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Reviews
Southland Tales (2006)
I know what you are thinking...
I won't tell you not to see this movie, but I will warn you that it isn't good. Not even close. It was a disappointment on two levels - firstly because the film is a failure, but also because it exposes and exaggerates the flaws in his previous work.
Kelly has not mastered his craft. Instead of deftly weaving the fabric of his nigh-apocalyptic universe (as he did in Donnie Darko) from the very beginning he has 'Pilot Abilene' give a monotonous, drawling voice-over detailing the various ways in which society has collapsed since 9/11. The VO does not leave off when the acting begins, but instead the rest of the movie is so incomprehensible and poorly put together that a continuous VO is necessary in order for us to be able to make any sense at all of the rest of the plot. The plot attempts some semblance of political espionage / thriller action but the characters are so enervated and the goings-on so contrived that it's more like entering the elaborate fantasy world of a 9/11 truther who hasn't quite got their meds sorted yet.
The characters are really just foils for Kelly's elaborate vision of how the world ends. You sense that it all might be building up to something spectacular but frankly I didn't bother to stick around to find out.
I was turned off as much by the know-it-all pretentiousness, the overwrought sci-fi babble, as by the actual execution of the film. I felt like I was supposed to be impressed by the futurism, by the self-conscious supposed originality of the film. Sci-fi window dressing is all well and good, but this film is fundamentally lacking a core of truth - not realism - but truth.
And it's also lacking a coherent story line, and most of the important aspects of story telling.
This brings me back to my first paragraph, and the way this film exposes Donnie Darko's flaws. Donnie Darko was a simpler, more emotional film which downplayed the sci-fi elements of Kelly's universe in favour of a coming-of-age tale about an outsider who finds redemption and spiritual truth. There is nothing new or original or particularly genius about that story, however Kelly's sci-fi preppy suburban dystopia provided enough window dressing for us to watch it all again, whilst still preserving the emotional centre of the film.
Southland Tales is the opposite of that. Trying so hard to be clever, it's not only unintelligible, but unlikeable.
Future Shock (1972)
old anxieties still relevant for our times
The Future Shock documentary was based on the best selling book by Alvin Toffler, and reflects the global ecological and technological concerns of society at the time.
THE GOOD: Awesome moody Moog-synth keyboard sounds, suggesting Future Shock was a stylistic forerunner of 'Blade Runner's' futuristic aesthetic. The doco also highlights many changing technologies that have indeed impacted on our civilisation. For example cloning, which was a completely implausible technology at the time, was discussed as a realistic possibility.
THE BAD: The style is at times stodgy and Wells puts on his very best harbinger-of-doom narration voice, whilst constantly bemoaning that 'Nothing is permanent any more' as though before that nothing had ever died or disintegrated in the whole history of the universe. Even heart transplants and artificial limbs are portrayed as examples of 'constant change, leading to Futureshock'. The double-sided nature of technology is not often discussed - most technology is seen as unequivocally bad.
Overall this program raises some good points that are still relevant today. It would have benefited from a deeper analysis of the ways technology would shape and even enhance our lives, rather than the overly-simplistic 'technology is change, and change is bad'. Clearly, not all change is bad, as in the case of desegregation and equal rights for women. But then, as a child of Future Shock, I don't know any different anyway!