THE ESSENTIAL JACQUES DEMY: DONKEY SKIN - #718

Though all of his musicals had fairy tale elements to them, Jacques Demy waited until 1970 to embrace the genre in full, adapting Charles Perrault's Donkey Skin for a big-screen, live-action version of a Disney cartoon.

Catherine Deneuve once again stars, playing both the Queen and the Princess, a smart device given the film's darker plot developments. As Donkey Skin begins, the Queen passes away, her illness the price to be paid for the good fortune that has otherwise befallen the kingdom. The land is rich, thanks to a magical donkey that poops money and jewels; however, the royal family has no male heir, and the Queen makes her King (Jean Marais, Orpheus [review]) promise he will only remarry if his new wife is both a princess and as beautiful as she. This, of course, proves impossible as no one is as beautiful as Catherine Deneuve except...well, Catherine Deneuve. Seeing no other alternative and suddenly smitten by the child he previously ignored, the King becomes determined to marry his daughter.

Suspecting that this is not kosher, the Princess goes to her fairy godmother (Delphine Seyrig, Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles [review]) seeking advice. When the fairy's first challenges to test the King's devotion fail, she has to get drastic. She suggests her goddaughter request the skin of the magic donkey, assuming killing the golden ass will be too much to ask. This too fails, and so as a last resort, the fairy has the Princess hide away as a scullery made in a nearby village. She wears the donkey's hide, head and all, as a cape, and never washes, a trick to keep suspicious noses away.

On paper, this set-up is grotesque, something Demy is well aware of. Unlike most modern retellings of fable and folklore, the French filmmaker doesn't scrub the narrative of its more difficult elements. His script mines the original for its most transgressive taboos. Not just incest, but vanity and prejudice, as well. How people treat the girl they call Donkey Skin exposes their own petty bigotry. As is the nature of Cinderella stories, the beautiful Princess can be hiding in the dankest of corners.

It's the person who can see past the superficial that is rewarded with love and treasure. The Red Prince (Jacques Perrin, the artist in The Young Girls of Rochefort [review]) from the next kingdom over sees past the enchantment and falls in love with Donkey Skin. The second half of Donkey Skin is devoted to his manipulating his  parents into letting him marry the disguised monarch.

Stylistically, Donkey Skin is fascinating. Demy establishes a kind of shabby chic. As befitting the late 1960s, he is adopting an old form for new aesthetics. The opulent fashions behind castle walls seem gaudy and inauthentic next to the grungy reality of medieval life. One has an almost sensory reaction to the dirtier aspects of serf living even while being enchanted by the gorgeous magic of the glamorous fairy. Seyrig is an excellent choice to play a mystical seductress. Her fairy godmother has her own selfish motives to keep the King from finding his bliss. It's suggested there is some dalliance in their past that left her betrayed. The Princess is like a child of divorce caught between two bitter parents. The Lilac Fairy also provides Demy with his most potent symbol for the skewed point-of-view of his aged allegory: as the years pile up and overtake the fairy, so do her powers fade. Just as most of us lose our imagination the longer we grow in the tooth.

The surreal set designs in Donkey Skin, including the use of actual human beings as furniture and props, recall the exquisite art direction in Jean Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast [review[. This is probably not a coincidence. Nor is the fact that Demy's King was Cocteau's Beast. Both auteurs challenge our grown-up notions of magic and illusion. We see the magicians at work, we hear that the Lilac Fairy is losing her fairy dust the older she gets, but our desire to believe and be swept away wins out. Unlike Cocteau, Demy indulges in a few anachronisms, the most notable of which is the appearance of the helicopter in Donkey Skin's finale. Is it possible a young Alex Cox was sitting in a theater all those year's ago taking notes, or is the end of Walker [review] just one of those things...?

Jacques Demy mostly works with a new team here, though he does reunite with Michel Legrand, who wrote the music and the songs. Donkey Skin comes off as both a natural transition from what came before and also the realization of a dream. It's the kind of movie Jacques Demy had to make. A sincere fairy tale that serves double-duty as a commentary on the same.

This disc was provided by Criterion for purpose of review.

REPO MAN - #654

"There ain't no difference between a flying saucer and a time machine," says one character in Repo Man, Alex Cox's 1984 punk rock comedy.

"I don't want no commies in my car. No Christians either!" declares another.

