The N.Y. Post‘s “Page Six” column has quoted that downbeat- tracking item I wrote last Saturday about The Breakup, along with a Universal spokesperson saying that “Wells doesn’t understand tracking” [and that] “for a romantic comedy, the numbers are very encouraging.” I quoted NRG figures that put “definite interest” levels at 30, and “first choice” at 5, and concluded, perhaps a bit rashly, that the game is “pretty much over.” The numbers were accurate and I conveyed an interpretation that seemed right to me, but I’m allowing for an error of emphasis on my part because I’ve since been told by others that this conclusion was simplistic and lacked perspective. The numbers I ran only tell part of the story, as they were only a reading of the pulse of the potential audience two and a half weeks away from the opening. The first choice and definite interest figures were misleading, I’ve been told, because biggies like The DaVinci Code and X-Men 3 were ruling at the time the survey was taken, and that scores for The Break-Up and The Omen will markedly improve with tomorrow’s (i.e., Thursday, 5.25) numbers. I’ve since been told, in fact, the The Breakup may pull in a more-than-substantial opening weekend sum. I’m not saying what I said earlier will prove to be incorrect — the Vince Vaughn-Jennifer Aniston comedy was not looking like a strong contender when I ran that item. Aniston’s name-marquee value doesn’t appear to mean much to audiences so far, and NRG respondents have reported a fairly pronounced disinterest in seeing Vaughn inhabit a romantic-boyfriend part. And there’s also that re-shot ending, which advance-screening witnesses have said is a cop-out. But sometimes the wind shifts and sometimes audiences are slow on the pickup, so let’s see what happens.

Babel is Booming

Alejando Gonzalez Innaritu’s Babel, which press-screened this morning, is, I believe, a lock to win the Palmes D’Or. Everyone seems to be feeling this, spreading it around. If it doesn’t win, fine — it’ll still be an incredibly vivid and brilliant film — but I’ll be greatly surprised.
Babel (Paramount Vantage, 10.6) is an incredibly shrewd work in the sense that it’s shaped in a way that keeps you fully absorbed, and yet gradually awakened to the fact that there’s a greater whole coming together than what is indicated by gathering sum of story and scenes.

(l. to r.) Cate Blanchett, Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu, Gael Garcia Bernal at this morning’s Babel press conference — 5.23.06, 11:33 am.

In the most rudimentary sense it’s a film about how one bullet out of a rifle causes damage and hurt to many people in various tangential roundabout ways. But it’s more deeply about how we’re all affected by everything and everyone…how no one is an island, we’re all in this together and everything we say or do echoes all over the place.
It’s about interconnectedness, aloneness, and human frailty, and is especially about parents and children. It radiates compassion and precision and refined artistry with every last frame, shot, edit and line of dialogue.
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That last line sounds like breathless film-critic crap, so let’s go over the basics again…
Guillermo Ariagga’s script tells four stories that take place in three countries — Tunisia, Mexico and Japan — and several disparate characters (four played by Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett, Gael Garcia Bernal and a young unknown Japanese actress, Rinko Yakusho).
The Tunisian section has two stories — that of a married American tourist couple (Pitt, Blanchett) and their encounter with a bullet, and a story about how that bullet is haphazardly fired from a long distance away by a pair of youths playing with a newly-purchased rifle, and about the consequences of this.

Innaritu, Blanchett as they entered the Salles de Presse inside the Palais this morning (5.23.060) at 11:25 am.

The Mexican section is about this couple’s nanny (Adriana Barraza) and her taking Pitt and Blanchett’s kids (Elle Fanning, Nathan Gamble) across the border into Mexico for a wedding, which leads to bad things all around, particularly for her nephew (Gael Garcia Bernal).
The Japanese portion is about the relationship between a wealthy businessman (Koji Yakusho) and his deaf daughter (Rinko Kikuchi), and the daughter’s encounters with various men, among them a visiting police detective.
They and many other are linked in the same way that the characters in Inarritu’s Amores Perros and 21 Grams are linked — by a single violent act.
This one of those “small” portraits of humanity writ large…and like I mentioned in my Inarritu interview a week and a half ago, it becomes larger and richer and more poignant the more you think about it.

