actors of all time, Katherine Hepburn and Cary Grant. Not only do they have chemistry and comedic timing to spare, they also sell every line, every fall and every joke. Their charisma brings likeability to two characters that could have been very tiresome otherwise.

Any kind of plot synopsis would give everything away and sound crazy anyway, so suffice it to say that there is a leopard named Baby, a dog named George, a missing intercostal clavicle from a brontosaurus, a trip to Connecticut, a drunk Irish gardener, and everybody ends up in jail at the end. Got it? It won't matter if you don't. What does matter is that you see it because I am convinced there isn't a funnier movie in existence.