Last Saturday, against all prevailing logic, I went to see Richard Kelly's new 2.5 hour diasterpiece Southland Tales. Legend of its booing at Cannes had already soaked into my brain so, for the sake of full confession, I did not enter the theater expecting it to eclipse Donnie Darko in any way. "How bad could it be?" is the idea my friend and I were operating under.
Very bad. And I don't mean "strange", over the mainstream's head, outsider film, bad. I mean Axl Rose/Colonel Walter E. Kurtz-esque, narcissistic madman with way too much money sitting atop a throne made of human skulls and not enough people telling him no type of BAD. While the actual film, and Kelly's intentions, can be analyzed a thousand different ways, what I found myself preoccupied with most was that remaining, oh who knows, lets say 5% of people, who enjoyed, even adored, the film. I am going to go out on a limb and say the vast majority of these people are Donnie Darko fans (as was the one person I spoke to directly that felt this way).
Kelly goes to great pains to establish a relationship between Darko and Tales, and this is a clever insurance policy. Beyond the obvious overall themes of time travel, apocalypse, and a final chance at spiritual redemption from the hedonistic quicksand of modern living, actual Frank (the bunny from Darko) posters abound in the background, and T-Lake's music video sequence features him sexily taunting the camera while wearing a tee soaked in blood thats been dripped into the the infamous bunny ears silhouette. Wasn't aware Frank was a Killers fan! Its a wink to his size-able cult of fans; "There IS a secret message here folks, just keep looking". We want there to be meaning within the entertainment, and when you've invested so much adoration in someone's previous work, maybe its not too hard to piece together an imaginary satisfaction from the mess on the screen.
I remember having the same feeling after Radiohead released Kid A. While much of that record is certainly brilliant, the fact they had discounted even a ballpark approximation of what their audience expected of them, and their subsequent coming out of that experience on top and more respected then ever, meant that all future bets were off. Their next record could have been a toilet flushing for 72 minutes and that small percentage of die-hards would argue that critics were "not paying attention", that they "just don't get it".
Interestingly enough, I've since learned that many fans did not enjoy the director's cut Donnie Darko that came out 2 years ago. I never saw it, but apparently its jam packed with ornate explanations of the weird science that drives the movie, and squashes the mystery that makes the film so utterly unique and eventually moving. Heres to hoping for the right editing team for movie #3, due out sometime in 2015?
