Microcinema DVDs - Searchers 2.0

2010-06-30 The Onion

Think: Cheech and Chong meets Road Trip, with smarter jokes and poignant insights about American culture and Hollywood.

2007-11-08 Box Office Magazine
By Ray Greene

Searchers 2.0 finds filmmaker and inveterate movie maverick Alex Cox in what can only be called Greatly Reduced Circumstancesâ€”which is saying something, since Cox has rarely made a movie with anything resembling even moderate financing behind him. With both the cult classic Repo Man and the enthralling punk fantasia Sid and Nancy to his credit, youâ€™d think a guy whoâ€™s been at it for more than 20 years could do a bit better than a 15-day production shot on frequently over-exposed digital video with semi-professional actors and the (minimal) financial backing of Roger Cormanâ€™s California quickie outfit.

Somehow, Cox manages to carve a characteristic effort out of all this; unfortunately, itâ€™s the broad and farcical anti-cinema of Walker and Straight to Hell heâ€™s channeling rather than the more controlled Highway Patrolman or Sid and Nancy. The comedic story of two former child actors who take a road trip to John Fordâ€™s famed cinematic dreamscape of Monument Valley, Ariz., Searchers 2.0 is a mÃ©lange of anti-corporatist Godard-ian asides, stock revenge movie clichÃ©s, offbeat surrealism and protracted movie-referencing riffs that make Quentin Tarantinoâ€™s indulgence in similar movie-loving arias seem the soul of subtlety by comparison.

Cox is an intermittently great and always interesting filmmaker who should have done better over the years. Every time the film industry seems to figure out what to do with himâ€”in the mid-â€˜90s, he was supposed to direct both the anti-fascist Ian McKellan Richard III and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, two seemingly ideal projects, but was replaced both timesâ€”something always goes wrong.

In Searchers 2.0, Cox shows that, despite professional setbacks, his enthusiasm for the medium is undimmed. His giddy ecstasy at going to Monument Valley with a camera and being given the run of the place is palpable, although his heart is clearly more with Sergio Leoneâ€™s revisionist Once Upon a Time in the West (another Monument Valley-set Western) than with the Ford classic from which he borrows his title. Coxâ€™s delight in his historic location and in filmmaking itself are visible in every frame but only get transferred into the audience in fits and starts. Heâ€™s hermetically sealed, a cine-geek locked in a closet with the fetish objects that comprise his obsessions, performing the rights of Onan with vigor and self-absorption and then asking the audience to applaud for all that jumbled seed heâ€™s just spilled fruitlessly on the barren desert ground.

The most expensive item on any Hollywood set is creative freedom, and Cox has usually insisted on maintaining it. Though Searchers 2.0 is pretty much a mess, Cox still seems like a treasure-filled safe some smart producer ought to figure out how to crack. But whether thereâ€™s any way to simultaneously reconcile Coxâ€™s unflinching anti-corporatism and his cinephilic fixation on the corporately produced artifacts of classic cinema is anybodyâ€™s guess. Corman completists take note: The legendary schlock maestro has a witty cameo as an evil studio executive. Cox gives himself a pithy walk-on as a fringe film-type, too.

2007-03-06 The Washington Post
By Rachel Beckman

Two washed-up actors take a road trip to Arizona to beat up a screenwriter. That's the premise of Alex Cox's new film, "Searchers 2.0," which opens the D.C. Independent Film Festival tonight.

"The strike hadn't happened yet when I wrote the script, but it's funny," says Cox. "What kind of weird circumstances could have evolved that two people would have been so terrorized by a screenwriter, of all people?"

Turns out that the big bad screenwriter (played by Sy Richardson, who appeared in Cox's 1984 cult favorite, "Repo Man") whipped the two main characters (Ed Pansullo and Del Zamora, also from "Repo Man") on a film set when they were little in order to make the kids cry during a scene. Decades later, the men hear that the screenwriter will be at an event in Monument Valley, Ariz., and they hit the road to exact revenge.

Carol Bidault, the founder and executive director of the festival, met Cox in the '80s in Los Angeles when he was "the hottest ticket in town," she says.

"He's an independent film icon," Bidault says. "Before there was Quentin Tarantino, there was Alex Cox."

Cox, who also directed the 1986 feature "Sid and Nancy," about Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols, shot "Searchers 2.0" for 0,000 over three weeks in December 2006. Cox, 53, says he made the film on a skeletal budget for the artistic freedom.

He says that producers approached him to buy the script, but he turned them down. The Hollywood suits imagined Bill Murray and Cheech Marin in the lead roles.

"There's a scene where the characters talk about how they haven't got health insurance," Cox says. "If it was Cheech Marin and Bill Murray or Steve Martin, it would be wrong in a way. Kind of immoral to see these wealthy Hollywood actors pretending they didn't have health insurance. It would cause an incredible disconnect."

The filmmaker and sometimes-actor from Liverpool, England, now lives in a small town in southern Oregon. He is DCIFF's big "get" for its 10th annual event, which features more than 100 films over 11 days. The festival closes March 16 with the documentary "The Clash Live: Revolution Rock."

In the same way that the characters in "Repo Man" were obsessed with cars, the stars of "Searchers 2.0" spend a lot of time on their road trip discussing old movies (the title is a reference to the 1956 John Ford western). The men debate whether horrific actions like whipping children are justified if they benefit the film.

Cox's take?

"Yes, because they were movie kids. People in movies are different. They deserve punishment," he says. "Ordinary people? No."

2007-09-24 Variety
By Ronnie Scheib

The always eclectic Alex Cox takes on John Ford via Sergio Leone -- or maybe it's the other way around -- in "Searchers 2.0." In Cox's comic take on the Western road movie, two aging character actors meet by chance and decide to travel to Monument Valley to wreak vengeance on the scriptwriter who terrorized them when they were child extras on the set of "Buffalo Bill vs. Doc Holiday." Zero-budgeted, Roger Corman-produced, digitally-shot curio will probably head straight to DVD, though its desert-set wanderings play particularly well on the bigscreen.

Stock Cox thesps Del Zamora and Ed Pansullo portray the two revenge-seeking bit-players, Mel Torres and Fred Fletcher.

Fred (Pansullo) comes off as a paranoid gun freak, ranting about Michael Moore and Al Gore. Mel (Zamora), on the other hand, is a deadbeat dad who tricks his grown daughter Delilah (Jaclyn Jonet) into driving the duo into the desert on the pretext of offering her a vacation. As the two codgers bicker non-stop from California to Arizona to Utah, Delilah is alternately amused and appalled.

They are pursuing Fred Frobischer (Sy Richardson), who is slated to present one of his old films on a huge inflatable screen in Monument Valley. But his Q&A is cancelled when the scheduled oater doesn't arrive, and the would-be avengers find Fred selling T-shirts.

A final confrontation between the three men takes the form of a triangulated showdown straight out of "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly," as they systematically challenge one another to name still-living Leone stunt men.

"Searchers 2.0" is as minimalist and laid-back as Cox's last film, "Revengers Tragedy" (2002), was overwrought and over-the-top. New pic's charm lies in its B movie-obsessed protagonists arguing over everything from whether Charlton Heston was ever head of the Screen Actors Guild to the war in Iraq. Their hodgepodge of beliefs, half-truths and rarefied experiences seems to come equally from extreme marginalism and middle-of-the-road Americana.

Tech credits are impressive; Steven Fierberg's flawless DV lensing does the wide-open spaces proud while Dan Wool's Grieg-laced score determinedly propels the travelers onward.