Southland Tales stars Dwayne The Rock Johnson, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Justin Timberlake, and Sean William Scott. It is written and directed by Richard Kelly, the same guy who wrote and directed Donnie Darko and wrote Domino.
The last time we saw The Rock and Sean together was The Rundown which was quite a good film. This movie, however, decided it wanted to be clever and steal a page out of Star Wars. The reason I say this is because the film consists of episodes 4-6 of the series. 1-3 are available in a book written by Kelly with View Askew helping out here and there (the guys who did all the Jay and Silent Bob stuff.) Just FYI Kevin Smith is indeed in Southland Tales as are a variety of other famous people like Mandy Moore.
Ok so basically this is the plot to the movie. The Rock is some big hollywood action star who gets kidnapped and driven to the desert during the 2008 election. It takes place in 2008 and is supposed to be in “the future” of America after World War 3 with the Middle East, oil costs too much, new fuels are created, the socialist party (or something like that) are in an uproar, etc. The only problem is this movie wasn’t released in time for any of this to make sense. It premiered in 2006 in France to a few people at Cannes, then showed up at a fan fest thing in the US in late 07, then premiered on DVD in March of 08. The movie is supposed to be taking place in July of 08. The timing of this film was done incredibly poorly.
Think of Late Night w/ Conan O Brien. “In the year 2000…..” being done in 2008. For Conan it’s a funny gig that has been updated now that he runs the Tonight Show to the year 3000 being that Andy clowned on him for doing such an old gig. That’s how this movie feels. It’s similar to an Obama administration thing regarding the auto industry (I got this in my e-mail) which I’ll actually share here instead of going into a full movie review…..
{I recently attended a breakfast meeting where the speaker/guest was David E. Cole, Chairman, Center for Automotive Research (CAR). You have all likely heard Cole CAR quoted, or referred to in the auto industry news lately.
Mr. Cole, who is an engineer by training, told many stories of the difficulty of working with the folks that the Obama administration has sent to save the auto industry. There have been many meetings where a 30+ year experience automotive expert has to listen to a newcomer to the industry, someone with zero manufacturing experience, zero auto industry experience, zero business experience, zero finance experience, and zero engineering experience, tell them how to run their business.
His favorite story is as follows:
There was a team of Obama people speaking to Mr Cole (Engineer, automotive experience 40+ years, Chairman of CAR). They were explaining to Mr. Cole that the auto companies needed to make a car that was electric and liquid natural gas (LNG) with enough combined fuel to go 500 miles so we wouldn’t “need” so many gas stations (A whole other topic). They were quoting BTU’s of LNG and battery life that they had looked up on some website.
Mr. Cole explained that to do this you would need a trunk FULL of batteries and a LNG tank at big as a car to make that happen and that there were problems related to the laws of physics that prevented them from…
The Obama person interrupted and said (and I am quoting here) “The laws of physics? Whose rules are those, we need to change that. (Some of the others wrote down the law name so they could look it up). We have the congress and the administration. We can repeal that law, amend it, or use an executive order to get rid of that problem. That’s why we are here, to fix these sort of issues”.}
OK, so the movie plays out something crazy like that where they made some new fuel that can power cars without oil. The only problem is soldiers get high off it too. For some reason there are soldiers all over LA that shoot commies (I have no problem with that) but for whatever reason The Rock gets wrapped up in this when Sarah Michelle Gellar, who plays a porn star of all things, gets him wrapped up with them. Anyway, the movie makes no real sense at all and wouldn’t even qualify as a good parallel universe film. You can tell the guy from Donnie Darko wrote it as he starts going into weird rants about time travel and seeing your future before it happens and such. The political undertones don’t really make any sense in the film. It’s over 2 hours long to make matters worse. Perhaps if it were set in say, oh I don’t know, 2030 I would have liked it better but having it come out a few months before the film is supposed to take place and the thought police are running all over monitoring everyone’s lives, well no I don’t buy it. Clearly the writer didn’t like the Bush administration and was trying to put his thoughts on homeland security and not using fossil fuels into a crazy “sci fi” film.
Pros: The collection of stars in this film is awesome
Cons: The writer is terrible and its a shame so many good actors were attached to this project
Verdict: I personally give this 2 out of 10. My girlfriend couldn’t even watch more than 20 minutes of this. Although I have heard if you read the prequel (episodes 1-3) then watch the movie (4-6) it makes more sense.
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