It's our seventh birthday, and all month long we're turning the keys over to THE FRIENDS OF HYPERREAL 💛🌟🫂

Ah, the infamous passion project. It's a tale almost as old as Hollywood itself: the hotshot director, usually fueled by the success of a big hit, takes a big swing and puts every ounce of effort into fully realizing a vision the rest of the world just isn't ready for. Michael Cimino detonated his career for HEAVEN’S GATE, Sofia Coppola’s MARIE ANTOINETTE met with wishy-washy critical reception, and even the MATRIX sequels took nearly two decades to find proper appreciation. However, none of these are quite as weird, polarizing, or just plain silly as SOUTHLAND TALES. It’s normal for movies to make $374,743 on a $17 million budget, right?

Following the release of eventual cult classic DONNIE DARKO – and the September 11th attacks mere months later – director Richard Kelly funneled his energies into what he called “a piece of science fiction about a really important problem we’re facing;” the problem, of course, being “civil liberties and homeland security,” as well as how “celebrity now intertwines with politics.” Somewhere along the line, these lofty examinations of Bush-era angst fell into the teleporter pod with Kelly’s insanely dorky filmmaking sensibilities, a cup of ambition too full for a lid, and a bunch of 2006’s finest B-to-D-list comedic performers (Dwayne Johnson! Sarah Michelle Gellar! Mandy Moore? John Lovitz??). What crawled out the other end was SOUTHLAND TALES, an absurd yet prescient slice of end-days stupidity which might be the best California apocalypse black comedy since MIRACLE MILE.

To fully describe the scope of SOUTHLAND TALES is a fool’s errand – after all, the film opens on “chapter IV” of an ongoing story which began in a series of three graphic novels nobody knew existed. The experience of watching it, however, is an overwhelming brain-blast of stuffed-full stimulus which feels like the myriad narrative threads of MULHOLLAND DRIVE filtered through the mind of a guy who thought talking about Smurf sex in his debut film was the funniest thing in the world. To be fair, he was kind of right. Constantly flip-flopping between near-serious commentary, low-brow cackle-inducing jokes, and stunning sequences of heart and bravado, SOUTHLAND TALES is a truly one-of-a-kind love-hate movie messterpiece. Check your grim, buttoned-up notions of apocalypse at the door – after all, the end of the world is probably going to be really, really dumb.

The vitals:
MONDAY, 7/3
7:00 - doors
8:00 - local short film
Following - SOUTHLAND TALES presented by Morgan 😎
(take a look: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9A82ciNC7jk&ab_channel=RottenTomatoesClassicTrailers)

Sliding scale $5-10 tix available for presale, any remaining sold at door (all proceeds go to studio's screening fees and future programming all for you!).

21+

SEE YOU AT THE MOVIES
🔮