2. Southland Tales (2007)
The Ensemble: Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Seann William Scott, Justin Timberlake, Wallace Shawn, Mandy Moore, Miranda Richardson, Kevin Smith I would love to have been inside Richard Kelly's head the moment he started to conceive
Southland Tales, because he must have been going slightly insane at the time same, and I want to know what that must've felt like. Coming off the back of sleeper/indie hit
Donnie Darko, a genuinely brilliant movie, the director could have made anything he wanted, and he chose to do this: a mind-numbingly pretentious, incomprehensible and inaccessible ensemble meditation on... something? It's a total mind from start to finish, and not in a good way. Seann William Scott, Sarah Michelle Gellar, The Rock and Wallace Shawn say their lines, but there's no sense that they have any idea what the movie is supposed to be about. As a twisted social and/or political commentary,
Southland Tales fails. As something you'd pay money to see to entertain you, it fails doubly so. As an ensemble vehicle for a cast that could have mustered up some genuine chemistry together, it's the equivalent of being taken out at dawn, blindfolded and shot in the back of the head.