It used to be that if you wanted your movie to be perceived as so cool and mind-blowing that it had a shot at outsider-midnight movie status, you had to somehow shock the bejesus out of people. But now that, as John Waters says, what was once shocking has been fully co-opted by Hollywood, so that everything from Hostel to South Park is mainstream entertainment, the best way to go about it seems to be to confuse people. A few years ago, Salon, in its function as a daily manual for the intelligent cool-hunter, was so impressed by the head-scratching qualities exhibited by David Lynch's Mulholland Drive and Richard Kelly's Donnie Darko that it provided handy skeleton keys to help guide the baffled viewer through both movies. Now, writer Thomas Rogers has whipped up an explanatory gloss on Kelly's new film, Southland Tales. (It should perhaps be noted that, in keeping with the insular nature of the pursuit of the coolest movie in the world, Southland Tales explicitly references Mulholland Drive, along with Kiss Me Deadly, Philip K. Dick, T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, and God knows what else.)
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