If George W. Bush's America vomited, it might look like Southland Tales, an incomprehensible piece of political satire that doesn't bother with pretension, instead throwing C and D-list actors, conceits, and signifiers at the screen as furiously as possible, hoping, perhaps, that something sticks. As cinema it's an act of vandalism, rejecting limousine liberal politesse in favor of what I would term direct action: if you want to say "fuck the Republicans" just say fuck the Republicans, I guess. That's not to say that Southland Tales is writer-director Richard Kelly's Fahrenheit 9/11, Michael Moore's infamous anti-Bush "documentary" polemic; in that film, you could tell what the hell was going on. Kelly, whose previous feature, Donnie Darko, abandoned logic in favor of an intuitive emotional authenticity, here just abandons logic in favor of taking out as many targets as humanly possible. Perhaps the culture is simply too large to be so simply indicted, but I imagine that someone like Kelly must have figured that the powers that be would get wise to his shit eventually and deny him the means of production, so why not try for the big brass ring all in one fell swoop?
23 March 2008
Escape From L.A.
If George W. Bush's America vomited, it might look like Southland Tales, an incomprehensible piece of political satire that doesn't bother with pretension, instead throwing C and D-list actors, conceits, and signifiers at the screen as furiously as possible, hoping, perhaps, that something sticks. As cinema it's an act of vandalism, rejecting limousine liberal politesse in favor of what I would term direct action: if you want to say "fuck the Republicans" just say fuck the Republicans, I guess. That's not to say that Southland Tales is writer-director Richard Kelly's Fahrenheit 9/11, Michael Moore's infamous anti-Bush "documentary" polemic; in that film, you could tell what the hell was going on. Kelly, whose previous feature, Donnie Darko, abandoned logic in favor of an intuitive emotional authenticity, here just abandons logic in favor of taking out as many targets as humanly possible. Perhaps the culture is simply too large to be so simply indicted, but I imagine that someone like Kelly must have figured that the powers that be would get wise to his shit eventually and deny him the means of production, so why not try for the big brass ring all in one fell swoop?
