Radiohead, MOBY, Nine Inch Nails, The Arcade Fire, Krysta Now, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, Muse, Elbow, The Killers, Jane's Addiction, Beethoven, Waylon Jennings.....
Movies
Kiss Me Deadly, Alien(s), Fight Club, Blade Runner, Brazil, The Big Lebowski, Repo Man
Television
IS USIDENT, and SHOULD BE DESTROYED........except for the Simpsons
Books
Anything Stephen King, Kurt Vonnegut, Raymond Chandler, and Richard Matheson.....
The city stands on the brink of social, economic and environmental disaster. SOUTHLAND TALES is an epic story set over the course of three days that culminate in a massive 4th of July celebration.
A large ensemble cast of characters includes Boxer Santaros (Dwayne Johnson), an action star stricken with amnesia, Krysta Now (Sarah Michelle Gellar), an adult film star developing her own reality television project, and Roland Taverner (Seann William Scott), a Hermosa Beach police officer who holds the key to a vast conspiracy.
This is the way the world ends.
This is the way the world ends.
This is the way the world ends.
Not with a bang but a whimper.
--T.S. Eliot
The conclusion of T.S. Eliot’s 1925 poem “The Hollow Men” has been altered for satirical effect in SOUTHLAND TALES, a comedic spin on the apocalypse, as it should occur in the great city of Los Angeles. Trust me on this one… if the end is indeed upon us (apparently 59% of fundamentalist Americans believe that it is ), it is going to happen in Los Angeles first.
I have always been obsessed with this whole apocalypse thing… and trying to decipher the encrypted symbolism in the Book of Revelations is enough to give anyone a headache. A friend once remarked that there is a legitimate debate among religious scholars that the Book of Revelations was written while the Apostle John was under the influence of hallucinatory mushrooms. Go figure.
Another friend sent me a very disturbing link to a story about something called “American Hiroshima”. Apparently this is one of many planned terrorist attacks that Al-Quaeda has in the works. This is the one where they smuggle nuclear weapons (purchased by Osama bin Laden from Russian gangsters) over the Mexican border into Texas with the aid of Mexican guerrillas. They detonate the nukes in mid-size cities where there is little domestic counter-terrorism surveillance.
Sounds like the apocalypse to me. Where would we go from here?
These are the sordid tales of what happens next… how it all comes crashing down. In the alternate future of SOUTHLAND TALES, the war machine is running out of gas, and there is no alternative. Alternative fuel, that is.
Global warming may indeed be the “whimper” that T.S. Eliot foretold. Perhaps our destiny is to slowly drown ourselves into oblivion.
Southland Tales will take you down that other road. The one that ends with a “bang”. What if there is a path to end all suffering, and hidden somewhere along the way is a primer? A primer that could help us extinguish this great big mess of a planet once and for all. Quick and painless.
There is no alternative. Alternative fuel, that is.
Until one day… when a mysterious German corporation arrives in the Southland with a kick-ass new formula. A cure for our sickness…
Who I'd like to meet: Karl Marx, Philip K. Dick, Stanley Kubrick
