the groundhog day project

John Hughes is involved, you know it’s going to be good on some level. Still, my obligatory ruining... or rather a quick quote from Hal Hinson, Washington Post , 27 June 1988: The gags that spring out of this situation were dreamed up by John Hughes, who wrote the script and acts as the film's executive producer, and they're all lame variations on the theme of nightmare vacations. It's hard to imagine how this theme could have been executed with less invention. Really, the main weakness of the film is not the gags--they're basic but executed well--but the disconnected structure. The raccoons, really. It feels like something tacked on when the script was too short. And then there's teen romance that never matters to the rest of the film; it just is. It's cute, but it's separate. Anyway, unlike my usual habit of writing this blog during the film, the film is over as I write now around a few scattered notes. Like this early conversation that is...

On the Stampede Trail near the Sushana River, about ten miles west of the Teklanika and Savage Rivers (and 22 miles from the closest road), sits an abandoned bus--Fairbanks City Transit System 142. Matthew Power (2007), at Men's Journal writes about this "green and white WWII-vintage International Harvester [which] looks surrealy out of place, like an artifact from a vanished civilization." (And, Chris (Emil Hirsch) just found it as I typed that; nice timing.) Power continues: "The bus doesn't at first seem a likely time capsule of American mythology, a shrine to which people from around the world make pilgrimages and leave tributes in memory of a young man whom they see as a fallen hero." Objects, like films, can anchor memories, anchor stories. Looking at the graves in at Boot Hill a few weeks ago, for example--while my kids didn't get it, I thought on the story of the "Gunfight at the OK Corral" the men who died there. If I had a car han...