In the latest issue of The Atlantic, Ross Douthat has a very fine essay on what he frames as Hollywood’s return to the 1970’s. It puts last fall’s spate of Iraq war films in context, bringing them into place alongside everything from the neo-exploitation slasher flicks of Eli Roth to the Bourne series and mediocre remakes like The Manchurian Candidate. Lots of ink (some of it mine) was spilled last fall dissecting the movie biz’s dreary, self-righteous takes on the war, but his essay paints the clearest picture by far.

I would say, however, he gives short shrift to one point: lame-brained politics or no, the crusading, politically-infused films of the 1970’s were simply better films–and that goes for the prestige pics as well as the B-movies. Douthat notes this in passing, agreeing that the 80’s were “a more middlebrow, conservative decade in pop culture” in comparison with the political engagement of 70’s cinema.

But it’s essential to note that today’s crop–at least in its most explicitly political incarnations–is by any standard rife with unambiguously rotten material. Lions for Lambs, Redacted, and In the Valley of Elah were painful to sit through. Even the better stuff, like the 2005 Clooney duo of Syriana and Good Night, and Good Luck were merely average–decent productions that fail to rise to the level of most cable television series. The only recent productions in this vein that stand out at all are the three Bourne films, which tend to use their political framework as a background and succeed mostly on the strength of their dazzling action setpieces.

Contrast this with the films of the 1970’s. There’s little comparison. Apocalypse Now may have little to do with the real-life experience of Vietnam, but it’s a hypnotic, singular vision from an accomplished cinematic artist working at the peak of his powers. All the President’s Men remains one of film’s best detective stories, and probably the best movie about Washington or journalism ever made. Middlebrow fare like The Parallax View and Flight of the Condor sparkled in a way that today’s mainstream thrillers rarely accomplish. And even low-budget films like Death Race 2000 and The Warriors crackled with a sense of outrage, awareness, and energy. Movies like these, as well as the early works of directors like John Carpenter and David Cronenberg, indulged in exploitation flick shenanigans. But they also had a tremendous amount of fun, and maybe even managed to say something about the state of the world, too.

Heaven knows the politics of Hollywood in 1970’s were off the wall, perhaps even wackier and more radical than today’s. But somehow, they still managed to turn out movies that were far less irritating than the artless, self-satisfied liberal consciousness-raisers we seem to be stuck with now.

I’ll leave judgments about the historical veracity of HBO’s new miniseries, John Adams, to those with some expertise in the field (at least one historian seems to think it’s not perfect, but not bad either). The real question is: Is it worth watching? And judging from the two episodes that aired this week, the series is (slightly) less than the sum of its parts. The good news, however, is that the parts are generally excellent.

Strong performances anchor the series. Paul Giamatti plays the title character, a lumpy, bald Boston lawyer who finds his way to greatness after successfully defending the British soldiers involved in the Boston massacre. Giamatti is characteristically frumpy here, but he lends Adams an interesting blend of arrogance and anxiety as well. He’s a patriot, yes, concerned for his country, but also about his own family, life, and legacy. It’s a showcase for Giamatti, but Tom Wilkinson (as Ben Franklin), Laura Linney (as Abigail Adams), David Morse (as George Washington) and Stephane Dillane (as Thomas Jefferson) also make quite the impression as well.

Meanwhile, from the costumes to the extravagant sets, everything on the production side is superb, but the standout element is the photography, which looks positively stunning in HD. Director of Photography Tak Fujimoto is a longtime Hollywood hand (I first recall noticing his work in 1991’s The Silence of the Lambs), and his visual trademarks are evident in nearly every scene.

He’s got two main modes behind the lens—the participant and the voyeur. The first mode is primarily used in the larger setpieces, most notably in the series’ opening sequence, which depicts the Boston Massacre; a handheld camera follows Adams as he stumbles through the streets and into the bloody scene, running side-by-side with the man as if his partner. It puts viewers inside the scene, makes them part of it. The more intimate scenes, mostly between Adams and his wife Abigail, are typically shot in low light, and often from another room, or behind an object. The effect is of peering in on history from the outside, watching an American founder from the outside.

