InsaneJournal

Southland Tales...
For our Christmas entertainment, hubby and I watched Southland Tales. I'm still not sure if I liked it, or if it was just so different that it goes in a special category by itself. The first fifteen minutes were hard to watch, partly because Dwayne Johnson is just being The Rock, but with different tattoos. (On the other hand, from the very start, Sean William Scott drops his typical obnoxious asshole shtick to show some genuine acting abilities in not one, but TWO roles. Color me stunned.)

Dawyne and Seann are supposed to be staging a fake murder scene to rig the election in the favor of the Democrats until another cop shows up, a real nutcase. THEN someone gets shot in front of Dwayne and he fucking loses it. (And kudos to Jon Lovitz for pulling off the stone cold psycho act so well. He REALLY creeped me out when he asked, "Do you wanna fuck, or watch a movie?")

After Dwayne takes off from the murder scene, the Rock is gone, and what's left is a big guy who looks scared shitless. He's muttering to himself, tapping his fingers, and steepling them in front of his chest all the time. He looks like a nut trying to plot his way out of his shell, and it's surprisingly good acting from him.

Sarah Michelle Gellar is atrocious throughout the film, BUT she's playing a porn star. So I present to you this quandary: if you know an actress can act, and they are put in the role of a porn star and act badly...then haven't they done their job? Yeah, it's a really deep thought, isn't it? (Okay, probably not really.)

There's a musical number at random. I love this, and it's my opinion that more movies need musical numbers at random. This is not to be confused with a request for more musicals. There's a moment when...when a junkie hallucinates a music video. It's just awesome, and it fits right in with the rest of the weird shit going down.

There's Bizarro dialogue going on throughout the film. A lot of it is sexual, but other times, it's...there a free-form poet, Dream, who goes apeshit, spouting a verse in front of a cop just before he blows her away. As a come on line, one of the aides tells his boss, "I could smell you all the way from my desk." Another schizoid GOP security screener tells Dwayne's character. "If you don't let me suck your dick, I'll blow my brains out!" Sarah Michelle repeatedly riffs on the same line, "Teen horniness is not a crime!" There's even a pop video to supplement this line, making for one random musical number, and one, not so random, but really grating on the ears. There were lines in this movies that made me choke and groan, "They didn't go there." If you've read my blog before, you know that takes some work.

The movie predicted the Democrats choosing Clinton and Lieberman for '08. (Just think about it...now shudder.) On the opposite side, the Republicans are made into serious control freaks beyond anyone's worst nightmares. You'd almost think they were being cast as the bad guys, except the "Neo-Marxist" liberals are cutting off people's fingers and hands to bypass the Big Brother network security set up by the GOP through the extended Super-Patriot act. There is a vast left wing conspiracy to match the right side in both size and function. The Democrats may, or may not be directly connected to the Neo-Marxists. (It's never made clear.) But one thing is for sure. The liberals end up looking just as psychopathic as the conservatives. The GOP has snipers posted on almost every roof, while the liberals willingly run over their own friends to cover their asses.

Nobody in this movie is a good guy. It's just like I'd want from more writers, a story where there is no way to find the hero, and everybody has some dirt in their background. But the creative minds behind this movie grabbed the weird knob and cranked it to full intensity. This is parody at such an extreme that there's no way to take any of it seriously enough to take offense.

There's porn stars, killer cops, Christopher Lambert as a mobile weapons dealer who drives his armory around in an ice cream truck, John Larroquette as a ruthless political advisor, US soldiers working as drug smugglers, reality shows hosted by porn starlets, dead bodies by the truckload, a pair of SUVs having full penetration intercourse, conspiracy theories from both sides of the political aisle, alternative energy sources, terrorism, a prophecy, and a rift in the space-time continuum...did I mention that there are two musical numbers? Because it bears repeating.

And yet, I can't be sure if I really liked it, or if it was just too different for me to forget it. In either case, I do believe that I'll be watching it again.

Later...