Richard Kelly's "Southland Tales"

Definitely an acquired taste, "Southland Tales" is director Richard Kelly's rude, confrontational political black comedy about a very messed-up, dystrophian America - a film with the vigor and incorrigible quality of a work-in-progress. It seems to be evolving - morphing - before our eyes as it thinks out loud about the weird combo of vulgar celebrity culture and hypocritical conservatism that currrently grips this country. "Southland Tales" carries on like a crazy cabbie, flailing, sprawling, all over the place, sometimes brilliantly so. Freely borrowing the pop style of Altman's "Brewster McCloud" (1970) and the impassioned social conscience of Frankenheimer's "The Manchurian Candidate"(1962), Kelly unleashes an urgent, in-your-face, often hilarious fable that dares you not to agree with it or even like it. Not surprisingly, some people don't.

Not me.

(Artwork: Richard Kelly, director of "Southland Tales")

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