Southland Tales: What? (Part I)
(Part 1 of an ongoing series, in which I attempt to tease out coherent thoughts from my now-broken brain regarding the jaw-dropping Richard Kelly sci-fi comedy drama satire musical apocalypse fiasco/masterpiece. Very minor spoilers.)
Days since watching film: 1
1. Attempting to explain the contradictions, frustrations, marvels and flat-out insanities of the film in words was, I believed, a futile endeavour. Sounds, maybe – I was toying around with a noise that can best be transcribed as “ooooohaaa- waaaiiahwaaiiahwaaiiah-eh’eh’eh! Eh! Eh?”. It seemed to sum it up well. But then I happened across a review in the Chicago Tribune by Michael Phillips, in which he gets round the problem by inventing the word “whatzahoozy”:
To be clear: The odds are in favor of you hating it. I hated a lot of it when I saw a barely dry work-in-progress print, 163 minutes long, at the Cannes Film Festival. It’s 19 minutes shorter and better now, though “better� is relative when you’re dealing with a whatzahoozy such as this.
Google confirms that the word “whatzahoozy” has only ever been used once – by Michael Phillips, to describe Southland Tales. And he’s spot on. It’s a whatzahoozy, possibly the biggest whatzahoozy in living memory.
2. In trying to write a review of the film, I found that I couldn’t use any of the traditional phrases used by critics when they know that a film was basically terrible, but have decided to be sympathetic. For example:
- “Whatever it is, at least it’s never boring” – No. It is frequently quite staggeringly tedious. Almost aggressively so.
- “It may be hard going, but Kelly’s is a unique vision” – I think the part where Kelly decides that the bowling alley musical dream sequence in The Big Lebowski was kind of cool and so he’s just going to do it again pretty much nails this one to the barn door.
- “Try as you like, you can’t ignore it” - I suspect that a significant number of people will manage to ignore it very successfully.
- “Intelligent” – Often stupid.
- “You have to admire its ambition” – It’s about the end of the world, has a large cast, and features a big shiny metal zeppelin. These can all be mistaken for ambition, but actually aren’t. The first isn’t terribly ambitious when 100% of your previous filmography was also about the end of the world, the second mostly means you’re just not very good at editing your scripts, and the third is ambitious only in the sense that he had an ambition to feature a big shiny metal zeppelin. A noble goal, certainly, but not really ambitious in the broader philosophical sense of the word.
- “It shouldn’t work, but somehow it does” - Shouldn’t work. Doesn’t.
3. I burst out laughing four times today at the mental image of The Rock doing his finger-tapping madness look. It’s a thing of pure wonder; you really have to see it for yourself. An enigma wrapped in a riddle wrapped in a whatzahoozy.
4. How the fuck long was Justin Timberlake’s opening narration/exposition dump? I swear, it felt like it must have been a good twenty minutes of JT telling us mostly irrelevant information that would then allow us to more fully comprehend the world we were watching incoherent unstories fail to take place in. Essentially, its goal was to ensure that the audience were at least baffled in context, as opposed to the more free-form, untethered befuddlement that might otherwise have ensued. Jesus. Has anybody timed it?
5. Nobody told Seann William Scott that this was a comedy, did they? Ha. Poor mite.
6. What was with all the midgets? Seriously.
To be continued…
