Kill Bill is gorgeous and ice-cold. Pure formalism. Where Tarantino’s earlier films were filled with humanity, with unforgettable characters and genius dialog, Kill Bill reduces these to an absolute minimum. Nothing is allowed to interfere with the pure kinetic beauty of the fight scenes. That is to say, Kill Bill is to Pulp Fiction as Kubrick is to Howard Hawks. In fairness, Kill Bill never feels anal or constipated the way all of Kubrick’s films do. Nor is Tarantino doggedly repetitive, the way Kubrick insists on being.
All the set-ups, all the elements of cinematic form in Kill Bill are fantastic: the decors, the camera angles, the editing of the fight scenes are so brilliant that they reveal in comparison how lame and unimaginative nearly all other English-language action cinema is. Even Lord of the Rings, powerful and lyrical as it is in bringing to life its (admittedly) dubious source material, can’t hold a candle to Kill Bill in terms of sheer visual inventiveness.
But Kill Bill‘s formal mastery comes at a price. Near the very start of the film we read the title: “Revenge is always best served cold” (which Tarantino, with characteristic cinephile in-joke wit, tags as an “old Klingon proverb”). And this story of Uma Thurman’s revenge is indeed served cold. The film is so utterly devoid of emotion it feels reptilian. (Perhaps I am slandering reptiles?). The fight scenes are awe-inspiring, but they have absolutely none of the sense of fun that makes Tarantino’s models, the Hong Kong fight scenes, so exhilarating. Nor is there any of the sense of fatality that imbues Leone’s (and others’) spaghetti Westerns, another obvious source of Tarantino’s iconography.
Even Tarantino’s racial obsessions are cut to the bare minimum. Uma Thurman gets the people of color out of the way in Volume One, killing Vivica Fox and Lucy Liu; in Volume 2, to be released next year, she will get to go after the white villains, Daryl Hannah, Michael Madsen, and David Carradine (unless Carradine is a fake Asian, as he was in the frequently-Tarantino-referenced Kung Fu).
So Tarantino has proved that he is as brilliant a visual director as he is a writer/director; but at what cost?
Kill Bill is gorgeous and ice-cold. Pure formalism. Where Tarantino’s earlier films were filled with humanity, with unforgettable characters and genius dialog, Kill Bill reduces these to an absolute minimum. Nothing is allowed to interfere with the pure kinetic beauty of the fight scenes. That is to say, Kill Bill is to Pulp Fiction as Kubrick is to Howard Hawks. In fairness, Kill Bill never feels anal or constipated the way all of Kubrick’s films do. Nor is Tarantino doggedly repetitive, the way Kubrick insists on being.
All the set-ups, all the elements of cinematic form in Kill Bill are fantastic: the decors, the camera angles, the editing of the fight scenes are so brilliant that they reveal in comparison how lame and unimaginative nearly all other English-language action cinema is. Even Lord of the Rings, powerful and lyrical as it is in bringing to life its (admittedly) dubious source material, can’t hold a candle to Kill Bill in terms of sheer visual inventiveness.
As for the citations and allusions: I got the sense that nearly everything in the film was sampled from one or another obscure samurai or martial arts film that I don’t remember or (more likely) haven’t seen. The effect was like the best hip hop: the film is rich in its web of references, and this works even if you don’t know what the references are to.
But Kill Bill‘s formal mastery and meta-cinematic referentiality comes at a price. Near the very start of the film we read the title: “Revenge is always best served cold” (which Tarantino, with characteristic cinephile in-joke wit, tags as an “old Klingon proverb”). And this story of Uma Thurman’s revenge is indeed served cold. The film is so utterly devoid of emotion it feels reptilian. (Perhaps I am slandering reptiles?). The fight scenes are awe-inspiring, but they have absolutely none of the sense of fun that makes Tarantino’s models, the Hong Kong fight scenes, so exhilarating. Nor is there any of the sense of fatality that imbues Leone’s (and others’) spaghetti Westerns, another obvious source of Tarantino’s iconography.
