Sometimes I like movies that a lot of other people don’t like and my reaction is surprise and anger: “Why don’t you like this? Are you stupid? Are you naïve? Are you a cinematic illiterate? Well, I do say, good sir, that one thing is quite certain: You are no one that I want as my friend. Good day.” And then sometimes I like movies that a lot of other people don’t like and my reaction is a bit more quiet, sympathetic: “Oh, totally. Yeah, I see your point. Uh-huh. Well, fair enough, friend. Fancy getting an alcoholic beverage or two?”

Falling into the latter category is Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales, which I saw Saturday, which has been greeted by general ambivalence from the moviegoing public, and which has been gleefully, mercilessly eviscerated by plenty of critics (including the Mercury’s own Wm. Steven Humphrey, whose review is right here). About 15 people were at the screening I attended Saturday afternoon, and at least three of them walked out before the end credits. I fully expect the film to bomb (ouch), to never be heard of again, to—at best—show up at used DVDs sales and be occasionally referenced by snide film critics making too-easy jokes. Which is probably what will happen, but that also makes me sad, because I really, really liked Southland Tales.

It’s not great, and it has some pretty major problems, but I can’t help but think that Southland—which, from its infamously poor reception at Cannes in 2006 to its underwhelming/botched release in the States to its reliance upon three prequel graphic novels that no one has read—is getting a raw deal. While I’m hesitant to say why this is, exactly—I’m hesitant because, to be entirely honest, I really don’t think I understood much of the film at all—I’m gonna take a few guesses.

Going in to Southland, I only knew a few things: That it was the long-delayed second feature from Donnie Darko director Kelly, that it had practically been booed off the screen at Cannes, that its amalgamation of genres (sci-fi, comedy, musical) had the potential to be noxious (or at least obnoxious), that it had one of the strangest casts I’d ever seen, and that reviews had been mixed at best. I hadn’t read any reviews in particular, other than the Mercury's, I hadn’t read Kelly’s prequel comics, and I hadn’t exposed myself to any plot threads or spoilers. I like to go into films pretty much blank; the knowledge that Donnie Darko is one of my favorite films and that Southland Tales was Kelly’s follow-up was enough to get me stoked, while knowing how the film had been received was enough to make me warily prepare for the likelihood of disaster.

A disaster is exactly what most people are calling Southland Tales, actually, and hey, fair enough. A lot of how one views the film is dependent on whether or not one’s willing to give Kelly the benefit of the doubt--at a great number of points in the two-and-a-half hour Southland, it’d be really easy to be overly critical and assume that Kelly is lost, guessing, flailing. But I think he knows exactly what he’s doing, for the most part. Southland plays off of a lot of elements of contemporary American culture that Kelly’s obviously angry about/critical of, and a lot of them are, artistically, the very worst elements: reality TV, internet overload, the sexualization of any and everything that can be sexualized, from women to SUVs. (Also factoring in to Southland’s labyrinthine plot: color-coded terror warnings, Iraq, technology, infidelity, fame, corporate omnipotence, the Book of Revelations, government surveillance, Republicans, something indecipherable about a Fourth Dimension and/or a perpetual motion machine, and enough references to the poems of T.S. Eliot and Robert Frost to give any English major a hard-on.) Kelly’s themes are deeply rooted in both the ham-fisted pop culture and the current status of America, which are confusing, frustrating, annoying, cheesy, loud, even dangerous--and I think a lot of the reason Southland’s detractors are having such a field day is the fact that Kelly pretty much perfectly captures what it feels like to surf the internet, to listen to politicians, to watch the news, to read an autobiography by Jenna Jameson. (Points to Kelly for capturing the details of all of this, but it’s thankless task--in capturing them so perfectly, he gives the impression that his film is either a symptom or example of the shoddiness of American culture, and not a critical analysis of it.) The Los Angeles that Kelly has created is an unholy mix of Blade Runner and Entertainment Tonight, and culturally, it feels right on--it doesn’t feel like a fine film, rather it feels like a hodgepodge of current events. To get back to the point: Whether you enjoy the surreal Southland or walk out of it, I think, depends on whether you think Kelly meant Southland to feel the way it does, or Southland feels the way it does out of Kelly’s indulgent incompetence. Against the popular tide, I’m gonna vote for the former. There are enough chunks of laugh-out-loud humor and visual beauty in Southland to let you know that Kelly knows exactly what he’s doing--but what he’s doing is something that hasn’t been done before, and it’s something that looks too much like American television or pop music to appeal, one suspects, to the usual critics or audiences of intelligent cinema.

