The Unemployed Writer

I was a huge fan of Kelly’s first film, Donnie Darko and it has been a long time in coming for his second. Unfortunately, it’s looking more and more like it might be a monumental flop. I’ll have to wait and see though - I seem to remember the original theatrical Donnie Darko release being a bit of a mess too, and it didn’t matter. Here’s an excerpt of the review from SpoutBlog:

“Could any film ever hope to overcome a festival drubbing like the one that greeted Southland Tales at Cannes 2006? Screened in competition, in an early incarnation clocking in at 2 hours 40 minutes (director Richard Kelly later claimed it had been a rough cut all along, but that’s apparently not how it was billed to the press at the time), Kelly’s follow-up to the slow-burning cult hit Donnie Darko was roundly, emphatically, infamously booed. Sometime after the first shockwave of bad buzz hit the States, a handful of critics rose to defend Kelly’s vision. The rest of us sat back and waited a year and a half to get a look for ourselves…

“In the film’s press notes, Kelly says he set Southland Tales in Southern California’s cultural sewers in an attempt to live up to the film noir’s seedy tradition, and oddly, if there’s one high-ish cultural mode that his characters are familiar with, it’s noir–judging by how many times it pops up on TV screens here, Kiss Me Deadly is the only film that survived the bomb. But with Kelly taking so many shots at various facets of rancid counter-culture, I wonder if he’s not aiming to shatter the post-Darko cultural suppositions foisted on him against his will. Kelly, a former frat boy, has always seemed a bit bewildered that Darko became a sensation amongst hipsters, goths, and countless youth cults. Southland Tales may fail on a lot of levels, but it’s fairly successful as an epic satire on the very notion of “alternative” culture. In practice, the Darko faithful may be the only viewers who will have patience enough to deconstruct Kelly’s vision, but I suspect that he’s not playing to his base so much as trying to shake it.”

Right now the flick is sitting at 41% and the more respected critics actually seem to be sticking up for it. I suppose I’ll sit back and wait for now and see what comes of the whole spectacle, but I’m hoping it’s not as bad as they seem to think it is.