Some journalists in the post-screening press conference were asking Innaritu, “So…what’s it all about, really?” That plus the hearty applause and whoo-whoos from the press at the end of the screening tells me it’s one of those film that resonates in a way that’s fuller and deeper than any concisely worded “meaning” or “explanation.”
Innaritu answered by saying the film “has no lesson — I don’t do films to give lessons. It is a film about human beings…not Moroccans, not Mexicans, not Japanese, not Americans. It’s not about what separates us, but what binds us.”
The teeming energy before the packed press conference began, and the respectful applause given to each player when they were announced at the press conference got underway…you can just feel that this film has connected in a big way.
“The connections between the characters [in Babel] are not about coincidence,” Innaritu went on. “What makes us happy varies with each culture, with each person, but what makes us sad and miserable is something that everyone knows and shares.

“I can say the film is about incommunication, misunderstanding and loneliness,” Inarritu said in an interview we did on 5.5, or about eighteen days ago.
“But for me, the bottom line DNA of this film is about how fragile and vulnerable we are. How do you say, this is a chain, this is a little piece of the chain? A link? For me when a link is broken then the chain is broken. And that, for me, is what this film is about.
“Babel was an idea I had when I first arrived in the United States,” he recalled. “This film would have been impossible without me being a director in exile, I would say. Because what comes from this is that you have a consciousness…a very strange perspective of your country and of yourself.
“I’m speaking of a complex relationship between a citizen of a Third World country” — Inarritu was born, raised and launched his career in Mexico — “and this country, and the traveling that I have done in the last six years, the way you understand things. So I guess that was what [led] to the necessity of making this film.
“So I started working on this thing with Carlos Cuaron [the brother of Alfonso Cuaron and screenwriter of Y Tu Mama Tambien]. In the beginning. He would be the writer. But we began it as an argument and never took it beyond that, so we decided that he would do another project that we were developing.

Babel director Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu during interview at CBS Radford — Wednesday, 5.3.06, 1:10 pm.

“At this point I invited Guillermo to participate in this story, and we obviously…as part of that process, we decided to share a lot of things.”
“I think Babel is different from Amores perros and 21 Grams because the range of this film is completely different, style-wise, than the other ones. Because every story has a particular narrative and personality, and I feel that this is a more cinematic piece.
“I tried to combine the realistic aesthetic that normally I have been working in, but qualitating from an imaginary world where the music and the sound is a guiding force. There are a lot of sound elements in Babel. I was really taking the audio seriously. Using it to try and be inside a character.
“I stripped down so many things in the script by myself, and I was constantly adjusting and adapting and rewriting a lot of things based upon the culture and the situation I was in. It was a very difficult and informative process.
“I feel it is a very different film from the other ones in tone and style. It’s more cinematic. I can only put only one line in the script, but in the shooting I can make a ten-minute piece out of a whole interior consciousness [trip] by one of the characters.

Inarritu, Babel editor Stephen Mirrione — Wednesday, 5.3.06, 1:17 pm

“I had to make a lot of decisions. In a good way. I added some things, and I also took out some things. I was shaping a lot and learning a lot and learning the limitations of the actors. So in the end I took out like 30% of the script down, in the editing. So there have been a lot of changes.
“We shot in Morocco, and then pre-production in Mexico, and then we shot in Mexico, and then over to Japan for pre-production and then we shot there. It was the same as doing four separate films, which was intellectually and emotionally very difficult. To shoot something in Morocco and at the same time think about the likelihood that a scene would cut directly into a scene I know I will shoot in Japan seven or eight months later. It was an exercise.
“And it was such a struggle, about going or not going to Cannes,” he added. “But we finally decided that Cannes is a good platform for this kind of film. It’s a four-language film, a very personal film, a very complicated film, and this festival exists for that…for this kind of film.

Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu’s Babel, which press-screened this morning, is, I believe, a lock to win the Palmes D’Or. Everyone seems to be feeling this, spreading it around. If it doesn’t win, fine — it’ll still be an incredibly vivid and brilliant film — but I’ll be greatly surprised.