The nouns are different, but the sentiments are the same. One crazy concept deserves another. When man has gone this nuts, all nutty ideas are created equal.

It's too bad that Criterion couldn't release Repo Man to the collection just after Robert Aldrich's Kiss Me Deadly, and then maybe followed it with Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction, giving us three consecutive spine numbers with mysterious glowing objects under the lid, each representing some kind of metaphor for man's dissatisfaction with the current state of being. Well, okay, I'm not sure we can take the briefcase in Tarantino's film that far, but he clearly watched Alex Cox movies back at the video store. In Repo Man, there are alien corpses thawing out in the back of a Chevy Malibu, incinerating all who look upon them. In Aldrich, our doom was the nuclear bomb mankind created to obliterate himself; in Tarantino, it's possibly the manifestation of spirituality and evil, hence the 666 combination lock; for Cox, it's the doom from beyond, a higher form come to show us what a pathetic race of meatbags we really are.

Emilio Estevez stars as Otto, a punker in Los Angeles who doesn't fit into the generic culture that permeates 1980s America. At the start of the picture, he works in a grocery store that deals exclusively in generic, plain-wrap food. It's a good sight gag but also one based in reality. At the time, the Ralph's supermarket chain had its own brand that was just white packaging with a blue stripe and the name of the product printed on top. Public Image Limited lampooned it with their album that was, well, called Album if you bought the record, and Cassette if you bought the tape. It had the hit song "Rise," about a social misfit who can't take it anymore. "Anger is an energy," John Lydon chants--and it could have just as easily been a motto for Otto. He gets fired from his job for refusing to stack the plain cans spaced equally apart. Uniformity is treason.

It's on his way home after being canned that Otto meets Bud (Harry Dean Stanton), a repo man who tricks Otto into helping him repossess a car. As payment, Bud takes the kid under his wing and teaches him the rules of the game. It's not so much a veteran of the system taking in the disaffected youth and corrupting him into selling out, but rather a veteran outlaw who himself exists somewhere outside the system while helping perpetuate and enforce it. The repo men are a little bit like the gang that couldn't shoot straight, and Cox's film has its roots in the western as much as anything else, even if there is some rejection of the tradition, i.e. "John Wayne is a fag." But that's anarchy for you. The cowboy frontier was about establishing your own code of conduct because civilization's laws were too stifling.

So it is here. Otto can continue to pursue nihilism for no good purpose, or he can find one. Given the way life was going under Reagan, that purpose is selfish at first, but the deeper Otto gets into this new life, he becomes exposed to the true extremes of society. One one hand, there is the CIA looking to squash radical ideas; on the other hand, the trio of mohawked, shaved-head crooks robbing liquor stores. At some point all these forces want the same thing: the Chevy Malibu and the secrets locked inside.

Repo Man's crazy theories are an amalgamation of the weirdness of the 1980s. Stagnant culture forced people to go searching for solutions that were beyond the norm. Whether it was believing in aliens or Scientology (here parodied as "Diaretics"), or jumping into a musical subculture, or living by a code in a secret society, everyone was looking for something. Cox's credo about UFOs and time machines, communists and Christians, was his dismissal of all such pursuits as being one and the same. In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. In this case, literally, he's the lobotomized driver trafficking in extraterrestrial corpses. Sure, he's got some wacky ideas. So does Miller (Tracey Walter), the one who equates spaceships and time travel. Considering where they both end up, they prove that just because you're paranoid, it doesn't mean they're not after you.

Though he goes with Miller in the end, Otto doesn't so much join the crazies as he rejects the ways of thinking that make him a part of the herd. The key scene is really in the shoot-out at the liquor store, the showdown between three aspects of Otto's life. In a standoff that must have given a young Q.T. many a good idea, it's a three-way battle between Otto's straight life (the security guard that escorted him out of the grocery store), his punk roots (the robbers, his former friends), and his newer career (Bud). Not only is he the only one who really walks away, but he does so by drawing an individualistic line in the sand. As his old buddy dies, he says, "Society made me who I am," to which Otto replies, "No, it didn't. You're a white suburban punk. Just like me." It's a defiant rejection of anything that would otherwise attempt to define you. Otto is his own man, and like Pablo Picasso, no one calls him an asshole.

