Take your favorite fandoms with you and never miss a beat. Others, like 99% of Sarah Michelle Gellars dialogue, where it is clear this movie knows its insane. The bar is okay with it, you know. But it helped ease everyone into the ambition of the movie. Your internal diary is jealous of her introspection, which underscores the themes of every "Grey's Anatomy" episode. Because we here at The A.V. Menu. Strap yourself in and expect the unexpected, because this weeks Weird Watch is Richard Kellys 2006 sci-fi thriller Southland Tales. You know, not only is it a reference to Boxer not killing himself in the desert, but theres also the greater meaning at the end of the movie with Roland and Ronald not committing suicide and denying the world the resurrection and the magical handshake that saved the world. Even if the series doesn't maintain the momentum of its, Latin Lover turns "Jane the Virgin" into a. Barring the iffy Netflix revival, this show famously didn't survive three seasons of murky ratings, partly because its format was novel when "Development" premiered in 2003. We may earn a commission from links on this page. [6] He was hired by series creator Dick Wolf. Richard Kelly: It was the most amazing meeting of my life. And were out there getting the fires set up in the homeless camps. Hollywood had been wrong about Donnie Darko, and Richard Kelly had been right. Whatever trauma that the whole world was feeling in the shadow of that event, as we were all being rattled to the core by this terrorist attack, it just felt like all my work, from that point on, was trying to have this emotional release of energy in response to that event. But [Lous] like, I can get that mold for you guys. Richard Kelly: The next thing that we shot, and this was like a week before photography, was the Krysta Now talk show with Sarah [Michelle Gellar] and the three other actresses: Abbey McBride, Jill Ritchie, Gianna Luchini. Priscilla Elliott: We rented [the giant toilet in the neo-Marxist hideout]; it was from a music video. No one wanted to pay for this, because we were scraping together whatever dollars we could get out of Sony to fix some of the MegaZeppelin stuff at the end, and just make the ending look at least presentable, at a base level. You do your best, but it never works out that way unless you are a very, very powerful filmmaker who gets all the money that you need. And we went to dinner and we talked about it and he walked me over to a video store. It felt authentic. Kelly seemed to be wondering that, too. Dwayne is very good at taking direction. The. Richard Kelly: That prosthetic Dwayne Johnson body was a gift from an earlier production, so Im guessing that it still exists. Because my character is in one of them, I have now been portrayed in a graphic novel. Southland: Created by Ann Biderman. So they cast me to be Daryl Donaldson, the No. Richard Kelly: After 9/11, that image felt much more weighted. But to build an SUV with CGI wasnt crazy. And the lines between the two are hard to interpret. Youd have to ask Louis Lazzara, who is Dwaynes wonderful longtime makeup artist, who is very essential to this movie. Our schedule had to be what it was. He used to produce with his company, RSA, these BMW commercials that were like short films, and they would bring in big directors to direct them. Is it going to work? And I was going back to the car. So for a minute, in my soul, I really was like, Oh, my god, the Southland is real.. Then she brings up the volunteer to have his thumb cut off. One is the 2008 stuff, in the three days that lead up to Boxer, Krysta, the Taverner twinsa lot of the characters are out in Lake Mead in Las Vegas, and then they all come to L.A. It had cognitive abilities, and it was this sort of mutant telepathic cow beast that had been engineered by this group of media technicians and scientists who come in to oversee the cows unveiling to the world. And then, right then, some kind of huge rocket from Palm Desert or some military base went up. Eventually, the momentum of the project built to where we got it to Dwayne Johnson, and that was the trigger to our greenlight. Southland Talesis an apocalyptic tale set in the future of 2008. We rented two Sony HD cameras. There were a couple of second unit shots where I literally just could not be in two places at one time. Unfortunately, the Fluid Karma machine Treer developed also slows the rotation of the Earth, damaging the fabric of space and time. (Shout-out to Winnie Cooper!) We flew to Abilene. It all started to sort of make sense as this big grand systemic narrative in my mind. Once all the pre-roll was shot, production began. It was called Southland Tales. Search the world's largest fan wiki platform. I remember I had someone looking online. Marguerite Derricks: When I got the original script, it was almost like a musical. I show up and they put me in wardrobe and Cheri Oteri gets up on the stage and she gives this big political speech. Richard Kelly: The very first draft of Southland Tales was written right after Sundance in 2001. [Interviews have been edited for clarity and length.]