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Roy (Alex Cox) is a British illustrator who has come to LA to sell his
work, but due to lack of success, he's continually on the run from the
repoman. Eventually, Roy finds a publisher who wants to publish his art,
even though he also wants to pull a fast one on Roy, and Roy finds love in
Krishna (who's really a girl, not the Hindu deity) - but Krishna is
somehow fucked up, and ultimately she kills herself in his bathtub. LA
in this film is not a glamourous city though but an impersonal place run
by large corporation and controlled by the army, who seems to be seeing
rebels anywhere - and suddenly, Roy finds himself on the run from the
army, too. Eventually though, Roy is shot on his way to the bank, as he
becomes mixed up in a heist he's got absolutely nothing to do with ... Alex
Cox' first film, which he made from 1978 to 1980 when he was still a
student on UCLA, is also his least accessible one, due to non-linear,
often associative storytelling, experimental filmmaking ideas and sonds
and images that are not always corresponding - but seen not as a piece of
narrative cinema but a creepy portrait of the city it's set in, Edge
City works like a charm, presenting Los Angeles as a large and empty
place that's run by a fascist gouvernment that's controlled by big
corporations and where life isn't worth shit - best presented in the
scene, where people are shot at a pool party by a sniper while no one else
seems to even care - and that's populated by all sorts of lowlives. In
terms of Cox' later, more commercial films, Edge City anticipates a
great deal, actually, like their underground, punkrock feeling,
sociopolitical satire and occasional outbursts of violence that aren't
necessarily to be taken too seriously.
True, the film, a featurette of less than 40 minutes, isn't Alex Cox'
best work, but it's an interesting film nevertheless, interesting in its
own right as well as in respect to Cox' later films. For years though, it
was also extremely hard to get, but now you can watch
it on YouTube.
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amazon.com
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find Edge City at adultvideouniverse.com
