The first time I watched Southland Tales, the second film by writer-director Richard Kelly, there was a point when I officially gave up trying to figure it out.  A friend of mine has a name for the point in which you officially don’t care about what’s going on in a movie anymore and he calls it “terminal confusion”.  I have not been brought to this point by many films but Southland Tales easily accomplished this task.

            The scene in question involves an amnesiac action star named Boxer Santos played by Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson being told that his amnesia was caused by his participation in an experiment with "quantum teleportation" in which he was sent three days into the future.  Furthermore his "future self" and "past self" confronted one another.  Then somehow his past self was killed by being burnt beyond recognition.  (You may be asking then how his future self is still alive but this way only leads to madness.)   When presented with the possibility that he had in fact killed his "past self" himself Johnson launches into a speech which ends with the line, "I’m a pimp and pimps don’t commit suicide," before winking into the camera.  Check please!

            For those of you who have not seen Southland Tales you will probably find my unwillingness to suspend disbelief any further to be understandable.  To those who have seen this film you may be wondering what took me so long since this is actually one of the more coherent and understandable scenes in the movie.  Both of these are beside the point.  What is most compelling to me is that despite this reaction I have taken it upon myself to see this film a second and a third time with the possibility of a fourth being highly likely.  This is not to find a greater understanding of the film.  It took me only a single viewing to deem it completely beyond my understanding.  In fact, I don’t give a rat’s ass what anybody involved with this cinematic travesty was thinking.  This is simply put the most entertainingly bad film I have subjected to myself to in years and if I have any desire at understanding it then the paradox that it remains both unquestionably wretched but endlessly fun to watch.

            When I first saw Richard Kelly’s first film ’Donnie Darko’ I was bowled over by his use of music and astounding visual style as well as his raw originality.  I was not however completely convinced that his story was altogether coherent.  Several more viewings later and the helpful watching of the director’s cut a few years later and I became convinced that the movie at least made some kind of sense on it’s own terms in the world the director had created.  In other words the science fiction was complete horseshit but as a fantasy the film really worked.              

      Southland Tales on the other hand is completely populated with characters who act out a series of bizarre skits and change their personalities based completely on the whims of the director.    While the characters in Donnie Darko all seemed to share a collective unconscious and one that was explained by the story’s "tangent universe" Southland Tales uses no such device but features characters even more divorced from reality.  In fact, Kelly gives his characters no motivation for any of their actions.  Late in the film a character played by Christopher Lambert kidnaps another character and despite three viewings I’m still not sure why or how he even knows who this character is or who he’s supposed to be working for.  It wouldn’t surprise me if the director didn’t even know because I get the distinct feeling that he doesn’t even care. 

          Amazingly the film has attracted some passionate defenders.  Some say it’s a political allegory and while Kelly shoehorned a bunch of topical references about alternative fuels, the war in Iraq and the 2008 Presidential election the movie has nothing to do with what is actually going on in the world or the country.  The election is supposedly hinging on California a state that if the Republicans needed at all it wouldn’t be when they had the vast majority of congress that the beginning voiceover tells us they do.  There is one very long online review that refers to the film as "post-cinematic" and compares the film to David Lynch’s INLAND EMPIRE.  Lynch’s film is shot on video while Kelly’s is shot on film and while debating the merits of Lynch’s film could take us down a detour I will say that the two films have almost nothing in common with each other and that the review itself seems to think that incoherence and weirdness for it’s own sake are some kind of virtue.  (In the future all movies will not make sense.)  These two views of the film seem to be in direct contradiction with each other.  Come on people the movies an absolute gas I’ll admit but it sure isn’t good by any standard.

            So why am I constantly entertained by this film anyway?  The obvious reason is I love a train wreak but for some reason I have a feeling that Southland Tales might develop a following every bit as impassioned as the one that follows Donnie Darko.  The cast alone is absolutely insane.  Jon Lovitz pops up as a sadistic cop and Mandy Moore mugs like crazy as a politicians daughter.  There are so many brilliant little casting gems like this that I half expected Steve Guttenberg or the guy who played Urkel on Family Matters to pop up at any second.