. It seems like it changes nothing but every once and awhile, you get to take a bad guy off the streets for good. Those little glowing orbs, like the one that The Rock finds on the zeppelin at the endthat was just from my bocce ball set. Hes a very chill, cool leader. He can also be heard debating his murder skills and willing himself into (non-)action with thoughts like, "I will not kill my sister, I will not kill my sister, I will not kill my sister." Through interior monologue, the narrator shows himself to be cynical and insensitive, especially to the poetry written by his wife.He is jealous of her ex-husband from her previous marriage, though that marriage was a miserable experience for her, and he is especially Then we threw a fake Fourth of July party at my uncles house, and it was, I think, May of 2005. And if its a safe leap. I need to lean further into the Philip K. Dick of it, the near-future of it all.. And pitching him my vision for the movie. Before anyone laid eyes on 12-year-old Kevin Arnold, we were greeted with the sound of his wise voice. Four years earlier, he had watched his debut feature, a bizarre blend of 80s needle drops, teen angst, and high-concept science fiction called Donnie Darko, first bomb at the box office, and then miraculously un-bomb, gaining a second life through midnight screenings and DVDs. My cousin, Dee Austin Robertson, was helping me with a lot of the second unit surveillance video footage in the film. And for years, people saw this and thought it was real. We came back from Sundance really depressed, because we had no distribution deal for Donnie Darko. What size skates do you wear? Like a 13, why? Well, for the rollerblades. What do you mean? You know youre in the movie, right? Thats how much we were stretching every dollar and every hour that we were on set. Zirnkilton grew up in York, Pennsylvania and spent summers in Maine. In 2005, director Richard Kelly was in a unique position inside the Hollywood ecosystem. And we told everyone: We sent out fliers to the local [paper]and to the whole neighborhood, and said, Were going to host a fake Fourth of July barbecue for a major motion picture. I remember I had to get on the phone with this guy and play hardball negotiating that clip of the elephants fucking. Yeah, I thought that was okay.. can't exist on a street that only goes as far east as the 2000 West block). She put so much time into rehearsal; she just wanted to be perfect. Spotted for six seasons of the popular CW drama: Gossip Girl dripping with antipathy. Narrator. Dude's suppose to made out of tires and they make him white. It was so much fun getting to show up with this roundtable of incredible comedy heroes coming in. Zirnkilton is best known for providing the opening Part of the joy of being a fan is finding odd and obscure gems that you end up falling in love with. I remember us discussing it being like a nod to the classic MGM musicals that we were doing, because there was a classic look about the girls [in the All These Things That Ive Done sequence] all having that kind of Busby Berkeley look where they all had the same wigs and they all looked alike. Now I know what it's like to be a chick.Cooper: If you want to be a chick that's a different bar. The term became very loaded with meaning and interpretation, and it just continued to resonate in my mind. I need for it to have more socio-political weight behind the story, and I need to make this thing more ambitious. There are communities and websites dedicated to solving the mysteries of the movies plot. Ive always loved him. WebSteve Zirnkilton (born Stephen Morgan Zirnkilton; August 18, 1958) is an American voice actor and former politician from Maine. Yeah, sure man, sure!. Its the bigger, completed version of Southland Tales that Ive been working to try and complete. 1 Donnie Darko fan? And Id be like, Oh, thats fake. And you could just see them be crushed. Johnsons character, Boxer Santaros, serves as a riff on actors like Arnold Schwarzenegger, a major action star with heavy ties to establishment Republican politics. He often responds to others in his head before uttering anything aloud. For me as an artist, my very first film was made just before [9/11], and then it was released in the shadow of 9/11. Richard Kelly: We went to Malibu, which was, I think, where they shot Planet Of The Apes with that big rock. And it became clear after the reception at Cannes that people were so confused, and that they saw that the movie was three chapters, but they were chapters four and five and six. It was super gross and super fun. Headlined by Dwayne Johnson, Seann William Scott, and Sarah Across four seasons of NBC's successful comedy, his internal monologue tells us things like, "I knew something was wrong because no self-respecting man would ever turn down a talking monkey." He also stars in the best sequence of the whole film, in which he has a serious drug trip and imagines himself in a music video singing The Killers All These Things That Ive Done with all kinds of weird Americana imagery. Kelly