The writer-director Richard Kelly makes movies that aren't obvious candidates for mainstream acceptance, and so far the mainstream has been responding accordingly. Kelly's first feature, Donnie Darko, opened to mixed reviews and no business in the fall of 2001. Donnie eventually earned a full theatrical re-release in an extended director's cut in 2005, but that was only after slowly building a cult through a DVD release, a music video for the song "Mad World", and a twenty-eight-month run as a midnight movie at New York's Village East theater. Kelly's long-awaited second feature, Southland Tales, has been doing its best to maintain that form.
The film, a dystopian sci-fi satire that features a cast including Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Seann William Scott, Miranda Richardson, Justin Timberlake, Kevin Smith, Mandy Moore, Wallace Shawn and Jon Lovitz, was first screened at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival, where it went over like a smirk at a sentencing hearing. At the time, J. Hoberman wrote in the Village Voice that "at two hours and forty minutes, Southland Tales flirts with the ineffable and also the unreleasable" and reported that the film was "received with a lusty round of boos and a smattering of applause," provoking "the festival's most negative press screening and hostile press conference since The Da Vinci Code." Looking back on the whole thing now, Kelly can only say, "It was painful. I just thought, 'Please let it be over.'"
It is, in fact, just beginning. A year and a half later, Southland Tales, now in a sleeker 137-minute edit, finally opens in theaters November 14. In addition to cutting out a lot of material, Kelly has added a million dollars worth of visual effects, re-recorded the voiceover narration (delivered by Timberlake), and added a prologue designed to better orient viewers to the film's apocalyptic, alternate-universe America. He tells the Times that he hopes to have made the movie easier to comprehend, but it's still the work of a filmmaker who sees himself as an acolyte of Philip K. Dick, David Lynch, and the Robert Aldrich of Kiss Me Deadly: "Part of me feels like I got away with murder. It's a film some people might consider an inaccessible B-movie, and it's been slaughtered at the biggest film festival in the world. They could have been like, 'You want more money now?'" — Phil Nugent