the groundhog day project

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...

A thought occurred to me while watching Bloodsport last night. (It's on again right now, but it has only just started, with the random bits of violence against objects and that one white guy fighting that one black guy and shots of people setting up the competition space.) I'm not sure why my parents enjoyed this movie. I mean, I know the movie is somewhat enjoyable on its face. American's love action films, generally. But, 1) I swear we saw this movie more than once at the second-run Academy Theater and 2) other action films make more sense for, you know, religious folks. I mean, Rambo fights evil Communists, John Matrix fights, um, that guy who's raising his own army for... reasons I don't remember. John McClane fights "terrorists". Etcetera. Frank Dux is just fighting other fighters for... well, for sport, I guess. But, it' snot like my family were fans of wrestling or boxing. They watched baseball, and fairly exclusively baseball. No bas...

Backing away from the serious angle, I must admit, I don't really understand Reverend Whirley's plan. Teaming up with the pornographer so they can keep their dispute constant and both profit off of it is actually an interesting plan. Except, that is not the Reverend's plan. That is what it seems like his plan is, and what the pornographer thinks the plan is, but then, no the police commissioner is in on whatever it going on as well, and they're going to kill the pornographer because... reasons. Seriously, what does killing Jerry Caesar get the reverend? Bait Magazine will likely still continue. It's been around for 25 years, so it's most definitely a corporate entity far bigger than Caesar. And, there are other, similar magazines out there; will the reverend kill each one of those magazines' owners as well? Is this going to be an overt, and even publicly acknowledged, war on smut, as it were? And, if so... What is the purpose of the P.A.G.A.N situatio...

To continue somewhere before I left off, I was not sent off to boarding school like Morgan. I just had private school, which meant very few friends in my neighborhood, and limited interaction with my friends outside of school, which limited my social life, I'm sure. Or maybe my introversion has other sources and it is just easy to blame the religious environment in which I grew up, and which isolated me from the larger world for a while. I definitely blame that upbringing for my attachment to film. I mean, why wouldn't I envelop myself in fiction as much as fucking possible when I'm being told on a regular basis that the world is ending? But then, I'm trying to come up with a comedic way to talk about the differing politics of my parents and me, even my oldest siblings and me. But, there's a pandemic and rioting and I am inclined to get into a serious rant instead... Or to focus entirely on the film today to avoid all that. As if that's possible. ...

I wasn't sure if I wanted to watch and write about Highlander another time. I felt I had little to say that wouldn't take me past some breaking point where I might have to obsess, you know, build a blog or a movies-by-minutes podcast around it, dig into each and every detail. I wanted to write more about White Nights the other day, but a) I got to that movie on the 1st of the month and on the 2nd I return to Groundhog Day , 2) it would be awkward (at least in my head) to write about White Nights , step away from it, and then come right back to it after a day away, and d) what I wanted to say about it had to do with the present; I mean, White Nights is okay, but it ain't a great film, but there was something about the dancing, especially some of the stuff Baryshnikov was doing in that cold open, serious strength moves that I was a little envious of because I'm sitting here by my couch, overweight, drinking an adult beverage and lamenting that I can't do th...

Recent high school graduate who, sure, has flown a fighter jet at least once--we see it in flashback--plans a rescue effort in unnamed Northern African nation along with a few friends and a retired pilot in three days (and that includes executing the mission itself). The plot alone is silly. But, worse--and I almost wish I had time to catalog all of this--it uses the same footage over and over again. Obvious case in point: every single time Doug fires a weapon, there's the same shot of thumb pressing button. And, when it's the machine gun, always the same closeup of it firing: And, then there's everything in act one between Doug's father's capture sequence and Doug and Chappy teaming up. Doug drives like an asshole. Then he fights with Knotcher for also driving like an asshole. And, then they can't fight because--and this is an almost clever infodump scene--Doug can't get in trouble for fighting again. Then, brother shows up with Doug's ...

For a movie that hinges on some rather exciting sequences, Iron Eagle starts out with some really slow, boringly scored footage of jets flying. Like we were all going to get off just seeing jets flying... which maybe we were in 1986. I know there were these books in our school library that were basically just visual and technical guides to military vehicles and it was like pro-America propaganda and war porn wrapped up in a series of... I guess they were Time Life books, but I was never as into them as a couple friends of mine were. But, give me a good action movie with Americans taking on Communists or Arabs for, you know, whatever reason, and surely I cheered like anyone else did in the theater. Iron Eagle was, of course, one of a string of jingoistic action movies in the 80s that offered an extra bit of fun for a kid--the protagonist was not some stuffy adult, was not some guy who follows all the rules (And, how was it so fucking common for protagonists in so many 80s films,...

It's remarkable sometimes how the silliest of films can work just as well as the best of them to bring me back to long ago, you know, happier times, when I was a cute little kid without a care in the world except for, well, the second coming of Jesus, Armageddon, the apocalypse, and everything* that I've ever cared about ceasing to be. (* except for my loved ones, of course, but damn it, what about my toys? What about these movies I loved? What about books? Games? The important stuff in life.) No cares but the biggest. And, Top Secret! , in particular, plays on some of that biggest stuff. Late in the Cold War... And then I got to wondering about exactly when this film takes place. I mean, Nick's music is very Elvis. So, I paused on the Billboard Top 40. Nick Rivers has #1 #2, & #4, with "Skeet Surfin'", "Skeetin' USA" and "Skeet City", respectively. He also has #3 in a duet with Tammy Wynette on "You're Skeetin' He...

