the groundhog day project

I was born in 1976. This is what babies looked like: (Yes, that's me.) This is what politicians looked like: This is what fashion looked like: This is what music looked like: This is what movies looked like: And there is where my record of the "connective tissue as well as the abyss between the present and the past" ends.* * quote from Sheila O'Malley's review of 20th Century Women . See, those movies... Rocky has been recently rebooted (after five sequels). Carrie has been remade twice (after one "sequel"). A new version of A Star is Born is being made now (I believe it's the fourth iteration of this story). Hollywood is stuck in nostalgia mode. I must make two things clear: 1) I'm not necessarily complaining about this. For every remake of The Magnificent Seven there's The Lobster . For every Ghostbusters remake, there's Swiss Army Man . If you bother to pay attention beyond the big studio films, there is plenty more th...

20th Century Women offers up multiple narrators and the convergence of several stories. A mother. A son. Their tenants. His girlfriend (of a sort). The mother, Dorothea (Annette Bening) tells the story of the son, Jamie (Lucas Jade Zumann) and vice versa. Others tell their own stories, though not in the same kind of voiceover. (Mike Mills trivia note: the family name here, Fields, is the same as in Beginners .) Dorothea has a fairly open-door policy about the house. She invites a fireman over to her birthday dinner, for example, after he helps put out their car fire. The girlfriend, Julie (Elle Fanning) comes and goes as she pleases, even when Jamie is not home. Dorothea asks Julie and Abbie (Greta Gerwig) to help her raise Jamie as a good man. (Then, interestingly, she tells Jamie that she asked them.) Though it's a common theme, it's done especially well--these people form a family even though they are not all related. Jamie tries to spread his wings with friends, but k...

Thumbsucker does not have the voiceover (and accompanying cutaways) that make Mills' Beginners and 20th Century Women what they are. That necessarily makes the film a little less charming. (I wonder if the original script had that stuff, and Mills didn't have the clout to get away with it yet.) It's good, but it's not as... Yeah, charming was probably the right word. Or maybe the problem is that focusing so much on the teen here means there isn't the more experienced perspective of Beginners or 20th Century Women . Or maybe I just don't buy Keanu Reeves as a dentist.           There is a sort of cutaway, but played more like slightly odd establishing shots. Closeups on name tags, for example. And, maybe it's not fair to judge this film for its focus on the teen. The point of this film seems to be that the adults are just as unsure of things, just as undeveloped, just as incomplete as Justin is. His mother wants to win a date with an actor. H...

I was going to rage tonight, get political, get advantage on ability checks. But, weirdly stressful midday and my students bugged me this evening and I'm in the mood for something simpler. This morning I watched Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 and right now I'm watching Beginners again. And, I feel like some old fashioned Christ-Figuring. If you've been with this blog for a while, you know what that means. If you haven't, then maybe look back on the original Kozlovic Scale Christ-Figuring two-parter (Days 93 and 94 ) regarding Phil Connors in Groundhog Day or what I take as the inaugural Kozlovic-Black Scale*--when I Christ-Figured Rambo . * Yes, I gave myself partial naming rights. If Anton has a problem with that, he has yet to talk to me about it. Anton being Anton Karl Kozlovic, who published a few times on the subject of the cinematic Christ-Figure. And, I've done it several times here. Thing is, I'm going for a twofer tonight. I am going to Christ-Fi...

Beginners quite deliberately echoes itself. The movie begins with daisies in a vase on the windowsill. We'll learn later that is Oliver's mother's vase. We'll learn even near the end of the film that she had a photo of an arm holding daisies that Oliver used to remember as his arm handing her daisies. In the present he imagines it is her arm handing him daisies. Early on, Oliver gives Arthur (the dog) a tour of his apartment. Nearer the end of the film, he gives Anna a tour as well, and even later Anna gives him a tour (over the phone) of her apartment. As a child (and early in the film) Oliver's mom plays as if she's shooting him and he has to perform his death. Nearer the end of the film, of course, it is Oliver's father who dies and Oliver must play... must be the grieving son. Oliver meets Anna and she has no voice (she has laryngitis). Later, when he goes to her place in New York (that tour mentioned above), she is a disembodied voice. And, Olive...

I watched Beginners for this blog before . It was during my ""six degrees of Kevin Bacon" month. It was one link in a chain of connected films... But, as per the usual line here, every movie is such a link, and the chain just keeps getting longer. The movie begins quietly enough, without much pretense. Oliver (Ewan McGregor) cleaning up after--as it will turn out--his father Hal (Christopher Plummer) has died. No voiceover at first. Though there will be plenty more later. Good voiceover, by the way. I made that point before. Like in Mills' more recent 20th Century Women , the voiceover and the cutaways offer "real characterization instead of simple information we could better receive another way" (which is how I put it last February). (It's been a while since I saw his Thumbsucker but I think it did something similar as well.) Then fireworks after the cleaning. Then Oliver talks to the dog, gives him a tour of his apartment and whatnot. Then ...

Instead, we get to Beginners from August: Osage County , the opposite direction of the original plan for this month. Things go backward sometimes. Plans fall apart. Marriages end. College plans get changed. A particular movie isn't available so a month has to be reconfigured so it will all still elicit the same poetry it was supposed to from the start. Poetry may be overselling it, but we'll get to that. (In the meantime, an aside: tomorrow is the Oscars, yesterday I saw the last of the nominees--Foreign Language Film nominee Embrace of the Serpent . This is only the second time I have managed every nominee. I've got a party of a sort tomorrow, but I don't even know how many people are coming. A speech tournament and a conference and a whole lot of sickness will be keeping people away. But, no big deal. Whoever comes comes, and we'll eat, drink, and be merry and I'm sure I'll tweet a whole lot (under my personal account, not the Groundhog Day Project o...