A Bad Man
The true confessions of Alex Cox
Perhaps you are philistine enough to prefer the brothers Farrelly to the brothers Coen. Perhaps you’re just fine with studio offerings of light cheese and shoot-’em-ups. Maybe you were even charmed by Bewitched, and watch it every time it airs on your premium cable package. (Hint: It’s better if you’re high.)
I am not judging you. Lord, I am not judging you. I don’t care for subtitles or Wim Wenders. With the exception of Almodovar, I could leave the Europeans. “Indie” film leaves my panties quite dry.
But there are exceptions – there are always exceptions – and the filmic works of Alex Cox are mine. And so I ate up near 300 pages of his new book, X Films: Confessions of a Radical Filmmaker, with a spoon and in just a few sittings. It’s a heavy travelogue through 10 of his flicks detailing the writing, the begging for money, the making of, even the post-production process for each. And then, that done, I retired to the couch.
On that couch, just last week, I’d shown my son Cox’s classic Repo Man. He was already well-acquainted with its soundtrack, and we paused along the way to admire the air fresheners (there’s one in every car) and the cans of Food and Duke’s Tragic Death Scene where he Blames Society. I told him that Aunt Annie, back when she was Uncle Johnny, had written her master’s thesis on “The Trickster in Repo Man.” I told him what The Trickster was. I asked if he remembered Harry Dean Stanton from Cool Hand Luke. (Or Pretty in Pink.) He asked if it were the Circle Jerks playing as the band in the bar. Yes, son, I told him, you are so smart.
And on this day, having finished off Cox’s walloping book, I prepared for a Saturday evening’s offerings on Starz.
I watched Dan in Real Life.
It was an insult of a movie, and I watched it all the way through. I felt worse for having witnessed it, a vague nausea permeating me as I absorbed the hackneyed story of a widower newspaper columnist, mean-tempered characters meant to be a charming and lovable extended all-American family with a fascistic enthusiasm for fitness, preposterous plot points about chief executives of a newspaper syndicating company willing to travel to see what the widower looks like at home before offering him a syndicate slot, gaggy writing (including that which is purported to be Dan’s columnizing skillz), and Juliette Binoche as the “angel in the room” (see what I mean?) who seemed to me nothing more than a manipulative psycho in a hot accent. Steve Carell was pretty good in it, though.
Dan in Real Life had an estimated budget of 25 million smackeroos.
Oh, what could Alex Cox do with $25 million? Not that much, I’m guessing, besides upgrade in his pan-global travels to free-champagne First Class. His radical filmmaker tastes tend to recoil from the Hollywood way. He doesn’t want the big trucks and the big lights and the off-duty L.A. cops standing security. He doesn’t want permission to shoot; he wants to sneak in after-hours with a cameraman and an AD. He would like to be able to pay people, but hey, what can you do?
He wants his stable of actors, some Roger Corman dough, and to stay in all-Europe’s most disgraceful hotel, whose many faults he enumerates with glowing affection. Cox is an affectionate and very charming man – or if he’s not, he plays one in his book. X Films is a caustic and funny look at the studios, his own friends, and himself. Poignant moments intrude and are then got past – his grotesque and entitled decision to keep shooting rather than attend the funeral of a Nicaraguan boy who was killed by his convoy in the making of Walker is examined briefly; he scourges himself; he moves on.
When a Dutch extra playing a Sandinista, after weeks of bad food and bad conditions and general abuse, follows protocol and the hierarchical structure and waits until the moment the film’s wrap is announced to punch Cox in the head, Cox writes, “I’ve always admired the Dutch. So able to combine justice with timing and common sense.”
Alex Cox has written 40 screenplays, directed a dozen (not counting TV). In between, he’s caroused in cities and countrysides all over three continents, playing with his friends. Los Angeles comes in for a lot of love; he learned his thieving ways at UCLA (where he was a friend and classmate of our own Andy Klein) and was part of the X and Plugz punk scene that sprawled at the east end of the city.
Sid and Nancy, one of the most beautiful love stories I’ve ever seen (“Fuck you, Grandma!” Nancy shrieks at the dinner table, without even an inkling Grandma won’t take it with the bonhomie with which it was intended), gets a lot of ink in X Films, but doesn’t seem to capture his heart. First of all, he thought the two were poisonous bastards. Second of all – well, I don’t really know why it doesn’t. It was beautiful.
Straight to Hell gets a lot more of his love, even though it was a stupid movie that was just him and Joe Strummer and Courtney Love playing make-believe in Spain.
I haven’t seen Walker or the others, though now, of course, I must, if only for Ed Harris’s blue eyes.
Meanwhile, you have been sitting on your couch. I think Dan in Real Life comes on at 8.
X Films: True Confessions of a Radical Filmmaker, by Alex Cox. Soft Skull Press. 298 pages. $17.95.
Published: 08/27/2008
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you write a hell of a book review. so nimble with words.