|
The tangy prologue—crumby flatlands, "Oh My Darling, Clementine" off-key, Kiss Me Deadly in the trunk of a Chevy Malibu—sets the free-associational guerrilla timbre. Otto the baby nihilist (Emilio Estevez) quits his job at the supermarket, ponders the phosphorescent wasteland before him, falls in with an ersatz-desperado gang of repo men. His wizened mentor (Harry Dean Stanton) extols the "repo code" in between cocaine toots and yearns to "go indie." Parents have long gone catatonic for TV charlatans, the damsel (Olivia Barash) turns out to be an activist with eyes on tabloid success. Battered urban surfaces, UFOS and government agents, a lobotomized envoy (Fox Harris) in a literally hot car. "Weird fuckin' shit, huh?" At the serene center lies the Zen manginess of Tracey Walter, recounting the "lattice of coincidence" by the vestal altar of a burning oil drum. "You know how everyone is into weirdness these days?" It takes a yank like Losey to chart the venomous circles of London, and it takes a Brit like Alex Cox to sniff out the chaffing subcultures of Los Angeles. Revolting against Reagan's smiley-face vision of America, he shreds narrative lucidity, stutters from one Godardian cameo to the next, and foregrounds every racial, social and political tension imaginable. In this half-shaggy, half-annihilating portrait of a junk culture, authority figures are rent-a-cops knitting sweaters, the punk mystique has boiled down to stealing sushi, and even Stanton's last-frontier code is an illusion. And yet revolt is not out of reach, the boy raised on products labeled "FOOD" and "BEER" can still find his way to the stars. Cox's belligerent-spacey-sublime revue, a thousand subversive messages scratched onto the celluloid, a peculiarly magical call to arms. With Sy Richardson, Susan Barnes, Vonetta McGee, Tom Finnegan, Del Zamora, Eddie Velez, Zander Schloss, Dick Rude, Miguel Sandoval, and Richard Foronjy.
--- Fernando F. Croce |