the groundhog day project

(We interrupt the planned programming here at The Groundhog Day Project --because my VHS set of Star Wars films didn't arrive and I don't feel like skipping ahead--to bring you a brief bit about mother! --because I saw it again today, and however much it is horrifying some people, I liked it even more the second time than I did the first time.) Honestly, you probably won't like mother! . I mean, statistically, most people won't like it. Maybe, taking into account the limited scope of this blog and the side of the Venn diagram of film aficionados who might come to my blog regularly, you're one of the few who will not only like it but love it. An Aronofsky fan, perhaps. A fan of divisive, provocative, polarizing cinema, maybe. Let's get some stuff out of the way right off. You know, SPOILERS. You're gonna get overloaded with imagery of violence, of gratuitous religiosity, of Jennifer Lawrence's breasts, of a newborn baby's half eaten corpse, and ...

Then again , who am I to tell anyone to shut up (not that what I did yesterday was that , exactly? And, who am I to preach about being creative when my only real creative outlet lately is this blog (with barely any audience) or Dungeons & Dragons , where my audience is a whole 6-9 players depending on the week? I had considered getting out a few of my unpublished manuscripts--the good ones--and re-editing them this summer to make available as ebooks, but then I got some summer classes to teach. Great news for the bank account but taking up a lot of my time for several weeks. Maybe I'll still get to the manuscripts. Knowing me, probably not. One little roadblock and I'll put it off, do something else. Story of my creative life. This blog--not strictly speaking an entirely creative exercise--is the one thing in recent years I have been able to stick with for a particularly long time. When I started actively trying to write fiction for the purpose of getting published--with ...

You don't know what's going on. We start with pointless voiceover-- In Hollywood, one of the fastest ways to the top is to work for someone who's already there. The system dictates that one must first be a slave before you can become a success. But this can be a very demanding process. Only a few people have the drive to endure the thousands of indignities and hardships that make up the system. Now, this drive is usually motivated by greed, sometimes ambition, sometimes even love. There are stories of love inspiring success over the most insurmountable of odds. This is not one of those stories. --adds nothing to what's coming, doesn't reveal anything unique or particularly intriguing, and you don't know what's going on. The conversation about Shelley Winters, on the other hand, is a fantastic introduction to what's coming. Guy (Frank Whaley) knows his films. It's clear that he is better than his position. Then, we meet his overbearing boss Buddy...

The thing about Everything Is Illuminated is it suggests--at the same time, mind you--that it's never too late to get over your past and your past will always catch up to you. If The Grey was purgatory , this is somehow both heaven and hell... or maybe just another form of purgatory... or maybe just life. The movie returns us to the idea that life is just stories , the what we choose to remember-- how we choose to remember it--matters more than the reality. Stories change over time. So do memories. Each return of a memory is affected by the previous one--that was a detail in the latest Pixar movie, Inside Out that I rather liked, in fact; positive memories turn negative, joy turns sad... and vice versa, I suppose. Bittersweet is introduced. Everything Is Illuminated is based on Jonathan Safran Foer's first published novel. It is, of course, about a young man named Jonathan Safran Foer going to the Ukraine in search of family history, specifically, the woman in a photo...

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 ...

A couple things... First, back in my Day 52 - if you only had one day to live entry, I explained how this blog is about me as much as it is about... then, I was talking about Groundhog Day , but I suppose whatever movie I’m watching this particular week fits. So, today, this blog is as much about me as (if not more so than) it is about Singin’ in the Rain . I’m of two minds about blogs at the moment (and only at the moment, future me, looking for something to quote in your master’s thesis): 1) blogging is an entirely selfish enterprise. Clearly, I don’t do this for the audience, though I know there is a small group of dedicated folks who check in regularly or semiregularly. If I wanted a bigger audience, I’m sure there would be some way to promote this blog much more than I do now. Just last week, my numbers jumped for a couple days; between Schulman’s “ The Accidental Swami “ and it being Groundhog Day, people were looking up my blog. And, maybe they were intrigued, but that doesn’...