Event

THE SEARCHERS 2.0

Dir. Alex Cox, 2007
90 Minutes, USA, English

Cox returns to his favorite genre, the western, by way of the existential road picture, and reunites with longtime collaborators Sy Richardson (Repo Mr actors, Fred and Mel, who seek revenge against a sadistic stuntman, Fritz Forbusher, who tormented them as children on the set of aan, Straight to Hell, Sid & Nancy, Walker), Del Zamora (also Repo Man, Straight to Hell, Sid & Nancy, Walker) and Ed Pansullo (yup, Repo Man, Straight to Hell, Sid & Nancy, Walker) in an equally comedic and tragic story about two washed-up Western characte film. Features cameos by Cox, Roger Corman and Leonard Maltin.

"Every screenplay Ive written (how many is that? 40? 50?) has had the same initial response: 'the characters are unsympathetic.' Perhaps this is why so few of them were made. Financiers are simple, twisted souls who like a simple story with false breasts, perfect white teeth, and a muscular, anti-intellectual action hero. Fred lifts weights while watching TV but he is otherwise unheroic: bogarting the joints and the beer, telling ridiculous and untrue stories, bitching about Al Gore and Michael Moore. Mel is, if anything, worse: a penniless deadbeat dad who gets itinerant workers fired and lies to his daughter. And Fritz Frobisher, beater of little children, is the worst of all...

...the story was about actors, and the politics were in the sub-plot (we follow a trail of sad memorials to those killed in WWII, Afghanistan and Iraq)...

At one point in SEARCHERS 2.0, Mel and Fred are mistaken for homeless people by a Mexican guy who gives them a dollar. This follows the revelation that neither of them has health insurance. Not a big deal 40% of the people living in the US [didn't] have any [at the time the film was made], either. But imagine Bill Murray or Cheech Marin, or any other pair of upper-middle-class, Hollywood actors, trying to say those lines. It would be impossible. Worse, it would be despicable like Jack Nicholson and Madonna playing homeless people, in a film for Universal." -Alex Cox