the groundhog day project

(There should have been at least one sentence at the end of the blog entry for yesterday . I think that when I switched from tablet to phone to post what I had written, it didn't load the final version of the file in Pages . There was something--after the line about Crabb's various occupations--about him being an everyman, except that the only occupation of his that seems to have any success is not an occupation at all, but rather his role within the native tribe. I said it very briefly, but not particularly cleverly, and I am glad it was lost. It was a very long day, traveling through New Mexico. (Today was long, as well, so I don't imagine too many words today, either. And certainly nothing clever.) So, as for Crabb's... Little Big Man's success, it would fit well with the anti-establishment, satire side of things. The white man, even if he is an everyman, cannot rightly exist--or at least, live successfully--in a world where "human beings" exist. On ...

This morning in the hotel breakfast room, there was a guy who works on scripts for AMC and the History Channel--their war shows--talking with his friend about script policies. Among other things, he said they had to downplay battles that we lost and to avoid referring to any time that we retreated. Scripts needed "high five" moments. I imagine the Western genre as something a lot like this, promoting the Western myth as fact, though cloaked in fiction. Today, for example, we were driving up the 70 to Roswell, New Mexico and we passed the location where John Tunstall was murdered (a moment we've seen in The Left Handed Gun already this month and that we will see a couple more times; the Billy the Kid story is one that bears repeating. I was surprised at how the location was situated in a nice green valley, surrounded by hills. I seem to recall the location being depicted more like a desert in film. Even when we emerged out of the valley, there were low hills and grasslan...

(Before I even get to the movie for today, a couple things. The least important right now is that I am writing today in Arizona, about 27 miles outside Tombstone. Got a little roadtrip going. On the one hand, this is the second trip done for the blog. On the other hand, spending some time with the kids, dragging them to some boring old west landmarks and maybe going to see some alien stuff as well in Roswell. We're finalizing the details as we go. Gor a few days to make interesting. Unfortunately, and why it isn't that important today, Tombstone is not related to today's film. I've been taking these things in chronological order and I won't get back to the Earps or the Cochise County Cowboys for a while. I will share the picture when they are more relevant. The more important thing--today Rick Ducommun died from complications related to diabetes. While I had room to talk about Harold Ramis for multiple days in this blog when he died, since the blog is not speci...

(Two movies today that were supposed to be on separate days. My schedule--already packed--got changed slightly a few days ago. Because of this schedule change--squeezing these two movies in before a roadtrip-- The Wild Bunch will get most of the words today and I won't get to go off on a tangent about Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid as exemplar of a great screenplay. I would recommend, if you're interested in screenplays, that you go read William Goldman's Adventures in the Screen Trade . In the meantime, I suspect an easy theme that will tie these two films together--aside from the violence; that was probably just a product of advances in filmmaking combined with the atmosphere of 1960s America.) Most of the Westerns I've watched this far offer little more than an implication of religion, nothing but the presence of a preacher of some sort. The remake of True Grit , through the voiceover narration only, offers some sense of a deity and a religious worldview. I...

We're introduced to Mattie (Kim Darby) in the original True Grit --I will also be watching the remake later--through a window. She's inside at a desk and she seems to know as much as or more than her father about the business of their ranch. She also has a short haircut that doesn't immediately suggest femininity, at least within the setting. But, True Grit brings up an interesting thing about the setting, about the genre. In an interview with The Guardian regarding the Coen Brothers' remake, Joel Coen compares the film to Alice in Wonderland ... In our minds, we never got real close to thinking about it in terms of the western. We weren't thinking: let's shoot it in widescreen like Sergio Leone. Ethan Coen interrupts. Sergio Leone has this weird western opera thing... and it's definitely not opera. And it's definitely not that John Ford tragic thing. Our sensibility has nothing to do with that. Joel continues: If anything... we were thinking ...

That painting by Frank McCarthy, which hangs at the Autry Western Heritage Museum near here, was used in some of the posters for Once Upon a Time in the West . And, I'm a good half hour into the movie before I type anything tonight. I'm just enjoying watching the ways Leone puts stuff together. He's obviously influenced by Ford, but he showed his tics with the Dollars Trilogy--the extreme closeups, the long shots. Here he makes generous use of slow pans as well, a lot more camera movement than with the Dollars Trilogy. Plus, he did some filming (at least a few establishing shots) in Ford's stomping ground of Monument Valley, not just Almeria, Spain. I can't find the original article, but I read a bit about how Leone considered his Westerns, especially The Good, the Bad and the Ugly , to be satire of the American Western. In pacing alone, that film and this one definitely deconstruct the action down the minutiae, offering us mysterious strangers--the Man with N...

I've read in more than one place that Barney Miller was the most realistic cop show and Scrubs was the most realistic medical show. So, I come into the comedy The Shakiest Gun in the West with high hopes, looking for a deconstruction of the genre, touching on common tropes and putting a light on them by making fun of them. I hope. (Haywood (Don Knotts) offers up a graduation speech--he's graduated from a dentistry school and is going to head into the west to practice there--and reminds me that I should share this: Nothing to do with this month of Westerns, of course, but as you should know if you're here this blog was all about Groundhog Day for the first year, and I still come back to that film once a month. That right there was my cap today for graduation. Technically, I won't have my Master's degree until I defend my thesis in the fall but I participated in the ceremony now rather than wait until next June. All my coursework is done. So, there's no...