the groundhog day project

Opening shots are of Quigley's cowboy implements. His boot. His bedroll. His saddle. His rope. His belt and cartridges. Plus, his hands, nails short. His knife. His rifle sliding into its case.Spurs going into a bag. His pocket watch. His hat. And then the map. The setup is simple enough. We've got a cowboy on our hands traveling to a faraway land, but the piecemeal shots maybe suggest a deconstruction at play. Reminds me of, at the same time, the gearing up sequence in Rambo: First Blood Part 2 and the fictitious magical costuming in Chaplin . One of the first things Quigley does, before he's even off the ship that brought him to Australia, is, on the behalf of an old woman, hit another guy between the legs with his gun. We've got basic masculine cowboy imagery, and then a nice hit to the balls to drive home the idea that... well, either we've got a serious man on our hands here, or we've got something very much else. Next thing he does is save Cora and s...

I never got to the point I wanted to make yesterday . It's difficult, really, to demonstrate how Into the Wild doesn't (quite) romanticize Chris McCandless' adventure just by looking at how he leaves his parents and his sister behind. His parents are not portrayed as good people that we might care about when they hurt. We can objectively understand that they are in pain, but we just might not care (even if the film does make the effort of framing the film with the parents in pain, Billie in the opening scene, Walt just before the ending. And, Carine--she tells us that she understands her brother's choice to leave. In reality, she explicitly knew that he was going to separate himself from their parents, though she didn't know what he was going to do. In her book, she shares a letter he sent her, which included this: "I'm going to completely knock them out of my life... I'm going to divorce them as my parents." What I think really serves to de-ro...