Dead Souls

Legendary filmmaker Alex Cox (REPO MAN, WALKER, SID & NANCY) embarks on his final film with a quirky and wholly unique take on the Western. In 1890 - the year of the U.S. census - chaos erupts when a man named Strindler arrives in a town in Arizona and requests money for providing the names of dead Mexican laborers.

Review from the National Review

While commentators debate the fidelity of Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of Homer’s 3,000-year-old epic The Odyssey, Alex Cox — the director of Repo Man and Sid and Nancy — braves a wily adaptation of Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls, from 1842.

It is Cox’s latest act of punk-rock effrontery, reworking Russian literary satire into his favorite genre — a farcical pop-cinema spaghetti Western. Cox himself portrays Strindler, a mysterious solitary Brit who treks through 1890s southwest Arizona territory, collecting the names of deceased Mexican-immigrant workers to cash in on their bosses’ tax liabilities.

Cox’s stunt (modeled after the scheme of Gogol’s protagonist Pavel Ivanovich Chichikov) not only flaunts literary tradition, it spoofs historical movies to reflect the current immigration/invasion crisis.

Whatever Nolan thought his work The Odyssey accomplished, Cox’s modern adaptation is consistent with his culturally savvy social commentary. Mixing genre parody, deadpan humor, and songs, Cox’s anarchic jamboree follows his 1987 Western burlesque Straight to Hell, which featured Joe Strummer, Courtney Love, Dennis Hopper, Grace Jones, and Elvis Costello, as well as Searchers 2.0, his 2007 faux John Ford homage.

Read the rest of the review from Armond White here...