Last night I watched a terrible movie. It was called Southland Tales, Richard Kelly's follow-up to Donnie Darko. It was a huge failure, barely released. It's a sci-fi movie that's completely unable to tell its story competently, and so reverts to voiceover narration. Those last two things apply to Mike Judge's Idiocracy, and that was my favorite movie of the year it came out. Southland Tales feels more like another argument that the world depicted in Idiocracy is already happening, with this feeling that its unable to get past vapidity, so steeped in the stuff is it. (It has an awful cast, consisting of big-name stars and Saturday Night Live cast members. Although also people who are smaller than SNL: Booger from Revenge Of The Nerds, Will Sasso from MadTV, a woman from Poltergeist.)

It also feels like it might be Richard Kelly's spiritual shield.

It is stupid nonsense, on every level, and one of those levels would have to be the way it keeps on heaping levels on. But: The moral of the movie is "Pimps don't commit suicide." This is literally said four times, one of which is the last line of the movie. It just makes me feel that all that vacuous shit- the movie is all vacuous shit, it makes me never ever want to live in L.A., for the way it's pointedly dumb- it's the world Kelly lives in, and that's probably a deliberate choice. I think I get the feeling of watching the movie of knowing where the guy's coming from- and it's a stupid place, that's mostly pot-smoke, knee-jerk liberal politics, and immersion in celebrity culture but I guess it gets him through the day. Donnie Darko was a popular movie with its cult following that probably existed for the same "Wait, I know exactly where you're coming from" reasons, it's just that, with this movie, where he's coming from is a place no one else can relate to. I do feel like I can recognize it, though: It's a garbage heap. There's no real sense of aesthetics, or value, or emotion- and I don't think any of that is intentional! I think it was all arrived at honestly, through being kind of stupid.

I can't recommend seeing it to anyone, even as I wish more people had seen it so I could know I wasn't hallucinating.