the groundhog day project

So a few pet peeves. One about something that happens in movies. One about how people react to movies. And one about life. I'll be as brief as I can. One, and this one occurred to me watching 9 to 5 , is when a conversation is split over two scenes. The example in 9 to 5 isn't even the most egregious example--Judy waits until she is at the store with Violet to ask about Doralee, when realistically she would have asked, you know, on the way there. Some movies, though, it's like midsentence, or between question and response, and that is not how people talk. It's a cheap manipulation of the medium. (To be fair, it can be used well, to suggest a conversation that happens again and again. Because one character just can't let something go, for example. But, too often it's just cheap.) Two, and this one occurred to me watching The Mummy , is about how people measure a film too much by what they wanted it to be. In this case, so many reviews referencing the 1999 The ...

Subtitle: thoughts on the film without the politics... if that's possible. For example, the costumes: Judy's. Outfit is far too conservative, far too reserved. While Violet's is looser, with a looser, Chinese pattern. to it. Her outfits are loose, practical, but her colors are subdued. (I rather enjoy Grace and Frankie and that's totally, if deliberately not explicitly a reunion of these two characters... Except I cannot imagine that Frankie ever worked an office job.) Doralee's costumes are somewhere in between, and far more showy. The office is stale, too practical, visually something out of the 50s with rare elements from the 60s--like Mr. Hart's office, a lot of Browns, a wood desk, wood paneling, but then some chairs that feel more modern (for 1980). One of the big changes, visually, later with the three women making the decisions, is that the office takes on a lot more color--very 70s. And, there's the scarf. Violet has to buy it for Mr. Hart...

...or better. Because, let's face it, when you keep a sex (or a race-- (Just note the early scene in 9 to 5 with the mailroom attendant Eddie Smith, a black man, who is upset by the new hire Judy (Jane Fonda) because he wants to be promoted out of the mailroom; the film acknowledges right away the problem is far bigger than just sex.) --or any group really) down systematically for, well, ever, it's going to take a little more than equality to make it right. Equal treatment isn't going to lift someone up enough--like Judy or Violet or Doralee here--that they would be anywhere near you if you've been lifted up since centuries or millennia before you were born. That is, lift up too unequal parties the same, they will still be unequal. Rich get richer and poor get poorer and all that. Men stay on top, women stay on the bottom, and the system runs as it has always run. Getting stuff like the changes the three leads make here at Consolidated Companies--job sharing, on-...