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(Coming right after the Netflix logo, I’d like to imagine this line is a self-aware, cheeky wink at everyone who railed against a live-action Cowboy Bebop, but that’s probably reading too much into it.) They control everything now,” he complains. In a cold open, we’re introduced to Tanaka, a gun-toting gangster holding a casino hostage. To be fair, the premiere has a lot of work to do to establish Cowboy Bebop’s characters, premise, and universe (though to be just as fair, the original series did the same job in an episode that was half as long). Most importantly, for both the episode and the season: The soundtrack is loaded with songs from Seatbelts, the Yoko Kanno–led band whose music was so essential to the original show’s style and tone.īut all this reverence does come at a cost: As a stand-alone episode, “Cowboy Gospel” feels just a little wobbly. The plot is drawn directly from “Asteroid Blues,” the anime’s first episode, and some of the original’s most iconic images have more or less been replicated shot for shot. The show’s entire aesthetic - the opening credits, the main character’s hair and costumes, the interiors and exteriors on the Bebop - are designed to signal a deep reverence for the original. When it comes to existing fans of the anime, “Cowboy Gospel” certainly does its best to win over skeptics. Second: It needs to convince those that haven’t seen the anime, but who might take a flyer on a new sci-fi/action series starring John Cho, that this is a TV show worth watching all on its own. First: It needs to convince hard-core fans of the anime that this new adaptation understands what was great about the original series. So the premiere of the new Cowboy Bebop really has two functions. After smooth-talking his way back under Lexi’s roof, Mikey discovers a promising contender easily enough at the Donut Hole (he also finds dozens of roughnecks willing to buy his weed, which seems to be the only way such an unemployable screw-up can earn some fast cash).Įverything in “Red Rocket” happens just a little too easily, which is one of the weaknesses of a self-indulgent regional satire that stretches its perhaps-80-minute plot over more than two hours: Like Baker’s beguiling “Florida Project,” it could have been tighter. In a place like Texas City - with a population of less than 50,000, living in the shadow of steaming oil refineries that popped up in the wake of a devastating industrial explosion back in 1947 - it’s not hard to imagine a pretty high school girl desperate to get out. Or maybe Mikey can find a new ingénue and talk her into following him out to SoCal. Maybe it’ll be Lexi (stage actor Bree Elrod), to whom he’s still married. “Suitcase Pimp” might have been more apt, since Mikey has essentially built his adult film career on “managing” the women he’s sleeping with, and the movie observes this fast-talking sleazeball coming home with a loose scheme to find someone who will be his ticket back into the porn industry. His movies not only grab people’s attention but have something profound and political to say once they’ve got it, and the same is certainly true of “Red Rocket” (the title of which is slang for a dog’s erection). But behind that impulse remains a sincere respect for such characters, elevating marginal or disreputable members of society the way Honoré de Balzac did. Baker seems to appreciate the way that making movies about porn stars, escorts and the like can scandalize and even electrify an audience. The subject matter may sound salacious, but in each of those projects, Baker revealed his soft core, so to speak: This nonjudgmental humanist genuinely cares about these characters, and while he doesn’t shy away from the illicit reality of their unconventional professions (the way “Pretty Women” did), neither does he gaze upon it with a lecherous eye (à la Ninja Thyberg’s 2020 Cannes selection “Pleasure”). trans fable) and “The Florida Project” (wherein a single mom turns tricks from her motel), and now this. “Red Rocket” marks the latest addition in what could reasonably be dubbed the director’s unofficial “sex-worker quadrilogy”: first “Starlet” (about the San Fernando Valley porn scene), then “Tangerine” (an effervescent L.A. Where other filmmakers still respect more puritanical codes, Baker shows an open interest in how the commodification of desire factors into modern life - specifically, how putting out can pay the bills and shift the power dynamic. Either way, the jolt works to the role’s advantage. Here, it’s the cred Rex brings to a part that’s the first genuinely meaty role of the B-lister’s career, and he’s not about to blow it, inhabiting the hyper, always-hustling Saber the way Mickey Rourke did “The Wrestler.” We’ve never seen Rex like this before - and quite a few have probably never seen him at all. Back then, an excursion into porn could be a career ender (or at least, a major embarrassment), haunting celebs like Sylvester Stallone and Vanessa Williams … that is, until Kim Kardashian and Paris Hilton demonstrated that such exposure could actually boost one’s brand. The movie stars Simon Rex, which is itself a stunt-casting coup, considering that Rex has been shadowed all these years by a handful of “solo” videos he shot before MTV tapped the chiseled and charismatic screen personality to veejay for it in the mid-’90s. |
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