the groundhog day project

(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...

(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. ...

Two movies today-- The Gunfighter and High Noon . Johnny Ringo was born in 1850 and died in 1882. He was involved in the Mason County War and was a part of the Cochise County Cowboys, a group of outlaws that we will see again this month, and he was in the gunfight at the O.K. Corral. (Or he wasn't; highchapparal.com suggests that Ringo was actually in California at the time, though he would return to Tombstone soon thereafter. clantongang.com disagrees, putting Ringo in Tombstone at the time of the famous gunfight.) And, Ringo himself was inspiration for numerous Western film characters. Already, in 1939's Stagecoach and it's 1966 remake, we saw "The Ringo Kid" who said his "right name" was Henry. The real life Ringo was, of course, possibly involved in the murder of Morgan Earp and was definitely involved in a dispute with Doc Holliday, and in the 1986 TV remake of Stagecoach , the Doc was changed to be Doc Holliday, suggesting that, if we had n...