The pop music thing is apt, since Southland is soundtracked by the likes of the Pixies and Radiohead and Moby (whose score is close enough to this to make me happy). More importantly, it’s also narrated by Justin Timberlake (who has one hell of a surreal musical number in the film's later half), and the rest of Southland’s cast is also appropriately pop: In a role that’s hardly a stretch, The Rock plays a likeable-if-befuddled action movie star, while Sarah Michelle Gellar plays a half-witted porn star entrepreneur and Seann William Scott plays a bewildered cop. (Yeah, there's a theme of confusion, which is pretty appropriate for a film that's... well, confusing.) Wallace Shawn, Jon Lovitz, Cheri Oteri, Mandy Moore, John Laroquette, and an unrecognizable Kevin Smith all turn up, too, in addition to very other character actor you’ve ever seen, ever--shit, even the fucking Highlander shows up, as a dude who sells guns out of an ice cream truck. It’s that sort of movie, but in Kelly’s Los Angeles (which is in a panicked, post-9/11 sort of mindset following two nuclear terrorist attacks in Texas) it all feels appropriate, chaotic, desperate, and--this is important, and something that a lot of people are missing--funny.

Southland Tales is a comedy more than anything else--a ridiculous, sprawling bit of both social commentary and slapstick, and the fact that Kelly doesn’t differentiate between what’s commentary and what’s slapstick gives the film a tone unlike anything I’ve experienced before. (The closest equivalent I can think of, and it’s not that close, is Vonnegut’s wackier stuff, where sometimes the most important stuff that’s happening is also the silliest.) At times melodramatic and at times damning, Southland Tales, like its setting and subjects, is hardly subtle: Orwellian national security forces monitor everyone all the time, oblivious celebrities party with oblivious politicians, out-of-control feminists/hippies threaten to bring down the government, and Gellar’s porn/pop star (her catchy single is “Teen Horniness is Not a Crime”) is the closest thing the film has to a heroine, and that’s largely just due to her naïveté. But throughout the candy-colored Southland, you can hear Kelly darkly snickering, feel him jokingly elbowing you in the ribs: Sure, Southland is bloated and stilted and ridiculous and overpopulated, but so are the very things it’s about, and more than a few hilarious moments in Southland attest to the fact that the smart, imaginative Kelly’s in control, unlike the people and events he’s capturing.

Kelly’s willingness to go all-out--to be difficult, to be silly--is something that differentiates himself from a lot of filmmakers. Anyone who says they totally understood Donnie Darko the first time they saw it is a goddamn liar, and I’ll wager only a few really get it after the third, fourth, fifth viewings. (Those few do not include me, just FYI. One of the reasons I love Darko so much is that while I’ve seen it six or seven times, it still feels fresh, weird, scary, and funny every time I put it in.) But in addition to its challenging plot, Darko perfectly captured what it felt like to be a teenager coming to grips with how the world works. If Darko’s plot is heady and tricky, though, Southland’s might as well be nonexistent: Convoluted and confusing, I can honestly say that I don’t fully comprehend any single element of it, at least not after seeing it once. (Some of this, I think, was intentional, but Kelly doesn’t get off the hook entirely--there are some fairly serious and glaring missteps in Southland, and a ton of clunky and ill-advised points, all of which could be tightened up, clarified, or wholly expunged, and Kelly’s refusal to do so either means he wanted to make a movie that people would walk out of or no one advised him about how to clear things up. The case is probably the latter, which is too bad; had Southland been a bit more reliable in its plot and less broad in its humor, it might not be in the derided position it is now.) But tonally, like with Darko, Kelly absolutely nails what he's going for. If you’re looking for narrative coherency, I’d recommend looking elsewhere; if you’re okay with a rambling, semi-abstract tone poem that riffs on the current (and likely future) state of America and its citizens, I’d have a hard time thinking of a better film.

(Especially if you’re young. I’m not sure what it is exactly, but Southland Tales seems directly targeted at the younger segment of America, those weaned on cyberspace and vague, far-away conflict in the Middle East. Thanks to both to its plot’s dissonance and its staccato, channel-surfing sort of random pop sensibilities, I have a hunch that Southland is going to resonate a lot more with the text messaging/MySpace/PlayStation crowd than it will the usual attendees of the Fox Tower, or even those with more rigid expectations of what films can or should provide.)

I’m not entirely ready to give myself up to Southland Tales, to shout its praises, to encourage everyone I know to go see it in the undoubtedly limited time it’ll still be playing in town. It has some serious flaws, and a lot of people really hate it, and fair enough. But I will say that I, at least, really enjoyed the film, that I found it funny and smart and cool and pretty, and I’m looking forward to seeing it again. But if you aren’t going to see it again--or if you have no interest in seeing it in the first place--I totally get it. Can't blame you for it at all. We’re still cool.