Babel (Paramount Vantage, 10.6) is an incredibly shrewd work in the sense that it’s shaped in a way that keeps you fully absorbed, and yet gradually awakened to the fact that there’s a greater whole coming together than what is indicated by gathering sum of story and scenes.

(l. to r.) Cate Blanchett, Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu, Gael Garcia Bernal at this morning’s Babel press conference — 5.23.06, 11:33 am.

In the most rudimentary sense it’s a film about how one bullet out of a rifle causes damage and hurt to many people in various tangential roundabout ways. But it’s more deeply about how we’re all affected by everything and everyone…how no one is an island, we’re all in this together and everything we say or do echoes all over the place.

It’s about interconnectedness, aloneness, and human frailty, and is especially about parents and children. It radiates compassion and precision and refined artistry with every last frame, shot, edit and line of dialogue.

That last line sounds like breathless film-critic crap, so let’s go over the basics again…

Guillermo Ariagga’s script tells four stories that take place in three countries — Tunisia, Mexico and Japan — and several disparate characters (four played by Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett, Gael Garcia Bernal and a young unknown Japanese actress, Rinko Yakusho).

The Tunisian section has two stories — that of a married American tourist couple (Pitt, Blanchett) and their encounter with a bullet, and a story about how that bullet is haphazardly fired from a long distance away by a pair of youths playing with a newly-purchased rifle, and about the consequences of this.

Innaritu, Blanchett as they entered the Salles de Presse inside the Palais this morning (5.23.060) at 11:25 am.

The Mexican section is about this couple’s nanny (Adriana Barraza) and her taking Pitt and Blanchett’s kids (Elle Fanning, Nathan Gamble) across the border into Mexico for a wedding, which leads to bad things all around, particularly for her nephew (Gael Garcia Bernal).

The Japanese portion is about the relationship between a wealthy businessman (Koji Yakusho) and his deaf daughter (Rinko Kikuchi), and the daughter’s encounters with various men, among them a visiting police detective.

They and many other are linked in the same way that the characters in Inarritu’s Amores Perros and 21 Grams are linked — by a single violent act.

This one of those “small” portraits of humanity writ large…and like I mentioned in my Inarritu interview a week and a half ago, it becomes larger and richer and more poignant the more you think about it.

Some journalists in the post-screening press conference were asking Innaritu, “So…what’s it all about, really?” That plus the hearty applause and whoo-whoos from the press at the end of the screening tells me it’s one of those film that resonates in a way that’s fuller and deeper than any concisely worded “meaning” or “explanation.”

Innaritu answered by saying the film “has no lesson — I don’t do films to give lessons. It is a film about human beings…not Moroccans, not Mexicans, not Japanese, not Americans. It’s not about what separates us, but what binds us.”

The teeming energy before the packed press conference began, and the respectful applause given to each player when they were announced at the press conference got underway…you can just feel that this film has connected in a big way.

“The connections between the characters [in Babel] are not about coincidence,” Innaritu went on. “What makes us happy varies with each culture, with each person, but what makes us sad and miserable is something that everyone knows and shares.

“I can say the film is about incommunication, misunderstanding and loneliness,” Inarritu said in an interview we did on 5.5, or about eighteen days ago.

“But for me, the bottom line DNA of this film is about how fragile and vulnerable we are. How do you say, this is a chain, this is a little piece of the chain? A link? For me when a link is broken then the chain is broken. And that, for me, is what this film is about.

“Babel was an idea I had when I first arrived in the United States,” he recalled. “This film would have been impossible without me being a director in exile, I would say. Because what comes from this is that you have a consciousness…a very strange perspective of your country and of yourself.

“I’m speaking of a complex relationship between a citizen of a Third World country” — Inarritu was born, raised and launched his career in Mexico — “and this country, and the traveling that I have done in the last six years, the way you understand things. So I guess that was what [led] to the necessity of making this film.

“So I started working on this thing with Carlos Cuaron [the brother of Alfonso Cuaron and screenwriter of Y Tu Mama Tambien]. In the beginning. He would be the writer. But we began it as an argument and never took it beyond that, so we decided that he would do another project that we were developing.

