the groundhog day project

(So... Altering the plan a bit. This "month" is going to take far longer than a calendar month anyway, so I looked back at the longer list of films I had made before narrowing it down for this exercise in deconstruction, because, my Star Wars VHS tapes still didn't arrive. Options were, skip past it, jump ahead to Heaven Can Wait , or... I looked at the larger list and found Across the Great Divide for 1976. Fits the pattern and I might start adding some other movies from the longer list back into this. This could take a while. But anyway, today... to night , actually; it's a late start because my Thursdays are busy anyway and I was hoping the mail would make Star Wars possible tonight. In fact, as I'm typing this little paranthetical, I'm still watching Critical Role . Their episodes end when their episodes end. So, it's near 11pm and I don't know when the movie will begin.           11:16--that's when.) The weird thing about watching ...

Still 1975. (Still not born yet.) Disney again. Except I was actually thinking about how different these childhood films are from the ones I watch now. Yesterday, for example, I watched mother! in the theater and I watched Adventures of the Wilderness Family at home. Today in the theater I watched Beach Rats and I'm watching The Apple Dumpling Gang now at home. Very different movies today. Very different movies today. I mean, you've got a big metaphor for human interaction with the universe, for religion, for male-female relations, for the cult of personality, sacrifice and self-sacrifice, and you've got a family running off to live in the wilderness and finding that some animals are nice and some are vicious... Which, really, taken simplistically, the themes could be much the same. But, Adventures of the Wilderness Family is just so innocent about everything. While mother! includes sex and violence and apocalyptic destruction as well as cannibalism. Meanwhile, Beach ...

A note before I begin: tonight's dinner is burritos and there are some chips and dip. This is the kind of meal we used to serve when we'd have people over to watch movies. Of course, there's no actual meat in the burritos anymore, as I'm a vegetarian now. But, it's an echo of the stuff we'd make when folks were coming over to watch a movie like this one... Most of the people coming over to watch movies happened in the latter half of the 80s and into the 90s, I'm pretty sure. But, this "month" is bundling all of it together. (Secondary note: apparently, I’ve been misnumbering the blog days for the last couple weeks and only just noticed. Today is Day 1141 even though I called yesterday 1040 on Twitter and Facebook.) Now, on to Adventures of the Wilderness Family one last time. One scene that undermines some of what comes later in Adventures of the Wilderness Family comes just after the family meets Boomer (the mountain man who wanders into the...

You gotta wonder, actually, how detailed the script for Adventures of the Wilderness Family even was. Aside from a few scenes, there isn't much dialogue, the story turns arbitrarily--hey, look, a cougar; hey, look, a bear; hey, look, another bear; hey, look, a random mountain man; hey, look, arbitrary use of slow motion; hey, look, Jenny's sick despite our rather basic attempt to save her from urban pollution--and there isn't really much of a plot, not a formally structured one anyway. This is 1975, but as I've said before cinematic decades bleed into one another. This is more a tail-end 60s film, a family-friendly extension of the counterculture. Skip Robinson is like a shoulda-been hippie who turned establishment, maybe because he got Pat pregnant and he needed work, because that's how the man says it's supposed to be. Skip tells the pilot of the plane that drops them off, "We thought a lot more than twice" about bringing the family out there. Th...

Adventures of the Wilderness Family is an interesting case, potentially. Watched it a lot as a kid. And, I mean a lot . My sister Bobbie recently informed me that this was the only movie our parents would let us watch on Saturday mornings; that was the sabbath for us. (And, that I grew up attending church regularly and going to a church-owned private school will become important below.) I remember hating it, or at least really disliking it. I guess, if I hated it, I probably would not have sat there and watched it every time. (I also remember associating the opening shot of this film--showing the Bonaventure Hotel being in downtown Los Angeles under construction--with the sitcom It's a Living , which was set in a restaurant at its top, but that's just an arbitrary link, however permanently fixed it is in my head.) Officially, I thought it was boring. But, I can't have been completely against it to have watched it so often, and to have sat through its sequels more ...