By all accounts, so is Alex Cox, and Repo Man is certainly its own movie. In all honesty, for as much meaning as I could sift out of it, I didn't find it to be an entirely satisfying viewing experience, not the way I did when I saw it all the way back in high school. The gonzo, anything-goes quality of the narrative that made it feel fresh and uninhibited thirty years ago just seems messy now. Cox doesn't quite know how to resolve all the criss-crossing story lines, instead letting the episodic storytelling pile on itself in one massive jumble. He also never finds a consistent tone for the humor. The biting satire gives way to ridiculous slapstick and an occasional meanness.

Still, Estevez and Stanton both give excellent performances, and the music is pretty good. Plus, you have to admire any film that dares to give a two-finger homage to Grease, stealing the musical's ending for its own purposes. Of all the punk rock stylings Cox adopts, that may be the most punk of all.

SID & NANCY - #20

I don't know if it was coincidence or some kind of neighborly retaliation, but while I was watching Sid and Nancy today, the hippy in the apartment next door started blasting the Eagles' "Desperado" during one of the Sex Pistols concert scenes. Though he and I are of different generations, it appears the division between 1970s sissy rock and old school punk will never close. Were my life a movie, I'd have started shouting obscenities and banging on the wall. Instead, I just waited it out. I had 111 minutes of Chloe Webb's nasal yowl at my disposal. Don Henley could suck it.

I imagine the Sex Pistols still remain a rite of passage for most rebellious teens. I don't know if I had seen Alex Cox's biopic of the band's iconic bass player before or after I bought my copy of Never Mind the Bollocks on cassette, but it was around the same time, at the very least. My family had left for the weekend, I unpeeled the plastic wrapping, and I blasted it through all two stories of our house while I dyed my hair black. I was in big trouble for the hair--if for no other reason that I got black dye all over the place, including the kitchen curtains--but the Sex Pistols was a clandestine revolt successfully enacted. My father and stepmother would most certainly not have approved.

They wouldn't have approved of Sid and Nancy, either. I'd wager viewing the 1986 film has become as essential as the Pistols' one complete album. For those of us who missed the reality, here is a simulacrum. Do you want to see what London looked like in 1978, and how a vintage punk rock gig might have come off? Sure, there are documentaries and bootlegs. There is also Sid and Nancy.

As the mythology goes, there was barely a month between Sid Vicious (played by a young, feral Gary Oldman) joining the Sex Pistols and his meeting Nancy Spungen (Chloe Webb, who would go on to star in the TV series China Beach). Sid was a scenester who had befriended Pistols singer Johnny Rotten (a.k.a. John Lydon, and played by Andrew Schofield) after the group's first bassist had departed. As portrayed in the script by Alex Cox (Walker [review]) and Abbe Wool (Roadside Prophets), Sid catered to John's most adolescent of tendencies. They drank and farted and made a public nuisance of themselves. For Sid, however, the music was always secondary to the lifestyle, and the dangerous American groupie offered Sid a chance to increase his image. She was already a junkie when they met, and he seized on her habit and made it his own.

The events that follow are tragic and all too familiar. Bonded by their addictions, the couple became inseparable. Sid's devotion to Nancy was equal to his devotion to heroin. Indeed, one depended on the other, to the point where the band had to try to remove both from his life. They were successful in leaving Nancy behind in England during an infamous U.S. tour, but getting Sid to stop the boozing and drugging proved more difficult. The Pistols broke up before the jaunt was complete, and Sid and Nancy eventually ended up in New York, where they shot junk and made each other miserable. Within a year, Sid had murdered his lover and then died himself, suffering an overdose not long after.

Sid and Nancy benefits from its narrow focus. Unlike most cinematic biographies, this film doesn't attempt to smash a whole life into two hours. Instead, Cox encapsulates two years, letting this doomed relationship serve as his narrative arc. He isn't concerned with trite causalities or psychoanalyzing his subjects. These were self-destructive individuals who found some messed-up form of love via their mutual death-wish posturing. Sid and Nancy is a seedy portrayal of an unglamorous lifestyle. Cinematographer Roger Deakins (True Grit [review], Revolutionary Road [review]) embraces the grime and squalor of the scene, shooting in low light and with a minimum of fuss. While there are some remarkable shots in the film, particularly ones using authentic landscapes as the backdrop (Sid and Nancy talking for the first time under a graffiti-covered wall; the final images of Sid walking along the Hudson River), it never feels like Deakins and Cox are trying to clean up the material. There is zero romance in Sid and Nancy; on the contrary, despite its status as a cult fave amongst latter generation punks or its mislabeling as a love story (albeit a heartbreaking one), it demythologizes Sid Vicious. As seen here, he is an unremarkable personality, a poor musician, and one monumental screw-up--a portrayal that is far from dishonest.

