the groundhog day project

Today, I am watching multiples movies. Not aiming to write about them. Just to enjoy them. The movies: The Cloverfield Paradox , I don't feel at home in this world anymore , Creep ... and maybe Creep 2 if Creep turns out to be good. And, you know what I want?

So, it comes down to this: what did I get from Grease 2 at six years old? And from all those many times watching it again over the next decade or more. I've already noted that 1982 may have been when I started to love musicals--three of them in my list of eight films for that year in this deconstruction of my childhood experience with movies. But, what else was there? For that matter, how do all these movies start to formulate together an explicit version of who I might be in the future? I'm looking at the list so far and wondering just how many of these movies suggest the very thing I've suggested is wrong with the Grease films--that you need to change who you are to get with the people you want. From Arthur to The Fox and the Hound , from Meatballs to Blackbeard's Ghost , so many of these movies involve people either having to change who they are to be accepted, that the world demands you to be one way, and you better be that way or you will be shunned, you will ...

I was going to start today's entry with a note I neglected yesterday: the first Grease does have one beat that the sequel doesn't--while Sandy changes for Danny and Michael changes for Stephanie, Stephanie doesn't change at all for Michael, but Danny does at least try to change for Sandy. He tries out for varsity sports, tries to clean up his image. It doesn't really take but Sandy's change covers the distance between them enough to make up for it. Stephanie, on the other hand, gets away with not even trying, yet Grease 2 almost feels like it wants us to see her as a feminist icon of a sort for the 60s setting, whereas Sandy was a good girl from the 50s until her makeover. I was going to argue, counter to the obvious point I made yesterday--that the message of both films is a bad one--that taking as singular instances, they're not so bad. If Sandy wants to change for Danny, that's on her. If Michael wants to change for Stephanie, that's on him. But, ...

It's actually strange watching Grease 2 again after many years because it is wide screen. I think our copy was recorded off cable, back when they just cropped the edges rather than having black bars at the top and bottom. And, kids, back in my day, the television screen wasn't wide enough to show the whole movie without doing one of those things. Immediate observation: the opening scenes of this movie move a little too quickly. It's the first day of school, it's a week later, it's bowling night, then it's time to work on the talent contest. Michael (Maxwell Caulfield) and Stephanie (Michelle Pfeiffer) have a two-part meet cute , with him enamored by her when she' spitting on the skirt over her capris, and then her kissing him to piss off Nogerelli (Adrian Zmed) at the bowling alley. It's both too simple and weirdly complicated. More than half an hour before "Cool Rider" gives Michael a goal and him writing essays for the T-Birds for money give...

Lest I complain too much, I will get one last detail of scientist 's piece out of the way. scientist describes the the death of Nurse Karen (Pamela Susan Shoop) like this: ...for sheer nastiness, nothing beats the hot-tub boiling of Karen Bailey. This sequence is truly ugly, with long, loving shots of Ms Karen's hideously blistered face interspersed with equally loving shots of her bare breasts--which, by the way, shouldn't be bare; when Michael enters the room, her towel is beneath her arms; when he grabs her, it's mysteriously around her waist. Also disturbing here is Michael caressing Karen before he gets to work, another action at variance with the child-man concept of the first film. Except, while you could call the shots of Karen's face "lingering" (at best), calling them "loving" suggests that scientist might have a problem. Also, there are not shots of her bare breasts while Michael is killing her. He dunks her five times into the wa...

That being said, Carpenter made the choice deliberately to give Halloween II more gore than the original. The director, Rick Rosenthal, was trying to ape the original a little more, but Carpenter altered it, reshot scenes (and I believe shot a few new ones as well). Our friend from the other day , scientist , may think this means Halloween II has gone "off the rails", but the "rails" for films like this were headed toward more gore, toward an increased body count, because, well, that was inevitable. scientist also argues, "The whole point of Halloween is, after all, that its events have no point." But, while the original film may not offer a specific motive for Michael's kills, it does explicitly namecheck " fate ". Every person's fate is to die. Every character in a slasher film (even if at the time, there was no such thing as a "slasher film" just yet) is looking at the possibility that fate will come soon. scientist ...

...and I like the gore. But, I will get to that. First, the promised list, films released between Halloween and Halloween II that fit the "slasher" bill (even if they were likely not called that at the time; more likely, they were marketed as "splatter" films or "thrillers" depending on the intended audience. The films are: Driller Killer , Savage Weekend , Tourist Trap , The Hollywood Strangler Meets the Skid Row Slasher -- (How have I 1) never heard of this one, because that title is so amazingly evocative and on-the-nose as to a brilliant piece of art regardless of the film itself (and, it is worth noting, Friday the 13th was marketed based on the title alone, before a script had even been written), and 2) never seen it? Hell, too many of the movies on this list I have not seen. Also, since I am interrupting, a few of the films on this list push the definition of "slasher" a bit, but I was trying to be as complete as I could. And, I...

I decided last night, after innumerable viewings of Halloween II over the course of the past 36 years, that Laurie does not shoot Michael in the eyes. I mean, yeah, he's purely and simply evil, and he's got some Cult of the Thorn pseudo-immortality going on, but as soon as Michael was back for The Return of Michael Myers in '88, it was either suspend my disbelief over eyes healing, accept that it takes 7 years for eyes to grow back when you've got cult of the thorn magic in you (even though the specifics of the Cult of the Thorn were still a couple movies off)... Or, the obvious option, which didn't occur to me until last night. 1) Laurie does not shoot Michael in the eyes. She shoots him, sure. But, she is not that good (or lucky) with a gun. 2) Michael, being all supernatural evil and serving the (incorrectly identified) Celtic Lord of the Dead Samhain, cries blood. It's not just an interesting visual, blood coming down like tears. It's tears. Michael i...

