Southland Tales (2007)

Richard Kelly’s much anticipated directorial follow-up to cult classic Donnie Darko is a disappointment, and not just in the sense that Darko would be intrinsicly hard to compete with. This movie is bad, the first half of it constituting the worst movie I’ve seen in a year, though the second half does come close to coalescing around something, but it never quite succeeds. Perhaps overly ambitious, it is confused and fractured, though there are a few musical sequences that did something for me, and some of the foundational material was intriguing. Loads of cameo’s can’t compensate for the fact that this is a bomb. However at least Kelly can have pride in the fact that there has never been a more original bomb to my experience. Good soundtrack.