Still, there's a reason that Sid Vicious' face still sells posters and T-shirts to disaffected youth worldwide. As Malcolm McClaren, the manager of the Sex Pistols (and played with an appropriately calculated sleaze by David Hayman in the movie), is known to have proclaimed, if Lydon was the voice of the punk movement, Vicious embodied its attitude. In capturing this, Cox does the best thing any biographical filmmaker can do: he cast the lead roles perfectly. Gary Oldman and Chloe Webb are a ferocious acting duo. Oldman gets Vicious' unique combination of swagger and cluelessness. Both performances appear to be spontaneous and are lacking in unnecessary vanity. Oldman and Webb are nearly unrecognizable on screen, and it's a credit to their abilities that Sid and Nancy didn't go on to define their acting personas.

Twenty-six years on from its original release, Sid and Nancy has aged well, though it's not without its flaws. Cox perhaps wallows too long in the addiction, drawing out his subjects' time in New York far longer than necessary for viewers to get the point. The latter half of Sid and Nancy is unrelentingly bleak, to the extent that it grows tedious. Cox occasionally pierces the darkness with surreal touches, some of which work (Sid and Nancy making out in an alley while trash rains down around them) and some that don't (speeding up the film when Sid scares the mean little kids away). Of course, this goes a long way to keeping Sid and Nancy from being a promotional film for heroin, which is important to the truth of the story but renders Sid and Nancy a little flat at the same time. There isn't any buried nuance here, no surprises to be discovered on repeat viewings. Like Sid's music, only a couple of chords are required to build the melody; at the same time, that simplicity allows for a direct impact more complicated dramas regularly fail to achieve.

Plus, bonus points: no Eagles.

Note: Even though the screengrabs here are from my Criterion disc, my full review was written watching the new MGM Blu-Ray; read the full piece at DVD Talk.

FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS (Blu-Ray) - #175

"Ignore the nightmare in the bathroom." - Raoul Duke (surely, if not an old proverb already, it will be eventually).

True story: half an hour after watching Terry Gilliam's 1998 adaptation of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas this morning, I was walking down my street. As I passed a house where some contractors were working on a remodel, I overheard one of the contractors explaining to the other about the "Paul is Dead" conspiracy surrounding the Abbey Road album cover. "George was dressed as a gravedigger," he said, "and Paul wasn't wearing any shoes."

Clearly something is in the ether today. The Beatles released Abbey Road, the last album they recorded, in late 1969. Within a year, they were no more, arguably closing the door on 1960s pop culture, following the zeitgeist of the decade right down the tubes. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is set in 1971. The peace-and-love generation is long gone, and chaos only exists in its place. Hunter S. Thompson's story of tumbling into a drug-fueled rabbit hole of decadence and danger was a harbinger of the decade that was to follow. Like the dust cloud at the motorcycle race he is sent to Sin City to cover, the 1970s would be a brown maelstrom of disappointment and disaster. Political activism would give way to complacency post-Nixon, and music and fashion was becoming bloated and boring. Let's face it, if it weren't for its cinema, the 1970s would be a decade best left forgotten. Torch the records, send it away!

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was long considered an "unfilmmable" book. Like William S. Burroughs' Naked Lunch, it was a tome revered for the irreverent prose style and the author's willingness to engage with all things taboo, and without the quality of the former the latter was rather difficult to capture. Conventional narratives these are not, and it would take equally unconventional filmmakers to make a movie out of them. Luckily, David Cronenberg got his mitts on Naked Lunch [review], and Terry Gilliam, the former Python turned surreal fantasist, tackled Fear and Loathing.

