the groundhog day project

Explorers opens with Ben asleep with his TV on ( War of the Worlds is on), dreaming about flying over a Tron -ish circuitboard reality. He wakes and frantically draws a piece of his dream. Then he calls up Wolfgang to talk about it. As you do. A good dream. A good movie. You gotta share with someone, gotta talk about it. Or at least I do. This blog is some of the obvious evidence. The Junior High the boys attend here is Charles M. Jones... That is, Chuck Jones, the cartoonist. Not the name of the High School where they filmed, but chosen deliberately. Because the cartoon reference matters. This is a movie about creativity and imagination and I just found out that Wolfgang's house is not far from where I'm writing right now, and I love that.           This Island Earth is the next movie we see, after some science fiction magazines and books. But, per the movie later, the island is not isolated. Like the immigrants in yesterday's An Am...

Headline from HuffPo : Did Back to the Future Originally End With 'To be Continued'? They say no. I say, fuck HuffPo , fuck whatever Mandela Effect reality you all are from, it was there on the big screen in my head, and was not some thing they added for VHS. I mean, sure we must've rented the movie to watch again at home once it was on video, and I'm sure the copy we dubbed off cable (Or maybe off the rental tape, not that I will admit that we ever did that, you know, with the bit of tape over that little indent on the one side so the machine can make a copy... Or was it breaking the tab in the indent and hoping the rental place didn't notice? I can't actually remember that bit because I have recorded things from one tape to another, entirely legally, so many times that I forgot how to do it illegally. Not that I am admitting that I ever knew how to do it illegally.) included the TO BE CONTINUED and I saw the VHS copy more than I ever saw the movie i...

A bit of a cheat, here. Technically, Escape from New York is not a fixture of my childhood the way (most of) these movies have been in this deconstruction. That is, it is not a film that I watched a lot when I was particularly young. I don't think I even saw it when it was new. I did see it on tv or cable or video when I was still quite young, but it really only became a fixture, in terms of repetition, when I was a teen. Still, it makes the list. And the reason is simple: parts of this film stuck with me. I'm saying this as the movie begins, and it has been several years probably since I last watched this thing, so I'm not 100% sure this is even the movie I'm remembering remembering. Some ugly, mutant-looking guy attacked Snake--that was a scene that stuck with me. Like, for years, I remembered one particular detail of the Haunted Mansion ride at Disneyland before I went on it again and fixed the rest of it in my memory; it was the wood door bending, and I had nig...

Let's see... Fox News Anchors Concerned This Wonder Woman Isn't Wearing Her Star-Spangled Underwear Why 'Wonder Woman' is less American than ever Wonder woman, feminist icon or bodacious fantasy figure? Let me echo Benesh (2011) before I get into this: ...according to Izod, after the film, "active imagination takes over and develops the recollected cinematic imagery by fusing it more completely with personal fantasy material. In the process, both are liable to change" (pp. 273-274). Thus, for viewers... An imprint remains as during the film the audience members "introject" or take in its psychic content including symbols, images, and narrative, as well as projecting individual personal concerns. After the film, if it is particularly "resonant," the process continues as the film "plays on" in the viewer's mind. A personal "edition" of the film is thus created and is assimilated into the psyche of the viewer. ...

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 ...

The last recap was Day 942 - what we got here is a little game of show and tell . Today is Day 1000. So, how about a quick reminder of where we've been lately. Day 943 - the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth took Murder in the First as its jumping off point, ended the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon month and was maybe the thematic end to this blog because that's where every movie was every other movie and the message was on repeat. Day 944 - i'm going out to punxsutawney was a thing I wrote for class about my pilgrimage to Woodstock, Illinois and meeting Danny Rubin, and Danny Rubin later sent me a lovely message about it on Facebook. Then I drifted. The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Them 945 946 947 The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Him 948 949 950 The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Her 951 952 953 The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Them 954 955 Antichrist 956 The Squid and the Whale 957 958 959 Mrs. Doubtfire 960 961 ...

