Southland Tales

Ever since Southland Tales got slated at Cannes, I've been looking forward to seeing it. Normally, those films that polarise opinion (or just plain get hammered), I tend to love. The Fountain, for example, is without a doubt one of my favourite films of all time.

I was looking forward to it even more due to the fact that Richard Kelly was directing. Donnie Darko was an absolute masterpiece.

So you can begin to imagine how disappointed I was when Southland Tales turned out to be a staggering pile of shit.

It's terrifyingly bad. I'm not talking bad in a fun way; something you could whack on with a bunch of mates and enjoy, even if it isn't going to win any awards - like Phantoms, or Dead or Alive, or the oeuvre of Uwe Boll. I mean it's embarassingly bad. It's crushingly dull; overbearingly pretentious, and is trying far too hard to be 'quirky'. It's like watching the works of a sixth-form goth who's obsessed by David Lynch.

The cast is ridiculous, for a start. I mean, just look at who's in it: Justin Timberlake. The Rock. Miranda Richardson. Sarah Michelle Gellar. Bai Ling. Christopher Lambert. Sean William Scott. Mandy Moore. Wallace Shawn. So you've got scenes where Queenie from Blackadder and Rex from Toy Story are spouting pseudo-science rubbish and it's impossible to take it seriously. Hell, it doesn't matter who's saying it, it'd still be garbage: you can't polish a turd.

I'll be honest, I couldn't even sit through it all. It's incredibly rare that I don't see a film through to the end. After ten minutes, my GTA IV craving was beginning to itch; however, I was determined to see it through. At 1hr 30mins, bored off my tits, I realised that there was still almost an hour to go. Maybe one day I'll finish it off. Mind you, someone should have finished this bloody film off long before it even finished shooting.