227 - Southland Tales

Eavesdropping at the Movies · May 1, 2020 · 32m

A film many have heard of and few have seen, Southland Tales is writer-director Richard Kelly's infamous difficult second album. Six years after his eventual cult hit Donnie Darko, this sprawling, confusing mess of an end-of-days parable was released to thunderous bafflement and almost no box office. We dive in and find that perhaps all we needed was to give it thirteen years to breathe. There's no defending much of the film's execution. Kelly's visuals are functional at best, almost never expressive, and rather obvious, there's an abundance of plot that feels at once over- and…