the groundhog day project

Opening shots are of Quigley's cowboy implements. His boot. His bedroll. His saddle. His rope. His belt and cartridges. Plus, his hands, nails short. His knife. His rifle sliding into its case.Spurs going into a bag. His pocket watch. His hat. And then the map. The setup is simple enough. We've got a cowboy on our hands traveling to a faraway land, but the piecemeal shots maybe suggest a deconstruction at play. Reminds me of, at the same time, the gearing up sequence in Rambo: First Blood Part 2 and the fictitious magical costuming in Chaplin . One of the first things Quigley does, before he's even off the ship that brought him to Australia, is, on the behalf of an old woman, hit another guy between the legs with his gun. We've got basic masculine cowboy imagery, and then a nice hit to the balls to drive home the idea that... well, either we've got a serious man on our hands here, or we've got something very much else. Next thing he does is save Cora and s...

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang again, this time with commentary--Robert Downey, Jr, Val Kilmer and Shane Black. Also, I did see The Hateful Eight today. And, I've got a love/hate relationship with its Tarantino. Not love it or hate it, but more like both at the same time. I mean, take Super Panavision 70mm, use it beautifully for a some landscape shots and a bit of the first act Stagecoach ... homage? ripoff? Then, you set most of the film in an enclosed space where the wide shot really doesn't matter that much. Take the requisite A [insert director's name] Film and turn it into the pretentious the 8th film by Quentin Tarantino and then give us chapter headings as well? Tarantino has these tics that bug the crap out of me. And he's arrogant. (Don't get me started on his tiff with the Cinerama Dome, because, yeah, they want to take Star Wars out after a week.) But, the guy can make a film. I mean, sure, The Hateful Eight hits a lot of beats we've seen before, and Ku...

(No recap today. The last one was Day 608 - teens tonight . I should have one today--got 28 days of identity movies and 32 days worth of Westerns to recap--but I did not have time to prepare the list of links ahead of time. For my thesis work, I'll have a complete list of every entry and all the links put together within the next month, so expect a good recap on Day 730... which may be the last entry of this blog.) For today, though, the approach is simple: Groundhog Day is a Western. Specifically, Groundhog Day , structurally, falls right in line with Wright's (1975) claassical plot . (First, I suppose I should explain something. Phase 2 of this blog ends after this month, just today's viewing of Groundhog Day , four weeks with four different movies, then another viewing of Groundhog Day . And, I'm mulling over options beyond that. I could continue as I have been--but no more variant* months like that last one; different movie every day, but same theme, and I...

(Two movies today that were supposed to be on separate days. My schedule--already packed--got changed slightly a few days ago. Because of this schedule change--squeezing these two movies in before a roadtrip-- The Wild Bunch will get most of the words today and I won't get to go off on a tangent about Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid as exemplar of a great screenplay. I would recommend, if you're interested in screenplays, that you go read William Goldman's Adventures in the Screen Trade . In the meantime, I suspect an easy theme that will tie these two films together--aside from the violence; that was probably just a product of advances in filmmaking combined with the atmosphere of 1960s America.) Most of the Westerns I've watched this far offer little more than an implication of religion, nothing but the presence of a preacher of some sort. The remake of True Grit , through the voiceover narration only, offers some sense of a deity and a religious worldview. I...

We're introduced to Mattie (Kim Darby) in the original True Grit --I will also be watching the remake later--through a window. She's inside at a desk and she seems to know as much as or more than her father about the business of their ranch. She also has a short haircut that doesn't immediately suggest femininity, at least within the setting. But, True Grit brings up an interesting thing about the setting, about the genre. In an interview with The Guardian regarding the Coen Brothers' remake, Joel Coen compares the film to Alice in Wonderland ... In our minds, we never got real close to thinking about it in terms of the western. We weren't thinking: let's shoot it in widescreen like Sergio Leone. Ethan Coen interrupts. Sergio Leone has this weird western opera thing... and it's definitely not opera. And it's definitely not that John Ford tragic thing. Our sensibility has nothing to do with that. Joel continues: If anything... we were thinking ...

The opening scene of Rio Bravo plays a bit like the opening of West Side Story , choreographed like there's a dance number coming. Instead, Chance (John Wayne) tells a guy he's under arrest. The Western has moved indoors over the last few films. Gunfight at the O.K. Corral , 3:10 to Yuma , The Left Handed Gun ... it's remarkable how we think of Westerns as being about big, wide open spaces yet so many of them are a whole lot of dialogue until the situation explodes into violence. In a way, the more the Western stays confined to town, the more it plays like other genres, gangster films (or gang films more recently)... like West Side Story without the songs. Then again, I've argued before that all movies are basically the same. Genre is just details. Which is a weird thing to say when I'm only a week into this month of Westerns. Trying to build it up but I just can't help bringing it back down a little... How about a little Wright to set things right? (I ...

(Before I get into today's film-- Duel in the Sun --I wanted to note that while the remake of Stagecoach was not nearly as good as the original, it did have a few elements that I rather liked. While the guy playing Ringo did not have the personality of John Wayne, his relationship with Dallas was more believable in the remake because they actually had more conversations. And, speaking of Dallas, the remake version has a lot more personality to her, and she and this Mrs. Mallory have far more interesting interactions in the remake than in the original. The remake's reliance on more violence seems unnecessary, but as we will see when we catch up to that era in Western films (the remake came out in 1966), violence was de rigueur at the time. But, turning Ringo's fight with the Plumbers into a more elaborate thing in the remake makes Ringo less special--no longer can he win a gunfight with exactly the minimum number of bullets he needs; instead, he barely wins and ends up do...

Let us just get right into this. We begin with Stagecoach (1939), directed by John Ford. A name we'll see again soon. We also see a bit of Monument Valley right away. That will be a familiar sight in the coming days. Same with John Wayne. A seeming conflict is set up right away--Geronimo is going to be involved. And, let us set up a regular commentary from Will Wright's (1975) Sixguns & Society: A Structural Study of the Western ... For most Americans, and for a large percentage of the world's population, this scene [I deliberately leave out the specific scene Wright is describing] is familiar, though few people have actually experienced it. It does not simply present a familiar setting, it envelopes the setting in social and moral meanings which are immediately understood. (p. 4) This is our genre. Something familiar even to those who have never really seen its exemplar. The scene literally tells a story... (Let's ignore the abuse of literally .) ...for i...