the groundhog day project

Jericho "Action" Jackson is a Cowboy Cop (on TV Tropes ). Captain Armbruster is Da Chief . Except neither of them really are. See the thing is, however poorly Action Jackson is executed, it seems to be trying to be something more interesting than just another rulebreaking-cop movie. He's a loose cannon, but DAMMIT he's the best we have! That's the Cowboy Cop . Furthermore: Sure, our society may be built upon rules and procedures, but they usually make for bad television. Sometimes you have to bend the rules, rough up the suspects, moon your supervisors and shred the Constitution to get stuff done. Jackson very much used to be that. As the two officers in that too-long cold open play him up as a bogeyman for criminals: Kornblau: Yeah, some say he didn't even have a mother. That some researchers created him to be the first man to walk on the moon without a space suit.  Lack: Mm-hmm.  Kornblau: Others says his mother was molested by Bigfoot, and...

I am breaking with the rules today. Instead of a fixture of my childhood as the movies have been for the last "year" of the blog. When I was figuring out where to stop the childhood deconstruction process, drifting out of my actual, you know, childhood, I discovered a few movies I had inadvertently never put on my list (And there are surely others. Still forgotten.) and figured out which of the ones still ahead on the list needed to be gotten to. Put the list together, decided on a whim to jump ahead to the end and work backward, and, depending on how this movie turns out today--it has a 5.5 on IMDb--(un)fortunately, I asked Sarah for suggestions for 80s movies I might've missed. Not that my deconstruction was entirely about the 80s; I mean I began with 1968's Blackbeard's Ghost and worked forward from there (mostly in release order, but mistakes were made) and I made it to 1992/1993's Strictly Ballroom and am working my back to 1985 again to end the...

A thought occurred to me while watching Bloodsport last night. (It's on again right now, but it has only just started, with the random bits of violence against objects and that one white guy fighting that one black guy and shots of people setting up the competition space.) I'm not sure why my parents enjoyed this movie. I mean, I know the movie is somewhat enjoyable on its face. American's love action films, generally. But, 1) I swear we saw this movie more than once at the second-run Academy Theater and 2) other action films make more sense for, you know, religious folks. I mean, Rambo fights evil Communists, John Matrix fights, um, that guy who's raising his own army for... reasons I don't remember. John McClane fights "terrorists". Etcetera. Frank Dux is just fighting other fighters for... well, for sport, I guess. But, it' snot like my family were fans of wrestling or boxing. They watched baseball, and fairly exclusively baseball. No bas...

What the hell else was America going to become other than a corporate-run, dehumanizing state that promotes violence against its citizens, incarcerates its citizens to an inordinate degree, and disenfranchises those citizens after so that their voices matter even less than before? The problem with RoboCop version of the "future" is that is assumes we need robotic muscle to put down unrest, to put down violent criminals, to put down regular citizens who dare to have darker skin. We never needed robots to police this country because we've got plenty of fodder willing and able to be police officers, to commit to thuggery and domination in the name of law and order. Body armor. Tanks. Big guns and bigger guns. And, reactionary policies that only get worse over time. After the news reports that begin the film, it's important to note that the first thing that happens is lawyers (or maybe a lawyer and a very hands-on bail bondsman) are forcibly pushed out of the po...

I was thinking about westerns today, you know, as one does. And, about war films, and cop films, and all those ex-soldiers killing far too many bad guys in the 80s, and there was a clear trend about (mostly) lone white men fighting all levels of evil, this specifically American (but surely understood in many another culture as well) fantasy about how much one man can do on his own (or with a small band of similar heroes). And, while recently we have drifted back into the same fantasy with the prevalence of superhero films, there is an interesting gap through the 90s--full of aging versions of too many of those 80s heroes and young heroes raging against fascist governments--that makes me want to do a serious study, a la Wright's Six Guns and Society or Nowell's Blood Money , but focused on the thesis that all these various types of action films are variations of one genre, not multiple. That westerns and those grungy cop dramas from the 70s, those big buff soldiers (some damage...

