MOVIES - Almost a never-ending tale

Initial expectations for the film were at a high because it marked the second feature from writer-director Richard Kelly, the follow-up to his 2001 slow-building cult sensation "Donnie Darko." Following the disastrous, spirit-crushing reviews out of Cannes -- "overwrought but underwhelming" read a sample notice -- "Southland" seemed to vanish into thin air, becoming a thing of conjecture and rumor. When was it coming out? How much would be changed or cut? And, perhaps most of all, why had Kelly made such an outrageously audacious sci-fi/political thriller/satire in the first place?

"I'm a bit of a masochist," Kelly remarked recently while standing on a hotel balcony that provided a sweeping view of Los Angeles, the city from which "Southland Tales" draws its name, locations and wild, rupturing energy. "I had obviously bitten off more than I could chew, and the challenge since Cannes has been to not choke, to digest it and swallow it."

'Slaughtered' at Cannes

When the film finally hits theaters in Los Angeles and New York today (and select cities on Friday), shorn of roughly 20 minutes from the Cannes cut, it will be the version Kelly considers finished and complete. Though the film is being released under the Samuel Goldwyn Films banner, it was Sony (which initially picked up the film after Cannes) that earlier this year paid for Kelly to finish the film's visual effects.

"It's tough to ask for more money when your movie has been slaughtered at a major film festival," Kelly said. "But when Sony gave me that money I fell back in love with the movie again. I got to finally see it as I always wanted it."

"This is definitely 'Southland Tales,' " said Kelly's longtime producer, Sean McKittrick, looking to put aside any presumptions that this is a somehow a bowdlerized or abbreviated version of the film.

Much like "Donnie Darko," "Southland Tales" is a perfectly imperfect movie, one which is nearly impossible to describe in the neat, compact logline-ology of contemporary Hollywood. Set in 2008, following domestic nuclear attacks in 2005, the film's interwoven story strands include an amnesiac movie star, a gang of absurdist revolutionaries, a team of shady executives, a troubled vet, a crooked cop, kidnapped twins, various dignitaries, politicians and bureaucrats, and a porn starlet turned ambitious entrepreneur who delivers one of the film's signature lines: "Scientists are saying that the future is going to be far more futuristic than they originally predicted."