the groundhog day project

Twenty years ago, I worked at the United Artists Marketplace theater in Old Town Pasadena. INSERT: me pausing to watch the awesome opening credits to SE7EN . Hell, not only are those credits amazing, but I love the establishing shot that follows--nothing but buildings. Like this city has no sky, even though the incessant rain would suggest otherwise. And in the next few minutes, the shots outside are framed to leave out the sky or include the slightest glimpses of it at the edge of the frame. There was supposed to be an opening sequence with Somerset (Morgan Freeman) looking at a house outside the city, to buy for his retirement, but the production reportedly ran out of money before they could ever film that sequence. I'm kind of glad they didn't because the open space of such a sequence would have countered the way this stuff is being framed a little too much. We're offered a dark, wet, melancholic city, and Somerset is the buddy cop stereotype, the guy about to retire...

(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. ...