Great Soundtracks: Southland Tales

Rarely is music as integral a part of any film not related to the subject of music as it is to "Southland Tales." A big part of the reason for this is the fact that initially, director Richard Kelly intended for "Southland" to be a full-blown musical. Apparently, that was a bit too crazy for producers, and he was persuaded to make it a narrative film. Granted, the film is not only crazy, but pisses on every line of sanity as is, but even so, imagining it as a musical is not that difficult. Many of the best moments in the film, as well as some of the most resonant, are the ones involving music as a passive or active force in the scene.

Towering over the entire film is the ominous score by techno success story/cuddly vegan Moby. Never have I heard ominous tones sound more soothing or hypnotic than what Moby creates here. Nearly every scene is backed by this, and he pulls off the difficult trick of making his ambient score memorable, without it intruding on the scene. Particularly during the climactic scene (which involves a floating ice cream truck, a rift into the fourth dimension and a wigger kid with a bazooka; I wasn't lying about how whacked this movie is), the score makes the madness onscreen come off as touching and dramatic; without the music, it might very well have just been ridiculous.

Kelly also drives a lot of scenes home using well-known songs as part of scenes, both as a score to onscreen action and as part of the action itself. One sequence, in which Boxer Santaros (Dwayne "Don't Call Me The Rock Anymore" Johnson) leaves a gorgeous, palatial mansion and drives a convertible through the pouring rain, is set to Muse's "Blackout." Another, in which Boxer runs through a fog-covered subdivision in California to a slowed remix of the Pixies' classic "Wave of Mutilation." Describing this on paper (or blog, as it were) is hard, because scenes like these make "Southland" a visual and aural wonder, and the full hypnotic impact of said scenes cannot be encompassed within my comparatively mediocre descriptions.

And finally, I cannot talk about the importance of music in this film without making note of the scene that Entertainment Weekly referred to as "the year's best scene from an otherwise bad movie," and that has been the most discussed regarding the film. This is the sequence in which the film's narrator, Pilot Abilene (Justin Timberlake) shoots up on a futuristic alternative fuel source (don't ask) and slips into a fever dream, where he lip-synchs to the Killers' "All These Things That I've Done" while covered in blood, as Marilyn Monroe clones writhe around and upon him. This is the scene that elevates the movie beyond the critical comfort zone of being labeled a "head trip" and into an upper echelon of abstract cinema. Watching a scarred war veteran sing "I got soul, but I'm not a soldier" over and over again is the sort of heartbreaking image that only the movies can pull off. Also, in utilizing a well-known pop song, Kelly breaks another fourth wall (he does that frequently in the film) between the 2008 we are living in and the one depicted in the film.