the groundhog day project

Day 1400 and I have just a couple things to say: 1) The messaging of The Secret of My Success is that a lone white male from bumfuck flyover Kansas is going to make it to big city and be such a hard worker because he grew up on a farm and is Grade-A middle American prime that he's not only going to kick the ass of his mailroom job but he will also successfully work a second (fake) job as an executive because bureaucracy is so stupid and complicated that he can game the system to invent a second name for himself, even though he's already called Brantley as if he was born and raised on Martha's Vineyard and not Foster Farms, and be better at all of this business stuff--and we will definitely, specifically, explicitly be shown this in a montage that let's us hear none of the dialogue and plays some crappy 80s song or another over it all and then the movie is going to take too fucking long to show how this one white kid is better than everybody else even though the fuck...

Matt Melis, writing for Consequence of Sound says, regarding Bernard Malamud's novel's ending—had it made it to the big screen intact: Malamud's ending undoubtedly stands as the more compelling conclusion (and more true to experience); however, I cannot imagine people lining up at the box office to see Roy Hobbs strike out and the movie end with Pop Fisher (Wilford Brimley), Red Blow (Richard Farnsworth), and Bobby Savoy [George Wilkosz] huddled in tears in the dugout. Yep, the novel The Natural ends with a downer. And, it does so deliberately. (Hollywood ruins it.) And I am distracted as the movie gets going because, do you realize that 48-year-old Redford is supposed to be just 19 years old during the first act of this movie? Couldn't be bothered to cast a younger version of himself to carry the first half hour, so he just plays 19. INSERT, me sighing. In his introduction to Malamud's novel, Kevin Baker calls it an "anti heroic tale about a baseball pl...

With action movies, it's easy. With courtroom dramas. Even with romances. If--and if they had, this movie would have probably been quite forgettable--they had gone ahead and filmed the scenes with Stephanie DeCastro , maybe it would have been easier. But, what makes Phil's situation so hard is there is not clear victory to be had, no simple solution. Chasing after Rita is not dictated by some Fairy Godmother or Magic Mirror. Phil's situation is both entirely his own doing and entirely not. It's simple. It's complex. It's unsolvable. And, eventually, it solves itself. Like life. If you're lucky. If the social and cultural and political and ethnic and racial rolls go in your favor and circumstance doesn't set you as an example for everybody else. The thing is, however silly bullshit American Dream lines feel all too often-- you can accomplish anything if you just put your mind to it , you can be anything you want to be and all the similar lies we tell...

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...

I paid little attention to the news today. Got up, watched a recording on the DVR, went to play D&D, learned of yet another mass shooting--this one in a church in Texas--just before I was heading home. That was a few hours ago now. I've been avoiding news a little more, watched a few more shows waiting on the DVR. My privilege. I can afford to ignore the horrible parts of this world when it's convenient. And, now I'm watching a live-action cartoon; back to The Villain . And, I remember watching this when I was younger, when it didn't matter that Cactus Jack Slade is an awful man, a criminal, a thief, a murderer (at least he's making an effort to be, and it's probably safe to assume he has killed before). But he falls on his face and there's a funny splat sound. He rides a horse that is smarter than he is. It's funny. It's safe, despite the awfulness. It occurs to me that all those Road Runner cartoons that this film quite explicitly apes were ...

The big problem I've got with Heaven Can Wait is that so much of it plays as just too easy. Joe dies, and he's the only dead person who doesn't want to get on that Concorde at the way station? He gets to inhabit (temporarily) the body of a rich business man, and he can reverse all the bullshit corporate norms that just happen to be awful in reality with one board meeting? The first woman he meets in his new life just happens to be the love of his life? This one is really part and parcel of the point of the film, but he buys the Rams and they rush him and rush him to let him know they don't want them there and one successful pass and they're already turning around? Tony is setting up to kill Leo (Joe) a second [correction: third; I forgot about the ceiling mirror collapsing onto the bed] time and the film has set up the cannon firing when they take the flag down at the end of the day, so that detail is fine as a coverup of the gun noise, but Joe just happens to stan...