Shall we talk about Never Say Never Again ? Or shall I ignore Octopussy , playing now, to talk about the four other movies I watched today to finish off this year's Oscar nominated films, with a couple weeks to spare? Because, I totally did that. An extra day off, and this week is speech week in my classes, so I've got nothing to prep, so I ignored the olympics for today, ignored any Dungeons & Dragons planning I might need to make soon, and turned on three documentaries ( Last Men in Aleppo , Icarus , Strong Island ) and one foreign language film ( On Body and Soul ) (all conveniently on Netflix, hence putting them off to the end). But, how about that Never Say Never Again ? Actually, I don't intend to talk about the film itself. I think I only ever saw it all the way through the one time, in the theater. I was seven, mind you, and I knew about the copyright issues that led to there being two different James Bond films in the same year. Never Say Never Again and Oc...

It occurs to me, sitting her with For Your Eyes Only playing once again, that I do not have much else to say about it. I think I've covered whatever my 5-year-old self got out of it. The hidden curriculum of James Bond, anyway. On the surface, I enjoyed it. If, watching this film, you have not seen too many thrillers or spy films just yet (which, me at five--I hadn't seen too many), it's well crafted enough to keep you paying attention. (Though, to be fair, there's no mystery to it, so there's no room for guessing. But anyway, I guess there is just this: Bond could have saved himself a lot of time by not going to Spain at all, just heading straight to Greece, finding the wrecked ship (or finding Havelock's notes without the aid of Melina, then finding the wrecked ship-- or better yet, he could have stayed home while a professional diving team working for MI6 goes to find it --and retrieving the ATAC device, and heading back to London... with maybe one...

Backtracking a bit before really getting into The Fox and the Hound . I talked yesterday about the Mandela Effect, particularly related to how I never knew Tod's name had only one D, but also how many people remember Chief dying rather than just breaking his leg. But, there's another thing about The Fox and the Hound that vexes me. I couldn't be sure about it until the movie was over yesterday--and I had already posted the blog entry, so I couldn't add this then--that I had invented this (or maybe my mother did or one of my sisters; like, maybe it was a thing we said in response to the dialogue in the film and I just always remembered it as being actual dialogue. (If it is that, I am sure one of my sisters will chime in after I post this entry. The youngest two, at least, pay some attention to this blog.) So, this is the thing (and this will actually tie in to the topic I expected to write about today, which is fortunate): Copper and Tod, when they are still cute an...

I was going to watch The Empire Strikes Back again today and write about how different people use it, how they put it into their corner, make themselves the rebels, the freedom fighters, or point out how the rebels are not necessarily good, even if they are the heroes. Instead, I'm catching up on some TV shows on the DVR tonight. And, this morning I saw Lady Bird . I won't review it here but to say, it's good; Greta Gerwig makes for a fairly confident director and writer (only her second time doing the former, and her writing credits on IMDb are... I'm not sure exactly what she's written, or how much of particular things she's written), though I hope she continues acting as well; Saoirse Ronan is great in it, as is Laurie Metcalf as her mother, and the film makes for a very thoughtful, if occasionally contrived bit of cinema. During the film I was noting certain lines of dialogue to use for the title for this entry, and an early contender was i wish i could ...

I never got to the second . Yesterday , I mean. I quoted some Alexander Hamilton, then got to ranting and rambling about a topic with a political bent--far, one might argue, from Blackbeard's Ghost . And, in particular, I said, "First, there's that line about seeing desolation and ruin everywhere." But, I never had a second to pair with that first . And, that provides me a mild disappointment. Before I move on to my final thoughts regarding the links between Blackbeard's Ghost and the formation of my identity as a film aficionado and as a human (because, I suppose, at times, the two things must be separated), I must have at last a second . And, it is this: Hamilton, near the end of the passage I quoted, says, "Say not, we have suffered also, and thence withhold your compassion." You know, your all lives matter crowd, your--and, here, I will raise the ire of some for sure--folks who blame antifa for the violence in Charlottesvilke as if a crowd of ...

The only time I saw Ishtar from beginning to end was on a plane. We were flying to England, I think [My sister tells me it was a trip to Hawaii.]. The movie felt longer than the flight. But, I have very little memory of the content from then. I've seen scattered moments from the film in the intervening years, but I have never sat down to watch the whole thing again. Supposedly, it's one of the worst films ever made; that's a superlative I should have sought out before now. Yet, here I am.           Twenty-two minutes before we get to the desert. I remembered none of that from seeing this before. And now, it feels like a different movie... And, I'm reminded of Spies Like Us , which also had a couple losers getting inadvertently involved in international affairs. Except, with better comedy, and, considering the timing ( Spies Likes Us came out in 1985, Ishtar in 1987), Spies Like Us made for a better twist on the tail end of the Cold War... Except I'm n...