the groundhog day project

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...

(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...

In the 1880s, it was apparently an insult to call a cattleman a "cowboy" (at least around Tombstone). (To be fair, the titular town of Warlock is in Utah, a good distance from Tombstone.) This may have been because of the Cochise County Cowboys (Johnny Ringo, Ike Clanton and their ilk), or they may have been called cowboys because the term was in disfavor. The negative take on cowboy did get outside of Arizona; the San Francisco Examiner, as quoted in The Earp-Holliday Trial: An Account , said in 1881, "Cowboys [are] the most reckless class of outlaws in that wild country... infinitely worse than the ordinary robber" (Linder, 2005). I mention this because the people of Warlock refer to the outlaws who occasionally come into town to make trouble the San Pablo Cowboys . In terms of Wright's (1975) oppositions--Wright does not mention Warlock specifically--this suggests a clear division between the townspeople and the cowboys. If these were legitimate cowboys...

I really should just be doing multiple entries rather than these extra long double movie ones. But I like them being numbered nicely. Today: The Searchers and Gunfight at the O.K. Corral . The opening of The Searchers offers us one of the structural oppositions that Henderson (1985) and Wright (1975) discuss--wilderness/civilization. Also inside/outside society. The door opens to the outside wilderness and Ethan (John Wayne) arrives, not unlike Shane yesterday . Henderson's focus is this very film and he offers up an important summary of one of the major themes: The Searchers is explicitly concerned with a number of anthropological issues. On its surface it treats questions of kinship, race, marriage, and the relations between tribes. These questions also have to do with the identity, status, and responsibilities of individuals: who is responsible for the retrieval and burial of the dead, for the search and recovery of captives, for vengeance? Who can marry whom? Which marri...

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...