The second issue of Burning Ambulance is coming out soon, and it includes my longish essay on punk rock movies of the late '70s and '80s. There's a sneak preview available at the B.A. blog.
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Anonymous
said...
I was killing time in a mall record shop, waiting for the start time for the movie, when I started thumbing through the soundtrack albums and pulled up the one for Sid and Nancy. I started to examine it, realized what it was, and felt as if the world had disappeared from beneath my feet.
I'm probably too hard on him, which is what he gets for having once gotten my hopes up high enough that he was able to disappoint me. I still love "Repo Man", and "Straight to Hell" has grown on me. But for reasons that I go into in the Burning Ambulance piece, I think that "Sid and Nancy" was dishonest and egocentric and a betrayal; in a nutshell, I feel that he misrepresented a truly dangerous character as a helpless, harmless man-child so he'd be more sympathetic to the audience, while at the same time scoring off him for being an idiot, to make the point that he, Cox, was a truer punk hero than his subject. Then there's "Walker", about which I can barely remember a wider gap between how excited I was about seeing what sounded like a great movie and how let down I was by what was on the screen.
For years I rooted for him to pull himself together, but after a few bombs on the order of "The Winner" and "Death and the Compass", I concluded that he wasn't even trying. Whatever I think of "Sid and Nancy", I'll concede that it's a real movie, but most of what I've seen of his later work seems just flat-out lazy, as if he'd managed to get the money together to make a movie and instead got his pals together and had a costume party and filmed the whole thing. Based on his interviews and written statements, he seems so taken with his self-image as a blacklisted wild man outlaw artist that he doesn't think he has to do anything on the set to back it up.
I think Revengers Tragedy would lower Phil's already low opinion of Cox.
For a while there, Cox was my filmic god. I love Sid and Nancy and I checked out Repo Man and Walker soon afterward.
I think Walker is amazing, I watch it every couple months, a cracking demolition of Reagan foreign policy and a look into the madness of the neocon mindset that makes Verhoven's Starship Troopers feel like kid stuff.
That said, The Criterion Edition of the film makes Cox look like a complete asshole. His commentary is condescending with a definite "noble savage" streak. In sharp contrast is fellow commenter Rudy Wurlitzer, who seems to actually give a shit about Nicaragua in terms other than it will make his personal scorecard look like.
And then there's Walker 2008 a short film of Cox going into a cabin in the woods (really) picking up the original newspaper reviews of the film, reading them, and then pausing to look at the camera. Then reading another negative review. And another. and another. And just pausing for a second each time.
And I began to feel the sort of revulsion Phil feels with Cox. After that initial trilogy he never really recovered, with the exception of Three Businessmen. That's a minor masterpiece, though it's thanks mostly to Miguel Sandoval's amazing performance as the "Ugly American" who's actually a swell guy.
Highway Patrolman is a particularly irritating piece of filmmaking- 107 cuts in 104 minutes in the service of an embarrasingly rote script by one of his producer buddies where the title character is miserable to start and stays miserable. That formalist trick continues through to The Winner, which Cox tried to take his name off of, when the studio ditched his score. God, that film is annoying, though it includes one of those enjoyably deranged Frank Whaley performances that he gives every so often and I sit there hoping someday I'd get a chance to work with him, and that someone would give the guy the right TV role.
But like you said, Phil, now he seems lost and obsessed with the persona he created. He reminds me not a little bit of Dennis Perrin. Revengers Tragedy is some bizarre broken future spaghetti western pastiche which honestly think wasn't "Written" so much as "shot around Eccleston acting nuts for two hours". Apparently Searchers 2.0 is terrible, and Repo Chick looks bad too.
Christ, this is a blog post in itself. BUt that's your job!
To sum up, he's still my hero, and I'd give my left nut to be directed by him, but... I can understand totally why you feel the way you do about him.
