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[onewheelwizzard]

Southland Tales is the worst film ever made.

Discuss.

[Johnny C]

Southland Tales is tremendously polarizing. I doubt it's either the worst or the best. It's probably okay.

[KvP]

I don't know man. Jon Lovitz as a loose cannon cop? Christopher Lambert as an arms dealer with a flying ice cream truck? Some of it sounds inspired.

The SNL also-rans portraying "neo-marxist" (what does that even mean?) rebels and fucking musical numbers set to the fucking Killers sound absolutely awful, though.

Nathan Rabin over at the AV Club had a nice summary of it for his awesome "My Year of Flops" feature.

[Johnny C]

Casting The Rock as an addled pseudo-action star is utterly perfect, I'd say. Method acting at its finest.

[KvP]

I ain't mad at the Rock, truth be told. He's got a measure of comedic talent.

[Jackie Blue]

The worst film ever made is that one Andy Warhol did that was nothing but a man sleeping for 6 hours, because it doesn't even generate interest at all.

Southland Tales, from all I've read about it, sounds like it is absolutely fantastic.  And anyone who thinks The Rock has no talent has clearly never seen the episode he hosted Saturday Night Live, or actually watched the bits of wrestling where they talk.

[Johnny C]

Man I ain't say he was talentless.

[onewheelwizzard]

It's not that everything about this movie was terrible.  OK, so almost everything about this movie was terrible, but every now and then something really hilarious or even possibly thought-provoking emerged, gasping, from the turmoil of boiling shit that was this movie.  I laughed out loud on several occasions.  The bad news is that I laughed out loud at the filmmakers, not the movie itself.  I mean, The Rock has a line in which he states with a straight face "I'm a pimp.  And pimps don't commit suicide."  If seen in context it's pretty amazing, in a painful sort of way.  Yeah, it's funny, but it's funny because it's so bad ... not even in spite of being bad, just because it's bad.

The main thing about this movie is that it is, simply put, the most poorly constructed story I've ever seen committed to film, on every possible level.  It's a total mess.  The director really needs to go into another line of work.

[Jackie Blue]

I have no idea what you're talking about.  "I'm a pimp.  And pimps don't commit suicide." is a genius line and I can pretty much guarantee nobody could have written it to really be a "straight" line, especially in a movie as wacky as this one is alleged to be.

[Johnny C]

Of course, with its absurdly limited distribution I won't be seeing it for months.

On a related note I can't find evidence that There Will Be Blood opened here, but it was supposed to. Consider me furious.

[onewheelwizzard]

I have no idea what you're talking about.  "I'm a pimp.  And pimps don't commit suicide." is a genius line and I can pretty much guarantee nobody could have written it to really be a "straight" line, especially in a movie as wacky as this one is alleged to be.

I understand that there's probably no way it was meant to be anything but comedy, but the movie tries so hard to do so many different things that the "haha look at this terrible dialogue" routine that shows up every now and then ("Scientists are predicting that the future will be more futuristic than originally thought!") falls flat on its face for lack of support in the rest of the movie.  Stuff like that is there to make the movie into a joke about bad movies, but this movie pretty clearly doesn't want to think of itself as a bad movie.

[KvP]

Sort of a bump? It hasn't been posted in for a month but it's still on the first page.

Anyway, I saw this a few weeks back. And yeah, it was a total mess. Still, The Rock was pretty damned good. If there was one thing I really hated about the movie, it was the insistence on long musical / dance interludes. That's when the film really started to drag. It didn't help that they got Moby to do the soundtrack.

I probably would've liked it a lot more had I not seen "Wild At Heart" a few days prior. Every time someone said something completely disjointed in Southland Tales I was brought back to Nic Cage or Willem Dafoe saying something crazy and it still making a certain sort of sense. I've come to the conclusion that Richard Kelly is the poor man's David Lynch.

The story goes that after Donnie Darko, Kelly decided to make a movie about the Iraq War. But halfway through development, he decided he wanted to make a movie about how Hollywood is phony. Then he wanted to make a movie about the apocalypse. So instead of waste time, he thought he'd mix them all together. Hence Southland Tales.