Drifting away from the horror film itself for the moment. Room 237 is on instead of a second day with The Shining because I think it's important to understand why we do this. Why I do this. Why you read this, for that matter. These movies--they're just movies. We don't really need all the subtext to enjoy them. I would never argue that there is no subtext; in fact, I think there is always subtext. For example, maybe it's about the Tang cans or the Golden Rey boxes over the Calumet cans. Picking one detail out of many says more about you (me) than it does about the film. Day 113 , I wrote: Why am I doing this? Because someone needed to. Because every piece of art deserves to be studied and broken down. Every piece of fiction deserves to be dissected until we know not just what it means but what it can mean. Chuck Klosterman, reviewing Room 237 for Grantland , says, "It introduces a new way to experience and consider movies." I'm trying to rememb...

After two new movies today-- The Gift and Southpaw --my IMDb seen it list has 4144 titles in it. And, I'm convinced there are still a whole lot of obscure movies I've seen over the years that I've neglected to add to that list. Walking home from the movie theater today, I wondered at what point I will have seen enough movies. Like there's a hole in me that I keep filling with them and at some point it will runneth over. I suppose my "edition" of each of these films (and, to be fair, a few TV series have found their way onto that list, I'm pretty sure) doesn't really take up much space. Not physical space anyway. Backtrack a moment to that "edition" line and flashback to, for example, Day 173 - who dreams of you at night , for a bit from Benesh (2011)--if you are new to this blog, Benesh wrote her doctoral dissertation on Groundhog Day and, over the course of a whole lot of days worth of blog entries, I systematically deconstructed, deba...

(No recap today. The last one was Day 608 - teens tonight . I should have one today--got 28 days of identity movies and 32 days worth of Westerns to recap--but I did not have time to prepare the list of links ahead of time. For my thesis work, I'll have a complete list of every entry and all the links put together within the next month, so expect a good recap on Day 730... which may be the last entry of this blog.) For today, though, the approach is simple: Groundhog Day is a Western. Specifically, Groundhog Day , structurally, falls right in line with Wright's (1975) claassical plot . (First, I suppose I should explain something. Phase 2 of this blog ends after this month, just today's viewing of Groundhog Day , four weeks with four different movies, then another viewing of Groundhog Day . And, I'm mulling over options beyond that. I could continue as I have been--but no more variant* months like that last one; different movie every day, but same theme, and I...

Because I'm sure many have not heard of it, let alone seen it, I must explain: Stories We Tell is a documentary about a mother, about a family, about the way we re-create memory in the telling of it, about how we decide what is history and what is not. Future thesis-writing me (sometime this summer probably), will appreciate the following. This is a reflection of everyday life; we pick and choose the moments within our past to hold onto, we pick and choose the people in our lives that matter and those worth forgetting, we pick and choose what parts of our personalities to express and which to hide away where no one else can see it, and we pick and choose the face we put on, the clothes we wear, the words we say. In other words, we invent ourselves as an ongoing process. You do it. I do it. Life is a story we are constantly telling and retelling until, we hope, we get it right. Of course, there is no right . There's just the way it is. Right off the bat, I must say of Storie...

Note #1 - I skipped a movie on my list today—I will get to it in a few days—because I wanted Day 450 of this blog to be something I knew I liked. I barely remember Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation but I know it had some issues with its release... and I’m using that to move it down the line for this “month” of slasher films. In case you haven’t been paying too much attention, I’ve been going in order of cinematic release (in the US). I skipped that particular film past its initial release to its later release, so that I could watch... Note #2 - Well, so that I could watch Wes Craven’s New Nightmare tonight. And speaking of release dates, I first saw this film before it was released in theaters, saw it at a test screening at the United Artists Marketplace Theater in Old Town Pasadena. At the time, it seemed like New Nightmare was just a working title. But, the prospect of Wes Craven returning to the series was good reason to go see the film as soon as possible. Now, onto...