The series’ weaknesses come mostly in the script by Kirk Ellis, which, at least at this point, has failed to bring the many other fine elements together. There are many strong moments, especially between John and Abigail (a nighttime monologue in which Adams, laying next to his silent wife, thinks through his dilemma—and those of the country—is particularly touching). But too many scenes feel overly scripted, as if the characters were simply spouting miniature editorials. I have no doubt they were eloquent men, but surely they stumbled once in a while? And in both of the inaugural episodes, there is far too much reliance on courtroom-style drama, as the series would really rather be Law & Order: American Revolution. Still, it’s by far the best thing on TV right now, and anyone with even a passing interest in the subject would do well to check it out.

If everyone at the Manhattan Institute suddenly became raving socialists and decamped to Baltimore to concoct a sprawling, five-year missive on urban decay and the failures of public institutions in story form, you might end up with something resembling The Wire. Never before has any television series been so deeply and smartly concerned with the interplay between public policy, local institutions, and individual lives. What happens when teachers’ unions threaten the mayor’s office in a bid to get more funding and the police department budget is shorted? The Wire shows us. And not just at the political level–but also on the streets, in the lives of cops, kids, teachers, and drug dealers, as well as the politicos at city hall.

The HBO series–as far as I’m concerned, the best that television’s ever seen–ended last night with an episode that managed to be both satisfying and appropriately open-ended (Andrew Johnston has a great write-up on the finale over at The House Next Door). Sopranos creator David Chase should take note: As much as I enjoyed and defended the non-ending ending to his show, this is how to end a major series. Major plot points were largely resolved, but the intractable problems of social organization and human fallibility were not. That’s one of the marks of a genuinely great series-that it feels as if there is something outside the confines of the hours we see on screen. In that respect, no other show comes close to what Wire-creator David Simon has accomplished over the last five seasons. These stories come to an end, but for everyone in the show who survives–and, in this case, that means much of the city of Baltimore–life will go on.

I am continually fascinated by the blogosphere—its odd blend of willful insularity and often-startling reach; its dominant personalities, at who’ve succeeded not so much at being larger than life, but at simply recreating parallel versions of themselves online, seemingly able to document every waking thought in real time; at the alliances and infighting that dominate, especially in political commentary; at the way it allows us to see the evolution of language, the spread of ideas, jargon, and stylistic modes, at a an amazingly rapid pace. In just the last few years, blogs have generated reams of material ripe for critical evaluation.

So I was rather disappointed by Sarah Boxer’s essay on blogs in The New York Review of Books, which seems written for people who have never—or only rarely—encountered blogs. The essay provides a cursory summary of how blogs work, notes a few of their literary tics, and suggests that they are popular because of the freedom they provide. It’s sort of “On the internet, no one knows you’re a dog” in 5,000 words. It’s a primer on blogging, but it suggests very little about the medium that isn’t patently obvious to a regular consumer. All this might have been fine in 2004, but in this case, it comes off as a marginally less awe-struck version of what Ross Douthat has called the “critic-as-fanboy style of criticism,” which he says usually come in the form of “extremely long critical essays that describe their subject, often in painstaking and florid detail, without bothering to interpret it.” I’m glad to see that writers are taking the internet seriously as a medium that deserves thoughtful examination, but if Boxer’s essay offers indication, the critical community has yet to figure out what to make of it.

With Cloverfield, producer J.J. Abrams and director Matt Reeves clearly had no intention of seriously addressing September 11th. As Keith Uhlich said, the movie’s more or less “a first person episode of Felicity interrupted by a humongous, pissed-off crustacean!” Serious political commentary was never the point.

