the groundhog day project

Twelve Monkeys starts with some lame text-exposition-- "...5 BILLION PEOPLE WILL DIE FROM A DEADLY VIRUS IN 1997... THE SURVIVORS WILL ABANDON THE SURFACE OF THE PLANET... ONCE AGAIN THE ANIMALS WILL RULE THE WORLD..." --but then makes it awesome by tagging it as "Excerpts from interview with clinically diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic, April 12, 1990 - Baltimore County Hospital." Great counter to get us going. The movie doesn't really leave much room for James Cole (Bruce Willis) to actually be insane--far too much detail (as one might expect in a Terry Gilliam film) in the future opening and later future scenes. But, as long as we can understand that Cole might question his reality later, the drama works fine in that regard. Meanwhile, we get what is probably the best time travel movie ever, or high on the list certainly. Like Timecrimes , Twelve Monkeys never contradicts its time travel. It doesn't play with time and the ability to alter the past. I...

Interestingly, just as started The Sixth Sense tonight, I notice a link to an io9 article—“ The Cultural Curse of Knowledge and Movie Spoilers ”—that doesn’t deal with The Sixth Sense ’s twist and how everybody knows it, but makes a good point about how those of us who know because we’ve seen the film (or any film with a twist, for that matter) almost can’t help but SPOIL it for anyone and everyone without much deliberation or planning. We just do it, because, as Inglis-Arkell (2014) writes in the piece, “People who have some piece of knowledge, whether it's technical or incidental, have a hard time thinking from the point of view of people who don't have the same knowledge.” For more SPOILERS, by the way, here’s a nice shirt from Threadless : The Sixth Sense is on the right, about a third of the way down: THE KID’S THERAPIST IS A GHOST . That’s the big third-act twist. The twist that made M. Night Shyamalan a household name. The twist that “blind-sided” Roger Ebert (1...

The Sixth Sense is all about the twist. That is what everyone remembers, even those who haven't actually seen the film. But, I'd like to start my week of The Sixth Sense by reviewing the movie for itself. Mendelson (2014) reminds us, " The Sixth Sense is really about a mother and son learning to communicate [which leads us right out of talking about The Ring for a week] and its real climax, a heart-to-heart conversation in a car, is a heartwrenching powerhouse that would have rendered the film an absolute triumph even without any kind of twist ending." (Another interesting link between The Ring and The Sixth Sense is that not only do we have a single mother and her son at the core, but in establishing that particular relationship/setting, we get the mother in a state of (semi-)undress, walking around the house, a sort of visual shorthand for a certain working-class, small house, tight-knit family closeness that tells us without dialogue that this situation --t...