Even Tarantino’s racial obsessions are cut to the bare minimum. Uma Thurman gets the people of color out of the way in Volume One, killing Vivica Fox and Lucy Liu; in Volume 2, to be released next year, she will get to go after the white villains, Daryl Hannah, Michael Madsen, and David Carradine (unless Carradine is a fake Asian, as he was in the frequently-Tarantino-referenced Kung Fu).
So Tarantino has proved that he is as brilliant a visual director as he is a writer/director; but at what cost?
Aki Kaurismaki‘s most recent film to date, The Man Without A Past (2002), is as good as anything he’s done. I’ve gradually come to realize that Kaurismaki’s films are inverted melodramas. That is to say, they are just as stylized and anti-naturalistic, just as reliant on music and decor, and just as socially critical as the melodramas of Douglas Sirk or anybody else; only Kaurismaki’s films are stylized by restraint, where traditional melodramas are stylized by excess. Kaurismaki’s deadpan minimalism – the way the characters are stoic and restrained, and do not indulge in any emotional displays; but also the way the scenes are framed, and the way the camera lingers on desolate details, or pauses while a melancholy song is being sung, but elides determinate action almost completely – all this formal restraint is almost Bressonian, although Kaurismaki is a humanist, and has none of Bresson’s spiritual severity.
The Man Without A Past is about a man (Markku Peltola) who suffers amnesia after he is attacked, and beaten severely on the head, by a trio of punks. He slowly and patiently rebuilds his life, although he has nothing. That’s just about it. As in more conventional melodrama, the characters are crushed and betrayed by social forces beyond their control — here, as usual in Kaurismaki, by the bureaucratic uncaringness of the state, and the ruthlessness of big Capital. But in this film, as in Floating Clouds and a very few others, Kaurismaki even allows himself a bit of hope at the end, which would be sentimental were it not so wry and understated. (Well, in a sense it is sentimental — this is a sort of melodrama, as I said, rather than Bressonian tragedy — but it is an entirely justified, “earned” sentimentality).
The film is devoid of the gorgeous youth you see in Hollywood movies. The female lead and love interest, as so often in Kaurismaki’s films, is played by the utterly sublime Kati Outinen, who has never looked so worn and haggard. (She’s older now – a decade older than she was in Match Factory Girl – and it shows).
Great soundtrack: the music is a mixture of 50s-ish rock (Finnish imitations) and more traditional melodies; usually a song is introduced diegetically, and then continues non-diegetically, which was neat.
Aki Kaurismaki‘s most recent film to date, The Man Without A Past (2002), is as good as anything he’s done. I’ve gradually come to realize that Kaurismaki’s films are inverted melodramas. That is to say, they are just as stylized and anti-naturalistic, just as reliant on music and decor, and just as socially critical as the melodramas of Douglas Sirk or anybody else; only Kaurismaki’s films are stylized by restraint, where traditional melodramas are stylized by excess. Kaurismaki’s deadpan minimalism – the way the characters are stoic and restrained, and do not indulge in any emotional displays; but also the way the scenes are framed, and the way the camera lingers on desolate details, or pauses while a melancholy song is being sung, but elides determinate action almost completely – all this formal restraint is almost Bressonian, although Kaurismaki is a humanist, and has none of Bresson’s spiritual severity.
The Man Without A Past is about a man (Markku Peltola) who suffers amnesia after he is attacked, and beaten severely on the head, by a trio of punks. He slowly and patiently rebuilds his life, although he has nothing. That’s just about it. As in more conventional melodrama, the characters are crushed and betrayed by social forces beyond their control — here, as usual in Kaurismaki, by the bureaucratic uncaringness of the state, and the ruthlessness of big Capital. But in this film, as in Floating Clouds and a very few others, Kaurismaki even allows himself a bit of hope at the end, which would be sentimental were it not so wry and understated. (Well, in a sense it is sentimental — this is a sort of melodrama, as I said, rather than Bressonian tragedy — but it is an entirely justified, “earned” sentimentality).