And that’s fine. Watching WB-network-ready downtown hipsters get crushed by humongous monsters is every American moviegoer’s God-given right, or something like that. But the problem is that the film tries to have it both ways. So, despite the film’s political apathy (it’s more concerned with girl troubles than international affairs), we get shots that are clearly meant to invoke the terror and panic of that day’s events: buildings crash, sending walls of debris push through downtown streets; ash-covered New Yorkers walk zombie-eyed through the lower-east side; TV news reports lead with graphics declaring that the city is under attack. Yet somehow, not one of the movie’s characters mentions September 11th. Is it even remotely possible that the similarity wouldn’t occur to any of them?

It’s a cheap and, I think, telling, appropriation of the days’ events. On one hand, it doesn’t want anything to do with the reality of September 11th; on the other, it borrows the images and sensations from the day in service of what is no more (at best) than an agreeably shallow bit of entertainment. J.J. Abrams and Matt Reeves, it seems, are exclusively interested in the day as spectacle, for its “wow factor,” as if no one should much worry about reimagining the 9-11 as a theme-park ride and ignore the rest

Is the new Rambo an argument for American intervention? Matt Zoller Seitz, who says that he “can’t think of another blockbuster action franchise that has been so unabashedly right wing in its world view,” makes the case:

Cowritten and directed by Stallone, the fourth Rambo movie is a bracingly political picture — as much an argument in movie form as No End In Sight; a pro-interventionist rebuttal to all the 2007 documentaries and dramas about America losing bits of its soul in Iraq. The I-word is never spoken in Rambo, yet in its coded way, the film makes a case for why we are in Iraq and should stay there until the job is done, whenever that may be.

In the comments section below Seitz’s long and intelligent post, the author further notes that Stallone, who co-wrote and directed the film, recently endorsed John McCain, and considers this further evidence that the film is a pro-intervention parable. Overall, it’s a very savvy reading of a very workmanlike film (I focused more on the film’s working- class ethos in my review), but I think Seitz gives the film too much credit when he calls it “an argument in movie form.”

Rambo, as the protypical 80’s action hero, is a macho man’s macho man—a tough-talking, bulked-up, weapon-wielding one-man army. He’s a militarized, ultra-violent version of Superman (same jaw, same over-muscled physique, same one-man-against-the-world ideals). Violence isn’t just his way—it’s his nature. It’s central to the character in the way that, say, bedding beautiful women is inherent to James Bond. You simply can’t separate the two. Moreover, the Rambo films themselves are, essentially, violence-delivery systems. They’re simple, straightforward pictures that exist almost solely to give audiences their violent jollies and let them be on their way.

But to justify that nature and purpose, and to sell it to a movie-going audience who wants to get their fill of bloodletting but also feel fine about it, you need two things: innocent victims and a cause. Because he’s a populist hero, aimed at entertaining the masses, that cause can’t be too complicated. And because he’s an American, that cause is inevitably going to end up aligned with basic American values, meaning freedom, justice, individualism, anti-authoritarianism—ideals that will easily and quickly appeal to a wide swath of the movie-going public. The victims, then, must consist of those whose freedoms are most obviously in danger, making the go-to helpless victims those who’ve been oppressed by violent totalitarians around the world (Communists in the second and third films, sadistic Burmese military warlords in the latest outing).

It’s not so much, I think, that Rambo makes an explicit argument for intervention as that it uses the widely understood morality of intervention (and not even political intervention, per se, so much as the basic rightness of protecting or avenging the innocent) as a pretext for indulging in extreme cinematic violence. Stallone’s personal politics no doubt flavor the film, but I think it’s a mistake to assign much force to the film as argument. Violence is the series’ product, and intervention is the simplest, most broadly appealing way to sell it.

Despite the consensus view that P.T. Anderson’s latest film is a searing, visionary work, numerous critics have complained about the final scene of There Will Be Blood. The New Yorker’s David Denby calls it “a mistake.” Ross Douthat writes in the most recent National Review that the film’s weakest part is its end. And Chris Orr, writing for The New Republic, argues that it “runs aground in its final act and, especially, its final scene.” But although the final scene is jarring, I think it’s a perfect close for both the director and the film’s central character. (As you might expect, spoilers lie ahead.)

