I think you’ve nailed some of the issues with The Box nicely – Kelly isn’t great with sci-fi and the film lacks spirit.

Cheers
Thomas

Good work on linking Kelly with Richard Linklater and Philip K Dick – I reckon that sums him up perfectly. I was a little annoyed at some of the blatant references to Philip K Dick’s novels in Southland Tales but to be fair I am an avid reader of Dick’s novels so such moments undoubtedly wouldn’t have stood out so much to most viewers.

I’m certainly now going to give Southland Tales and The Box another go somewhere down the track. I actually didn’t think much of Donnie Darko when it first came out either. I found it very pretentious and horribly overrated. It was only on a second viewing that I really embraced it. I would also be curious to see the original cut of Southland Tales and at some point I’d also like to read the graphic novel that takes place before the film. I honestly still suspect that it is ultimately a film that simply doesn’t work, despite have some interesting moments, but I’m open to being convinced otherwise.

In the meantime, thanks again for contributing such excellent insight and discussion. I’m really enjoying reading your analysis.

Do you really think Kelly is trying to articulate specific ideas? If you sum up the totality of Donnie Darko (a movie, I feel compelled to disclaim, I wanted to like more than I did) — with its alternate reality game web site, its multiple cuts, the endless talking around it that Kelly did while promoting it — you end up with what seems like a purposefully obtuse and self-contradictory farrago of parapsychology, time travel and wantonly nonsensical quantum physical speculation. Lynch is definitely part of a tradition that explicitly ties to Buñuel, and Kelly is less avant garde and auteurish and more indebted to Philip K Dick’s self-contradictory gnostic materialism, as well as a very American kind of ramshackle whatever-works bricolage (Kelly and Richard Linklater are definitely kindred spirits).

I like that Kelly tries to push people out of their comfort zones, and I’m happiest when he’s suggesting possibilities rather than implying there’s a single reading you just haven’t discovered yet (which might be why the director’s cut of Donnie Darko fell so flat). The Box is a good starting point for Kelly because it’s got a bunch of Kelly’s preoccupations embedded in it as a very concrete sort of thought experiment, and it allows him to do his usual poking and prodding in a lower register than his impossibly overambitious debut and sophomore films.

That said, I still haven’t seen it. I’ll definitely stop back to report once I have. I just feel compelled to defend Southland Tales, mostly because, even though Donnie Darko left me ambivalent, I knew I was going to love it as soon as I read about it (some of my other favorite films along these lines: The Rapture, Paprika, In the Mouth of Madness, Jacob’s Ladder) and it seems to have been consistently misread ever since its disastrous debut at Cannes. I am hoping that someday it’ll find enough of a following to convince Kelly / Universal to release a version with his original Cannes cut on it.

Thanks for dropping by and leaving such a thoughtful and well-argued comment in defense of Kelly and Southland Tales, which is a film not too many people have been able to defend with such a considered approach.

My main problem with Southland Tales actually has more to do with what I feel is simply dodgy dialogue and clunky acting. I actually quite liked the bizarre atmosphere and almost free-fall narrative but it was let down by poor writing. For a film to be that audacious I think the director needs to have a better grip on his material. Kelly clearly has a lot of ideas that he wants to communicate but I’m not convinced he is developed enough as a filmmaker to do so successfully.

I see where you are coming from with the comparison to David Lynch but I think the major difference is that Lynch is motivated by feelings and impulses where Kelly is motivated by his desire to express specific ideas. There is of course a huge amount of meaning in Lynch’s cinema but his films are far more organic than Kelly’s films, which feel too self-consciously like puzzles that are designed to be de-coded. Having said that, Kelly has only done three features so far so perhaps it is too soon to make grand statements about him just yet. Despite everything I’ve said I am still very intrigued to see what he does next.

You clearly have an excellent knowledge about the background to the ideas explored in The Box so please come by again once you’ve seen it and let us know what you think.

Cheers
Thomas

I think Kelly operates in a candy-colored version of David Lynch’s world, where striking images and setpieces are substituted for story and narrative flow. Both Donnie Darko and Southland Tales were at their best when they were building scenarios (especially Kelly’s obsession with fakey retroism) and dwelling on moments (Donnie with his therapist; Donnie and his sister the morning after the party; The Rock’s moments of weird vulnerability; the completely out-of-nowhere, brilliant Justin Timberlake lipsync of The Killers) and at their worst when they had to move the plot along.

The Box intrigues me, because the story is pretty exhausted at this point (thanks to Abu Ghraib overdosing everybody on the Milgram experiment and Matheson’s weird pull on Hollywood ensuring that this story’s already been adapted several times, not to mention Numb3rs and Knowing and Signs going where I’m pretty sure the story chooses to go) but I can trust Kelly to do something volatile and imaginative with it, even if it doesn’t add up to anything too meaningful.