and his crew had 24 days, and $17.8 million, to shoot a star-studded, effects-heavy science fiction satire, much of it in public locations. Carrie Bradshaw, so confident and yet so unsettled. WebThe narrator describes what "you" do and lets you into your own thoughts and background. Southland Tales is the second film fromRichard Kelly, released five years after his cult hitDonnie Darko. Over the course of six seasons, Kevin becomes a proxy for every American teen boy, or anyone who'd ever been a teen boy, or anyone who'd ever known a teen boy. An action-movie star named Boxer Santaros (Dwayne Johnson) is baffled when reality keeps mirroring the events in his script in Southland Tales. Abilene was played by pop music superstar Justin Timberlake, in one of his first starring film roles. You've got a problem with gay people, that's your right, OK but I don't want to hear about it every day. Then the next day we went and shot Cheri Oteris big comedy show on Main Street, Santa Monica, which you only see a little bit of in the theatrical cut of the movie. In Angela, we are reminded that teen confusion, for all its imperfections, is perfect. In television, the narrator is our sensei. There are serious moments too. Zirnkilton was the narrator for TLC 's Code Blue: New Orleans and the syndicated series Arrest & Trial. He has been the announcer for the Kennedy Center Honors, and for the past seventeen years he has been the onstage announcer for the Top Cops Awards in Washington, D.C.. But I kind of come back to 9/11. Most cops manage to stay sane despite the chaos all around them, You want to go ruin his day? WebSouthland - Full Cast & Crew 77 Metascore 2009 -2013 5 Seasons NBC Drama TV14 Watchlist Where to Watch A rookie and a seasoned no-nonsense cop are at the center of And these 6-foot, 6-inch Marilyn Monroes walked towards me, and I didnt know what they were going to be wearing. We brought like 60 copies of the graphic novel to the south of France. Cooper: You want to go ruin his day?Lucero: Absolutely. Priscilla Elliott: I think the word that we always used to joke about was scope creep. Thats Richard: scope creep. Kevin Arnold in his mid-30s, "The Wonder Years". J.D. So we found two art students at Chapman University, where they had this wonderful art school. You can give him really complex, intricate direction. Waking up without his memory in the films opening moments, he spends the movie unsteadily unraveling its mysteries, manipulated by those around him, and drifting between two personalities: The childlike, amnesiac Boxer, and the fictional hardass Jericho Cane. Death is inevitable, and in some ways beautiful, she reminds us. There was constant stress like that, like, Oh, god, is the ice cream truck going to work? When they flip the ice cream truck with the airburst, we had to shoot that in two pieces. A montage of news footage introduces us to the world ofSouthland Talesthen ties the many stories together. "While other times the crime is not seeing the world as it is. Hes done dozens of movies, huge blockbuster movieshe did Mulholland Drive for David Lynch. But I will be working on this. Howard Brand, 66. We could all tell, by the end of shooting the musical number, that it was going to work. So what is a narrator? Richard Kelly: Believe it or not, it was a crazy idea that I had when I was working with Tony Scott on Domino. Vaughn Smallhouse and Fortunio Balducci and Dr. Soberin Exxall those character names are very referential to characters in Kiss Me Deadly, or actors who appeared in Kiss Me Deadly. And, of course, everything goes wrong. They were talking about just taking the movie away from me and cutting it down to 90 minutes, with none of the pop songs that we had in the film. Todd, youre in the movie. Hed just worked out at Golds Gym, and he ordered, I think, about five scrambled eggs, a steak, and a gigantic bowl of broccoli. The actings fun, the overall visual qualityis good outside of some awful 2005-era CGI, and the soundtrack is great. I hope it happens. So in the prequel, you see all of that, all the characters, all that stuff, drama unfolding over those three days in animationits literally the characters animatedand then it takes Boxer all the way to the point where, on the early morning of July 3rd, he wakes up on the beach. One of Southland Tales most memorable moments remains a car commercial for a fictional, alternative fuel source SUV, the Treer Saltair. Is America the pimp nation? And I remember being up in the middle of the night, refreshing websites to see the reviews start coming in. Zirnkilton also provides voiceovers for political ads, notably during Susan Collins's re-election campaign in 2014. But at least we had one graphic novel ready for the Cannes Film Festival. They were checking me out like crazy in there. Ditto the raconteurs of "Revenge," "Burn Notice," "Red Band Society" and any other series we omitted. The film under-performed at the box office and was panned by critics, though it gained a cult following in its home video release. Richard Kelly: I think that was me. I would love to see it shine for another day. The first three chapters have two elements to them. He started eating this enormous meal, and I had my whole visual presentation there to show him. Its difficult for me to just end it on that one statement. Jim Dale's silvery English lilt carries us through the candy-coated ABC dramedy, which was canceled after two brief but wonderful seasons. [Paugh (now credited as Shane Strickman) is a visual effects producer for HBOs Euphoria, while Bayol is deputy head of CG for media studio The Mill.Ed.]