Babel director Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu during interview at CBS Radford — Wednesday, 5.3.06, 1:10 pm.

“At this point I invited Guillermo to participate in this story, and we obviously…as part of that process, we decided to share a lot of things.”

“I think Babel is different from Amores perros and 21 Grams because the range of this film is completely different, style-wise, than the other ones. Because every story has a particular narrative and personality, and I feel that this is a more cinematic piece.

“I tried to combine the realistic aesthetic that normally I have been working in, but qualitating from an imaginary world where the music and the sound is a guiding force. There are a lot of sound elements in Babel. I was really taking the audio seriously. Using it to try and be inside a character.

“I stripped down so many things in the script by myself, and I was constantly adjusting and adapting and rewriting a lot of things based upon the culture and the situation I was in. It was a very difficult and informative process.

“I feel it is a very different film from the other ones in tone and style. It’s more cinematic. I can only put only one line in the script, but in the shooting I can make a ten-minute piece out of a whole interior consciousness [trip] by one of the characters.

Inarritu, Babel editor Stephen Mirrione — Wednesday, 5.3.06, 1:17 pm

“I had to make a lot of decisions. In a good way. I added some things, and I also took out some things. I was shaping a lot and learning a lot and learning the limitations of the actors. So in the end I took out like 30% of the script down, in the editing. So there have been a lot of changes.

“We shot in Morocco, and then pre-production in Mexico, and then we shot in Mexico, and then over to Japan for pre-production and then we shot there. It was the same as doing four separate films, which was intellectually and emotionally very difficult. To shoot something in Morocco and at the same time think about the likelihood that a scene would cut directly into a scene I know I will shoot in Japan seven or eight months later. It was an exercise.

“And it was such a struggle, about going or not going to Cannes,” he added. “But we finally decided that Cannes is a good platform for this kind of film. It’s a four-language film, a very personal film, a very complicated film, and this festival exists for that…for this kind of film.”

Alejando Gonzalez Innaritu‘s Babel, which press-screened this morning, is, I believe, a lock to win the Palmes D’Or. It’s an incredibly shrewd and brilliant film about all of us…about frailty, interconnectedness, aloneness and particularly parents and children. It exudes compassion and acute precision with every frame, shot, edit and line of dialogue. I fucking loved it.

It’s one of those “small” portraits of humanity writ large…and like I mentioned in my Inarritu interview a week and a half ago, it becomes larger and richer and more poignant the more you think about it.
Some in the post-screening press conference were asking Innaritu, “So…what’s it all about, really?” That plus the hearty applause and whoo-whoos from the press at the end of the screening tells me it’s one of those film that resonates in a way that’s fuller and deeper than any concisely worded “meaning” or “explanation.”
The teeming energy before the packed press conference began, and the respectful applause given to each player when they were announced at the press conference got underway…you can just feel that this film has connected in a big way.

X-Men 3 is a Brett Ratner coarsening of a action franchise that had more than a touch of class — wit, smarts, well-sculpted characters — when Bryan Singer was directing. But of course, everyone knew this was in the cards when Rattner was hired, and if you accept the downgrade as the way of the corrupted world it’s not that bad to sit through. One of the beefs I have with the Ratner is the same I had with Singer’s first installment, which is Hugh Jackman‘s Wolverine getting clobbered so hard that he flies backwards and slams into walls (and usually though them). This happens so much in that Wolverine’s fight scenes become almost humorous after a while. He acts tough and talks tough, but as soon as he gets into a fight, no matter who his opponent may be…there he goes! A scowling, mutton-chopped backwards-soaring missile…wham! Then he’s on the ground…grimacing, grunting…wow, that hurt…but I guess I’m okay. Fifteen mintues later and another fight happens, and there goes Hugh again! He suffers through a good five or six flying back-slams before the damn thing’s over. If they do a Wolverine movie, please…no more of this.

