the groundhog day project

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...

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...

When Toy Story was released in theaters, November 24, 1995, I worked at a movie theater--the United Artists Marketplace in Old Town Pasadena... which doesn't exist anymore. I remember one of the ushers complaining about the tagline "The Toys Are Back in Town" being inappropriate for what was not sequel. I don't know how many times I've seen this movie, but I saw parts of it several times a week when it was in the theater. That happened with a lot of movies in the seven months I worked there. Also, since our theater had a deal with another theater a block away we could arrange to see movies for free at either theater. Except for the midnight premiere of Batman Forever , which I arranged somehow, we weren't supposed to use our free movie privileges to see "busy" screenings. (And, don't even get me started on the mess that is Batman Forever , except to say that watching the beginning of that movie and the end of that movie time and time again whe...