6 comments:
I was killing time in a mall record shop, waiting for the start time for the movie, when I started thumbing through the soundtrack albums and pulled up the one for Sid and Nancy. I started to examine it, realized what it was, and felt as if the world had disappeared from beneath my feet.
Thank god you didn't kill yourself, like Javert.
Hey Phil, what's your opinion of Cox as a filmmaker overall?
I'm probably too hard on him, which is what he gets for having once gotten my hopes up high enough that he was able to disappoint me. I still love "Repo Man", and "Straight to Hell" has grown on me. But for reasons that I go into in the Burning Ambulance piece, I think that "Sid and Nancy" was dishonest and egocentric and a betrayal; in a nutshell, I feel that he misrepresented a truly dangerous character as a helpless, harmless man-child so he'd be more sympathetic to the audience, while at the same time scoring off him for being an idiot, to make the point that he, Cox, was a truer punk hero than his subject. Then there's "Walker", about which I can barely remember a wider gap between how excited I was about seeing what sounded like a great movie and how let down I was by what was on the screen.
For years I rooted for him to pull himself together, but after a few bombs on the order of "The Winner" and "Death and the Compass", I concluded that he wasn't even trying. Whatever I think of "Sid and Nancy", I'll concede that it's a real movie, but most of what I've seen of his later work seems just flat-out lazy, as if he'd managed to get the money together to make a movie and instead got his pals together and had a costume party and filmed the whole thing. Based on his interviews and written statements, he seems so taken with his self-image as a blacklisted wild man outlaw artist that he doesn't think he has to do anything on the set to back it up.
I recommend checking out "Revengers Tragedy," if you haven't seen it. Christopher Eccleston is terrific in it.
I think Revengers Tragedy would lower Phil's already low opinion of Cox.
For a while there, Cox was my filmic god. I love Sid and Nancy and I checked out Repo Man and Walker soon afterward.
I think Walker is amazing, I watch it every couple months, a cracking demolition of Reagan foreign policy and a look into the madness of the neocon mindset that makes Verhoven's Starship Troopers feel like kid stuff.
That said, The Criterion Edition of the film makes Cox look like a complete asshole. His commentary is condescending with a definite "noble savage" streak. In sharp contrast is fellow commenter Rudy Wurlitzer, who seems to actually give a shit about Nicaragua in terms other than it will make his personal scorecard look like.
And then there's Walker 2008 a short film of Cox going into a cabin in the woods (really) picking up the original newspaper reviews of the film, reading them, and then pausing to look at the camera. Then reading another negative review. And another. and another. And just pausing for a second each time.
And I began to feel the sort of revulsion Phil feels with Cox. After that initial trilogy he never really recovered, with the exception of Three Businessmen. That's a minor masterpiece, though it's thanks mostly to Miguel Sandoval's amazing performance as the "Ugly American" who's actually a swell guy.
Highway Patrolman is a particularly irritating piece of filmmaking- 107 cuts in 104 minutes in the service of an embarrasingly rote script by one of his producer buddies where the title character is miserable to start and stays miserable. That formalist trick continues through to The Winner, which Cox tried to take his name off of, when the studio ditched his score. God, that film is annoying, though it includes one of those enjoyably deranged Frank Whaley performances that he gives every so often and I sit there hoping someday I'd get a chance to work with him, and that someone would give the guy the right TV role.
But like you said, Phil, now he seems lost and obsessed with the persona he created. He reminds me not a little bit of Dennis Perrin. Revengers Tragedy is some bizarre broken future spaghetti western pastiche which honestly think wasn't "Written" so much as "shot around Eccleston acting nuts for two hours". Apparently Searchers 2.0 is terrible, and Repo Chick looks bad too.
Christ, this is a blog post in itself. BUt that's your job!
To sum up, he's still my hero, and I'd give my left nut to be directed by him, but... I can understand totally why you feel the way you do about him.
He reminds me not a little bit of Dennis Perrin.
Now that's just mean.
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