10000 ways to die - The Screengrab

Not a Review of Alex Cox's "Searchers 2.0"

As you may have deduced from the title of this post, I had originally planned to bring you a review of Alex Cox’s latest film Searchers 2.0 in this space. That’s not going to happen for the very simple reason that the screening of the film I’d planned to attend last night never happened. The official reason for the cancellation was “circumstances beyond our control.” These circumstances are somewhat mysterious, yet very disappointing for any fan of the self-described “radical filmmaker” behind Repo Man and Sid and Nancy.

A Big Bowl of Spaghetti Westerns with Alex Cox

If you’ve ever seen the IFC documentary The Spaghetti West or the extras on the Once Upon a Time in the West DVD, you know Alex Cox loves him some Italian westerns. “My obsession with the spaghetti western started early,” Cox writes in The Financial Times. (Really, Commie Alex? The Financial Times? That just seems wrong, somehow.) “Mostly, I blame my schooling. While it’s thought that girls do better, academically and socially, if educated separately from boys, the awful corollary of this is that boys would be educated separately from girls. And that – as I discovered when attending a single-sex grammar on the Wirral in the mid-1960s, where arbitrary violence and crazed sadists ruled the playground – is a horrible thing.”