the groundhog day project

There's a thin line between the romantic pressuring we see in romantic comedy and stalker behavior. Riding that line is the premise of a lot of stories, from shows like Netflix's You , which pushes right over the line in its opening scene and keeps pushing, to simple moments like when Charlie says please after Harriet turns down his proposal in So I Married an Axe Murderer . The romantic comedy way is simple: if at first she says no, keep pushing, invade her space, make her realize she can't live without you by defying her to take out a restraining order. Pressed up against the baseball plot here, the romantic comedy plotline between Jake and Lynn can be taken as an extension of the main idea. Their relationship failed a few years back. The Indians' relationship with Cleveland (at least the way Mrs. Phelps sees it) also failed... well, more than a few years back. The problem is that we can see the Indians' players improving (maybe not why they're improving ...

I actually watched Major League --today's movie in my childhood deconstruction's confused final weeks--just last year. As a movies-by-minutes podcaster, I participated in a charity trivia contest, and along with UHF , Major League was the topic one of the rounds. The final round was live at a movies-by-minutes get together in Portland, Oregon in August. This year's event has been cancelled because a pandemic makes such events problematic. This year was going to be in Philadelphia. I don't think I've ever been there. Maybe next year. Meanwhile, Rachel Phelps wants to move the Cleveland Indians to Miami, so she has called for some very specific recruits for this year's team, slackers, nobodies, has-beans, weirdos. Jake Taylor is hungover in Mexico when he gets the call. His knees are shot. But, he' supposed to be a catcher. Rick Vaughn is in prison when he gets the call. Eddie Harris has to put, among other things, snot on the ball, to pit...

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...

I made the mistake--and, in this case, it was a mistake [it made hating this thing even easier]--of reading Roger Ebert's review of The Natural before I pressed play on the film tonight. I remember this film as a weird sort of film noir that somehow involves a baseball player. And, it opens now with Robert Redford (who we will find out later is playing a character called Roy Hobbs) waiting for and then getting on a train, not useful dialogue, not characterization effort, just Redford. CUT TO: flashback montage, Roy as a boy learns to play baseball while his father says some lines that someone thought were philosophical when they wrote them... A storm. Montage of sports pennants in the flash of the lightning. Then the tree out back gets struck, Roy carves a bat out of its trunk and I get something Roger says. Roger explains: As for the baseball, the movie isn't even subtle. When a team is losing, it makes Little League errors. When it's winning, the hits are so accurat...