- Richard Kelly’s secretive “Southland Tales” finally let the cat out of the bag in its Cannes premiere yesterday. Quite a few plot details, stuff we’d never seen anywhere before, have leaked. Here’s a few highlights:
“Southland Tales” is a 2 1/2-hour mishmash of genres: black comedy, action film, sci-fi, political commentary.
The film starts with a nuclear attack in Texas on July 4, 2005, before it flashes forward to Los Angeles in 2008.
Kelly says he wanted to look at “how we would respond, how our country would survive and go on (after a nuclear attack), and to construct a great black comedy out of all this.”
The plot is not easy to describe, to put it mildly. There are dozens of subplots, and everyone is double-crossing someone else. To sum it up, someone in the ensemble cast has to save the world from the apocalypse.
“Southland Tales” imagines a Los Angeles on the brink of apocalypse in 2008, when the Internet is under government control, gasoline is replaced by something called “fluid karma” and the Democratic Party has splintered into neo-Marxist cells.
The full AP press release has full details on what went down. No details in the piece on Kevin’s involvement, though we have heard his part in the film is relatively small.