End of days, L.A.-style

A byzantine doomsday freakout that also somehow feels eerily familiar, "Southland Tales" is Richard Kelly's panoptic denunciation (or sendup, it's hard to tell) of the imminent, oil crisis-fueled apocalypse as seen from Los Angeles. The movie was booed at Cannes when it screened there last year, though I don't know what that says about it beyond noting that it joins the ranks of Sofia Coppola's "Marie Antoinette," Vincent Gallo's "The Brown Bunny" and Pamela Anderson. Since Cannes, "Southland Tales" has been extensively re-cut -- though, at 2 hours and 24 whacked-out minutes, it's hard to imagine what it looked like before.

The director's second film after the cult hit "Donnie Darko," his new movie is even more logic-resistant than his first, though hopefully it's not quite as prescient. (The September 2001 release of "Donnie Darko" was delayed because of its inopportune imagery of a commercial airliner fuselage falling out of the sky.) The scariest -- and best -- moment in "Southland" takes place before the credits, during a scene at a children's birthday party in Abilene, Texas, where a passed-around video camera happens to record the detonation of an atomic bomb smuggled across the Mexican-American border by members of Al Qaeda.

From here, we get the rundown on the three years leading up to 2008: World War III has begun, the draft has been reinstated, access to oil is limited, there are no alternative fuel programs in place, the Patriot Act has been expanded to place all of cyberspace under federal control, and the 2008 presidential election will be decided entirely by California's electoral votes. Meanwhile, in celebrity news, top action star Boxer Santaros (Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson) -- husband of Madeline Frost Santaros (Mandy Moore), whose father, Sen. Bobby Frost (Holmes Osborne), is the current Republican vice presidential candidate -- disappears into the desert and reappears a short time later with amnesia and an entrepreneurial porn star girlfriend named Krysta Now (Sarah Michelle Gellar) with whom he's written a doomsday screenplay.

What happened to Boxer and who's responsible? It's apparent that someone, somewhere has cooked up a plot of some kind, but that could be almost anyone. In the three days leading up to the third anniversary of the attacks on Abilene, local neo-Marxist guerrillas from Venice Beach (mostly actors, documentary filmmakers, porn directors and slam poets who oppose total federal control of cyberspace) scheme to blackmail Boxer's powerful family.