“It doesn’t have a sales agent. It was shot in digital video by a rookie director and cost less than $1 million. But it could prove itself one of the unexpected success stories of the Festival de Cannes.” So begins an Anne Thompson story in the Hollywood Reporter about M. Blash’s Lying, which has, I believe, something to do with the telling on un-truths. I’ve been watching for it because my friend Tricia van Klaverman produced it with about seven others. Playing in the Directr’s Fortnight section, it stars Chloe Sevigny, Jean Malone, Leelee Sobieski, Maya Goldsmith and Haley Wegryn Gross. I’m also attuned to it because I’ve been invited to a Tuesday afternoon yacht party in its honor.

The first 20 minutes of World Trade Center, which was shown last night at 10 pm at the Salle Debussy, is smooth, well-cut, understated and pro-level all the way. But as I suspected, it doesn’t feel very much like a Stone film…not this portion of it, at least. One of the most urgent, hyperkinetic, go-for-it directors of the late 20th Century has chosen to go tasteful, respectful, and understated (no shots of the planes hitting the towers, only one glimpse of a jumper, etc.). Which is an okay way to go for a film like this, I suppose — it just feels like a film thatg anyone could have directed. I’ve said it before, but World Trade Center is basically Ollie’s make-up film for having failed with Alexander — he’s proving to the powers-that-be that he can play the role of a de-balled functionary who can turn out a money-making film. I guess we’ll see how the rest of it plays a month or two from now, but at the risk of boring everyone (including myself) I still don’t understand — I will never understand — what is so fascinating and meaningful about a couple of Port Authority cops buried by North Tower rubble on 9/11 and unable to free themselves until help comes along, etc. And I still really despise that soothifying Craig Armstrong music (i.e., music meant to tell you that what you’re watching is supposed to produce a lump in the throat). The warning buzzer sounded for me when Nicolas Cage‘s John McLoughlin character looked in on his sleeping kids and we suddenly hear tinkly Marvin Hamlisch piano music. But the sound is fantastic, and the film looks sturdy and disciplined. The only “bad” thing comes when the building starts to collapse and it goes into slow-mo when Cage says “runnnn!!” to his men. (Slow-mo action scenes are bad…very bad…they haven’t been hip since The Wild Bunch .) I was scrunched into one of the balcony seats. Before it began Stone came up to the stage and talked a little bit about WTC and also Platoon, which is being honored for its 20th anniversary. Three of his Platoon stars — Charlie Sheen, Willem Dafoe (the French emcee called him “Weeleem Dahfoohh!”) and Tom Berenger (“Tohm Behhrangeahrr!”) joined him on the stage, but they just smiled. Dafoe and Sheen look almost as young and trim as they did in ’86, but Berenger has clearly bulked up some. I sat through about a half hour’s worth of Platoon, a superb film that will hold up for a long time to come. The print looked fine but not spectacular (Stone said it hadn’t been restored) but I was totally shagged and fagged and couldn’t keep my eyes open. Stone abalogized the two films by saying, “For me, the struggle [all along] has been to try and make these stories about people who really see it with their own eyes and their ears, whether they were in the jungles of Vietnam or the deserts of Iraq or rubble of the World Trade Center.”

Read Andrew C. Revkin‘s N.Y. Times piece about Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth (Paramount, 5.24 limited) and tell me if you detect a skeptical, slightly patronizing tone in some portions of it, as I do. Example #1: “The frustrations of a man whose long-sought goal remains out of reach are vividly on display in the [film during the] first few minutes.” (This is a skewed observation, to say the very least — there isn’t so much as a whiff of frustration in the film’s opening section, which is basically footage of a peaceful flowing river with Gore speaking voice-over about the serenity of nature.) Example #2: “For the moment, opinions on prospects [for the doc to change attitudes] range from hopeful to scornful, not so much a reflection on the film’s quality as the vast distance between combatants in the fight over what to do, or not do, about human-caused warming.” (Scornful? Only a person with styrofoam between the ears (or a die-hard Cheney-head) can watch this film and come out of it spewing scorn. There perhaps may be some who will worship The DaVinci Code and call it one of the finest American motion pictures of all time — would it therefore be legitimate for a N.Y. Times writer to declare that reactions to the film “range from derision or dismissiveness to unqualified adoration”?) Example #3: “Mr. Gore…tries just about every possible tactic to make his points…he tries to connect the dots…he often chooses his words to avoid making direct causal links that most scientists say are impossible to substantiate”. (Gore tries, Gore does what he can, Gore struggles, etc…the obvious implication being that he doesn’t fully succeed.) Example #4 : “The libertarian Competitive Enterprise Institute, in a clear jab at both the film and recent news media coverage focused on worst-case climate risks, unveiled two television commercials last week that amounted to a defense of the main gas linked to warming, each with the tag line: ‘Carbon dioxide. They call it pollution. We call it life.'” This is tantamount to including a positive quote from NAMBLA (the North American Man-Boy Love Association) at the end of an article about reactions to a documentary about Catholic priests who’ve molested altar boys. New York Times articles rarely make me furious and sickened — this one did.