The film is devoid of the gorgeous youth you see in Hollywood movies. The female lead and love interest, as so often in Kaurismaki’s films, is played by the utterly sublime Kati Outinen, who has never looked so worn and haggard. (She’s older now – a decade older than she was in Match Factory Girl – and it shows).
Great soundtrack: the music is a mixture of 50s-ish rock (Finnish imitations) and more traditional melodies; usually a song is introduced diegetically, and then continues non-diegetically, which was neat.
Tonight, at the Little Theater, I saw two reels of Andy Warhol “Screen Tests” from the mid-1960s. Each reel had ten Screen Tests; the subjects included Lou Reed, Mama Cass, Baby Jane Holzer, Salvador Dali, Susan Sontag, and Nico, as well as many people I hadn’t heard of.
The idea behind the screen tests was simple. Everyone who visited Warhol’s factory was asked to sit still in front of a silent, black and white film camera for three minutes, the time of a single reel. (The reels were then supposed to be screened at silent speed, 18fps instead of 24fps; unfortunately they were unable to do this tonight).
It’s hard to sit still for three minutes, doing nothing. Some of the subjects try their best to sit still (though they fail). Others make faces, or otherwise mug for the camera. Baby Jane brushes her teeth. Dali is suspended upside down. Nico is subjected to flash cuts and unmotivated zooms (such as one finds in Warhol movies of 1966 or so, such as Chelsea Girls, which she was also in); whereas for everyone else, the camera is stationary, one continuous shot.
Watching the screen tests is a strange experience. It’s hard to watch a face for three minutes, in silence, without any action taking place on the screen. No matter how hard you concentrate, your attention wanders (unless, I suppose, you have trained yourself through Buddhist meditation to avoid this wandering). It’s almost like, the more rapt your attention, the more you catch yourself drifting away. The faces on screen invite such rapt attention, because they promise everything, but give so little away. What do outsides tell us about insides? These “portraits” never show us enough. We keep on thinking that we will penetrate to the essence of the person on screen, but all we get is vacancy: an emptiness that is equivalent to the emptiness of the subjective experience of sitting in front of a camera for three minutes, doing nothing, expressing nothing. Everyone is the same, in a certain sense: there’s a lot of self-conscious, self-reflexive posing in awareness of the camera, and this is oddly impersonal, identical from one person to the next. What’s different from one person to the next, on the contrary, is unconscious, or perhaps absent altogether. All of the subjects of these Screen Tests are empty, but everyone’s emptiness is unique. Your emptiness, not your positive identity, is what makes you singular in the world. An identity isn’t singular; everybody has one. But modes of absence cannot be replicated from one person to the next, or even in the same person from one moment to the next.
Tonight, at the Little Theater, I saw two reels of Andy Warhol “Screen Tests” from the mid-1960s. Each reel had ten Screen Tests; the subjects included Lou Reed, Mama Cass, Baby Jane Holzer, Salvador Dali, Susan Sontag, and Nico, as well as many people I hadn’t heard of.
The idea behind the screen tests was simple. Everyone who visited Warhol’s factory was asked to sit still in front of a silent, black and white film camera for three minutes, the time of a single reel. (The reels were then supposed to be screened at silent speed, 18fps instead of 24fps; unfortunately they were unable to do this tonight).
It’s hard to sit still for three minutes, doing nothing. Some of the subjects try their best to sit still (though they fail). Others make faces, or otherwise mug for the camera. Baby Jane brushes her teeth. Dali is suspended upside down. Nico is subjected to flash cuts and unmotivated zooms (such as one finds in Warhol movies of 1966 or so, such as Chelsea Girls, which she was also in); whereas for everyone else, the camera is stationary, one continuous shot.
