the groundhog day project

The best part of Fletch is not the humor, not the one-liners, or Fletch's deliberate obnoxiousness. The best part is that the plot works, and works well. And, like many a "detective" story-- like Jonny Gossamer novels in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang , "the plots, they all have this thing, this formula that was so cool... two cases that were seemingly unrelated. One's normal, and the other' some wild shit... Then you' defined out that they're connected. That it's all one case." --the two cases/stories that Fletch is working end up more connected than just the coincidence of him hanging out at the beach to look like a junkie and Stanwyk picking him because he seems aimless and disposable. And, the connections don't feel arbitrary. SPOILERS. But really, if you haven't already seen Fletch , you should just go watch it now, come back later. Stanwyk's connection the drug trade is a pretty good reason for him to fake his death and make a run ...

It's interesting that, as a kid, the big mystery films I watched a lot were Murder by Death (watching it now) and The Private Eyes (watching it sometime in the coming weeks, months, years? Who knows how long this "month" will take). Comedies that parody and/or satirize older detective films and stories that I had less access to. My views of detective stories in film would forever be tainted by these movies.           And, I sit here watching (and being distracted by cats and people, but mostly just watching). And thinking about genres, about how we experience them based on past experience. The same way we experience every film, of course, in context of your history with every other film we've seen. And, with genre, we learn the tropes, the conventions, we learn the character archetypes, the usual plots beats and settings. And, after a while, the details become so common and well known (even outside the films (or stories) themselves) that even if you hav...

John McClane was born in 1966 and his name was Joe Leland. He was born in the pages of a novel called The Detective by Roderick Thorp. In 1968 he would be played by Frank Sinatra in a film adpatation. In 1979, Thorp would publish a sequel called Nothing Lasts Forever in which Joe Leland was trapped in a building taken over by terrorists. Supposedly, Sinatra had a clause in his contract for The Detective that made him the mandatory first offer to play the character in a sequel. I'm not sure when that happened, but at some point, Sinatra turned down the role. The script was reworked as a sequel to Commando but Arnold didn't like it... I should mention, since I probably will not have cause to cite specific passages that I am going by information from Ryan Lambie's Den of Geek piece, "The strange history of the Die Hard movies," 24 November 2011; Andrew Barloq's I Choose To Stand blog entry, "Retrospective: Die Hard with a Vengeance (1995)," 10 De...