The News: Monday News Haikus!

Man, that Reverse Shot list is so wrong when it comes to Southland Tales.

They can accuse me of reverse snobbishness for calling it an underappreciated, misunderstood film that I'd like to like more than I did but I think I'll call them on beating up a crippled puppy.

Its so easy to screech "ITS ALL OVER THE PLACE! TOO IN YOUR FACE! I DIDNT GET IT! And therefore it stinks." I'm not going to say that it's a great movie because try as I might I really couldn't say that (after rewatching it, I really enjoyed it but wasn't bowled over) but it is great as an homage to Philip K. Dick.

Actually at no point in the capsule or 2000-plus word review of Southland Tales is the film accused of being "all over the place" or "too in your face" and at no point did anyone moan to the skies with clenched fists, "I didn't get it!" Read on.

I did read the whole thing, thanks.

The three kinds of criticism of the film I've seen are listed in my three possible replies to the film.

The piece assumed that it had a deeper meaning and balked at the fact that they couldn't see it (" I still haven’t read a defense of Southland that convincingly explains any idea actually contained in the film—there are only laundry lists of Kelly’s pop references and plot contrivances, as if their mere existence on movie screens amounted to subversion") so I file that under "I didn't get it" and "all over the place" because of the list reference.

Its a caricature of a caricature. There is no winner, no solution or side that has it right because Kelly has never done that. Even if you look at the parents in "Donnie Darko" you see the ineptness and the smug attitude of liberal inaction. "Southland Tales" functions in the same way, watching clashing parts of "American culture," the biggest cartoon of them all, come together to end up in a big apocalyptic clusterfuck. Its not an earnest attack on consumerism or the war in Iraq or sexual prudishness but rather a caricature of those concerns as minor in a reality where the world will end with a handshake.

And to talk about Olver Stone and Gregg Araki as having outdone it in terms of political satire is absurd considering the shallow posturing of "Natural Born Killers" or "Doom Generation." Why those two films, let alone any of films of theirs or anyone else's should preclude the market for a new satire is beyond me, frankly.