Johnny Depp stars as Hunter S. Thompson, who went to Las Vegas as a journalist, covering an epic motorcycle race in the desert under the guise of Raoul Duke. He would also stick around to report on a convention for law enforcement officers. Ironically, their chosen subject was stopping narcotics. Thompson is a notorious druggy, and he spends the entirety of this movie hopped up on some chemical concoction or another. Along for the ride is his "attorney," the larger-than-life Dr. Gonzo, played with pure animalistic chutzpah by Benicio Del Toro. The actor gives a purely physical performance, ditching actorly mannerisms for phlegm and sweat. He is perpetually clearing himself of some sort of bodily substance, and his character has a sinister bend that is truly disturbing. By juxtaposition, Thompson is a cartoon character, and Depp plays him as such. As a performance, it is definitely one extended impression of the real deal, but Depp approaches Thompson's contrived personage with the same honest intensity as, say, Robert Downey Jr. taking on Charlie Chaplin [review]. It's less an act than it is sculpture: the karate chops and whistles chip away at the artifice until it turns into something absolutely authentic.

Plot seems irrelevant in a discussion of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. The movie's script went through various permutations, including a pass by Repo Man-director Alex Cox, who is one of four credited screenwriters (Gilliam is also on the list). Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas doesn't really have a narrative arc, it's more like a narrative descent. The thrust of the story is ever downward, as each over indulgence alienates Gonzo and Thompson further from real life, to a point where things get so paranoid and weird, not even the criminal underbelly of Vegas will have anything to do with them. There is a tremendous scene here in a back-alley diner, featuring a memorable cameo by Ellen Barkin. She plays a waitress who ends up on the wrong side of Gonzo's anger, and Del Toro's beastly delivery of the threats is so convincing, it's hard to tell if Barkin is acting or if she's really scared.

It's an interesting view of Las Vegas, taking us down its glitzy ladder rung by rung, going from its most surreal heights (a version of the kiddy casino Circus Circus) to this rundown, all-too-earthly greasy spoon. It seems to me that the key to the material is in understanding that the city itself is a trippy place, that the drugs are almost a tool for comprehending its garishness. No matter how weird the hallucinations get, Vegas can match the nightmare horror for horror. Visually, Gilliam and his team make tremendous use of the city's neon landscape. A driving montage down the strip uses rear projection and cutaways to melt and bend the surrounding signs and advertisements. Overdone hotel wallpaper and carpets come alive and swallow the patrons. Cinematographer Nicola Pecorini (The Order, The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus [review]) often sets the camera at an angle, so that the image leans to one-side, upsetting the equilibrium of the frame. It's almost as if the movie is trying to spill its protagonists out of the other side of the screen the way you or I might try to kick away a dog humping our leg.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is nearly formless in its construction, though it solidifies over each selective viewing. To carry the drug metaphor, you build a kind of tolerance, gaining an ability to maintain the more you partake. Though I wouldn't have said so when it was first released, I'd hazard to call it Terry Gilliam's most together movie. Not necessarily his best, but possibly the one where he is most in command of the elements. For all the bedlam depicted onscreen, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is meticulously choreographed. Many of the scenes of Gonzo and Thompson wandering through the casinos while going off their heads play for extended lengths without much cutting. In these, they are each performing independent actions, including interacting with crowds of extras. Sometimes it's super complicated, like the hotel bar when they first get to town, just before all the other drinkers turn into lizards; other times, it's more simple. When Gonzo argues their way into a Debbie Reynolds concert, Thompson stays by himself, doing more drugs on the sly. Gilliam keeps the shot wide and lets the actors move around the frame. You could watch either of them do their thing, they are both doing something interesting, and yet it also works perfectly in tandem.

Naturally, with an experience like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, there is no real exit, no grand conclusion to be had. The trip ends--in both senses of the word. The vacation is over, the vacationers have to come down off of the high. Yet, Gilliam gives us a satisfying wrap-up anyway. In his way, he has contained the chaos, and so there is a relief in making our way back out of it. Rubber hits the road, and Hunter S. Thompson heads back to Los Angeles, a smile on his face, remembering all the devils in the preceding details, having survived to return to some kind of perceived normalcy. And yet, that grin also says it's never going to be completely over: the craziest diamonds always shine on.

For a complete rundown on the special features, read the full review at DVDTalk.

Screen captures are from the DVD, not the Blu-Ray.

WALKER - #423

Agitprop is not usually big box office, because usually the time it is needed most is when people have the least interest in hearing it. After the success of Sid & Nancy and Repo Man, director Alex Cox was poised to be the hottest young turk in Hollywood, but after his cultish misfire Straight to Hell, he decided to get more contrary and difficult and make a film about the lingering consequences of America's involvement in the social unrest in Nicaragua. Working with screenwriter Rudy Wurlitzer (Two-Lane Blacktop), Cox made Walker in 1987, when the U.S. government's support of the rebels attempting to overthrow the Sandinista government was still a hotbed of lies and controversy. Needles to say, the Me Decade wasn't interested.