Has anybody read the "graphic novel" prequel? I've heard it's terrible.

[Johnny C]

Just watched this film. I really enjoyed it to be honest.

It's certainly not a mess. Outright ridiculous at times but I get the feeling that Kelly knew what he was doing from the first frame.

I'll have to watch it again. Definitely some things I will have missed this time around.

[Jackie Blue]

Southland Tales is the worst film ever made.

Discuss.

Having FINALLY gotten to see it last night, I can say without irony or sarcasm that it is one of the greatest films ever created.

I do understand why people don't like it, though.  What I don't understand is why there isn't a massive, rabid cult fanbase.  Though I guess it might be a little early for that since it's just now widely available on DVD.

[KvP]

It's just not a particularly fun movie. It's played too straight, and it's too long. As I said earlier in the thread, I think only Lynch can really do that sort of weird stuff and pull it off.

Also, it has Cheri Oteri in it.

[Jackie Blue]

I think we watched different movies.  I think it was extremely fun and not played straight at all.

It is extremely long, but I didn't mind, because something was always happening.

[famous]

Ahah, yeah, if you take it at face value it's just a confusing, horrible movie. But everything about it really was very well thought out. There's reason that Kelly picked all of the 'bubble-gum' actors like the rock and stifler and mandy moore to star in an apocalyptic movie like this. Also, apparently there are a series of comics out that tell a lot more of Pilot (JT)'s story. There's a lot of discussion on it, one of the ideas I like is that it's all being told by Pilot who was betrayed to the max so in his story everyone betrays everyone. Which also explains why they say out of character things and talk to themselves at odd times.
But yes, not recommended as a light movie to watch and never think about again.

[RedLion]

This managed to be, simultaneously, one of the worst and best things I've ever seen. I really can't tell if it takes itself seriously or not, so I can't decide whether I should. It goes way, way beyond the point of the remake of "Wicker Man," which was just horrendously bad and presented itself as a totally serious movie. Part of me feels like this movie is just some elaborate, post-modernist joke.

[Jackie Blue]

I'm pretty sure that a film whose last line is "He... is a pimp.  And pimps don't commit suicide." is meant to be an elaborate post-modernist joke.  That's how I watch it, anyway, and every time I see it I find new things to laugh at or think about.

[RedLion]

Awesome. That's how I've decided to interperet it, and I think it's one of my favorite movies currently.

[Johnny C]

The making-of literally starts with a shot of Jon Lovitz calling the film a comedy about the end of the world. It's supposed to be a big joke. This isn't something Kelly said after it was finished and got panned, this is something he had intended from the start.

[Dimmukane]

On the subject of post-modern movies, someone just the other day tried to tell me that that's what Epic Movie/Meet The Spartans/Date Movie/Disaster Movie all were.

[RedLion]

God, how I wish it were so.

[Siibillam-Law]

As awful as Southland Tales was...

it is NO WAY near as bad as Going Overboard
As Adam Sandler's first film, it should have been his last. This is without a doubt one of the worst things ever brought in front of my eyes. And for some reason I have seen it twice 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MKNZqnJ0hzU

shudders...

right you've seen that. Now sit through 70 minutes of it

[the Goat]

Southland Tales is neither bad nor good, it is crazy. Crazy films exist outside any critical framework and really can't be held to any standards.

Personally, I appreciate crazy movies, in the same way some people appreciate crazy YouTube videos, or My Chemical Romance songs. They may make no sense, be 3 hours too long and packed to the gills with half-formed pretentious ideas; but at least they're trying. I have to give props to anyone who says "Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!" and churns out some unmarketable mess. It's almost the most punk rock thing you could do.


The worst movie ever is a movie like The Skulls, a film whose bad writing, acting and plot are made even worse by the conventional and boring execution. Its a movie that exists only to make money. Movies like Southland Tales strive to be trancendental. They both may fail tremendously, but the latter, IMO, is the nobler one.