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...

There are too many scenes set at night in Wyatt Earp . And, I say this not even 20 minutes into the film. There's a strange back and forth between very bright daytime scenes and too dark nighttime scenes... I know this movie is long so I'm trying to just sit with it for a bit rather than start typing away and have yet another blog entry so long that no one reads it all the way through. Also, while I want to continue the discussion from yesterday about the good man with a gun , about how we automatically side with the authority, how we decide on impulse who's right and who's wrong, damn the details, I'm inclined to also get into a redefinition (again) about what the Western is because Wyatt Earp is structurally a biopic, not a Western. Not that we have movie rental stores anymore, but Westerns often had their own section, but did we separate other settings? The middle ages from the dark ages, the industrial from the enlightenment? The Western is a strange "g...

I lament the fact that we arrived in Tombstone too late last week to get into a few of the places. But, driving into town, we saw Boothill Cemetery first. The gift shop/entrance had this on the door: Doc Holiiday (Val Kilmer) didn’t need his guns just now to kill a man, of course, in Tombstone . Set his guns on the table and stabbed the guy instead. Sure enough, Holliday was a bit of a killer and not a particularly nice guy. Some graves, starting with the Cowboys killed at the “Gunfight at the O.K Corral”: And, this marker which could fit right in outside the Haunted Mansion at Disneyland: A couple more: Two gift shops—and a shot glass for my collection later and we drove into the town proper, parked about 20 yards from this: For the record, once again, the gunfight did not happen at the Corral but a good distance off, next to Fly’s Photographic Studio. right about where I was standing when I took these pictures: first, on fremont looking east, the porch at the ri...

(I considered including Dances with Wolves but decided not to, even though it did win Best Picture at the Oscars, because it's basically a ripoff of A Man Called Horse but for the re-inclusion of the soldiers as villains in the final act. So, we'll move on past it into the '90s.) The fun Western didn't last long. Like that final bit of Young Guns II , with Billy recognizing that all those deaths were his fault, the Western had to realize it was far darker than it had been pretending to be. All those casual deaths, all that violence--that doesn't come without consequence. The brothel in that film was burned to the ground, its women run out of town. Here, we begin in a brothel, sex and violence twisted together to start us off. We get a clearer image of the status of prostitutes in Young Guns II (as trash to run out of town) and Unforgiven (as property that can be damaged without monetary (or the equivalent) restitution only), than in many a previous Western. ...

Electric guitar... a bunch of young actors. The Western is being reborn (or attempting it anyway) with Young Guns . But then they've got to go and have 50-year-old Terence Stamp as Tunstall. Tunstall was 24 when he met Billy the Kid... Emilio Estevez (Billy) is 26, about 8 years too old. Kiefer Sutherland at 22 is actually 7 years younger than his character, Doc Scurlock. Lou Diamond Phillips is about the right age for Jose Chavez y Chavez (Phillips 26, Chavez 27). Charlie Sheen, at 23, is 5 years younger than his character Dick Brewer. Casey Siemaszko, 27, is 3 years younger than his character, Charlie Bowdre. (Odd detail, that I only noticed because I was recently there. Tunstall tells Billy he can stay at the ranch or, if he wants, the Santa Fe leaves out of Albuquerque in the morning. That's a good distance to get by morning. Tunstall's ranch was south of the town of Lincoln, not sure how far, but from Lincoln to Albuquerque is 185 miles. The Pony Express riders were ...

Strange jump in time, from The Outlaw Josey Wales in 1976 to Silverado in 1985. It's not that there were no Westerns released then--there were a lot. Nothing too... big, though. I considered combing through the ones during those years and find a few (because my month of Westerns needed even more titles to it), but then I figured I could let the Vietnam-era Westerns be left behind and move into the Reagan-era, see what that gave us. Extra benefit, we're into Westerns that I saw in the theater now, actually a few past. I'd seen The Man from Snowy River , Urban Cowboy , The Gambler , The Legend of Lone Ranger , Pale Rider ... My first opportunity this month to deal in box office. Yay. Silverado came out the same weekend as Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome and Explorers . Separately, I would imagine each of those being films we saw opening weekend, but with all three, I'm not sure. A week before was Back to the Future and The Emerald Forest which I know I also saw in the...

Clint Eastwood once again (directing as well as starring)-- The Outlaw Josey Wales . By the time the opening credits come to Eastwood's director credit, we've seen the titular Josey's wife and son murdered by Union soldiers and Josey join up with Confederate guerrillas. We've seen more war footage already than in the entire Civil War section of How the West Was Won , and just barely over ten minutes in, the guerrillas are surrendering. But, not Josey. He stays right where he is and says, "This isn't what happened last week! Have you all got amnesia? They just cheated us! This isn't fair! He didn't get out of the cock-a-doodie car!" Sorry, wrong film. More like, they just cheated us, we lost the war and have to be one country again. The cheating follows, actually--the massacre of the surrendered guerrillas... And, the Western hinges on the Civil War once again. And, it's a sore subject in this country in the present. As Josey tells Lone Wa...

I could keep watching Westerns for a lot longer than the next ten days. Not because I have fallen in love with the genre though I do think of it a little differently than I used to; after watching far too many Westerns as a kid, it became a genre I tend to avoid. The reason I could keep watching them is that while I tried to reduce the list of notable Westerns to 32 films, I ended up with far more, hence a few days with more than one film, and I have actually added a few more as I've been going. Today was supposed to have two films, but I have opted out of one of them-- High Plains Drifter --because, well... (A story: Car broke down in Arizona yesterday. We were supposed to be home last night, but had to wait until this morning to learn the fate of the car... No, let's make this interesting. This morning, I awoke to learn that my trusty steed Saturn had died. With no mount to get us out of the dusty town of Kingman, Arizona, we sought a new ride. We lamented the loss of po...

Today, Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid . (But first, a story: Meant to be home in Los Angeles tonight. Stuck in Arizona instead. Car trouble. Up until the car trouble, today was going pretty well, though. We stopped off at Meteor Crater-- --and hiked down into Walnut Canyon-- --and that was before lunch. Car was making noise and I figured I'd get back to LA tonight, get it looked at in the morning. But, the car had other plans. Instead, we are still in Arizona, about 30 yards from this: And, really that's all you need to know about that.) That this film begins with old man Pat Garrett getting gunned down and, plotwise, is much the same as the later Young Guns II makes for a nice echo of that later film, starting, as it does, with Brushy Bill Roberts, AKA (claiming to be) old man Billy the Kid. Immediate impression of the casting... Coburn is good as a "lawman" and Kristofferson seems good as the outlaw but both seem a bit old for their roles, by...