the groundhog day project

This month of Westerns is coming to an end. Just two more days after today. I will have watched 42 Westerns in 32 days. I will have driven over 2000 miles, visiting Tombstone, Arizona and Lincoln County, Roswell and Fort Sumner, New Mexico. (Wanted to go to Monument Valley as well, but that would have added another 400 miles or so.) Got a nice sense of the openness of the West while out on the road. Open Range was filmed in Canada, but it's got a nice openness to its early shots, before Charley (Kevin Costner, for the third time this month) and Boss (Robert Duvall, for the second) head into town to retrieve Mose (Abraham Benrubi). It goes right back out into the open after just a few minutes in town. Oddly, this makes it stand out from a lot of Westerns; so many Westerns for decades have centered themselves in the town, dealing in the civilizing parts of said town in conflict with forces of chaos from outside, often in the form of Cowboys, outlaws. The conflict here is more bet...

(As this month of Westerns winds down, it comes in handy that I've got a few extra films on my list. Turns out I forgot to find a copy of Wild Bill to borrow, it's not on Netfllix or Hulu, and there isn't even a good torrent of it available. So, the choice was watch it through iTunes and be stuck with a small screen or skip on past it. So, skip on past it, it is. The Quick and the Dead boils a whole lot of Western tropes into the gunfight. the standoff in the street. Here, it's an organized contest, with a handful of stars, a few of which have been in Westerns before. The throughline is a vengeance plot, but with the elements out of order, saving explanations for flashback as The Lady (Sharon Stone) joins an otherwise all-male shoutout contest and immediately wants to challenge the big man in the town of Redemption, John Herod (Gene Hackman) to a fight. But, the setup is a bunch of duels. The direction is fun, Sam Raimi's usual moving camera and angled shots co...