the groundhog day project

"Crazy" Cora is introduced fighting off two men. Seems their boss has told them they could bring some "white tarts" back with them because they're sick of black women. Meanwhile the titular hero Quigley is on his way to their boss's land for a job he does not know the details of just yet. There is long-distance shooting involved--that's all he knows. Yet he went half way around the world to take the job. Until, of course, Marston tells him what the job actually is. A couple details that matter if you've not seen the film and need to know (rather than going and watching it post haste): 1) Marston has a fascination for the American West and Quigley is visually very much the cowboy of most Westerns, 2) Marston wants Quigley to shoot Aborigines. It's interesting now that the guy who carries the bucket off for Quigley's show-off shot after he arrives at Marston's is apparently called Whitey. It's a movie with a blatantly racist vi...

Drifting away from the horror film itself for the moment. Room 237 is on instead of a second day with The Shining because I think it's important to understand why we do this. Why I do this. Why you read this, for that matter. These movies--they're just movies. We don't really need all the subtext to enjoy them. I would never argue that there is no subtext; in fact, I think there is always subtext. For example, maybe it's about the Tang cans or the Golden Rey boxes over the Calumet cans. Picking one detail out of many says more about you (me) than it does about the film. Day 113 , I wrote: Why am I doing this? Because someone needed to. Because every piece of art deserves to be studied and broken down. Every piece of fiction deserves to be dissected until we know not just what it means but what it can mean. Chuck Klosterman, reviewing Room 237 for Grantland , says, "It introduces a new way to experience and consider movies." I'm trying to rememb...