the groundhog day project

Ben wants a big answer. His story here begins with a dream that leads to the design of a new antenna the leads to the space bubble thing, which leads to the Thunder Road spaceship which leads to the alien vessel and Ben wants it all to mean something. Like, there's got to be a reason he and Wolfgang are bullied, when Trisha over at Charles M. Jones Junior High School is just as much a nerd... but maybe not as much of a geek. A reason why Steve Jackson and his friends are assholes. A reason why Darren's father is the way he is. Why Darren's mom died when he was young. Why movies like War of the Worlds and This Island Earth can lift Ben out of his mundane suburban life. Why he can't manage the confidence to talk to Lori Swenson. Ben is still a child. He's got a crush on Lori but when he gets the opportunity to hover outside her bedroom window, he isn't looking for her to be undressing--as Darren points out, it's too early in the evening for that--but is e...

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...

In 2000, Fievel Mousekewitz was named an official icon for UNICEF for "promoting worldwide understanding and friendship among children." However much Roger might have dismissed the movie for being too depressing— he wrote, among other complaints, "The movie has such vague ethnic grounds... that only a few children will understand or care that the Mousekewitzes are Jewish. And few of those are likely to be entertained by such a tragic, gloomy story. —the film not only performed well—it was #2 behind Crocodile Dundee its opening weekend and #18 at the box office for all of 1986 (and it didn't come out until November)—but has also endured. A few sequels, a couple video games, a comic book, and some nice retrospective articles years after release. Regarding the latter, for example, Dave Trumbore, who credits An American Tail as the first film he saw in a theater, writes for Collider , 21 November 2016: What I once regarded as a darkly serious and sometimes sil...

It's strange how some movies can be entirely familiar after decades, and some that were familiar once have slinked away out of my head. A few movies ago, I realized that somehow I had conflated Big Business and Outrageous Fortune as one big movie involving, I guess, two pairs of mismatched twins who also share a man and get involved with some sort of organized crime (I still can't quite recall what happens later in this film) and end up in the Mexican desert. Instead there's a genius acting instructor--Stanislav Korzenowski--and just two women (only one of them played by Bette Midler) who both audition for his workshop. And, I'm reminded of when I went to a Meisner workshop a couple years ago with my friend Christi from D&D, and it was fun but I had issues. For one, how the teacher described the way one plays as a child, becoming the thing you are playing at being, was exactly what I meant when I used the word "pretend" which was a semantic argumen...

The thing about Baby is, she is already is someone who wants to make the world a better place. Maybe despite her parents—it's a little presumptuous to think they aren't all for her plans—she wants to join the Peace Corps. The Peace Corps had only recently begun. The first group of volunteers started training in June 1961. She references monks burning themselves in protest—Thich Quang Duc famously did so June 11 1963. Right before the film starts. And, she "wants to send her leftover pot roast to Southeast Asia" (sort of) and she plans to major in "Economics of Underdeveloped Countries"— (I find it odd that Neil tells her that he is "going to Mississippi with a couple of busboys, freedom ride." With a different tone, it could be a sarcastic response to her Peace Corps plan, like he doesn’t buy that a rich Jewish girl like her would deign to do that. Except, the actor playing Neil doesn’t say it that way. He says it like he means it. His reference ...

I want to say coincidence, but I'm guessing there's something more involved than just chance. But, anyway, weird coincidence that Dirty Dancing came out just a month after Adventures in Babysitting and they both* begin with The Ronettes' "Be My Baby". (* This isn’t true but for whatever reason “Be My Baby” sounded just like “ Then He Kissed Me ” in my head and then even as I realized the mistake I was already writing.) Which at least distracted me momentarily-- trying to see if there was a producer or someone in the music department that worked on both these films --from the voiceover narration that lasts all of three sentences. The worst kind of narration, the useless opener because someone involved, probably the director, couldn't think how to establish place and time succinctly. That was the summer of 1963, when everybody called me "Baby" and it didn't occur to me to mind. That was before President Kennedy was shot, before the Beatle...

Jericho "Action" Jackson is a Cowboy Cop (on TV Tropes ). Captain Armbruster is Da Chief . Except neither of them really are. See the thing is, however poorly Action Jackson is executed, it seems to be trying to be something more interesting than just another rulebreaking-cop movie. He's a loose cannon, but DAMMIT he's the best we have! That's the Cowboy Cop . Furthermore: Sure, our society may be built upon rules and procedures, but they usually make for bad television. Sometimes you have to bend the rules, rough up the suspects, moon your supervisors and shred the Constitution to get stuff done. Jackson very much used to be that. As the two officers in that too-long cold open play him up as a bogeyman for criminals: Kornblau: Yeah, some say he didn't even have a mother. That some researchers created him to be the first man to walk on the moon without a space suit.  Lack: Mm-hmm.  Kornblau: Others says his mother was molested by Bigfoot, and...

