I know it may not seem like it if you’ve read anything I’ve written about any of his movies in the past few years, but I root for Richard Kelly. I’m not sure he has any idea what he’s doing when it comes to filmmaking mind you, but I root for him. Donnie Darko is a brilliant movie, but everything he’s done since then, including the director’s cut of that same film, makes it seem more and more like Darko was a happy accident which even he doesn’t really understand . But man, I’d like to be wrong about that.
So I’ll probably always give him a chance. Here’s the next movie I’ll be giving him a chance on: Corpus Christi. The movie is titled after the same-named, Texas coastal town and it’s described as a more “traditional narrative” by Variety. What they mean by that is that Kelly’s movies are often really freaking weird and this one probably won’t be. I love oddity but it hasn’t really been working for Kelly lately, maybe something more grounded will be just the thing to get him on track?
This traditional narrative will be about a mentally unstable Iraq war veteran named Patience, and the strong relationship he forges with his wealthy, politically ambitious, supermarket chain owning boss. Why that kind of movie needs to be set in Corpus is anyone’s guess, but any time anyone sets a movie somewhere besides Los Angeles, New York, or New Orleans I’d consider that a win.
Corpus is a strange Texas city which, whenever we visited it for a beach vacation as a kid, always seemed more fun in theory than it is in practice. Part of the problem is perhaps that, unlike beaches everywhere else, the Texas coast is kind of dreary. If they actually shoot the movie there, it’ll be pretty dreary too. If it looks like an episode of Rick Springfield’s High Tide though, then you’ll know they didn’t actually shoot it in Corpus.
