Attempt at black comedy has numerous problems

May 22, 2006

By CHARLES EALY / The Dallas Morning News

CANNES, France — In the first five minutes of Richard Kelly's Southland Tales, Texas is devastated by a series of terrorist nuclear attacks on the Fourth of July. You get to watch Abilene residents pause from their barbecues to stare at the mushroom cloud on the horizon.

For the rest of the movie, nearly every evil politician is identified as being from Texas.

So you might begin to think that Mr. Kelly has some problems with the Lone Star State.

Not to worry. In its current cut, Southland Tales has so many problems in structure and narrative that it seems unlikely to find a distributor.

At a news conference after the Sunday screening at the Cannes Film Festival, Mr. Kelly said he was trying to make a black comedy about the near future, which is dominated by a corporation that has figured out a way to harness the sea's tides to provide all our energy needs. But most people in the audience weren't laughing, and lots didn't even stay for the end.

A quick summary gives you an idea why.

As head of the evil corporation, Wallace Shawn discovers that his new energy invention is actually slowing the rotation of the Earth's axis and has created a weird zone in Nevada, near Lake Mead.

The Rock, who's married to Mandy Moore, the daughter of a Texas senator, ends up in the special zone and suffers from amnesia. He eventually winds up in the arms of Sarah Michelle Gellar, a porn star named Krysta Now, who hosts a popular TV show about current affairs.

She in turn, has ties to two separate neo-Marxist terrorist groups, one run by Cheri Oteri and the other by Nora Dunn. You might ask: Isn't one neo-Marxist terrorist group enough?

Not in Mr. Kelly's disjointed world.

At any rate, by the end of two hours and 40 minutes, you get to see a flying ice cream truck, carrying two Seann William Scotts, shoot down a mega-zeppelin over the LA skyline as the world approaches extinction — or not.

Despite the overall idiocy, Southland Tales has a few brilliant moments. One includes Justin Timberlake, whose character performs a music video mid-movie by lip-synching a song by the Killers. And a dance routine by Ms. Gellar and friends leads up to the weird finale. So it's not all bad.

Lots of music from Moby helps ease the pain. But Southland Tales appears destined to go down as one of the most infamous Cannes premieres ever.