A quick recap: After two and a half hours of quiet, tightly-controlled, poetic naturalism, in which Daniel Day Lewis’s fiercely independent oil baron Daniel Plainview manipulates and dominates everything and everyone around him, the film explodes into a wild—some might say unhinged—absurdism. He confronts Eli (Paul Dano), a wily spiritual huckster—and something of a competitor—who has come begging for help, and then, after growling and howling his way through a riveting, if borderline insane, monologue that features the line, “I DRINK YOUR MILKSHAKE,” he begins hurling bowling balls at Eli and eventually kills him. It’s transfixing, brutal, uncomfortable, and defiantly weird.

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I’m on record as being an Oscar-cynic; as far as I’m concerned, the annual awards ceremony is, rather than a celebration of cinematic accomplishment, primarily an excuse for Hollywood to indulge in awesome displays of lavish narcissism. Everything about the night, from the $40,000 gift bags to the six-figure formal-wear to the clunky mechanical stage pieces, screams “Look at me! Look how wonderful I am! I deserve an award!“

But as often as not, those receiving the awards don’t deserve them. Any idea that the Academy is a reliable judge of cinematic merit should have gone out the window by the time the organization named Crash Best Picture.

Yet for movie fans, it’s nonetheless hard not to be swept up in the buzz and excitement. This year, that’s especially true, as the nominations are unusually strong, particularly in the Best Picture Category. There Will Be Blood, Juno, and No Country for Old Men are all worthy contenders, and even Michael Clayton was mildly enjoyable, if overrated. Only Atonement, the lackluster period picture based on Ian McEwan’s novel, stands out as a poor selection – and this was to be expected, as it was virtually assured it a slot by its literary pedigree.

A few people seem to be surprised by the nomination of Juno, a scrappy, sharp-witted film about teen pregnancy by Thank You for Smoking director Jason Reitman, but its nomination is in keeping with the Academy’s tradition of nominating one slightly edgy but successful indie-style (if not actually independent) film each year; think of Little Miss Sunshine, Fargo, Moulin Rouge, or Lost in Translation. Call it the Pulp Fiction nod.

Instead, the film that stands out as odd to me is Michael Clayton. Yes, it received generally favorable coverage, but beyond a marvelously dour star turn by George Clooney in the title role, there wasn’t much to it beyond dreary moodiness and a melancholy anti-corporatism, and neither the critical buzz nor the box-office returns were particularly notable. The only explanation I can come up with is that it was nominated as the token “political issue film” because none of the year’s hideous crop of Iraq-war movies could justifiably take the slot. But who knows what lurks in the minds of the Academy’s members.

Sidney Lumet’s Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead isn’t so much a heist picture as a post-heist picture, a film about the sad and deadly spiral of greed and evil that follows two brothers who plan a robbery of their own parents’ jewelry store. As a genre, this is a small one, and often overlooked; only a few films, Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs among them, go after it with such gusto.

The novelty may explain the gushing critical reaction. It’s undoubtedly a strong film, gripping and tersely paced throughout, and many have compared it to Lumet’s classic, and undeniably brilliant, foray into the heist picture, Dog Day Afternoon. But though the subject matter is broadly similar—a holdup in New York goes deadly wrong—the two films are hardly of equal stature.

Dog Day earned its classic status not only though its taut pacing, but through its lovingly crafted cast of characters, and its subtle portrayal of the social frictions of 1970s New York. Rather than simply existing for their own sake, the genre elements fused into a framework by which to examine a place and an era. The film was, in other words, about more than the robbery, or even its aftershocks.

Devil, on the other hand, is content simply to wind up its ingenious little Rube Goldberg of a story and let it play out. A number of the supporting characters are flat, functional stereotypes who appear only so they can help keep Lumet’s narrative machine running. There’s nothing particularly wrong with this, and the movie is still almost certainly one of the year’s best. But it’s just genre—albeit very, very cleverly constructed genre—and shouldn’t be mistaken for anything more.