Watching the screen tests is a strange experience. It’s hard to watch a face for three minutes, in silence, without any action taking place on the screen. No matter how hard you concentrate, your attention wanders (unless, I suppose, you have trained yourself through Buddhist meditation to avoid this wandering). It’s almost like, the more rapt your attention, the more you catch yourself drifting away. The faces on screen invite such rapt attention, because they promise everything, but give so little away. What do outsides tell us about insides? These “portraits” never show us enough. We keep on thinking that we will penetrate to the essence of the person on screen, but all we get is vacancy: an emptiness that is equivalent to the emptiness of the subjective experience of sitting in front of a camera for three minutes, doing nothing, expressing nothing. Everyone is the same, in a certain sense: there’s a lot of self-conscious, self-reflexive posing in awareness of the camera, and this is oddly impersonal, identical from one person to the next. What’s different from one person to the next, on the contrary, is unconscious, or perhaps absent altogether. All of the subjects of these Screen Tests are empty, but everyone’s emptiness is unique. Your emptiness, not your positive identity, is what makes you singular in the world. An identity isn’t singular; everybody has one. But modes of absence cannot be replicated from one person to the next, or even in the same person from one moment to the next.
Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation is a dreamy, drifting film, as befits the state of mind of its protagonists. The characters played by Bill Murray (in what I am tempted to call his best performance ever, building on but transcending his role in Rushmore) and Scarlett Johanson are far apart in age, but they are both Americans adrift in Tokyo, not understanding the language or many aspects of the culture, insomniac from jet lag, semi-estranged from their spouses, not having much to do, and essentially alone, even in the midst of company. My friend Billy writes aptly in his blog of the movie’s “strange and lucid and indifferent spell” (actually, I am not sure if he means the spell of the movie, the spell of jet lag and insomnia, or the spell of sublimated sexual desire; but I suppose all three are accurate). The movie has no real direction, it doesn’t really build to anything like a climax: Murray and Johansen meet, spend time together, are tender with one another, don’t have sex, and then separate again. Indeed, the movie suggests – as William Gibson does in a very different way in Pattern Recognition – that jet lag is the quintessential postmodern condition, and it makes a strange and beautiful poetry of the consequent dislocation of its protagonists. Lost in Translation is lyrical without being sappy; and it conveys a sense of the alienness (from an American point of view) of Japan, without turning this into the usual essentializing, orientalizing portrait of the Mysterious Other (something of which even Gibson is perhaps guilty). For there is no exoticism here. Exoticism requires a grounding sense of familiarity and being-at-home in order to emphasize the difference of the Other; but here that reference to being-at-home is precisely what gets dissolved. The Situationists celebrated urban drift, or what they called derive, as a form of exploration, as a radical reconfiguration of the real by means of defamiliarization. But Lost in Translation presents a blank, neutral, oddly impersonal form of derive, in comparison to which the Situationist project seems merely a wishful idealization. When I say blank and neutral, I don’t mean anomie or alienation, but an ontologically primary condition, deeper than either grounding or estrangement. And I don’t mean affectlessness, but rather a kind of impersonal intensity, in which things are distant, and yet that very distance is powerfully present and powerfully affecting (I think this is part of what Billy means by “lucid”). Lost in Translation is both funny and sad, at times, but its lyricism is too precise, and too wryly observant, to be characterized as either nostalgic or wistful. The film has the force of a revelation, even though (or maybe precisely because) it is telling us that there is nothing to be revealed.
Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation is a dreamy, drifting film, as befits the state of mind of its protagonists. The characters played by Bill Murray (in what I am tempted to call his best performance ever, building on but transcending his role in Rushmore) and Scarlett Johanson are far apart in age, but they are both Americans adrift in Tokyo, not understanding the language or many aspects of the culture, insomniac from jet lag, semi-estranged from their spouses, not having much to do, and essentially alone, even in the midst of company. My friend Billy writes aptly in his blog of the movie’s “strange and lucid and indifferent spell” (actually, I am not sure if he means the spell of the movie, the spell of jet lag and insomnia, or the spell of sublimated sexual desire; but I suppose all three are accurate). The movie has no real direction, it doesn’t really build to anything like a climax: Murray and Johansen meet, spend time together, are tender with one another, don’t have sex, and then separate again. Indeed, the movie suggests – as William Gibson does in a very different way in Pattern Recognition – that jet lag is the quintessential postmodern condition, and it makes a strange and beautiful poetry of the consequent dislocation of its protagonists. Lost in Translation is lyrical without being sappy; and it conveys a sense of the alienness (from an American point of view) of Japan, without turning this into the usual essentializing, orientalizing portrait of the Mysterious Other (something of which even Gibson is perhaps guilty). For there is no exoticism here. Exoticism requires a grounding sense of familiarity and being-at-home in order to emphasize the difference of the Other; but here that reference to being-at-home is precisely what gets dissolved. The Situationists celebrated urban drift, or what they called derive, as a form of exploration, as a radical reconfiguration of the real by means of defamiliarization. But Lost in Translation presents a blank, neutral, oddly impersonal form of derive, in comparison to which the Situationist project seems merely a wishful idealization. When I say blank and neutral, I don’t mean anomie or alienation, but an ontologically primary condition, deeper than either grounding or estrangement. And I don’t mean affectlessness, but rather a kind of impersonal intensity, in which things are distant, and yet that very distance is powerfully present and powerfully affecting (I think this is part of what Billy means by “lucid”). Lost in Translation is both funny and sad, at times, but its lyricism is too precise, and too wryly observant, to be characterized as either nostalgic or wistful. The film has the force of a revelation, even though (or maybe precisely because) it is telling us that there is nothing to be revealed.
PS: soundtrack music to die for, by Kevin Shields (!!!)
Bangkok Dangerous, by the Pang Brothers, is a superb gangster film about a deaf-mute hitman. The story is resolutely lowbrow and generic: violent, sentimental, and sententious. The narrative drifts for about half the movie, and then powerfully coalesces into a revenge plot. The music is pounding, unsubtle, and relentless. Much of the story is conveyed without dialog, and the visuals are amazing, filled with jerkily moving handheld camera, extreme closeups, jump cuts, deliberately mismatched shots, affective montages, abstract use of (grimy and murky) color, scenes shrouded in darkness, and unexpected shifts of perspective (one of my favorites was a shot from the POV of a gecko standing upside down on the ceiling). The Pangs’ stylization is as extreme as John Woo’s, but going in totally the opposite direction: where Woo is gorgeously poetic, with precisely articulated violence and an elegant sense of melancholy, the Pangs are like down ‘n’ dirty grunge rockers, mixing emotional rawness with an unexpected (but still raw) tenderness and vulnerability.
Bangkok Dangerous, by the Pang Brothers, is a superb gangster film about a deaf-mute hitman. The story is resolutely lowbrow and generic: violent, sentimental, and sententious. The narrative drifts for about half the movie, and then powerfully coalesces into a revenge plot. The music is pounding, unsubtle, and relentless. Much of the story is conveyed without dialog, and the visuals are amazing, filled with jerkily moving handheld camera, extreme closeups, jump cuts, deliberately mismatched shots, affective montages, abstract use of (grimy and murky) color, scenes shrouded in darkness, and unexpected shifts of perspective (one of my favorites was a shot from the POV of a gecko standing upside down on the ceiling). The Pangs’ stylization is as extreme as John Woo’s, but going in totally the opposite direction: where Woo is gorgeously poetic, with precisely articulated violence and an elegant sense of melancholy, the Pangs are like down ‘n’ dirty grunge rockers, mixing emotional rawness with an unexpected (but still raw) tenderness and vulnerability.
Chen Kuo-Fu’s Double Vision, a Taiwanese/American co-production, mixes genres to brilliant effect: it’s a combination of serial killer/police thriller, supernatural horror, and family melodrama, with a bit of cross-cultural-misunderstanding comedy thrown in for good measure. A Taipei cop with a traumatic past, whose life and career are a mess (veteran Hong Kong actor Tony Leung) tries to solve a series of murders with both high-tech and mystical Taoist overtones, with the help of an American FBI man (David Morse). The cinematography is fluid and elegant, and the plot is genuinely shocking as well as creepy, as it continually shifts its ground (and the genre expectations it arouses), moving from police procedural to splatterfest to subdued melancholy to an absolutely hallucinatory and delirious conclusion. The overall affective tone of the film is pessimistic and anguished, though it also manages to project a balance between spiritual yearning and extreme skepticism in a way that I’ve neve felt or seen before. (This is tied in as well with the film’s theme of inevitable misunderstandings between American and Chinese culture; my own cultural preconceptions obviously limit my understanding of the film, but this is something that the film explicitly addresses with Morse’s character). All in all, this is a rather grim film that nonetheless gives a great deal of pleasure through its continual inventiveness and surprise. It fuses art and pulp to provide continual astonishment. Double Vision is sufficiently original that I have trouble describing it any less abstractly that I have here. All I can say, really, is that it provides both intensity and wonder; what more could I ever ask from a film?
