Beowulf
Southland Tales
Richard Kelly’s first film, Donnie Darko, was booed from the Cannes Film Festival, an event that might mark disaster for other filmmakers. But Darko DVD sales proved it a financial success and the director’s cut was welcomed back at Cannes with a standing ovation.
Southland Tales, Kelly’s second film, was also booed from Cannes, but time will tell whether this spiritual and thematic sequel will garner the same cult following as its predecessor.
Whispers and murmurs have been circulating Internet geek websites since the studio demanded Kelly re-cut the film. The release was postponed, but early screenings were extremely negative (except for a few die-hard Kelly fans that would pay top dollar just to watch his home videos). Critics used negative terms like “dreamed up” and “strange” and “kitsch” to describe the film, but this is only because silly words like “Shicklemanpf” and “Leikzdoof” and “Ceeponarallicha” don’t exist.
Southland Tales is the most insane, most engrossing, most original movie to confuse audiences since Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 or David Lynch’s Dune. But unlike these other films, which have confusing plots, Southland Tales is remarkably easy to follow. The film deftly handles three major story lines and multiple, character-driven sub plots. The real mystery of Southland Tales is deciphering exactly what the film means.
Major characters and plot devices include, but are not limited to: a porn star who sings the hit song Teen Horniness is Not a Crime, liquid karma, a movie star with amnesia, two S.U.V.s having sex, The Messiah, a Justin Timberlake video, midgets, the 2008 American presidential election, and a floating ice cream truck.
This does not include the brilliant but sometimes distracting cameos from Saturday Night Live actors as sundry neo-Marxist rebels.
The film opens with home video footage of a nuclear attack on Abilene, Texas and is quickly followed by a complicated web interface that explains the film’s back-story. Both of these devices are employed multiple times throughout the film, to various degrees of success. Where the integration of the Internet could quicken the pace, long stretches of fake news footage and flashing business sponsorships work to bog down the first half of the film to an almost unbearable pace.
But after the characters are established and the scene has been set, the film rockets into weirdness overdrive. Moby’s score is hypnotizing. The ensemble of b-level actors and improv comedians is bizarre, hilarious, and fascinating. The camera work and special effects are mesmerizing.
In the end, Southland Tales leaves the audience engrossed but remarkably sedate. One group of rowdy teenage boys sat behind me, loud and obnoxious as the film started, but completely silent as the film progressed. As the final credits rolled, they congregated near the exit and began to describe their feelings using words that averaged four letters long, then broke into a round of applause.
The film is nothing short of hypnotizing; a jaw-dropping, satirical, head-shaking, finger-pointing, pop-opera starring The Rock and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It’s an experience more than a good story, creating thoughts and vague feelings rather than pure emotion. It is intellectually and spiritually confusing, trite and profound, deathly serious and tons of fun. And it will easily make my top ten list for the year.
I just don’t know why.
The Mist
Frank Darabont’s The Mist dares to go where few horror movies are brave enough to tread: the far-away land of Realism. Sure, the film has its share of mutant bugs and slimy monsters, even inter-dimensional rifts and magical fog, but it outshines its peers with its cast of real, nuanced, and empathetic characters.
The plot is simple: After a major storm, a thick, unnatural mist rolls into a rural Maine town, bringing unholy terrors and forcing a small group of people to barricade themselves in a supermarket. This stock horror set-up happens in the first ten minutes, building tension with a 9/11-like urgency.
The worst part of any horror film is when the best characters do stupid things. It could be a beautiful girl heading up the stairs instead of out the front door, or the hero yelling “anyone there?” so the monsters know he’s ready to be eaten, or large groups of people waiting for their dramatic close up when they should be running for their lives. In The Mist, even the “expendable” characters are smart. In times of panic, such as an exciting scene involving a burning pterodactyl-like creature, no character does anything stupid enough to make the audience smack their collective forehead.
These incredible characters, who act like normal people, flesh out the bare-bones premise of The Mist. Thomas Jane and Andre Braugher turn in complex performances as neighbors locked in a land dispute. Although their characters are normal, they are detailed and likable. Braugher in particular strengthens the beginning of the film, playing a slick out-of-town lawyer who has a healthy distrust of locals. When they approach him with a fantastic tale of giant tentacles on the supermarket loading dock, his denial and appeal to logic seems completely justified. He is not a mindless pawn written by a mediocre screenwriter, he’s a real person reacting a realistic way.
As a gentle, even-keeled store manager, Toby Jones’s Ollie is a voice of reason. He is battered by the strange events and deadly creatures, but remains calm and helps anyone in need. He is quiet with a slight hint of femininity, which makes his final, bloody act so perfectly brutal.
Marcia Gay Harden counters Ollie’s qualities as Mrs. Carmody, a psychologically frail religious zealot. As the mist rolls in and folks start dying, Mrs. Carmody turns to the Old Testament for sanity, reciting debatable passages about locusts and expatiation like a mantra. She rallys the weak and the sick and the scared, forming a violent mob of survivors ready to perform human sacrifice to appease the evil mist.
This might seem silly and over the top, but in the hands of brilliant actors and Frank Darabont’s talent, the real horror of The Mist is the depth of human depravity. The terror of humans acting like animals is more shocking and terrifying than any computer generated monster.
It is this theme that makes The Mist a cut above its peers. But if it goes down in the annals of horror legend, it will be for the worst ending in recent film history.
Although Stephen King has blessed Darabont’s new finale, the ending loses the passion and hope of the original novella and fails to maintain the gritty realism of the film, opting instead to make a thematic point that flies in the face of all logic. Not only is the ending abrupt and ironically timed with the precision of silly Hollywood fantasy, it requires the protagonist act completely against his character, abandon his code of ethics, and lash out irrationally when all of his previous actions have been meditated and wise.
Some viewers might be happy with this ending, claiming that happy endings are too perfect. But even with its gritty anger and nihilistic morality, The Mist still manages to wrap its strengths up in a tight, suffocating bow.
