Smells like team spirit (3/28/01)
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Straight To Hell. [Alex Cox, 1987. Written by Cox and Dick Rude.]
Alex Cox, who claims to have written his thesis at UCLA on the spaghetti Western, here [at least to hear him and Dick Rude tell it] grabbed a few of his musician buddies [e.g. Courtney Love and Elvis Costello], spent a couple of days writing a script, and drove off into the Spanish outback to a town built for a Bronson flick [not far from the famous Eastwood sets] to shoot this rather plotless feature [in which a gang of unshaven American hoodlums who drink beer and a gang of unshaven Irish hoodlums who drink coffee glare at one another for a few days before they all start blasting] over the space of a few weeks without the slightest recourse to cocaine — and, despite the relative polish of the homage and the surreal hilarity of the musical numbers, one is tempted to take this claim at face value and suggest they needed stronger drugs. Not quite Sergio Leone as interpreted by Buñuel; forethought might have helped. — With Dennis Hopper, Grace Jones, Jim Jarmusch, the unrelenting Iberian sun, and several thousand tons of blowing dust. — My mistake: four coffees.
____________Deja vu all over again (3/16/01)
