They Made Him Do It

Via Israeli film critic Yair Raveh comes the trailer for Richard Kelly's upcoming Southland Tales. Kelly burned off a lot of my goodwill with the agonizingly awful director's cut of Donnie Darko, and Southland Tales's by-now infamous reception at last year's Cannes festival (which necessitated a radical recutting of the film into its present form) reinforces my suspicions that Kelly needs a strong hand to steer him away from his tendency towards pretentiousness. That said, the trailer itself gives off the same impression of grandeur and profundity that made me so eager to see Donnie Darko after watching its trailer, and which the film itself came very, very close to delivering. I am, in spite of my reservations, eager to see this.

In other movie-related links, Kit Whitfield's reading of Brad Bird's The Incredibles offers a compelling explanation for all the skeevy quasi-fascist undertones in that film (link via Torque Control), and this humorous (I hope) take on the Star Wars universe attempts to reconcile the original trilogy and the prequel films, and ends up concluding that Chewie is the puppet-master orchestrating events throughout A New Hope (via).

Comments

Anonymous said…
Didn't like the "Southland Tales" trailer. The dialogue sounds plain awful, the story bits failed to grab my interest, and the visuals don't look like anything special.
Though on an interesting note, Kelly did employ in this film one of the most imaginative designers in cinematic SF - Ron Cobb, who also worked on "The Last Starfighter", discussed some posts below (where for some reason I tried adding a comment without much success).

-Raz Greenberg
September 23, 2007 11:29 PM
Fred said…
I had pretty much the same reaction to the trailer. I fear the film is going to be really, really bad, but the trailer really, really made me want to see it.
September 24, 2007 5:29 AM
Abigail Nussbaum said…
I agree that it's not a very promising trailer in terms of what it tells us about the film or its characters, but if memory serves, the trailer for Donnie Darko was similarly ineffective. And for much the same reason - because there is simply no way to effectively describe that film in 2.5 minutes without giving it completely away. What that trailer did was intrigue me (partly because I found some images visually striking, and you're right that the Southland Tales trailer doesn't achieve that effect either), but it was the positive word of mouth from other sources that got me to watch the film.
September 24, 2007 8:58 AM
Yair said…
Hi. I Love the Southland Tales trailer. I hope the film will be just as wacky. And although I agree with you that Kelly's director's cut for Donnie Darko is mediocre, he is after all the writer-director of Donnie Darko. So let's give him his credit, and forgive him the usual ailings of the disturbed artist who tries to say too much, when understatement is preferred. At least he had the good sense to take advice from the right people, and do as they said.
September 26, 2007 9:44 AM

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