CEO and unabashed appreciator of this movie, Tim Barley breaks the pre-2000 rule for ‘classic cinema’ to talk about one of our favorite DVDeep Cuts…
🥃🥃🥃🥃 Premium Pour – Highly Recommended
Southland Tales (2006) — An often misunderstood, WAY overambitious, and totally wild ride that only gets better with age (and maybe a cocktail or two).
From the Mind Behind Donnie Darko Comes… Something Entirely Else
After the cult success of Donnie Darko, writer-director Richard Kelly had the world’s attention—and he used it to deliver something no one expected, including audiences at Sundance (see below). Southland Tales isn’t a follow-up to Darko. It’s an apocalypse opera, a political fever dream, and a sci-fi satire wrapped in a sun-soaked paranoia tableau in Southern California (Hermosa Beach, where this author resides, to be exact!) and is populated by an absolutely stacked cast.
This is a film that swung for the fences and didn’t care if it missed. But the older it gets, the more it feels like it hit something—maybe even the future.
Southland Tales – The Plot (Deep Breath):
It’s three days before July 4th, 2008, and America is on the brink. A nuclear attack on Texas has triggered World War III and led to the creation of a Patriot Act on steroids—US-Ident, a government surveillance system that tracks everything and everyone. Oil has dried up, civil liberties are basically gone, and the West Coast is a boiling pot of paranoia.
Boxer Santaros (Dwayne Johnson), a Hollywood action star with ties to the Republican Party, has gone missing. He turns up in the desert with amnesia, and has now co-written a 
screenplay called The Power with Krysta Now (Sarah Michelle Gellar), a porn star-turned-entrepreneur and self-help mogul who believes the script might be prophetic. The thing is… it might be.
Meanwhile, a pair of identical twins—(or are they?)—named Roland and Ronald Taverner (Seann William Scott) get caught in a tangled plot involving mistaken identity, time loops, and a possible tear in the fabric of reality. Roland, a cop working with a radical underground movement, becomes central to a larger plan that might save—or end—the world.
Hovering above all of this is the President of the United States, Bobby Frost (Holmes Osborne), broadcasting from a zeppelin and micromanaged by his calculating First Lady, Nana Mae Frost (Miranda Richardson), who runs US-Ident like Big Brother in Prada.
As the world teeters, a greedy corporation, Treer, led by the eccentric Baron Von Westphalen (Wallace Shawn), who sees himself as a messianic figure, is pushing a new energy source called Fluid Karma, which is derived from ocean currents but might be messing with the flow of time itself (which just so happens to be the plot of the Santaros/Now screenplay…
Neo-Marxist revolutionaries, deep-state surveillance agents, racist cops, double agents, drugged-out veterans, and a prophetic Justin Timberlake (yep) all crash together in this multi-threaded narrative that’s part Revelation, part The Big Lebowski, part Philip K. Dick on acid. (the film borrows heavily from Dick’s works, especially Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said.
And by the time Boxer, Krysta, Ronald, and Roland converge at a party on the flying mega-blimp Mega Zeppelín, reality itself is beginning to collapse.
It all ends with a mirrored handshake, a gunshot, a levitating ice cream truck, and possibly the end of the world.
Okay, NOW take a DEEP breath…
The Cast is INSANE
Due to Richard Kelly’s star status after Donnie Darko, this cast list reads like a 2000s fever dream:
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Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson – paranoid, twitchy, and genuinely compelling.
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Sarah Michelle Gellar – channeling post-modern Britney Spears energy.
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Seann William Scott – doubling up in a surprisingly emotional role.
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Justin Timberlake – narrating the film and lip-syncing to The Killers while hallucinating.
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Mandy Moore, Amy Poehler, Jon Lovitz, Cheri Oteri, Miranda Richardson, Bai Ling, Wallace Shawn, Kevin Smith, Will Sasso, Curtis Armstrong, Christopher Lambert—and MANY more. Everyone’s dialed to eleven and operating in a reality just slightly to the left of ours.
Critics Didn’t Get It. The Box Office Didn’t Care.
But, premiering at Cannes in 2006 in the midst of turbulent political and world events, Southland Tales was savaged by critics and quickly became one of the most notorious flops of its year. It never had a wide release and made less than $400K at the box office.
But something funny happened on the way to oblivion—it refused to disappear.
Over time, a cult following formed. Fans dove into the film’s massive mythology (including a prequel comic trilogy), its conspiracy-laden structure, and its bold vision of post-9/11 America teetering toward collapse. Suddenly, the chaos didn’t feel so absurd—it felt prophetic.
Why It’s a DVDeep Cut Favorite
Southland Tales is a DVDeep Cut BECAUSE it’s the kind of cinematic oddity we live for—ambitious, messy, overloaded with ideas, and deeply, deeply sincere. It tries to do too much and ends up creating something unforgettable.
The tone wavers between Lynchian dream logic and Idiocracy-level satire. The visuals are hypnotic. The dialogue is absurd and quotable. And the soundtrack is pretty awesome, including a fever dream Justin Timberlake music video homage to The Killer’s “All These Things That I’ve Done.”
It’s a time capsule from a future that never came, and in 2025, it feels more relevant than ever.
CocktailsandMovies.com Bottom Line:
Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales is a bold, hilarious, odd, overreaching and terrifying look into the end of the world (and Hollywood). It’s a cracked mirror held up to America, and the reflection is unforgettable.
Watch it. Rewatch it. Then read the comics. Then watch it again.
Southland Tales is for the deep end of the cocktail crowd.
Currently available for rent on Amazon Prime and Apple TV+. And enjoy The Fluid Karma Fizz we created just for this tribute.