Back from the less-than-elegant but somewhat entertaining- passable-not painful X-Men 3…thank the gods for the wondrous Shakespearean energy and laser-like performing precision of Ian McKellen…Magneto forever! …3:15 pm Cannes time…working on a review and e-mailing about events and interviews over the next four days, which is the time I have left here (not counting the remainder of today)…and incidentally…

Sitting in the Orange Wi-Fi cafe with 40 or 50 other journalists in the mid-afternoon often feels like a very peaceful, almost serene thing…the crowded streets, the yelling photographers (whom Elton John, visiting the festival yesterday or the day before, said “should be shot”), the intense sunlight, the strain of racing around…none of this penetrates…journalists murmuring on their phones in Italian, Serbo-Croat, French, Spanish, Polish, Portugese…the vibe is almost as peaceful as my own home, because I am at home, I feel.

For only the second time in seven days, I allowed myself to sleep past 6:30 ayem so I’m only just starting. It’s 11:10 now and I have to pack up and get over to the X-Men 3 screening at the Lumiere, which I feel obliged to see in a half-resigned, half-teeth-gritting way. More postings later…kind of a uneventful Monday, and that’s fine for a change.

After the regrettable but inescapable duty of writing my reactions to Southland Tales (which could, it seems to me, be trimmed and refined and re-shaped to its benefit, so there’s another critical-reaction chapter yet to come…I hope), I shuffled out of the Palais and down the Croisette to a very pleasant HBO beach party, with the blustery winds buffeting the see-through plastic barriers that had been draped around three beach-facing sides of the tent. mPRm’s Michael Lawson and James Lewis were hosting, and I had a pleasant shmooze with senior vp media relations Nancy Lesser. Around 6:45 pm I arrived at a Southland Tales party on a Cadillac Escalade-type yacht called the Big Eagle in the Cannes harbor. I had a great talk with bright and engaging Senh Duong, the Emeryville-based creator and major domo of Rotten Tomatoes. I also had a good chat with Persistent Entertainment’s Matthew Rhodes, who hands-on produced and/or handled financing for Southland Tales, Walker Payne and Lasse Hallstrom’s An Unfinished Life, among several others. Rhodes is now preparing to produce The Beautiful Ordinary, a suburban high-school drama written and directed by Jessica Manafort, whom Rhodes said is cut from the same kind of imaginative, creatively audacious cloth as Southland‘s Richard Kelly.

California Dreamin’

Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales, which had its first public screening this morning inside the Cannes Grand Palais, is a very long throw of a surreal wackazoid football — a stab at a great, sprawling GenX apocalyptic nightmare about an Orwellian police state running things a couple of years from now.
I liked portions of Kelly’s film here and there (especially the musical numbers and the wild fantasy stuff that kicks in toward the end), but mostly it felt like a struggle and a muddle. I’m sorry to say this because I think Kelly is one of the best younger filmmakers around, but this is the kind of difficult film that only an audacious visionary could make.

Seann William Scott (center, shaved head) as Hermosa Beach cop Roland Taverner in Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales. (I’ll figure out the other actors’ names later on.)

