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...

          I sit here, watching The Road Warrior instead of writing about it. The combination of interesting and exciting vehicles with evocative musical cues, and very little dialogue--I have not counted but supposedly the titular Max only has sixteen lines--is quite captivating. I was going to say "oddly captivating" but it is not odd. Aside from me loving the film since I was young, it still holds up as a great action film. One of the definitive action films, really. (So much so, that I almost included it in the "month" (roughly January 2015, overlapping from late December to early February) of action films during phase two of this blog. But, then I skipped it for Top Gun (added to the month with Lethal Weapon , Die Hard , Commando , and Rambo: First Blood Part II ) because then I was dealing specifically in 80s American action films, which made for a more straightforward throughline--the decline of American Hegemony, the struggle to raise up...