the groundhog day project

In an interview in Vanity Fair , the interviewer started with, “This is the most romantic film I’ve ever seen with this much fighting.” Star Julie Delpy replied, “The most romantic film about fighting!” Amusingly, a piece in Elite Daily says, “No epic love stories were written about complacency from years of living in the doldrums of lame ass bullshit.” Before Midnight , taken on its own, is not particularly romantic. But, it also is not supposed to be. The Celine and Jesse story has moved beyond romance. That does not mean that it has moved beyond love. The present (and near future) of Celine and Jesse’s relationship actually gets wrapped up in the car conversation; Celine announces that she may take a government job and this exchange happens: JESSE No, you don’t want to work for him. CELINE Why not? JESSE For the government? CELINE This is different. We need laws. That’s the only way this is gonna happen. JESSE That’s not the only way. You guys have been getting a lot of good ...

I find I can't--or don't want to--write about the third act of Before Midnight . But, who needs to get that far into everything anyway? Instead, I could talk about punctum, or a series of puncta. If you're new, or you've forgotten, a punctum, by way of Barthes, is the piercing, wounding moment that pulls you in, that forces you to identify with a character perhaps, that puts you fully into the story, the small detail that makes it all real for you in the moment. I can avoid the greater wound by dealing with the lesser. (As Jesse is left behind, Hank gone, music starts up and it feels intrusive. I'm sure there was background music in Before Sunrise and Before Sunset but I really don't remember it. If it was there, it wasn't intrusive. Here, and a few instances later in this film, the music is a bit too noticeable, making this film feel more like a movie than whatever the previous two films were.) The first punctum, I suppose, is in the car. The girls are...

The one who frowned and the lady. (And, if you get that reference, bully to you.) But, who gives a damn about closure? Every story ends in death if you keep telling it--and, if there is a fourth film in this series, rather than the phrasing-appropriate Before Noon , I hope it's called Afternoon and someone's dead. That would be the appropriate thematic end to this story... Hell, already in this driving and talking sequence, there's talk of death--Celine's Cleopatra kitty story is horrible. But, I don't really want to fabricate a fourth story. I've already written recently about how I don't like people thinking the movie needs to match up to their ideals for it. Wood (1998) would agree with me, I think. He writes--in a piece entitled "Rethinking Romantic Love: "Before Sunrise" by the way: I believe in the possibility of a "definitive" reading of a work only in the sense that is is definitive for myself at a certain stage of my e...

Today's blog entry is brought to you by the number four and the words che and pussy , if you'll forgive some crudeness and poetry. A couple not so serious things before I move on to Before Midnight . Except isn't all discussion of film serious, really? I kid (but I don't). Plus, I just livetweeted through two other movies ( Final Girl (sucked) and The Final Girls (awesome)), so I'm 1) maybe running out of words (as if that would happen) and 2) I might be prone to short bursts because, well, Twitter. First an aside: I like Jesse's answer about the end of his book. "It's a good test, right? If you're a romantic or a cynic." There's not supposed to be an answer. At least prior to the existence of Before Sunset . The end of the movie is a note of hope at the tail end of a story that talked remarkably often about death while operating upon our notions about love and romance. But, whether we think that hope means Jesse and/or Celine will s...

Before Sunrise ends with a montage of shots--locations where Jesse and Celine have been, but now they are not there. It's an empty echo of their story. Before Sunset begins with such an echo, a montage of locations where Jesse and Celine will be. (Just in case you have never seen Before Sunrise , there's also a montage of scenes with Jesse and Celine as he answers questions at his book signing. (His book, This Time is basically the first film. Jesse tells his readers about an idea for a new book, one that will take place within the span of a pop song. He talks about two moments happening simultaneously, and we get one more shot of Celine from the previous film--that moment when Jesse takes her "picture." And, in the present, there is Celine at his book signing. Jesse is supposed to catch a plane in about an hour, but he goes off with Celine anyway. More walking and talking, but this more in real time than the first film. Within minutes, Celine asks if he showed ...

I remember when I was in Woodstock, Illinois two years ago--that's the filming location for most of Groundhog Day , if you must know, this blog's namesake and the film I watched for 365 days in a row and still come back to at least once a month--and I imagined being stuck in that location for a repeating day, and there was a "homeless" guy--really, he was just out of work and had made his way to Woodstock from a nearby town because he knew the crowd would mean he might be able to get more handouts from sympathetic passersby--that is, more people overall, more sympathy just by playing the percentages not that he was as cynical about it as I think I just sounded in describing it--and he was a nice enough guy, but unfortunately, I couldn't give him any cash because I saw him on my third day in Woodstock and I had run out of cash--I did offer to buy him Starbucks, I think, because I had just emerged from Starbucks, which is right by where Phil Connors hugged Ned Ryers...

Before Sunrise begins on June 16. Some might know that day as Bloomsday, a celebration of James Joyce's Ulysses , which takes place on that day. I, however, am one of those people who tried reading Ulysses and never got very far. But, I can read about Joyce and have done so. Did so again today. The following is--because, as Luke McKernan puts it in his film blog , 19 July 2014, "Richard Linklater's Before trilogy is more subtly and rewardingly Joycean than any literal transcription of his work to the screen"--me mapping Before Sunrise onto the structure of Ulysses (which itself is mapped onto the structure of The Odyssey ). (Admittedly, some of these will be stretches.) Ulysses is told in eighteen episodes. As I understand it, the labels for those episodes were not included by Joyce but he used them in his letters and offered them to his friend Stuart Gilbert, who later published the schema. Episode One: Telemachus , named for Odysseus' son, in my mapp...

Who needs a plot anyway ? Who needs plans, our for things to end up how you want them to end up? (Or for a blog month's theme to outlast its novelty... twice.) Changing gears a little today with Before Sunrise . Jesse's (Ethan Hawke) 24-hour reality show idea has, of course, been surpassed by YouTube and Twitter and Tumblr and Snapchat and Vine and Facebook and whatever else everybody's using... It amazes me that with the setup of a thing like Boyhood anybody hoped for a plot. Linklater is kind of the anti-plot director. I mean, this Before trilogy, Dazed and Confused , Waking Life , SubUrbia ; even Bernie which is based on a true story kinda meanders. Before Sunrise (and its two (so far) sequels) is quite deliberately plotless. It's just two characters wandering around Vienna, talking about anything and everything. Good mid-90s fun. The epitome of such films actually got the title Walking and Talking . Unlike a lot of these films, Jesse and Celine (Julie Delpy) ...