Set mostly in the beach communities of Los Angeles (with a final act that happens above the streets of downtown Los Angeles) over a July 4th weekend, it’s about various permutations of frenzy, delusion, egoistic fame-seeking, and underground anti-government activity, all of it running rampant after a second 9/11-type attack (a much worse one) occurs in Texas.
There weren’t that many walkouts during the screening (I noticed about 12 or 13) but they were almost all people with soft bellies and gray hair. I don’t know how many tickets Southland Tales (Universal, mid-fall) is going to sell when it opens, but if it makes out at all it’ll be largely due to the GenX-ers and GenY-ers who turned Kelly’s Donnie Darko into a cult hit after it opened in October ’01, despite many critical pans.
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Southland Tales is absolutely not a movie for your average 55 year-old. I’m not saying all younger people will like it, but you can almost certainly scratch the boomers.
I was of two minds. I felt distanced and frustrated by the lack of a clear through-line and a not-simple-enough unfolding (especially in the beginning), and by the sense of insufficient refinement in the story strokes.
But I also felt dazzled and delighted by some of the flights of fancy and fantasy that Southland veers into, especially during the final act. This is a crazy, no-holds-barred, go-for-it Richard Kelly film. And I think vigorously challenging mind-scrambling movies are good for the soul, even if you don’t get everything about them.

Duane “the Rock” Johnson

Kelly himself admitted in the post-screening press conference that the film is “a tapestry of ideas” and “an experience of a puzzle,” and that perhaps it will take “a second viewing to comprehend all the intricacies.”
That’s the problem with the film — it’s too dense and complex and ambitious by half.
And the actors — Duane “The Rock” Johnson, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Seann William Scott and Justin Timberlake have the lead parts — have been directed to perform with arch and mannered deliveries, or to act ultra-serious and alarmed with constantly shocked expressions, and so it doesn’t connect on an emotional level. Nothing is allowed to sink in and touch you.
Southland Tales is meant to be a black comedy, but the jokes are on the dry side and under-delivered (which is usually the kind of humor I prefer…except here) and they’re frankly not very funny.

The film is also supposed to be a kind of half-musical, but Kelly doesn’t work enough songs in (only Timberlake has an out-and-out musical number) and Southland could have really used the anchor effect of characters occasionally singing and dancing their butts off.
My opening paragraph makes Southland Tales sound like a bad oppressors vs. good revolutionaries story, but it’s not that simple.
All kinds of ideas, echoes and story elements have been thrown into this puppy, mostly stemming from post-9/11 attitudes and intrigues.
Armed soldiers are on the street, a privately-run big brother outfit called USIDent is checking up on everyone, the environment is heating up badly, two pairs of identical twins (or twin souls) are part of the general plot swirl, and there are a lot of folks getting shot at the end.
There’s also a decelerating globe, a political alliance between an ex-porn star and an action star (i.e., Gellar and Johnson), a conniving neocon political candidate and his flunkies, a power-mad company called Fluid Karma that delivers ocean-driven energy, Santa Monica-based neo-Marxist revolutionaries blackmailing politicians, a mood-altering substance that various characters inject into their necks with a high-tech syringe, veterans of the Iraq War suffering post-traumatic stress disorder…and that’s just for starters.

This morning’s press conference — Monday, 5.22.06, 12:55 pm

Southland tales is probably going to get a rough reception from the Cannes critics. I talked to a few of them as we shuffled out of the screening, and I don’t think it’ll be pretty.
Here’s what Kelly has written in the press notes: “Southland Tales is a comedic spin on the apocalypse, as it should occur in the great city of Los Angeles. Trust me on this one…if the end is indeed upon us (apparently 59% of Americans believe that it is), it is going to happen in Los Angeles.”
I thought it a bit odd that only Duane Johnson, Sarah Michelle Gellar and Kelly’s producer Sean McKittrick were on the dais with Kelly at the press conference. The no-shows included Seann William Scott, Justin Timberlake, Chris Lambert, Jon Lovitz and Kevin Smith (who is close to unrecognizable in the film due to a heavy makeup job).

Sarah Michelle Gellar

Reservations aside, this is one of those films you have to see just to see how much you can get on the first take. I’m definitely going to take Kelly’s advice and see it a second time.
But Kelly should consider doing a re-edit before showing it again at a major festival. I think there’s a slightly better movie inside the one I saw this morning. And if he does a re-edit, he should consider cleaning up the beginning and make it simpler and more straight-arrow and with less plot thrown at the audience so early on.