When I wrote about Halloween II before , I referred to my younger self, standing around watching the scene in which Loomis tells Sheriff Brackett that he shot Michael 6 times being filmed as "a wee little, impressionable child." Today, when someone on Facebook asked people to post an image of a fictional character that impacted their life, I posted an image of Michael Myers, atop the stairs at the Doyle house in the original Halloween . I wrote about my impressionable self and then I talked about Michael's psychosexual fury (Clover 1987 1992). The slasher film is explicitly tied to visible acts of sex. The kind of thing my mother would try (and usually fail) to cover my eyes for. Not the kills, which were more gory than the original. (I actually only just now learned that the decision to add more gore than the original was Carpenter's decision, not director Rick Rosenthal's. Carpenter supposedly even directed some scenes to make them bloodier. Since the orig...

Really, it is simple to understand part of it. Just because you're a bankable actor, or a proven director (having graduated from music videos to feature films), doesn't mean that your life is guaranteed, that you will always have money. Sometimes, you have to make bad movies, or at least not so great movies, to stay alive, and for your career to stay alive. Michael Caine, for example, quite famously said of Jaws: The Revenge , "I have never seen it... but by all accounts it is terrible. However, I have seen the house that it built, and it is terrific." Not every actor can make $20 million a film, and even if they can, you cannot live on that forever if you plan to stay in the limelight. You gotta keep making movies to be able to keep making movies. And, they can't all be the greatest film ever, they can't all be Oscar-caliber, they can't all be blockbusters. For example, it's hard to find the original source for this (it's quoted all over the Inte...

The question then: why does something like Highlander II happen? The explanations have been offered of course, stuff like economic collapse in Argentina just as production was underway there, for example. But, that is just an explanation for or why some of the awfulness exists. Obviously, there was some initial script, before there were money problems or investors taking over problems, and that script included aliens from the planet Zeist, and that script ignored a great deal of the original. What kind of cynical Hollywood puts this kind of thing together and ever thinks it's a good idea? Or does it think it's a good idea, at all? Is it just after money? Is it simply Hollywood banking on the familiarity of a name? Regarding that last question, I got curious. For anyone to think you could bank on the Highlander name (for anything beyond a syndicated late night tv series, as Highlander would have a year after the awful sequel), science fiction and fantasy had to be doing part...

I intended to watch enjoyably bad movies this month. Like, aw, how cute that they tried to make a real movie and failed so hilariously. Like Troll 2 ; you watch that and you know the filmmakers thought they were making something good. It's not good. But it is entertaining. I want every movie to be entertaining. Highlander II (which I guess I'm watching the Special Edition, though Amazon does not label it) is not entertaining. Its turns are too maddening, its characters to unbelievable, and its deformation of everything I liked about the original is despicable. I didn't even notice yesterday that Ramirez doesn't mention Zeist by name in this version. I guess my memory of the original cut overshadowed this version so much, I heard something that wasn't there. But leaving it out actually makes Ramirez' vague speech and the resulting failed revolution worse; I mean, what are they fighting for? Are they even the good guys? Did Ramirez just marry himself to Connor?...

I didn't write about the ending to Ginger Snaps 2: Unleashed the other day mostly because I just did not care for the film, and I think I posted what can best be termed a non-entry about that film before I'd even gotten to the very end. And, maybe that is a good thing because I might have had a rant in me about how the sequel did far worse than just diminish Brigitte as a character and neglect pretty much all of the metaphor and meaning vital to the original; additionally, by shutting Brigitte up in the basement, leaving her to be a werewolf trapped by Ghost (who apparently fantasizes about using her against her enemies), Brigitte becomes victim to not only the infection from her sister, not only to the attack from the new werewolf or the men at the rehab facility, but also to Ghost and to the filmmakers and the film itself. What should have been, and could have been a continuation of a story that embraced femininity even as it tackled the difficulties of adolescence for fem...

Ginger Snaps 2 Unleashed . Opening credits-- not being a montage created by the characters=trying too hard.         I think they have lost their metaphor.         Unless you get into to the whole concept of "hysterical" and how women were more likely than men to be hospitalized for (supposedly) mental disorders. Historically, I mean. Seriously, though, does it even matter that this main character is Brigitte from the original film?         Ghost (Tatiana Maslany) is pretty funny, though.

In the past 24 hours, I've watched Toy Story , Toy Story 2 and five Toy Story shorts (don't know the proper order, but they are the three "Toons" Hawaiian Vacation , Small Fry and Partysaurus Rex ; Toy Story of Terror! and Toy Story that Time Forgot ). For the record, I have never seen more than a couple minutes of the Buzz Lightyear of Star Command cartoon. Right now Toy Story 3 is playing. The "end" of the feature story, of course, leads into those shorts; they are all set after the toys become Bonnie's. Still, it is an ending of a sort of the story of these toys. (Those shorts focus more on other characters more than, say, Woody or Buzz (except Small Fry ) or Jessie (though the climax of Toy Story of Terror! does depend on her). Instead (taking the order above), they focus on Barbie and Ken (minor nitpick: Barbie and Ken stay at Sunnyside at the end of Toy Story 3 , so they really shouldn't be with Bonnie's toys), a fast food restau...