the groundhog day project

It's time to cheat a little. Today I'm watching Highlander which was not really a fixture in my life until my teens, though I did see it in the theater when I had just turned 10 and I loved it. There are numerous movies, surely, that I've skipped because they weren't fixtures. Influence doesn't have to come from repetition. Trying to figure out what some of those movies might be, though, I noticed the first few I thought of were films I had already covered in some context other than this deconstruction of my childhood experience with film. Regarding Highlander , though. Saw the sequel in '91, was amused but did not like it--if you aren't familiar with the Highlander franchise, the second film not only contradicts the post-original reality but also retcons the backstory into a thing that doesn't make sense. And, it shoves it into a near-future dystopia for no particular reason. Third one in '94 was unnecessary but held up far better than the...

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...

Bob Clark directed Black Christmas , Porky's and A Christmas Story . There is either something really wrong with that fact or something really awesome. On the one hand, those are three very different films. A horror film, a sex comedy and a nostalgic family picture. I don't think the odd man out here is A Christmas Story , though. I think it's Black Christmas . Black Christmas , whatever its faults--check this blog last December for details on that film and A Christmas Story --is a fairly straight forward film, played for realism (unlike the over-the-top remake). Porky's and A Christmas Story , on the other hand, are actually both quite nostalgic. The simpler time for A Christmas Story is 1939-40, before World War II really twisted the 20th century around, before the Cold War. The simpler time here in Porky's , on the other hand, is decade and a half later, World War II has come and gone, young men are fighting across the world in Korea now, but it's not t...