Chen Kuo-Fu’s Double Vision, a Taiwanese/American co-production, mixes genres to brilliant effect: it’s a combination of serial killer/police thriller, supernatural horror, and family melodrama, with a bit of cross-cultural-misunderstanding comedy thrown in for good measure. A Taipei cop with a traumatic past, whose life and career are a mess (veteran Hong Kong actor Tony Leung) tries to solve a series of murders with both high-tech and mystical Taoist overtones, with the help of an American FBI man (David Morse). The cinematography is fluid and elegant, and the plot is genuinely shocking as well as creepy, as it continually shifts its ground (and the genre expectations it arouses), moving from police procedural to splatterfest to subdued melancholy to an absolutely hallucinatory and delirious conclusion. The overall affective tone of the film is pessimistic and anguished, though it also manages to project a balance between spiritual yearning and extreme skepticism in a way that I’ve neve felt or seen before. (This is tied in as well with the film’s theme of inevitable misunderstandings between American and Chinese culture; my own cultural preconceptions obviously limit my understanding of the film, but this is something that the film explicitly addresses with Morse’s character). All in all, this is a rather grim film that nonetheless gives a great deal of pleasure through its continual inventiveness and surprise. It fuses art and pulp to provide continual astonishment. Double Vision is sufficiently original that I have trouble describing it any less abstractly that I have here. All I can say, really, is that it provides both intensity and wonder; what more could I ever ask from a film?
Hideo Nakata’s Ringu is an effectively creepy horror film, which well deserves its cult reputation. The power of the film comes from its minimalism and restraint, as well as the fact that we the viewers get to see the (strange, disjunctive, and oddly haunting) video that kills anyone who watches it. The film’s double ending – an apparent resolution, followed by a twist in which the danger is still active – is in itself a genre cliche, but both “endings” are emotionally resonant. The corpse’s emergence from the well is quite beautiful. The overall theme of electronic media as vectors of contamination is also poetically apt (and it seems to be in the air right now: a similar scenario, of a video that kills whoever watches it, can be found in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest; the same theme, only with a song instead of a video, is the basis of Chuck Palahnuik’s Lullaby. But the particular twist of Ringu, which I won’t mention here in order not to ruin the experience for anyone reading this who hasn’t seen it yet, has a special resonance).
Hideo Nakata’s Ringu is an effectively creepy horror film, which well deserves its cult reputation. The power of the film comes from its minimalism and restraint, as well as the fact that we the viewers get to see the (strange, disjunctive, and oddly haunting) video that kills anyone who watches it. The film’s double ending – an apparent resolution, followed by a twist in which the danger is still active – is in itself a genre cliche, but both “endings” are emotionally resonant. The corpse’s emergence from the well is quite beautiful. The overall theme of electronic media as vectors of contamination is also poetically apt (and it seems to be in the air right now: a similar scenario, of a video that kills whoever watches it, can be found in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest; the same theme, only with a song instead of a video, is the basis of Chuck Palahnuik’s Lullaby. But the particular twist of Ringu, which I won’t mention here in order not to ruin the experience for anyone reading this who hasn’t seen it yet, has a special resonance).
I’ve never really liked the movies of the Coen Brothers. All their films are formally exquisite, but way too snide and condescending, in an annoyingly facile and self-congratulatory way. Fargo is probably their best film; I can’t say I didn’t enjoy it, and they maintained a better balance between suspense and sarcasm than they usually do. But it still feels slick and empty afterwards. Maybe I’m just being a curmudgeon about Joel and Ethan Coen; everyone else seems to love them.But something just doesn’t connect for me; it’s not that I object to cynicism, necessarily, but it annoys me how they are too cynical to even own up to their own cynicism.