Showtime’s Dexter, which just finished its second season, is up for a WGA award this year. Like most high-profile cable dramas that have appeared in the wake of The Sopranos, it balances upper middlebrow dramatic concerns—quirky characters, complex narrative lines, psychological questioning—with visceral, often vulgar elements. But the competing interests of these two strains has forced it into a series of ungainly, and sometimes ugly, moral contortions.

The show, which follows the exploits of Dexter Morgan (Michael C. Hall), a Miami PD blood-spatter analyst who also happens to be a serial killer—albeit one who only targets other murderers—is high concept in the extreme, a cockeyed mash-up of American Psycho, Miami Vice, and CSI. Dexter, we learn, is a bona fide murderous sociopath—lacking a conscience and unable to experience normal emotions—but he lives by a code imparted to him as a boy by his adoptive father.

The code allows Dexter to control his bloody urges by killing those who “deserve it,” and requires him to blend in with society in order not to get caught. So he maintains a polite, even conciliatory persona, and has a perky girlfriend, a respectable job, and a sister for whom he has assumed responsibility. Meanwhile, Dexter, in voice-over, muses on his own humanity (or lack thereof) as a creature with no more moral compass than a rock.

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The fifth and final cut of Ridley Scott’s 1982 science fiction classic, Blade Runner, comes out this week in a variety of overstuffed DVD packages. Anyone interested in the film should read Gary Giddin’s very eloquent New York Sun piece on the film’s somewhat awkward juxtaposition of marvelous visuals and clunky storytelling. He gets the otherworldly quality of Scott’s compositions just right:

Every inch of the screen is answered for, indoors and especially outdoors, as horizons disappear into matte paintings, smoke pots, shimmering neon, giant screens, airborne vehicles, and crowds as opaque and variously dressed as in a Halloween parade in Greenwich Village. From the justly celebrated opening shot — a grotesque metropolitan hell with fireballs shooting into the starless night — we are drawn into an alternate world.

Giddin comes down hard on the story (maybe too hard), saying the script and characterizations “suggest directorial incompetence,” but his basic point stands: Blade Runner succeeds on the power of its meticulously created world. It’s a triumph of visual ingenuity that, even in the age of limitless CGI possibility, few films can match.

More than that, however, the film is a landmark because of how it opened up the genre of cinematic science fiction. Much science fiction, especially the low-grade junk that flourished in the decade before Blade Runner hit the screen, was cheap, rough, and carelessly assembled. That’s not to say that none of it was enjoyable in some adolescent way, but it was hardly serious; even the best efforts (Star Wars) rarely transcended their pulp origins.

Blade Runner, though imperfect, sought to be something more, something grand and thoughtful, and if its fraught production process (exhaustively detailed in Paul Sammon’s book, Future Noir) resulted in a less-than-focused final product, its outsized ambitions, and the talent behind them, were always completely clear. In the end, simply looking as stunning as it did was enough of an accomplishment, for it gave the often raw and jagged science fiction genre permission to be something more than a juvenile stomping ground—to be haunting, elegant, and yes, even beautiful.

Here at the horizon, Dara Mandle wonders about the death of reading. Over at The New Republic, James Wolcott offers a lengthy and vastly entertaining piece on the decline of book reviewing (the piece itself is a review of Gail Pool’s Faint Praise: The Plight of Book Reviewing in America), a topic also explored recently by Steve Wasserman in the Columbia Journalism Review. All seem to agree that reading (and serious thinking on it) is in a state of flux, and probably on the wane. Mandle’s post, for example, ends with the question, “Do electronics like the Kindle have what it takes to save reading?” The underlying assumption is that reading needs saving, and that recent cultural and technological shifts are part of what’s killing it.

It’s an easy assumption to make, of course, but as Wolcott’s essay points out, it’s hardly a novel idea. Academics, intellectuals, and ordinary book lovers have been fretting over the decline of serious writing and serious thinking about writing for decades. As always, reactions vary. Many, like Adam Kirsch in The New York Sun, have simply given up, pronouncing the internet-dominated literary scene a total loss. Others, including critics like Terry Teachout and journalists like Megan McArdle (now of the Atlantic), are more enthusiastic.

