Is “Southland Tales” the next “Donnie Darko?
Is the spectacularly ambitious “Southland Tales” the next “Donnie Darko”? By Andrew O’Hehir Nov. 15, 2007 | Was 17 months of work enough to transform Richard Kelly’s epic post-9/11 fantasy “Southland Tales” from a misshapen monstrosity into a masterpiece? No. But here’s the good news: It didn’t have to be. After its disastrous 2006 premiere at Cannes, Kelly took his endlessly awaited follow-up to “Donnie Darko” back to the drawing board and reshaped it extensively. If it arrives in final form as (still) a total mess, it’s such a passionate and ambitious mess — overcrowded with extraordinary images, incomprehensible ideas, literary and pop-cultural references and colliding subplots — that it transcends its adolescent awkwardness and approaches being magnificent. Nothing about “Southland Tales” should work. A lot of it flat-out doesn’t work. Like Kelly’s cult-fave debut, it’s a movie about the end of the world. But while “Donnie Darko” focused its apocalyptic fantasy and metaphysical m
