Not with a bang but a whimper.

That’s T.S. Eliot, yo, from “The Hollow Men” (1925). It’s also a voiceover spoken by Justin Timberlake in Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales. It’s out this week on DVD, affording Canadians an opportunity to watch yet another Richard Kelly movie not available to our citizens on first run in an actual cinema. Oh, Canada.

Anyway. It’s a crazy, fever-dream of a movie, each scene brimming with ideas both au courant and classic, jam-packed with character actors intoning exceedingly-dire dialogue, teetering on self-parody. It’s smart and self-satisfied and is the antithesis of the dumbed-down, superobvious shit which passes for Important Cinema — cue Crash! — these days.

It’s also a total mess. I’m not sure even its most fervent defenders — outing myself! — will deny that it’s a deeply-flawed movie. It’s campy when it shouldn’t be, elegiac when a snappier delivery would serve the material, too-laden with Saturday Night Live alumni and for a filmmaker with not too many movies under his belt, Kelly might think twice about repeating significant aspects of his previous, also-flawed (and also-terrific) Donnie Darko. I’m talking about time rifts and bullets to the eye, buddy.

It is a total mess. And I loved every messy minute of it. No, really. It’s superquotable (”teen horniness is not a crime!”) and Seann William Scott won’t win an Oscar™ any time soon, but imagine my surprise when the sexyhot star of Dude, Where’s My Car? actually got me choked up in the film’s closing frames. I know, right?

Seann William Scott as Roland Taverner in Southland Tales

And I’m recommending it. But don’t come whining to me if you’re one of those people who can’t pay attention to what’s going on in a movie because you stepped away from your living room to make some popcorn or you were talking on the phone or clipping your fingernails when you were supposed to be looking at the screen to see what’s happening or listening to, oh, I dunno, what the characters are saying to each other.

Or if you get your Hipster Cred through glib, dismissive put-downs of material which, admittedly, has a reach very far exceeding its grasp; at least it reaches.

Or if you’re Andrew Sarris.

I can cope with the blithering stupidity of Intertubes democracy, but it’s ever so much harder to handle it when it comes not just from someone who makes their living reviewing films but is acclaimed for doing so. Take, for example, Roger Ebert’s review of The Mist, in which he states:

You may not be astonished if I tell you that there is Something Out There in the mist. It hammers on windows and doors and is mostly invisible until a shock cut that shows an insect the size of a cat, smacking into the store window.

What, exactly, were you paying attention to, Eeb, when said giant insect appears in the distant mist, flying corkscrew-like, closer and closer, until it smacks against the window? Shock cut, my ass. You should know better.

And so the fuck should Andrew Sarris. His review of Southland Tales in The New York Observer is an embarrassment, and revels the critic as either massively underqualified to review films any more or as stupid as the trolls infesting the IMDb message boards (a site which, I’m relatively certain, he has never visited, but more on that in a minute). Let’s parse a bit of the review out, shall we?

If I seem to be stalling for time, it is because I must eventually confess that the film made even less sense to me than Mr. Kelly’s Donnie Darko, his 2001 debut with Jake Gyllenhaal, Drew Barrymore, James Duval, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Mary McDonnell, Holmes Osborne, Katherine Ross and Patrick Swayze, all in all, an awesome cast for a directorial debut. This perhaps at least partially explains the favored cult status the film enjoys to this day despite a universal rejection of the unsatisfactory ending.

Okay, first off, Donnie Darko was Kelly’s feature film directorial debut, something anyone with access to IMDb would be able to ascertain in under 30 seconds. And if Sarris honestly thinks Darko achieved cult status because of its cast and not precisely because of its “unsatisfactory” ending, he needs to stop using the word “cult” to refer to movies, like, forever.

Consequently, Mr. Kelly’s problems with narrative logic are compounded in Southland Tales by its comparatively no-name, no-face cast vis à vis Donnie Darko. In this respect, among the high-billed performers, Sarah Michelle Gellar is vaguely familiar to me from the Buffy the Vampire Slayer series on television. Dwayne Johnson as the top lead has the kind of striking face he has inherited as The Rock in a series of films, but otherwise this densely populated motion picture is mostly a collection of blanks except for John Larroquette and Wallace Shawn as two of the evil, ruling-class villains.

For fuck’s sake. SMG is vaguely familiar from Buffy? I trust Miranda Richardson, Kevin Smith and Justin Fucking Timberlake — only one of the most-recognizable names and faces on the fucking planet! — will not be overly offended if Andrew Sarris can’t pick them out of a crowd. This man reviews American popular culture? And is paid for it? And is respected?

But then anyone who can imagine a character in Donnie Darko proclaiming her ardent support for Michael Dukakis against George H. W. Bush in the 1998 presidential election has a great deal to recommend him politically.

Nineteen eighty-eight, Sarris.

As for the rest, I must single out the first cinematic display of two cars copulating as a demonstration of an infinitely renewable energy source. You have to see it to believe it, but I am not sure if it is worth your time.

You’re fucking kidding me, right? That’s the one sequence — a throwaway advertisement in the background of a scene of monumentally intricate camera choreography, with a cinematographic nod to PT Anderson’s opening to Boogie Nights (itself a nod to Scorcese’s achingly long tracking shots) — he’s singling out, which is itself the conflation of the themes of capitalist greed, oil dependency and pornography which, by the way, Andrew, the film is all about? I guess the ancient critic was pissed that it wasn’t Buffy, baring her boobs in a clip from Cockchuggers 2: Cockchuggin’.

The plot, such as it is, deals with death and reincarnation, amnesia and identity theft on a grand scale, and a mini-nuclear-holocaust of sorts to start things off with a bang. I suspect that I am too old to appreciate the picture’s pop illogic. Yet I did not find it at all depressing in as much as it roamed too far from any reality I could recognize.

I guess not, Andy, since, of the plot elements you mention, only two actually exist in the movie.

Hence, I can just write Southland Tales off as an example of a sophomore jinx encountered by radically experimental directors after their first effort proved to have more traction with audiences and critics than they had anticipated. Still, there is such a thing as being so radically experimental as to risk drifting into a deserved oblivion. But that’s only one critic’s opinion. Critics of one kind or another are indispensable for would be cinematic trailblazers. Certainly, the vast risk-averse public cannot be counted on to propel new artistic adventures in the medium.

Here Sarris reveals himself to be utterly without merit. To call Southland Tales a radical experiment in cinema is to completely miss it’s pop-art purity — in its subject matter, its expansive cast and, perhaps more importantly, its presentation. This medium is definitely a big part of the message. Unless a haunting soundtrack by Moby is what he’s talking about, I’m missing anything overly radical. And to write off such an ambitious movie as being unworthy because a risk-averse public won’t support it? When your inept and retarded review is completely indispensable for turning off dozens (hundreds? (thousands?)) of potential viewers?

Shut up, Andrew Sarris.