I’ve never really liked the movies of the Coen Brothers. All their films are formally exquisite, but way too snide and condescending, in an annoyingly facile and self-congratulatory way. Fargo is probably their best film; I can’t say I didn’t enjoy it, and they maintained a better balance between suspense and sarcasm than they usually do. But it still feels slick and empty afterwards. Maybe I’m just being a curmudgeon about Joel and Ethan Coen; everyone else seems to love them. But something just doesn’t connect for me; it’s not that I object to cynicism, necessarily, but it annoys me how the Coens are too cynical to even own up to the consequences of their own cynicism.
Seeing that Alex Cox film the other day reminded me of other recent films which, from my point of view, OUGHT to be recognized as great cult films but which unaccountably aren’t. Here’s a short list (undoubtably, I am leaving things out, but here are some that come to mind immediately, in addition to Cox’s Revengers Tragedy):
These are all astonishing films which almost nobody has seen, and which have yet to get anything like the recognition they deserve; not even the underground following of, say, Donnie Darko.
Seeing that Alex Cox film the other day reminded me of other recent films which, from my point of view, OUGHT to be recognized as great cult films but which unaccountably aren’t. Here’s a short list (undoubtably, I am leaving things out, but here are some that come to mind immediately, in addition to Cox’s Revengers Tragedy). These are all astonishing films which almost nobody has seen, and which have yet to get anything like the recognition they deserve; not even the underground following of, say, Richard Kelly’s brilliant Donnie Darko.
Alex Cox is mostly known for just one film, his first, Repo Man. But in fact, he has been making superb, innovative films for two decades now, mostly outside Hollywood, and without access to Hollywood funding. Many of his films are not well distributed and hard to see, but among the ones I’ve seen, I certainly think that Sid and Nancy, Walker, and El Patrullero, at the very least, are major works. To their number can now be added Cox’s latest work, Revengers Tragedy. This film is a contemporary staging – set in grimy Liverpool – of the Jacobean play of that name by Thomas Middleton. Murder, rape, incest, fratricide, revenge, venality, corruption, and grotesquerie (poisoned skulls!) are the order of the day; Middleton’s vision translates well to a contemporary world of grimy slums and fashionable clubs. Cox’s direction is always visually inventive, with fluid camera movement, odd framings, and unexpected cuts and inserts. The soundtrack is mostly pounding dance music, together with a wide variety of modes of speech, from Middleton’s blank verse to British working-class slang to the formal, standardized language of media and political pronouncements. The film as a whole is both kaleidoscopic and subtle, and it really does manage to convey the tone of the play, at once grimly nihilistic and absurd.
Alex Cox is mostly known for just one film, his first, Repo Man. But in fact, he has been making superb, innovative films for two decades now, mostly outside Hollywood, and without access to Hollywood funding. Many of his films are not well distributed and hard to see, but among the ones I’ve seen, I certainly think that Sid and Nancy, Walker, and El Patrullero, at the very least, are major works. To their number can now be added Cox’s latest work, Revengers Tragedy. This film is a contemporary (or rather, near-future) staging – set in a postapocalyptic, grimy Liverpool – of the Jacobean play of that name by Thomas Middleton. Murder, rape, incest, fratricide, suicide, revenge, venality, corruption, and grotesquerie (poisoned skulls!) are the order of the day; Middleton’s vision translates well to a contemporary world of grimy slums and fashionable clubs. Cox’s direction is always visually inventive, with fluid camera movement, odd framings, and unexpected cuts and inserts. The soundtrack is mostly pounding dance music, together with a wide variety of modes of speech, from Middleton’s blank verse to British working-class slang to the formal, standardized language of media and political pronouncements. The film as a whole is both kaleidoscopic and subtle, and it really does manage to convey the tone of the play, at once grimly nihilistic and absurd.