Southland Tales
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| German title | Southland Tales |
| Original title | Southland Tales |
| Country of production | United States |
| original language | English |
| Publishing year | 2006 |
| length | 145 minutes |
| Age rating | FSK 16 |
| Rod | |
| Director | Richard Kelly |
| script | Richard Kelly |
| production | Bo Hyde Sean McKittrick Kendall Morgan Matthew Rhodes |
| music | Moby |
| camera | Steven B. Poster |
| cut | Sam Bauer |
| occupation | |
| |
Southland Tales is an American film from 2006. The science fiction film was directed by Richard Kelly , who also wrote the screenplay. The leading roles are played by Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson , Seann William Scott and Sarah Michelle Gellar .
action
In 2005, two devastating nuclear terrorist attacks occur in Texas , which overshadow everything that has gone before and claim hundreds of thousands of deaths.
Three years later, radical neo-Marxist resistance groups are fighting underground against a militarized American control and surveillance state, in particular against the government organization USIDent, which monitors all activity and spies on citizens. To destroy capitalism and dethrone God are the declared goals of the neo-Marxists.
Meanwhile, the war in the Middle East severely restricted America's access to oil, and so the importance of alternative sources of energy has grown enormously. A mysterious scientist named Baron von Westphalen - a great-grandson of Karl Marx - appears together with his team and holds the key to solving the energy supply problem: Fluid Karma . The previously unknown liquid substance is extracted from the so-called Serpent Trench , a channel that winds its way around the entire planet like a snake. The vapors of the Fluid Karma , which mix with the atmosphere on the earth's surface, create a gigantic wireless electrical network that supplies all machines within its range with energy. In its liquid form, the Fluid Karma is injected into soldiers stationed in Iraq for test purposes and enables them to communicate telepathically with one another and to look into the past and, with long-term regular consumption, into the future. A few people - the so-called natural bleeders - can use some of these psychic abilities without the influence of the drug.
Boxer Santaros, a famous action film star who wakes up in the Nevada desert with no memory of his past , is picked up as a hitchhiker by the seedy Fortunio Balducci and introduced to the ambitious porn actress Krysta Now. Krysta has had clairvoyance since boarding a plane that flew over Lake Mead , which was also where Boxer Awakened, and wrote a screenplay called The Power that predicts the last three days of the world.
Meanwhile, a burned-out car is discovered in the desert with a corpse that has been charred beyond recognition, which is forcibly taken by Treer , the organization behind which von Westphalen stands.
Boxer and Krysta are immediately drawn to each other and spend a night together. However, the action star is married to Madeline Frost Santaros, the daughter of influential Senator Bobby Frost. The neo-Marxists who come into possession of incriminating sex photos of Boxer and Krysta want to blackmail the Senator for a million dollars and influence the outcome of the upcoming election to reduce USIDent's influence.
Boxer and Krysta finally arrive in Los Angeles where they meet Ronald Taverner, who, like Boxer, suffers from amnesia , is tormented by the fact that he has not had a bowel movement in days and is pressured by neo-Marxists to pretend to be his twin brother Roland . Roland, who accidentally disfigured his best friend and comrade pilot Abilene with a grenade during a mission in Iraq under the influence of Fluid Karma , which he could never forgive himself, is meanwhile drugged and imprisoned for his own safety as Dion Element and Veronica "Dream" Mung, the neo-Marxist leaders, and Zora Carmichael's Ronald assure.
To familiarize himself with his role in The Power , a police officer named Jericho Cane, boxer accompanies Ronald with a video camera, who takes over his brother's job as a UPU2 cop. A double murder planned as a staging of Dion and Dream suddenly turns into a real double murder, which Zora had planned long in advance, on the one hand to get rid of what she saw as the incompetent leader of the neo-Marxists, and on the other to obtain incriminating video material from boxer Santaros.
When the hiding place of the neo-Marxists is stormed and Roland's hostage-takers are killed, he is able to escape at the last second, but is captured again shortly afterwards by a man named Walter Mung.
A short time later, Zora and her henchman Bart Bookman are shot dead by a soldier while pursuing Krysta, who came into possession of the compromising video tape of the murder. Meanwhile, Ronald prevents the young Martin Kefauver from attempting suicide and tries to find his brother Roland again.
After boxer Santaros was drugged and brought back to his wife by Fortunio, who revealed himself to be the baron's henchman, almost all of the film's characters finally meet on the mega-zeppelin Jenny von Westphalen , which is taking off on its maiden flight . There Boxer learns about Simon Theory, Dr. Soberin Exx and Dr. Katharina Kuntzler, who work for Treer , the background to his memory loss and the extent of the catastrophe the world is facing.
By Treer operated promoting fluid karma from the Serpent Trench has the rotational speed gradually slowed down the planet, causing a tear in the space-time near the Lake Mead led. After initially unsuccessful experiments with monkeys, boxer Santaros was kidnapped by Roland Taverner on behalf of Baron von Westphalen and brought through the crack, which allowed both to travel 69 minutes back in time and meant that the two people existed twice. Boxer's former self was killed by a remote controlled self-destruct mechanism, but Roland's second self (Ronald) escaped. The direct contact of the two tavern selves who share one and the same soul would lead to a paradox and could collapse the fourth dimension, which would mean the end of the world.
