the groundhog day project

Really, it is simple to understand part of it. Just because you're a bankable actor, or a proven director (having graduated from music videos to feature films), doesn't mean that your life is guaranteed, that you will always have money. Sometimes, you have to make bad movies, or at least not so great movies, to stay alive, and for your career to stay alive. Michael Caine, for example, quite famously said of Jaws: The Revenge , "I have never seen it... but by all accounts it is terrible. However, I have seen the house that it built, and it is terrific." Not every actor can make $20 million a film, and even if they can, you cannot live on that forever if you plan to stay in the limelight. You gotta keep making movies to be able to keep making movies. And, they can't all be the greatest film ever, they can't all be Oscar-caliber, they can't all be blockbusters. For example, it's hard to find the original source for this (it's quoted all over the Inte...

No Oscar nominations for Desperado . Still, despite Roger Ebert 's suggestion, in his review, that Robert Rodriguez had not yet "learned... How to structure a story so that we can care about the violence on more than a technical level," I think there are characters here worth caring about. Plus, the technical level here is so far above so much else that it hardly matters. The simple take--Ebert's: Rodriguez "has a gift for visuals that can make scenes dance on the screen." The more complicated version: After making El Mariachi for $7,000, using local actors and local, well, non-actors, practical effects and readily available locations--plus the camera thing, which I'll get to in a moment--Rodriguez knows how to plan his scenes, how to stage them, how to frame them. Unfortunately--I think--he got sidetracked later into kids films, but there are moments of genius in some of his stuff. The camera thing, and I learned this in either the commentary track o...