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

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 18 May 2009 15:00:00 GMT

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.

Cox was scheduled to appear at the Alamo Drafthouse in Austin to present both Searchers 2.0 – which was actually inspired by one the Alamo’s Rolling Roadshow events, a screening of Once Upon a Time in the West in Monument Valley – as well as the 1966 spaghetti western Arizona Colt (Italian oaters being one of Cox’s passions; he appears prominently in the documentary The Spaghetti West and he authored a just-published book on the subject, 10,000 Ways to Die.) Tonight he was to introduce his cult classic Repo Man, a screening that will still go on without him. According to the Austin Chronicle blog Picture in Picture, “The word on Cox's sudden detour into Suck City comes from the Alamo's ever-reliable (and insanely hard-working) Zack Carlson, who rang us this past Wednesday with word that Cox, for whom the Alamo had already secured plane fare from his home in Los Angeles as well as local lodging -- as they do for all incoming cinema legends (yes, even the cast of Troll 2) had mysteriously balked at the layover times in his airline itinerary. Carlson emailed back to swap flights around until Cox was satisfied, but that gambit proved fruitless, netting only a final, bewildering email from one of Cox's associates which stated that, and we quote, ‘Alex feels he has been mistreated and has chosen to cancel his appearance.’”

I interviewed Cox in connection with his scheduled appearance (you can read it here), and found him good-humored and entertaining, as I always have in his talking head interviews and commentary tracks. Honestly, I’ve generally found him more interesting as a film fan than a filmmaker. Although Repo Man is one of my desert island discs, and I’m very fond of his little-seen Three Businessmen, a shaggy dog story that plays like a cross between Slacker and a Bunuel film. Most of his filmography is more fun to hear him talk about than it is to watch, but I was looking forward to Searchers 2.0, which looks to be right in my wheelhouse. Maybe there’s another side to this story that doesn’t make Cox look like a petty jerk. I sure hope he has a better reason for letting so many people down than inconvenient airport layovers. Not too radical.

A Big Bowl of Spaghetti Westerns with Alex Cox

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 04 May 2009 17:30:00 GMT

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.”

Cox theorizes that attending a mixed-sex school might have facilitated an appreciation for nuanced cinema, but as it turned out, “the world I knew best had more in common with the psychos and testosterone freaks depicted in the new Italian, or spaghetti, westerns that emerged during this period.” Since the American western was in serious decline in the mid-60s, it was up to the Italians to pick up the slack. “For them, westerns were a great fantasy world, something they had enjoyed in films or comic books. Yet their take on the wild west was something quite different. Hollywood had chosen to manufacture a certain type of product, pretending this was what the audience wanted: it was sentimental, propagandistic, authoritarian stuff. The Italian directors made cynical – ironic would be too mild a word – popular action films, sometimes about gladiators, sometimes about spies. All featured the kind of infantile male violence that greatly appealed to teenage boys such as me and my classmates. The fact that the Italian westerns tended to receive an X certificate – and were, therefore, banned to all under 16 – made the thrill even bigger to 13- and 14-year-old boys.”

After arriving at UCLA in the mid-70s, Cox finally tracked down his holy grail of spaghetti westerns, Django. He even wrote a book on his favorite genre, 10,000 Ways to Die. It was never published, but a new version of the book is due out soon, and you can download the original (re-titled Massacre Time) from Cox’s website.

The Screengrab : the spaghetti west

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

A Big Bowl of Spaghetti Westerns with Alex Cox