I go into this viewing of Tremors assuming there will be little to say because it has no flaws. But, then again, I think Back to the Future is one of the best screenplays ever written and I wrote about that thing for like a week. Even starting off with what feels like an obvious matte painting watching it today, and one of our lead characters taking a piss off a cliff. It's a remarkably apt opening shot for the film to come. That cliff will come into play later. And, Val not only being out in the middle of nowhere first thing in the morning (though the light reads more like afternoon) but also taking a piss out in the open tells us a lot about him as a character. Plus the cowboy hat, of course. Earl is introduced asleep in the back of the pickup. And they argue about breakfast, then talk about their schedule in the truck (Earl keeps track, Val wants things easy). Rhonda is introduced as an immediate punchline to what Val wants the new grad student to be--"long b...

I gotta watch Sing Street this week for a podcast, and Fran's outburst here in Strictly Ballroom that was yesterday's (and today's) title reminds me of Raphina's line there: "You can never do anything by half." A basic enough message. You want something, you gotta go for it. What you'd expect from a romantic comedy. Or drama... I mean, movies inherently involve some protagonist going after some goal, some dream, some love, some whatever. Messages aren't going to run deep, and sometimes they're obvious, but that doesn't make them lesser. Like, I've written in this blog a few times about About Time and have a currently running podcast about that film and some of the negative reviews about it complain about its central message--to slow down and appreciate the things around you. And, yeah, that's a basic message, but if more of us followed that advice we wouldn't hear that message so much. Like this movie: don't ...

And, I have decided to go backward for the remaining/additional movie life list movies. So, let us jump forward to 1992... -ish. Really, since we saw this movie at the second-run theater with a movie released in April 1993, we're jumping forward to 1993. And, I'm a senior in high school In the theaters, we saw Strictly Ballroom alongside Benny & Joon , but, while Strictly Ballroom made it into our home and got watched a bunch more times by us and by visiting friends, Benny & Joon did not. At least not as much. And, maybe I'm delusional about the whole thing because Strictly Ballroom is not even on our family "movie list" last updated by me 8 June 1999. So, who knows? Either way, I'm watching Strictly Ballroom today as I work my way backward through a few other fixture movies to, you know, encapsulate my childhood, or something. Baz Luhrmann's first film. Some nobody from Australia. A romance about ballroom dancing. But, we loved it. ...

I don't know why The Great Outdoors starts with "Yakety Yak", but it does. And it reminds me of my recent watching of Stand By Me . A far better film, but they are so different that it's hardly worth comparing. But, comparisons are inevitable when movies come and movies go time and time again. Like, John Candy was was in--what?--two of these childhood fixture movies of mine: Vacation and Splash . He was also in Planes, Trains & Automobiles , which I spent a week on in this blog back in November 2014, except that movies was not a fixture with my family. I'm not even sure we saw it on the big screen. If any Thanksgiving movie made the list, it would be Dutch , which came out in '91 so might be early enough to qualify, or Home for the Holidays , but that didn't come out until '95, far too late for the list, thought we did watch it probably every year for a while there. ( Dutch and Home for the Holidays also each got a week in that November of T...

At the emotional climax of the film, Caldwell gets drunk (off very little alcohol) and sits with Maclure on the roof of Maclure's building, and he has a poorly-written but fairly well-executed monologue as part of his conversation with Maclure: Maclure: Sometimes I think it was easier winning that medal than wearing it. Think any of those people over there give a shit about us? Caldwell: Do we give a shit about them? That's what matters. You know what I think? I think America is like a big fancy house. And we're the Doberman Pinschers.  Maclure: Doberman Pinschers?  Caldwell: A guy hears a noise downstairs, he's really happy to have his big ugly dog. But, the next day when he's got his friends coming around, he locks up the dog. Why? 'Cause he's embarrassed. But at night, sure as shit, he unlocks the dog to protect his big fancy house. If some guy comes in and the dog doesn't bite his ass, he's gonna take a rolled-up newspaper and smack h...

I turned thirteen the year after Josh did. He got the big city fantasy, the cool job (though inside two months it's feeling less cool by the time he leaves), the girlfriend who (eventually) plays along with his childish ways, the great apartment with the high ceilings and open spaces (I wanted Josh's apartment so much when I would grow up. I mean, how could I not think about the things I would want as a grown up when I'm watching this movie. I've said in this blog time and time again before that when I was younger I didn't think too seriously about the future, because, you know, late - Cold - War World War III fears coupled with cult leanings into the end of the world meant I was bombarded regularly by the idea that I would never actually have to adult. Certainly wouldn't grow up to have some corporate job, fun or not. And, I was a sad, overweight, late - bloomer, so the idea of a girlfriend who put up with my shit or not -- that was a bigger fantasy than most...

There is a detail I love in Josh's carnival ride tragedy: though he is distraught at being too short to ride, Cynthia, the girl he has a crush on (who is there with another boy... who drives ), immediately says the height rule is stupid. She stand s up for Josh even as he is already too stuck in his own short - person head to notice. He Charlie Brown walks through the carnival and finds himself in front of that fateful Zoltar machine. And our setup is complete. He is a kid with chores, and a crush on a girl, and when he dares something scary -- and I went on a ride like the loop one he tries at a carnival once, and it was pretty frightening -- and gets close to that crush in line, everything falls apart. Hi s whole world comes apart, really. And, then gets twisted by magic into something else entirely. And, at the other end of the film, the trick is that it is not rejection that pushes him to change back, but something like the opposite. Billy brings him the location of the...