I lean towards enthusiasm, but I think some of the worries and criticisms are valid, if somewhat misplaced. The danger to reading, it seems to me, is less of the lack of respect for books and book criticism, or the uninformed opinions of amateurs replacing the thoughtful screeds of professionals, or the diminishing number of book reviews in newspapers, but instead, the glut of written material fighting for our collective attention. Even the most robust literary scene would have difficulty keeping up with the truckloads of books published each year. And although newspapers may be publishing fewer book reviews, the internet, by giving free and easy access to all those with internet access, has actually expanded access to top-tier reviews for nearly everyone.

Book review pages in medium sized newspapers have fallen off in large part because they are unnecessary in a world where nearly everyone can easily browse the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Boston Globe, the L.A. Times. Meanwhile, smaller publications, including blogs, but also established print journals, are flourishing on the web, creating a wealth of easy-to-access material for every niche. The difficulty with reading these days is not that there is too little being written, or that no one is doing it, or even that no one is doing it well. It’s that there’s too much to read, too much to process. We are not short for words. We are drowning in them.

In I’m Not There, director Todd Haynes takes the stale, conventional music biopic and runs it through a blender. The film claims to be inspired by the life and music of Bob Dylan, and features six different performers, including Richard Gere, Christian Bale, Heath Ledger, and Cat Blanchett as Dylanesque figures (none is actually named Bob Dylan). But one needn’t be a Dylanologist, or even more than a casual fan to wonder at the fantastic concoction he’s whipped up.

Gone are the genre’s usual forms. The familiar arcs of talent, love, addiction, stardom, and redemption that played out in Great Balls of Fire, Ray, and Walk the Line are nowhere to be found, and holiday audiences looking for those familiar patterns will almost certainly be confused and disappointed. Haynes doesn’t just dismiss the clichés; he seems unaware of them, as if he’s inventing everything in the film for the first time.

That’s not to say one can’t spot his influences. Haynes pulls from the fragmented narratives of Bunuel, the feverish and foggy visions of Fellini, and the cinematic playfulness of Godard. Haynes is a fussy formalist, mimicking a dozen or more distinct and easily identifiable styles throughout the film, but his grand scheme embraces a dreamlike expressionism. This isn’t a film about the life of Bob Dylan so much as a rock film fantasia, like Alice in Wonderland as reimagined by Hunter S. Thompson.

Much of the movie’s buzz has centered on the casting, especially Blanchett’s. And indeed, she’s remarkable in her role as Jude, a Dylanish ‘60’s rock hero given to rash behavior and elliptical pronouncements. She provides one point on the ever-spinning Dylan pinwheel, a dazzling array of characters. Between the manic stylistic riffing and the hall-of-mirrors approach to the central figure, Haynes seems to be gesturing toward the fluidity of identity in the media age, where the idea of the self has become fragmented and illusory, polluted by cross-talk and competing personae.

If this sounds a little murky, that’s because it is, but it’s also often exhilarating, and to ask for too much clarity would probably be a mistake. Any movie seeking to capture the essence of Bob Dylan that’s easy and simple to understand is almost certainly doomed to fail.

Robert Zemeckis’s computer-animated adaptation of Beowulf led the box-office this weekend, and it will likely continue to perform well over the Thanksgiving holiday. The film utilizes a high-tech animation process some say portends the future of filmmaking (James Cameron’s next feature will employ the same technology).

Comparing it to its source material is of little use. It’s been streamlined and modernized, and now bears more resemblance to a computer game than an ancient epic. And despite a number of favorable reviews, the best that can be said about it is that it is an empty spectacle, devoid of substance and unconcerned with providing even the barest cinematic pleasure. There’s plenty of bloody fighting, and yet nothing much happens. The movie is not so much a real battle as a military parade—a carefully orchestrated show of arms more notable for the power and technology on display than for any real movement.

