It's set in a dystopian near-future Los Angeles. It's cast includes Dwayne "the Rock" Johnson, Sean William Scott, Amy Pohler, Christopher Lambert and Justin Timberlake. I generally enjoy movies with those people and consider all of them a boon to a film.
Sure Donnie Darko is exactly the film a stoned teenager would come up with after watching NOVA's episode on wormholes, but second time's a charm. Right?
Right?
Nope.
It's god-awful.
I was gonna go with the idea, as I have in the past, that the film is some large meta-joke about poor films, the world and all sorts of stuff, but then I blew that apart with two thoughts:
1. Richard Kelley has never made a good film, so it's very likely beyond his capacity to create self-referential super-art.
2. It's extremely cynical, both of me and the imagined creator, to make something that is just one giant "fuck you" to everyone. The best analogy I can come up with is if you took a shit, then managed to convince people they liked eating it to the point where everyone happily would eat your shit, would seek out your shit to eat and would evangelize eating it on the internet, and then you laughed at them. It's a pretty elaborate ruse to pull off in popular media and thinking rationally I don't think either "Wanted" or "Southland Tales" are such attempts, as much as it would make me feel better about the universe...somehow.
There's a lot of problems with the movie, but by focusing on one, I can hopefully explain why it's so bad. The movie hates republicans, which, okay, fine. But it hates them in such a simple and childish way. Not particularly original other than replacing "Government" almost exclusively with "Republicans", but there it is.
A story, if you'll amuse me:
When I was in high school, I was going to write a play about futuristic people enslaving and torturing other people if I can remember correctly. I was sure that my depiction of the strife of these people was going to bring tears to the eyes of everyone who saw it. I was 16 or 17 at the time. I'm really glad I didn't write that play, but I feel that Richard Kelley's mind sees his stories exactly as mine did back then. When he thinks about his stories, sees the images it's all fantastic, brilliant moving stuff. His worlds are flush with culture and history. I'm sure of it, and that's fine. It's actually pretty awesome. The problem is, much like my aborted dystopian one-act, what the rest of us see does not glow the way it does in the creator's mind. It's awkward, clumsy, cynical and boring.
It's also way too damn long.
No comments:
Post a Comment