Sin #74: When Good Goes Bad

It all starts with a rebellious teenager. Donnie’s got issues; first of all, he has strange visions of a man dressed as a grotesque rabbit who apparently knows when the world will end, then he gets obsessed with black holes (with some astonishing revelations) and time travel.

“Donnie Darko” is the brilliant debut of Richard Kelly, and it is simply a formidable calling card that became an instant midnight cult film. People saw Kelly as a director of great ambition and imagination and expected mighty things of his next movie. Unfortunately he delivered one of the most wretched pieces of entertainment of its year with his “Southland Tales”, which is an incoherent mess of epic proportions.

While “Donnie Darko” focused intently on its hero, “Southland” is scattered all over the place in an unconvincing futuristic dystopia that never comes to life. The first mistake is its quirky and unconventional casting that ranges from The Rock to several members of Saturday Night Live (not to mention Justin Timberlake in an inexplicable role; he also gets to deliver one of the most awkward musical scenes I’ve seen while covering The Killers’ All the Things That I’ve Done).

Even though “Southland Tales” is a complete failure, I still had faith in Kelly. Surely he would see the mistakes of it and return to his roots by making a more grounded story. He surely tried with “The Box” but sadly with it, he has taken an intriguing premise and run it to the ground in a smorgasbord of overall lunacy and absurdity. The film starts promisingly as a mysterious man hands a couple a box with a single button; if they press it they win exactly one million dollars but someone they don’t know will die. The next events in the movie are impossible to predict since they head into the realm of cheesy existentialistic sci-fi (how far does the story remove itself from its earlier scenes!).

There are some directors who seem to walk a tight rope every time they make a movie; you never know if they will succeed or fail. Terry Gilliam is one of them. While “The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus” was an entertaining and lovable fantasy, “Tideland” descended into perversity while being incredibly dull. Kevin Smith is another example since his stories usually involve junkies and fart jokes. In his best movies (like the great “Dogma”) he is able to combine an adolescent kind of humor with some pretty meaningful themes (well, not really that meaningful but sweet). Recently however, Smith sold out with the appropriately titled “Cop Out” which is one of the dumbest cop buddy movies I’ve ever seen. Here is another film hammered by some irritating casting decisions. By making Tracy Morgan into the obnoxious sidekick, Smith has made the movie unbearable (it is important to say that this is the first movie he has directed in which he didn’t write the script, hence the lazy jokes). Desperation quickly crawls into this vacuous vortex and the movie remains painfully unfunny throughout even though it’s in a desperate bid to remain entertaining.

I’m afraid Kelly will never do something as intriguing and powerful as “Donnie Darko” (and by the way, I’m pretending the sequel “S.Darko” doesn’t actually exist). He remains a man of big ideas but somehow he is unable to channel them successfully. With “Southland Tales” and “The Box” he reveals himself as basically a one-trick pony. On the other hand I still believe in Gilliam and Smith because they’ve showed me their strengths on more than one occasion and they remain engaging and creative filmmakers. I think they work better outside the system, inside the independent and art-house constraints whose limitations can be seen as more of a blessing than a curse.