I can’t wait for these Tales

After a round of Cannes bashing (from some pretty lowbrow reviewers), finally someone who seems to at least get what Rich was going for with his latest film.  From J. Hoberman of Village Voice:

Kelly’s second feature is as talented as—and even more ambitious than—his debut, the cult hit Donnie Darko. A high-voltage farrago of unsynopsizable plots and counterplots, Southland Tales
unfolds—mid–presidential campaign—in an alternate, pre- and
post-apocalyptic universe where Texas was nuked on July 5, 2005, and a
German multinational has figured out how to produce energy from ocean
water. The mode is high-octane sci-fi social satire; the cast is large
and antic (with wrestler Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson as an anxious,
amnesiac action hero and Sarah Michelle Gellar biting down hard on the
role of socially conscious porn queen Krysta Now).

Essentially, Southland Tales is a big-budget, widescreen underground movie. ("Star-Spangled to Death,"
one colleague commented as we left the screening.) Filled with
throwaway gags and trippy special effects, it’s a comedy as well.
Philip K. Dick is the presiding deity—the movie is thick with drugs,
paranoia, and time-travel metaphysics—although Karl Marx (and his
family) keep surfacing in various guises, including the last remnant of
the Democratic Party. The film is a mishmash of literary citations,
interpolated music videos, and movie references—most obviously to
Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly—but it’s even more concerned with evoking the ubiquitous media texture of contemporary American life.

At two hours and 40 minutes, Southland Tales flirts with
the ineffable and also the unreleasable. There’s no U.S. distributor;
nor does the movie’s humor, much of it predicated on a familiarity with
American television, political rhetoric, and religious cant, seem
designed to travel easily. Received with a lusty round of boos and a
smattering of applause, Southland Tales provoked the festival’s most negative press screening and hostile press conference since The Da Vinci Code.
The first question suggested (incorrectly) that Kelly’s movie had set a
Cannes record for number of walkouts and asked the director how he
felt.

Why was the Kelly Code too much to take? Sensory overload is certainly a factor, but unlike Da Vinci, Southland Tales actually is a visionary film about the end of times. There hasn’t been anything comparable in American movies since Mulholland Drive.

I don’t know how to effectively communicate JUST how excited I am to see this movie.