By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com
Homeland Tales: Southland director grounded from Cannes travel for "terrorist" suspicions? [UPDATED]
“What the hell?” shouldn’t trip off the tongue so readily, so often. With the headlines this morning about the government allegedly getting telco cooperation to spy on tens of millions of American citizens’ phone calls, this from SF Chronicle’s Daily Dish is an astonishment. Donnie Darko director Richard Kelly, about to debut his soph feature, Southland Tales at Cannes is on the no-fly list. Canny promo or topical paranoia? Kelly will likely miss Cannes “because his passport is being reviewed by the U.S. government. Homeland Security is investigating 31-year-old Kelly, reportedly because there is a James Kelly on the terrorist watch list… Kelly has contacted a U.S. senator and has recruited his mother to hunt out documents to help him prove his American citizenship. The Virginia-born writer-director fears the issue could be connected to the plot of his new movie, which is in part about security measures taken by the U.S. government following Sept. 11… “The paranoid conspiracy freak inside me is starting to think this has something to do with the film.” UPDATE: The Guardian has a bit more this morning: “Sources suggest that the film-maker has been confused with another man, “James Kelly”, who is on the terrorist watch list. Kelly’s full name is James Richard Kelly. “Born in Virginia, the son of a NASA technician… [h]is latest picture, Southland Tales, is set in a dystopian Los Angeles paralysed by economic and environmental collapse… [T]he film is implicitly concerned with security measures taken by the US government after the events of September 11, 2001.”