Shot using a process called motion capture, in which the performances of real actors are captured by computer sensors and then digitally rendered and presented in 3-D (you even get to keep the glasses), Beowulf shows off its digital wizardry at every opportunity. Mostly this means a parade of gory imagery pushing out from the screen, demanding attention in the way of a small child tugging on your shirt. There are flying 3-D arrows, thrusting 3-D swords, severed 3-D heads, and buckets of 3-D blood oozing out toward the audience. Like the cheap, crude 3-D films of the 1950’s, the presentation is pure gimmickry.

The technique seems intended to add weight and substance, to heighten the drama and add intensity to the action by making everything seem more real. But the computerized animation only serves to make everything seem hollow and fake. The detail on the animated humans is impressive—every hair and facial pore is visible—but such detail fails to impart a convincing sense of human presence. Instead, the people move awkwardly, like expensive toys controlled by remote.

In fact, the entire production has the disconnected feeling of watching a video game being played by someone else. It seems content to engage the audience solely through technology, and, as a result, lacks even the shallow visual pleasures of a bombastic Hollywood blockbuster. Perhaps more worrisome are the desires of the production team to attain an impossible standard of perfection and of the movie-going public to disengage from anything approaching reality. What does it say when even the face and figure of Angelina Jolie must be digitally nipped, tucked, smoothed, and polished? If this is the future of film, does that mean it will lose all touch with what is physical, human, imperfect, real?

It’s possible that Southland Tales, the apocalyptic satire from Donnie Darko director Richard Kelly, is not actually as stultifying and incomprehensible as it seems, that somewhere amidst its frantic mess of pop-culture allusions and political reference points, there is a coherent narrative, or at least a reasonably cogent idea or two. Of course, it’s also possible that Dennis Kucinich will be the next President of the United States. But I wouldn’t bet on either.

The film’s influences are easy enough to spot: the paranoiac science fiction of Harlan Ellison and Philip K. Dick, the surrealist menace of Terry Gilliam and David Lynch. But it musters neither the cohesion nor the sustained mood of any of their work. Attempting plot summary would likely prove a fruitless endeavor, though I think David Edelstein makes a valiant effort in his review:

World War III has erupted; Middle Easterners nuke Texas (Why Texas? Why not?); the government is run by totalitarians, among them Miranda Richardson as Cruella De Vil; mutant Iraq-war vets hover like lifeguards over Venice Beach; Wallace Shawn in transvestite makeup invents “fluid karma energy” to solve the energy crisis; and Nora Dunn masterminds a “neo-Marxist” rebel group with the aid of hard-core porn star Sarah Michelle Gellar. There’s time travel, too, as well as a paranoiac screenplay that begins to blur with reality—or is the screenplay the real reality?

I think it’s a safe bet that neither reality—nor, for that matter, anything approximating it—is among the film’s chief concerns. What’s clear, though, is that Kelly thinks his film is saying something, and probably something important. Any movie that kicks off with a nuclear cataclysm on U.S. soil, quickly moves on to news reports about America going to war with Syria and North Korea, employs Sarah Michelle Gellar to play a combination porn star/talk show host, and features Wallace Shawn as a demented (probably evil) environmentalist who shouts things like “No longer can even the most jaded neocon fatcat deny the majesty of our mother ocean!” clearly aspires to some sort of socio-political relevance.

Sadly, there’s not a shred in evidence. It’s all a hazy, manic jumble, in which dream sequences with pop-singer Justin Timberlake as a scarred, drug-dealing Iraq-war veteran make just as much (which is to say as little) sense as any other scene.

In a strange way, however, it’s refreshing. After a season full of smug, irritating political diatribes posing as prestige pictures, it’s almost pleasant to see a film that tackles current events—the energy crisis, terrorism, the war, just to name a few—without an air of smarmy self-satisfaction. Discombobulated as it all may be, it’s a step up from insolence and dimwitted self-certainty. Southland Tales obviously has no idea what it wants to say about the state of the nation’s politics. But at least it’s bold enough to own up to its confusion.