Does Kelly feel he was caught with his pants down at Cannes? “I was 31 at the time,” he says, “and Southland was my second film, running two hours and 43 minutes. It had all these actors who are associated with American popular culture — actors whom one could feel are not welcome on the red carpet at Cannes. There was a long list of things that counted against us, like a gigantic bull’s eye on our chest. I think we were destined to have critics come after us — which is what they did at Sundance, too, with Donnie Darko. I’m used to it now, and in a way, the pattern sort of works. We’ve been joking that we’re gonna take The Box to the Venice Film Festival just so we can have that one bomb too.”
Related:
The wasted land, Rabbit forming, Review: The Box, More
- The wasted land
Richard Kelly’s wildly ambitious and widely loathed Southland Tales now seems among the most believable works of film futurism ever made in this country.
- Rabbit forming
For further indication of the darkening zeitgeist, consider the personae of imaginary rabbits.
- Review: The Box
First-semester social-science students would wince at the overreaching metaphors in Donnie Darko director Richard Kelly’s latest Rorschach test.
- Shafted
American Gangster , Ridley Scott’s adaptation of Mark Jacobson’s New York magazine article about ’70s Harlem drug kingpin Frank Lucas, is as generic as the title.
- Moral minority
“It’s incorrect to assert that traditional Hollywood films always have happy endings,” film historian Thomas Doherty once noted on a panel I attended.
- Rock and roles
A good number of the jokes in Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story are available for your amusement right now, well ahead of the film’s December 21 theatrical-release date.
- Bride and prejudice
Noah Baumbach’s The Squid and the Whale marked him as the reigning bard of disaffected 16-year-olds from privileged, culturally elite, miserably broken families.
- Cannesglomeration
This article originally appeared in the June 1, 1971 issue of the Boston Phoenix.
- The medium is the movie
In almost every movie you go to these days you’ll see another screen — a television, a computer, even another movie screen — within the screen you’re watching.
- Factory guy
“If you want to know all about Andy Warhol,” Andy Warhol is quoted on the US Post Office stamp commemorating him in 2002, “just look at the surface: of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There’s nothing behind it.” Wasted again: Factory Girl isn’t the bio-pic Edie deserves. By Gary Susman
- Dead reckoning
Although it’s a transgressive masterwork, nobody seems eager to revive the pestilent 1992 film Les nuits fauves|Savage Nights .
- Less
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