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Southland Tales

Written by Nobuhiro Hosoki

 

Audio Q&A with Director Richard Kelly

As a follow-up to his cult hit "Donnie Darko", director Richard Kelly sets "Southland Tales" in an alternate version of the U.S, in 2008. It is a story depicting a post-9/11 view of anxiety and paranoia in an apocalyptic universe. Three years after Texas was nuked, an energy crisis drives whole nations into acts of desperation and spawns corrupt representatives to lead an election campaign. Here, the Democrats have turned into militants under the banner of Karl Marx and the Republicans have established a restrictive version of the Patriot Act called USI dent. A corporation controls cyberspace under the government, abusing its power by monitoring the Internet all the time.

The film begins with a series of quick montages of a summation of the first three parts of Richard Kelly's six-part graphic novel--the rest of the parts remain in the movie. In the midst of the chaos, the protagonist, action superstar Boxer Santaros(Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson) is kidnapped and brainwashed. He no longer remembers his marriage to Madeline Frost(Mandy Moore), the daughter of Republican presidential candidate Bobby Frost(Holmes Osbourne). Then he reappears with his current flame, Krysta Now (Sarah Micelle Gellar), a former porn star turned TV-talk-show host, who has developed a script together with Santaros called "The Power." As a preparation of the film, he decides to ride along with Taverner (Seann William Scott), a racist cop and veteran of the Iraqi war who does military observation for the left.

The script grabs the attention of Baron Von Westphalen (Wallace Shaw), the inventor of a web-generated energy called Instant Karma. Frost's wife (Miranda Richardson), the head of USIdent, watches a myriad of newscasts and reality television shows along with Krysta Now. Throughout the film, director Kelly throws in a whirlpool of pop culture, with most of the cast appropriate for the WB channel; even some of the shots deliberately resemble those of the paparazzi. He lets us peek through the protocols of our current national entertainment state throughout.

In this particularly celebrity-crazed world that we live in, perspective in the future is bleak, with cartoonish characters speaking nervously to each other, with half the characters watching the other half, with guns used in an arbitary way, and people indifferent to who is the ruler or who is the victim. We are heading into a world as narrated by Justin Timberlake when he says, "This is how the world ends." The value of our nation is depicted well in the scene on Krysta's show that declares the country's most urgent problem is "the horniness of teens." This film is a message from a self indulgent director to a self-indulgent country!

Written and directed by Richard Kelly
Director of photography: Steven Poster
Edited by Sam Bauer
Music by Moby
Production designer: Alexander Hammond
Produced by Sean McKittrick, Bo Hyde, Kendall Morgan, and Matthew Rhodes
Released by Samuel Goldwyn Pictures.
Running time: 144 minutes.

Cast: Dwayne Johnson (Boxer Santaros)
Seann William Scott (Roland Taverner/Ronald Taverner)
Sarah Michelle Gellar (Krysta Kapowski/Krysta Now)
Curtis Armstrong (Dr. Soberin Exx)
Joe Campana (Brandt Huntington),
and Nora Dunn (Cyndi Pinziki).