My birthday's coming up (January 24th, if we're going to be technical) and while I'd love to see all of you at the lil get-together I'm having that evening at The Ginger Man (6:30pm; be there), I realize that that's not going to happen for some of my new out-of-state chums. So I figured let's celebrate the way the lovely and amazing Marya Murphy did this past year--with a live-tweet!

So. January 22nd. 11:30pm EST. Richard Kelly's much-maligned Southland Tales.

I chose this film because it deserves a lot better than it's gotten. I'm sorry but people who see a crude mess in it are just plain wrong. I've written extensively on the film in the past and now am cashing in my birthday chips to get people to see what the fuss is about. @Patrick_Pogo and I will do our best to show you why underneath its aggressively loud exterior is an amazing film about "The Information Age," about the destruction of history and of identity and about how we're so stoopid and desperate that we'd use holy fire for a renewable energy resource. It's all there and then some, I swear and it only gets better when you know what to look for. This is Kelly's ballsiest film, the one with all of its ideas running pell-mell, helter-skelter for the simple reason that he doesn't expect you to keep up.

It's the end of the world in Southland Tales because there's too much distracting data and too many false prophets claiming they understand it all for anyone to get it all. Underneath its breakneck, broad frathouse humor is a dark and smirking celebration of a society that's become so unglued that the only people to realize what's going on are three schizophrenic soldiers and even they only understand that the world is ending, never really why. This is a film about the disintegration of language, of the use of everything from religion to Karl Marx to explain what's going on and why we'll never understand the brutally unkind way Kelly's God destroys us without so much as an explanation--not with a whimper but with a last gasp view of America as the butt of a divine, cosmic joke.

Join us. It'll be fun. And heady. And silly. And long. And exciting. And obnoxious. But mostly fun.

Hashtag is #rkstales