Violent street fighting has broken out in Los Angeles . After a car accident in which Mung dies, Roland manages to escape, but is shot at. He meets his second self while Martin receives the order from the dying Mung to destroy the zeppelin with a rocket launcher. When the taverners shake hands in Mung's overturned ice cream truck, the truck shines in bright light, rises and floats towards the sky, with Martin Kefauver and the rocket launcher on board.
In the Zeppelin, after a few vocal interludes, there is a ritual-like dance between boxer and Krysta, to which Boxer's wife Madeline joins. The baron makes it clear that he has been playing the wrong game all along and secretly supporting the neo-Marxists. Meanwhile, they storm the headquarters of USIDent, led by Fortunio Balducci, killing the senator's wife, Nana Mae Frost.
Boxer Jesus - tattoo begins to bleed immediately before Martin Zeppelin from now high above Los Angeles floating truck from shoots with a rocket and is then covered in depth.
Roland is forgiven for the incident in Iraq by his second self, through whom pilot Abilene speaks telepathically to him under the influence of Fluid Karma . The film ends without explicitly showing whether the feared apocalypse will actually occur or whether a new messiah was born with Roland Taverner and a new world was created.
History of origin
Richard Kelly began working on the story of Southland Tales after the premiere of his high-profile independent film Donnie Darko at the Sundance Film Festival in July 2001 . He has been recognized by films such as Rattennest (1955), Dr. Strange or: How I Learned to Love the Bomb (1964), Brazil (1985) and Pulp Fiction (1994) influenced. After the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 and the start of the Iraq war , he rewrote the story to bring political aspects into the film. Kelly described the film in an interview as "a black comedy about the end of the world" .
The shooting, which on location in Los Angeles and in Middlesex in New Jersey took place, began on 15 August 2005 and ended on 28 October 2005. The production amounted to 15 million US dollars .
The well-known musician and singer Moby composed the music for the film. On September 20, 2005, the long-awaited trailer appeared on the Firstshowing website .
reception
The premiere took place on May 21, 2006 as part of the competition at the Cannes Film Festival . Critics rated the film mostly negatively and accused it of pointlessness. Jan Schulz-Ojala wrote in the Tagesspiegel on May 22, 2006 that the film was a "mild political-porn-science-fiction satire".
Kelly then created a new cut version of the film, which has been shortened by twenty minutes compared to the original version.
Southland Tales was originally planned as a nine-part "interactive experience", with the first six parts being published as six hundred-page comic books and the film containing the last three chapters. A website was also created to interweave and deepen the backgrounds of the comic books and the film. The number of volumes was later reduced to three. These comic books tell the prehistory of Southland Tales , which the film seamlessly builds on , and were written by Richard Kelly and illustrated by Brett Weldele. The individual titles are as follows:
- Part One: Two Roads Diverged (May 2006)
- Part Two: Fingerprints (September 2006)
- Part Three: The Mechanicals (January 2007)
The three volumes have also been published as an anthology under the title The Prequel Saga .
The titles of the parts from the film are:
- Part Four: Temptation Waits
- Part Five: Memory Gospel
- Part Six: Wave Of Mutilation
background
The film was released for the first time in Germany on May 15, 2008, but only on DVD.
Reviews
“ Southland Tales is a two and three-quarters of an hour opus that calls for a second look. You can feel that Kelly is striving for the high category of the 'Latter Days of Mankind', like two other L.A. films: Ridley Scott's vision of the future Blade Runner has remained undamaged for over 25 years, ten years later nobody speaks of Kathryn Bigelow's Strange Days . The feeling after the first Southland impression points more in the direction of Strange Days . "
“ Southland Tales is the disaster of a film that always tries to be funny and cool ( Justin Timberlake plays a soldier with a totally scarred face, by the way), but only tramples horribly on the nerves of its audience. But perhaps the most terrifying thing about this trash slam is that the organizers in Cannes are not too stupid to show it in the competition. Well, it was once again co-financed by a French company. "
“A film like this, colorful and loud and courageous, which so rigorously defies every common narrative convention, which seems to burst with energy and humor, which hurls its sometimes grandiose ideas at the viewer so ruthlessly and confidently at such a film rarely seen. It's not about understanding. Southland Tales is like a frenzy: unpredictable, at times unbearable, but on the whole a fascinating experience. And then you have a headache. But that's just part of it. "
"That Kelly, whose previous debut" Donnie Darko "was able to translate similarly ambitious intentions into bundles of puzzles, which were still approved by the same critics who now reject" Southland Tales ", has this time also undertaken much more than strong poetry - the most patriotic deliver left film from the late Bush era; To show David Lynch what a post-linear cut rake is; boiling up a comic remedy for American history fatigue and so on - sometimes makes him pile up overly lush delusions in "Southland Tales". What he's charged himself with should break the backbone of the toughest Altman episode film. "
Individual evidence
- ↑ http://www.firstshowing.net/2007/09/20/must-watch-richard-kellys-southland-tales-trailer-finally
- ^ Spiegel Online "Apocalypse Now!" By Daniel Sander
- ^ Film review by Dietmar Dath in the FAZ