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The title of this column is misleading. Taken literally, it means that I would be embarrassed by films I like that are deemed terrible by others. I have no shame, though. I’m not embarrassed by any film I like, and I’m damn proud of it. My pleasures aren’t guilty at all.

Many people are fanboys, and I’m no exception, although usually of those off the beaten track. Ever since The Visitor, I’ve been a Richard Jenkins fanboy. I get excited every time I see him pop up in a film (even if it’s Step Brothers), and I really think he can do no wrong. Jesse Eisenberg is another one, and not just because he kind of looks like me and acts like me in most of his movies. Were it to come out now, I would even see Cursed. I don’t think my fanboy-ness for Jenkins and Eisenberg, though, come close to my fanboy level of love for Richard Kelly.

Like the rest of my peers, I saw Donnie Darko in high school and thought it was one of the deepest, most thought-provoking movies this side of Fight Club. Although I don’t put it on a pedestal anymore, I still think that it’s one of the most interesting recent films and that it’s a pretty successful example of early viral advertising (the Web site, DVD commentary, and discussion boards are all key in understanding everything in the film). What’s incredible about Donnie Darko, too, is that it was Kelly’s first film. He’s not like Christopher Nolan needing to make Following before he understood how he would do Memento. He dived right in with possibly the ballsiest debut film ever.

Obviously, then, his second film would be the ballsiest second film ever. Southland Tales takes the themes of time travel and the apocalypse that were introduced in Donnie Darko and blows them up to crazier proportions. He also shows us he has great flair for names that I’ve only seen with Wes Anderson before – Boxer Santaros, Jericho Kane, Roland Taverner, Pilot Abilene, Cyndi Pinziki, and Baron von Westphalen all meet up with each other over Independence Day weekend in an alternate 2008.

The Rock (whose professional name change to Dwanye Johnson is as terrible a move as the films he usually chooses to do now) plays Boxer Santaros, a successful movie star engaged to the daughter of a Republican senator vying for the Vice Presidency who now has amnesia and has been living with porn star Krysta Now (Sarah Michelle Gellar) who has ties to the leftest underground movement called the “neo-Marxists” who have kidnapped Roland Taverner (Seann William Scott) for a plot to throw the election who was in the military with Pilot Abilene (Justin Timberlake) who narrates the film for us with direct quotes from the Book of Revelations. You may be asking how this all connects. I’m still kind of asking that same question.

I don’t think I would be giving Southland Tales enough credit to be calling it a “beautiful mistake,” although that’s what it basically is. Kelly is a hell of an ambitious filmmaker, probably the most ambitious one that I know of, and the leap between Donnie Darko to Southland Tales is admirably risky. While Donnie Darko has a full plot whose only fault is that it may not be evident from the film alone, Southland Tales really makes no sense. The plot points all work together, but the motivations are wacky. In fact, I feel like that may even be a Richard Kelly trademark. When the plot becomes too confusing and would be even more confusing to explain to the audience, Kelly decides not to do any explaining at all. Characters are just given an innate sense of knowing what to do to advance the plot. Boxer Santaros even explains what he’s thinking and what the audience needs to know at the end.

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