More Problems for Southland Tales

I don't know if this is indicitive of the "Auteur" movement getting out of hand, or just lazy filmmaking. The worst thing Hollywood did was allow James Cameron to make a 3 hour movie. Suddenly every director had to make a three hour epic, but here's the thing, more isn't necessarily always better.

Take Donnie Darko. The theatrical version is tight, and forces viewers to make some logic jumps. The "Director's Cut" is long, plodding, and spells out every damn thing (sometimes hammering you over the head with the "Do you get it? No seriously, did you get what I was saying there?").

Gangs of New York, good movie...would have been a GREAT movie with about 20 minutes trimmed out of it.

The problem is that it takes discipline to trim those 20 minutes out. It's so much easier to "leave all of that great stuff" in the movie, but all that extra great stuff rarely leads to a better movie.

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Wow, ever since seeing DD just a few weeks ago i became obsessed.
and for good reason... cause I LOVED THE ambiguity of the original release (the silence/sound/song edits)...

I cringed while seeing the DC's.
I would have loved it with the addition of certain scenes but I HATED the additional noises/sounds in certain scenes... i understood the director's vision... (tho i did NOT need the insertions of the book's chapters =/)
so if you want THAT vision, the DC's for you, IF YOU LOVE to remain in a state of confusion/epiphany... the 1st one is for you (and I like it better)...

SO somehow he's wrapped up in himself? Nothing wrong with that BUT hasn't he read ALL ABOUT Shyamalan and the lady in the water? ISN't he listening to ANYONE? Is anyone telling him?

But is he listening?

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This is apparently old, out-of-date, and incorrect news:

http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.ListAll&friendID=87279726&MyToken=06ef44e2-e963-47a7-89e8-fa0767cfb582ML

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We tend to have a major problem with calling a director an auteur after making one movie that usually borrows from a hundred other movies in an obscure, clever way. Then we give them final cut and bigger budgets when they are just starting out and wonder why the subsequent films are self-indulgent messes. Richard Kelly is talented, but he's not a "great" director. I think he has it in him, but he needs to pay some dues, have some failures and get some more chances. It sounds like "Southland Tales" is one of those failures. Our best directors (the Altmans, the Kurosawas), the directors that endure over long periods of time, developed their style gradually, and after quite a bit of life experience and movie after movie (some of which are failures, its inevitable.) Our impatience, our desire to market someone as a great, major presence right NOW, is one of the reasons why so many shitty movies are released by kids who promptly disappear.

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Chuck Bowen, your last sentence couldn't be more true. That's exactly it. I, for one, liked Donnie Darko a lot and I'm very interested to see Southland Tales, good or bad.

But I think Kelly is getting a bad rap. The Donnie Darko haters don't hate Donnie Darko because it's a bad movie. They hate it because the people that loved it (like me) wouldn't shut up about it and overhyped it. I've never thought that Richard Kelly is the second coming of Kubrick or anyone else for that matter but he is a good filmmaker and he has enough skill to do something great. Southland Tales may not be it but it has to have some degree of merit to it as it is now.

As you said about Altman and Kurosawa, they developed their style over time, making the inevitable bad movie here and there... well, why is Kelly different from them? Why isn't his potentially self-indulgent mess being taken as seriously as a self-indulgent mess by Altman, who made a handful much later in his own career?

I'm of the opinion that a failure with good intentions is worth more than an artless piece of fluff that happens to work. Give me 10 Southland Tales before you give me one Meet the Fockers.

What I'm trying to say is, I think you're right, that the demand is too high for debut filmmakers to make a second film right away. But that's only the first half. We need to allow them to make mistakes too. Just as we're quick to label them auteurs after one film, we're also quicker to label them worthless after one bad film.

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Even if its long as a 3 hour cut, I'd say the chances of it sucking less than *Superman Returns* will be about 100%. Yep, I'm an optimist.

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