the groundhog day project

I'm torn, on this final day with Halloween II ; I wanted to do some Christ-Figuring but I cannot decide if I want to do a serious sort of figuring focused on Loomis or a semi-serious one focused on Laurie, or a probably not serious at all one focused on Michael. The vital question, because I think we know what I got from a movie like this back when I was five years old, is can I manage all three. And, in the process make an even bigger farce of the Kozlovic-Black Scale of Christ-Figuring. Note, in case you are new: the scale is scored out of 25, but there are more than 25 items. 1 tangible and 2 central are easy here, but Michael and Loomis take the lead over Laurie with 3 outsider and Michael takes the lead with 4 divinely sourced (though I could make the argument for Loomis having that point, too). Michael: 4, Loomis: 3, Laurie: 2. No one gets the point for 4.5 miraculous birth but Laurie gets the point for 5 alter ego . I'm tempted to give that point to Michael as...

Watching Howl again. Feeling preachy. Feeling political. Tired of so many news stories about refugees, about terrorists, about transgender men and women using the "wrong" bathrooms and scaring all the nice, upstanding, good Christian folk. How dare anyone want to flee a warzone for somewhere safer. How dare anyone lash out at power when they feel impotent. How dare... Actually, those two cover the transgender thing, too. It's all some bullshit war. Christianity being persecuted, of course, because the rest of us (and some of them) don't want them to be allowed to discriminate and hate and hurt and destroy just because "God" says it's okay. And, I'm watching a film. A film about a poem. A poem about a world destroying those who dare to be different, about those who dare to be different trying to destroy the world, or at least to reshape it into something new, something less demanding and restrictive. A film that couldn't exist at the time of i...

Freud will have to continue a little bit for a couple reasons: 1) there is bit more to say about Freud before I inject some Lacan and 2) I realized that Mulvey doesn't include Jung, so in terms of my paper not being a research paper but an analytical piece based around the supplied readings, I shall leave Jung out of it... even if there may be useful things to say; for instance, much of what Mulvey is trying to argue about how Freudian psychoanalysis connects with common cinematic representation fits with the Jungian idea of the collective unconscious . Effectively, however much a filmmaker intends to put psychoanalytic concepts into a film, they go in anyway. And, even divergent concepts, arguably, exist within film not necessarily because a filmmaker may deliberately be trying to diverge from the norm but unconsciously. But anyway, Freud... Another Freudian idea central to our experience of film, according to Mulvey, is scopophilia , looking as a source of pleasure. The voyeu...

From a psychoanalytic point of view, we can find Freudian, Lacanian and even Jungian imagery and narrative elements in Moulin Rouge! . That's an okay topic sentence, but I think I need an introduction. Most of the following entry will be part of my upcoming media theory paper if it goes well, so I've got to worry about structure and formal content a little more than usual. Still, I will interrupt if I need to, and just cut these parts later. Anyway... Figuring on maybe looking at Moulin Rouge! in terms of psychoanalysis (which I will work on during this viewing), as a populist film and... probably queer theory, since I;m working on a presentation on queer theory for performance studies, or as an auteur film (except we're not expected to do research outside the readings we had for class, so that one might not be so doable. Our class defines musical as a genre even if I do not, so I could go with that. Whatever I end up using, the following should be a bit of what I'l...

I was talking about mythology. As I mentioned near at the end of yeterday’s entry, Harty (2000) calls “the Arthurian myth… central to the plot of M. Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense ” (p. 57). He compares Cole Sear to King Arthur, pointing out the obvious allusion in the second of the two school plays we see in The Sixth Sense , in which Cole now has the lead and the braggart child actor Tommy Tammisimo plays the village idiot… (It’s worth pointing out here that there is no internally logical reason for this reversal of roles. We in the audience don’t like Tommy, sure, but the movie has not told us he was cast in the prior play because of his one professional acting job or that Cole has any acting ability himself. Not that elementary school plays are built on great acting. We may assume that Cole got the lead because he has gained new confidence with Malcolm’s help, and that seems to be the intent of the scene; it just bugs me that Tommy’s character even exists here, since his onl...

To begin today, I nitpick: Benesh (2011) summarizes Groundhog Day in chapter one of her dissertation. And, in making a link between the film--or rather, all film--and our active imaginations, she mentions the phrase "no consequences." She calls it "a phrase that Phil Connors... uses at one point to describe his unique situation" (p. 8). She's wrong. That's Gus' line, not Phil's. But, I don't really intend to nitpick Benesh today (it just fits my character to do so). In fact, I rather like her first chapter. I like the approach she takes to connecting film and dreaming. I particularly appreciate a line she quotes from Beebe (2008): ...in addition to wanting to be entertained, the mass audience is in constant pursuit, as if on a religious quest, of the transformative film. (p.20) Thus a film can be a metaphor that teaches us something about how to live, not in a prescriptive way, but in an evocative one, by allowing us to vicariously expe...