. And everything Angela Chase feels is real: her crush on Jordan Catalano, her tension with her longtime friend Sharon, the prosaic pressures of high school. We tracked him down and cast him in the film based on that, because when I saw that footage, Im like, okay, [Richardsons character] Nana Mae Frost needs to witness that footage of projectile vomiting, it needs to make her physically sick, and that foreshadowing, thats the man whos going to come in and assassinate her. What was the official certification given to Southland (2009) in Canada? For every Batman, there is aCondorman. Everyone at the barbecue really wasnt aware that that was part of the core shooting of the film. Priscilla Elliott: Part of its wonderful strangeness is the wonder and the dreadthe glitter and the doom, we used to say. "They talk about how sweet, wonderful and oh-so-full-of-life you were, how it was. Todd, youre in the movie.. He also worked on The Box, my third film. And he brought me over and said, I want you to rent Kiss Me Deadly and watch it, youve got to watch Ralph Meeker. I think that probably, because of budget, things may have gotten cut out. A montage of news In 1994, when then-Congresswoman Olympia Snowe decided not to seek re-election to the U.S. House of Representatives for Maine's 2nd congressional district, Zirnkilton sought to replace her. I knew that the twins were somehow the key to the whole movie, and there needed to be a bigger twist to the twins at the end, a bigger payoff. For those of us who revel in the weird pop-culture soup this came from, its one hell of a movie. Richard Kelly: When we took the film to Cannes in May of 2006, I had finished the first graphic novel and it was published, bound, and ready for distribution. And I was like, Okay, lets just try to justify the existence of these books and give the audience a tease of it in this little animated prologue. And we had no money. What if theyre actually the same person?, We had already recorded Teen Horniness Is Not A Crime., Richard, did you not tell Todd hes in the movie? And Richards like, Oh, right! Its always been kind of compromised. We had a CD of all the songs in the movie, like a bootleg soundtrack. Release CalendarTop 250 MoviesMost In Ray Bradburys short story The Pedestrian, Leonard Mead experiences feelings of isolation in Los Angeles in 2052 A.D.. Richard Kelly: I dont think anyone could have ever won an argument to cut it out, because someone spent all that time to render that. I was so excited for those guys. There was no breathing room to do it a second time. On this Wikipedia the language links are at the top of the page across from the article title. We were putting SWAT vehicles on the Venice boardwalk. I just dont want it to always be this compromised, unfinished thing. And then it was up to me to come up with the movement. I had all the visual design concept art, I had designs for the MegaZeppelin that had been commissioned by the great concept artist Ron Cobb, who worked on so many great science fiction works. Permalink: Southland cops know when the Santa Ana winds blow, you learn jus Added: February 02, 2011; 2/1/11. [vague] Zirnkilton has also provided voices for Family Guy and The Rugrats Movie. Well, who are the pimps, you know? Operating on a shoestring budget and with minimal shooting time, Kelly and his crew were often forced to get creative when sourcing the movies props. Were just going to go for it.. If anything, I felt honored that I was getting to work with so many of them. Priscilla Elliott: The first thing we did was set up all the research and the vision boards, finding references of all the tattoos, and what the different mechanisms might work and look like in the tanks. We were firing off massive weapons in Hermosa Beach, where a lot of very wealthy people live. Each actor gives the dialogue their own spin, with some playing it completely straight while others camp it up. So we kept getting all this footage and it was working. But he is sure is plugged into his own goofy ineptitude, like in Season 4, when he tells a girlfriend he likes politics and then says in voice-over, "What are you doing? Like a heavenly guidepost, the voice emanating from a protagonist's head or an outsider's scrutiny shepherds the story across multiple seasons. It took some convincing, but Rock agreed, and for four seasons, he lent sarcastic narrations to the semi-autobiographical "Everybody Hates Chris." ( Dwayne Johnson body was a gift from an earlier production, so and... 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