Walker is the story of William Walker (Ed Harris), a renaissance man who abandoned safe, lucrative jobs as a doctor and a lawyer to pursue adventure in support of a puffed-up faith in democracy. After he failed to foment a revolution in Mexico in the mid-1800s, Walker, who often referred to himself in the third person, was convinced to go down to Nicaragua to secure an overthrow of the nation's government on behalf of industrialist Cornelius Vanderbilt (Peter Boyle). Vanderbilt cared nothing about democracy beyond it being a means for him to secure exclusive rights of trade through Nicaragua; that means was a tool to secure Walker's service. Such are dirty deals made in the American system.

As a character, Walker is a complex mixture of personal pain, pride, and conviction--a perfect concoction for an actor with Ed Harris' stoic intensity. His decision to take Vanderbilt's assignment comes after he loses his fiancée (Marlee Matlin) to cholera, and so jumping back into battle is as much to hide from his grief as it is a righteous cause. He also rejected God on her deathbed, so his moral posturing has lost some of its gravity. Not that he expresses any of this. A reserved man, he keeps his thoughts bottled up and conducts himself with a self-possessed rigidity. He is a walking, breathing embodiment of Manifest Destiny, strutting imperiously through gunfire and chaos without being harmed. Parts of Walker's journals are used as voiceover, often as ironic commentary to the action. He was the greatest of spin doctors, turning the bleakest situation into propaganda.

Wurlitzer and Cox establish a darkly comic tone for their satire. The filmmaking style of Walker is just shy of crossing the line into gonzo territory. Cox uses several incongruous elements to achieve a sense of irony in the picture. This notably includes former Clash-frontman Joe Strummer's peppy, Latin-flavored score, which pairs mariachi horns with slow-motion death and destruction. The most talked about incongruity, though, is the introduction of anachronistic elements. We see the wealthy businessmen of the region reading Newsweek and Walker's face on the cover of Time. At the climax, the modern world comes crashing into the old one in all of its mechanized glory, changing the fate of William Walker in one dramatic swoop.

I think you'd have to be a dunderhead to miss Cox's point: the Reagan administration's campaign to interfere in Nicaragua is part of a long history of U.S. interference in that country. In the 1850s, the people rose up and eventually kicked us out, and this was exactly what was happening again in the 1980s. America's cockiness was no match for the will of the people, and democracy did not mean foreign rule. Walker's ultimate fate is also part of a larger pattern of U.S. backed dictators that grow mad with power and get abandoned by the people who put them in its seat. In order to maintain control of the nation, William Walker betrays each of his principles one by one, and with each restraint that gets lifted, the world around him declines deeper into madness. By the end, it's beginning to look a lot like Apocalypse Now, something that was likely intentional given that Cox begins his closing credits with a clip of President Reagan insisting comparisons between Nicaragua and Vietnam to be baseless. Sarcastic juxtaposition, anyone?

Though many of today's cable news pundits would have us believe that history is vindicating Reagan in all things, more rational minds will show the advantage is Alex Cox's. Just as history will also likely not be in George W. Bush's favor for leading America into virtually the same swampy morality of greed with his campaign in Iraq.

But just because Alex Cox is right, does that make Walker any good? I'd say the answer is yes and no, but mostly yes. The film received a pretty horrendous critical drubbing in 1987, and I'd say unfairly. The film does have its faults. There are times when it feels like the director is in less control of his picture than he should be, and it comes dangerously close to veering off the edge. If you'll indulge another reference to Apocalypse Now, in much the same way the insanity of the war he was portraying infected Francis Ford Coppola, so too does it feel like Cox is getting lost in the carnage of Nicaragua. Just as William Walker couldn’t keep a firm grip on his army, the final film suggests Alex Cox found Walker a slippery fish.

Even so, as I said, the answer is mostly yes, the film is mostly good. Walker remains as potent a blast of political anger twenty years later. Its reemergence on DVD for this excellent Criterion edition has come at just the right time, too. Given all the madness around us, maybe a bloody, anarchic allegory will restore a little lucidity to the arena.

One can only hope.

For technical specs and special features, read the full article at DVD Talk.