          I often get lost as these old movies from my childhood play, but I didn't expect to get lost in The Pirate Movie as soon as it got started. But, "Victory" starts playing over pirate ship battle footage and I'm in. And then the main plot gets going pretty quick and Ninjas attack the pirate ship and it's on. This was what really got me when I was a kid, the action and the romance. I talked about the military side of An Officer and a Gentleman was just as much rooted in fantasy as the love story yesterday --but the actual action in something like this is an easy in for a kid. Pirate adventure, plus ninjas, and later cops, plus the romance and songs.           I had yet to see a production of The Pirates of Penzance when I first saw this film, though I would see it later, so I didn't know a lot of the basic specifics being spoofed. But, unlike some more recent spoof films, this one keeps a main plot that makes sense...

Had a good day so far. Ran a Dungeons & Dragons game then came home to watch the Golden Globes. Now For Your Eyes Only is playing and I almost want to be brief, after livetweeting the Globes. So, there is this: James Bond, regardless of the version (though, to be fair, I have only read one of the novels, and it wasn't one of Ian Fleming's originals; it was John Gardner's novelization of Licence to Kill ), is a horrible role model for young boys. He's a womanizer who far too easily gets every woman he meets to fall for him. He's an expert at everything (so much so that it amuses me when he checks his map early in this film, as if James Bond does not have every street of, well, all of Spain already memorized), and there is never any actual chance that he might die. (Sharks won't even try to kill him when he is openly bleeding.) No one should ever try to be James Bond. But, so many boys--me included--looked (and look) up to him. It wasn't just an 80s t...

Talking with Fresh Air about Mad Max: Fury Road , director George Miller says "that a film's reception changes with time. 'First of all, people write about it in reviews and... [then] after a while The audience starts to tell you what your film is...'" I found this when looking for old interviews with Miller, get a better idea of his reasoning for making the original Mad Max or, more importantly, The Road Warrior . But, in this deconstruction going on in this blog of late, that is not necessarily the point. I mean, in 1981, I am five years old. I don't rightly care why a film gets made. If the film entertains me, I am just glad that it got made at all. By '83, when Return of the Jedi comes out, I am buying... Or having my mother buy for me behind-the-scenes books and magazines. I learned about blue screen from a section about the Speeder Bikes. But, I suppose that I might write more about that when I get to Return of the Jedi . What matters today is t...

1) Back to the childhood deconstruction. It's 1981. I turn five at the end of January. For whatever reason, the first film from 1981 that made my list didn't come out until May... According to IMDb. However Wikipedia says the film was not out in Australia until December of '81 but came out in the US in 1980. Roger Ebert's review is dated 1 January 1981, but he also mentions Raiders of the Lost Ark , and IMDb says the explosion of hte compound was filmed 22 July 1981, so who knows? I'll have better dates for the rest of the films from 1981 because they weren't imports. 2) This is a bit of a cheat. This is supposed to be a deconstruction of my childhood in terms of the films I watched time and time again when I was young. I did not have The Road Warrior on video until I was a teenager, but I know I watched it more than a couple times on TV. And, I think I saw it in the theater. I am not sure about that. But, as I have said before, the memory is often more impor...

"From Dan Dare to James Tiberius Kirk, Flash Gordon's DNA is shot through our notions of what a hero - and superhero - is like a jagged bolt of lightning," writes Adam Smith in Empire . Director Mike Hodges describes the role of Flash as "an all-American hunk, decent, honourable, but, most importantly, naive ." And, taking this film version, energetic and fun, and hardly capable of, let alone prone to, bouts of negativity. A nice birthplace for the 80s action hero, really. For example, Rambo had his angsty origins, but was all action and getting things done in the 80s. Not every 80s hero was angst-proof; Martin Riggs , for example, was essentially suicidal. But most were almost gleefully violent (and so, really, was Riggs, just for different reasons). Compare even Riggs to say, Paul Kersey from the Death Wish films, begun in 1974; or Harry Callahan, whose films began in 1971. Seventies violence may have been just as outlandish as the best moments of, say, Com...

