the groundhog day project

Some of the great moments in 10 Things I Hate about You are the more subtle things. Not Kat's overt antisocial behavior or her feminism but Bianca's disinterest in most of what Joey does, even as she's sort of stuck around him when he's near. As my daughter put it today, Bianca cannot be herself around Joey. But--and this is me. again--there are those moments that she's bothered by her own interest. Like when she calls his headshot "pensive" and he says he was going for "thoughtful." In that moment, she's more like her sister, smarter than the girl whose opening line is that shallow bit about liking her Skechers and loving her Prada backpack. Or when he's doing his underwear and swimsuit poses and she's got no more clue than we do what the difference is. Of course, one of the subtle moments that isn't as good is Bianca's and Joey's reaction to her accidentally shooting Mr. Chapin with a bow and arrow. The subtle non-react...

Then there's Hackers . Which, remarkably, has great characters, realistic characters--and I do not at all mean that their hacking is realistic; I'm sure it isn't. Our old standby Roger Ebert contrasts the teenagers in this movie to those in Dangerous Minds , and calls these "much more authentic... they're younger, more intense and vulnerable, and more gawky than hunky." I love that Dade / Crash Override (Jonny Lee Miller) hacks a TV network just so he can watch The Outer Limits .           As I get pulled into the film and "forget" to write about it, let's look back at its opening weekend. September 15-17, 1995, a couple months after The Net . To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar is the #1 movie, which is weird because I don't remember much of anyone coming to see that movie. Clockers at #2 was over at the underground theater. I saw it sometime that weekend, probably Sunday. Dangerous Minds was #3, and we had that o...

I was not going to watch The Net again, but yesterday I noticed something... worth discussing. Here's the thing. Obviously, The Net is an early attempt to fathom the reach of the Internet and what it means to have our information out where anyone can find it if they just know how to hack the right website or database. But, then there's the plot itself--Angela (Sandra Bullock) has her identity erased and is sent on the run. Yesterday, I compared it to The Fugitive , the film version of which came out in 1993 (and I could also compare it to 1995's Nowhere Man TV show). (On the subject of The Fugitive , by the way, two things: 1) I watched the film just last week on the plane, indirectly. That is, guy in the row in front of me was watching it, and, somewhat familiar with the film, I didn't really need to hear the dialogue again to follow it. Not as good as when I watched Groundhog Day and the earphone splitter wasn't working, so I let my friend Pablo hear the mov...

It's 1995. The internet is still mostly a fantasy. A scary fantasy. We had Lawnmower Man a few years ago. Later this year we'll have Virtuosity and Hackers . Right now, it's July and we've got The Net . When we meet Angela Bennett (Sandra Bullock, and that name means Blessed Angel; we'll get to that below), she's playing Wolfenstein. Killing a computer virus. She's got a friend who collects them. I had a friend like that in high school. She orders a pizza online--state-of-the-art stuff right there--and "A Whiter Shade of Pale" plays and that's a love song, right? Her and the pizza? Back up. The movie begins with a politician killing himself at Hains Point in DC. The camera pans up and over The Awakening-- --and I'm wondering if the choice is deliberate, a metaphor for... For the Internet struggling to dig it's way out of the earth into regular use? Humanity (like Angela) struggling to live life while being buried by an increasingl...

I was going to watch Howl one more time, give myself another opportunity to rant about the state of the world or to wax poetic, or some combination of their two. But, we mustn't dwell. No, not today. We can't. Not on Rex Manning Day. That is to say, today is the day that Rex Manning (Maxwell Caulfield) visited Empire Records back in 1995. And, since Empire Records is old enough to drink, I've got myself a drink, and since it's Rex Manning Day, well, I'm watching Empire Records . I also saw Deadpool a second time today and watched and livetweeted a sweet little creepy doll horror film called Robert because I just couldn't pass that up. And then, Lucas (Rory Cochrane) just had to drive past Trump Plaza... twice, because he wants me, twenty one years in the future, to rant about politics. But, I'm going to resist. Because it is 1995 right now, there's a lot of good, and definitely evocative, mid-90s music going on, and mid-90s, I was not that into...

Warning: there will be swearing. I've been meaning to get to this film for a while now. Kept trying to fit it into my week-with-a-movie format in phase two of this blog, never found a place for it. It's got nothing to do with werewolves , by the way, so maybe I still haven't found the place for it. Imagine it as a transition into whatever comes next. (Plus the other day, I started a rant about gun control with this film's title, so to speak. The film's actual title: S.F.W. . What it stands for: So Fucking What? Why have I been trying to get to it for a while, you may ask. Because it was cowritten by none other than Danny Rubin, creator of Groundhog Day . (Based on a novel, apparently--a detail I had completely missed until right now during the opening titles.) If you don't know the movie, the setup is that a terrorist group called Split Image took a convenience store hostage (with five hostages originally) and aired the next 36 days live on TV. The film open...

A subversive eye-candy explosion of Clueless, Heathers and Carrie gleefully detonated by sex bomb Rose McGowan. That is Crackle 's description for Jawbreaker . If you don't know the movie, imagine if the spiritual successor to Heathers had seen The Craft a few too many times but didn't like witchcraft, and just couldn't be bothered to be audience friendly enough to make Mean Girls . The Heathers, the Plastics, the Debbies (bonus points if you get that reference)--here, the Flawless Four. We begin with a little voiceover--gotta have some voiceover because the audience needs things spelled out--then it's the morning of the birthday of the nice one of the Flawless Four--Liz (Charlotte Roldan). The other three, disguised with masks and hoodies staged a kidnapping to surprise her. The titular piece of candy in her mouth and some duct tape over it and when they go to open the trunk of the car (oh, they also tied her up and stashed her in the trunk), turns out she;s...