rock over London. rock on, Chicago.

  I am doing my lanudry.
  a few hours ago, I had just gotten off of work. and I was looking at my kitchen table, and on it, I had my remote for the television, and a ball peen hammer. so my choices were: watch some more Democratic Convention coverage — because cable news was bound to be showing reruns of the Mark Warner and Hillary Clinton speeches and all of the awful, awful punditry goings on in between – or I could take the hammer and beat myself stupid with it. I would end up, I figured, in roughly the same state of mind. 
  instead, I watched a movie. I watched ‘Southland Tales,’ and I think I shall write a review of it. I do, I think I shall!

  I had heard ’Southland Tales’ was bad, and it was, but I didn’t hate it. no. and I’m going to tell you why: it was big, and confused. not necessarily confusing, though it was that too. but more confused … like it didn’t know what it wanted to do with itself. there’s just so much going on in it, and it moves in so many directions, that it’s hard to decipher even the obligatory plot summary (that’s coming up next). so, ’Southland Tales’ has a lot of ideas — many of them interesting — it just does a shitty job of explaining almost all of them.
  it’s a movie set in an alternate future, set almost entirely in Southern California. in 2005, nuclear bombs are set off in Texas, which in turn sets off WWIII. the US reinstitutes the draft and goes into Iran, Syra,  and North Korea, in addition to the continuing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan … where, by the way, an American-led force killed 90 civilians in airstrikes there over the weekend. sixty of them were children. so much for smart bombs.
  anyway, the movie: the Republican party (the movie is very clear about which party) starts straight dominating in national politics. the Patriot Act is extended, movement between individual states is restricted, and the federal goverment takes over the Internet.
  because of the massive acceleration of military activity, especially in the Middle East, the world’s energy supply becomes strangled, and alternative fuels become the latest hot commodity. and this German company, it comes up with a design for a massive generator that they called Fluid Karma — built ominously off of the famous Santa Monica Pier — that uses the ocean currents to provide an unlimited energy supply.
naturally, liberals hate all of this, and so the real radicalized of them get into Marxism, and neo-Marxist cells start forming up and engaging in political blackmail and violence to get the Patriot Act curtailed. but they don’t even recognize the real god damned problem, which is …
  the generator is faulty! and it opens a rift into the fourth dimension, and if you enter into it, then time travel can cause human redundancies which could bring about the end of the world, and there’s astrophysics, and then someone launches what’s called the “MegaZeppelin”, and it gets even completely more god damned ridiculous than everything I’ve described here.
  the point is, ’Southland Tales’ touches on a host of issues; energy, civil liberties, celebrity, infotainment, the military industrial complex, the ongoing war in Iraq, and on first read, it does a pretty awful job of tying all of these threads together. see, what I think is, there’s just too many god damned threads. the movie’s just too ambituous. it know what it wants to be, but it wants to be too much.
  with all of that said, it’s got a few things going for it. I thought it looked great. it’s funny in moments, and even striking in a few, mostly in its imagery. like Justin Timberlake sitting with a rifle on top of a building at the end of a pier against the sea, looking down on a beautiful, sunny California beach. The Rock on a clean white bed with a bloodied American flag in front of it. the MegaZeppelin floating above Los Angeles.
  and the cast was pretty impressive, too, if only in its scope. besides those I mentioned, these are the people I recognized: Sarah Michelle Gellar, Wallace ‘inconceivable’ Shawn, Nora Dunn, Christopher Lambert (the Highlander!), Mandy Moore, Sean William Scott, the tiny lady from ‘Poltergeist’, Cheri Oteri and Amy Poehler from Saturday Night Live, the fat guy from Mad TV, Jon fucking Lovitz, and Kevin Smith. I don’t know what half of their roles were, but they were definitely in it, doing something or other.
  and, it has a pretty decent soundtrack. songs like this, and this. there’s a scene at the end that features a song pretty heavily, and I said to myself, ’that’s gotta be Moby,’ and it was. apparently, he scored it. so, you know, hooray for pop music.

  so. it’s not great. but if you’ve got nothing else to do and a couple of bong rips to get on top of, ‘Southland Tales’ isn’t a huge waste of time. 
  simply put: it knows what it wants to say, and it can’t figure out how to say it to you, but that won’t stop you from thinking about what you’re looking at anyway. I guess you could just do bong rips and read a newspaper. there’s some crazy shit going on in the world.