Then, there was The Principal . Actually, in movie terms, this movie came before Lean on Me . It's a different beast, perhaps, because it's fiction. Doesn't start with school. Rather begins in a bar. Rick Lattimer (James Belushi) is clearly an angry, violent man. Making that clear right away, as he goes after his wife's divorce lawyer/new boyfriend with a baseball bat. Afterward, cop asks him his occupation. Wait for it--school teacher. We're supposed to be surprised. I'm not sure why we should care (except of course we know already this is a movie about a principal (who could very well also be a teacher). He's also a disgusting bachelor-type. Smells the bad milk, is revolted, puts it back in the fridge, for example. (Box office aside: I saw this movie at The Academy, a second-run theater in Pasadena, so I'm not sure when I saw it. But, looking at the weekend it came out, I like that I saw all of the top 12 ( The Principal was #4), but only about ...

So anyway, last night I was so tired that I'm surprised I made it through the entirety of Speed Racer ; aside from a couple musicals, it's the longest movie I've watched for this blog. Though I did not fall asleep--unlike, say, when I watched A Nightmare on Elm Street --it played like a weird dream... which is appropriate since the Wachowski's constructed the film visually like a technicolor dream of sorts, a live action cartoon. It's not just the color, either. Though the palette of the film is far broader and brighter than many a movie of late--seriously, just today, I saw a video in which someone brightened up Man of Steel because, well, Superman should not be dark, but that's the way of movies lately, most everything's a little dark and dreary, and far too many movies have that teal and orange thing going on. This movie plays like something not only outside our normal reality but very much outside the movie reality. For example, Royalton and Speed ...

(This month is a little different than usual. Instead of four movies for a week each, I've got 10 movies recommended by other people--family, friends, regular readers--three days each.) This movie is like a live action cartoon. Which makes sense, considering it's a live action film based on a cartoon. By the way, it's Speed Racer . And, I have seen so many episodes of the show--not that the individual episodes were all that unique; the closeups and the blurred lines for a background--that is very much my memory of the show. I didn't see this movie in the theater. It was #3 its opening weekend. #1 was Iron Man starting its second week. I saw that one opening weekend. I'm trying to remember what I was doing spring 2008 that I wasn't seen a lot of movies. Seriously, out of the top 20 movies that weekend, I only saw 3 of them in the theater (the aforementioned Iron Man , The Visitor and Dr. Seuss' Horton Hear's a Who . I'd eventually watch on cable ...

(This month, I'm doing things a little differently; I will be watching 10 films--each recommended by someone else, each one for three days. Today starts the second of these 10 films. The first one was The Room .) To start, I must say, it's amazing that Ming's computer readout labels are written in English. I mean if we didn't see the label EARTH QUAKE, would we have been able to guess how his actions destroyed that building on his screen? Without VOLCANIC ERUPTION, would we have know that was a volcano erupting? And, without HOT HAIL, would we have... actually we probably would have been really confused because hot hail is not a thing. If Ming can make hot rocks fall out of space, out of nowhere basically, no football player is going to save us. The premise almost immediately plays as ridiculous. Plus, there's the whole racism angle with the character of Ming the Merciless (and many other characters in the old comics and serials), but I will be dealing with th...

It might not seem like the obvious link to connect Groundhog Day to those teen movies from the 1980s (or any decade) that I watched over the past month (or ever). But, there's a reason I refer to Phil's "adolescent" period when talking (or blogging) about this movie. First of all, that's how Harold Ramis refers to it on the commentary track, if I remember rightly. But, also, it just makes sense. Phil Connors, realizing the freedom inherent in the time loop, is like an adolescent sowing his wild oats. Pre-loop Phil is also like a teenager in that he thinks he knows everything, thinks he's better than everyone else and he is entirely self-centered and self ish . But, mostly, I don't want to talk explicitly about Groundhog Day tonight. I will note that the movie is going by unimaginably fast, like I'm so familiar with it, it almost isn't registering. I'd be tempted to stop typing and just focus on the movie, but who's got the time for that?...