Deposed Royalty

And the director's latest flirt with the "mainstream," 1996's The Winner, is right at the bottom of the barrel--one of those cable movies that thinks "colorful noir" equals "Damon Runyon farce." Vincent D'Onofrio is a Vegas dimwit who can't place a losing bet; Rebecca DeMornay is the big-haired, lobster-slurping bimbo after his cash; and Billy Bob Thornton, Delroy Lindo, and Michael Madsen stand around in ill-fitting suits, counting the change in their pockets. Cox contributes some elaborately staged long-take sequences, wherein eight pages of dialogue play out in a single, gliding shot. But when the material is this bad, you can't help thinking: Man, that Steadicam operator's back has got to hurt!

And so the bastard son of Sam Peckinpah and Joe Strummer finds himself here, at the beginning of a new millennium, teaching "indie film"-loving teeny boppers about The Seven Samurai on cable TV, and hoping coeds will sign up for his Internet acting class. Hell, it could be worse: Peckinpah himself was doing Sean Lennon videos in his dotage. Cox just needs a little Keith Richards blood transfusion--he needs a writer with a Repo Man-ish sensibility to give him something tasty to chew on, along with a few well-placed boundaries and limits. (Cox, in a disciplined phase, could have handled the script of Being John Malkovich as well as Spike Jonze.) In the meantime, skip his cable documentary, go to his Web site, and spend a few bucks if you can: Cox's buyout checks from his aborted Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas won't last forever.

The lower depths: Director Akira Kurosawa as seen by Alex Cox

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Kurosawa: The Last Emperor airs Monday at 3:00 p.m., Tuesday at 1:30 p.m., and additionally throughout February on the Independent Film Channel (cable channel 56B in Minneapolis, 73 in St. Paul).