SOUTHLAND TALES Special Screenings

In 1920, Robert Frost described two roads in a yellow wood. More than 85 years later, filmmaker Richard Kelly, director of the cult favorite DONNIE DARKO, takes the one less traveled. In one of the year’s most anticipated films, Kelly takes us on a journey into a parallel reality. The year is 2008, the place is Los Angeles and Boxer Santos, an action star, has married into the political world. (Sound familiar?) His budding relationship with porn star and business mogul Krysta Now leads to a screenplay that may or may not be an accurate prediction of the end of the world. And it only gets stranger from there.

Kelly’s vast, visionary story encompasses a new US security program that identifies all Internet activity by fingerprint, a new wireless energy system called Liquid Karma and radical nee-Marxists who seek to disrupt the power structures that loom above them.

This most unexpected political satire is a trenchant and wry documentary on the nature of identity and power in a celebrity future. Ideas and images from this alternate, Orwellian near future come at us with a dizzying pace, offering a shiny corporate sponsored vision of a future on the edge of apocalypse. So grab a can of Krysta Now, a couple of severed thumbs and your ticket to the Mega-Zeppelin. The future is here and it’s far more futuristic than you might expect.