the groundhog day project

Except , Murder by Death isn't even really a mystery. I mean, it's not like it offers up clues for the audience to solve anything, nor does it even show the detective's discovering useful information for their final solutions (plus all of their final solutions are so far out of left field, and wrong (especially Sam Diamond's (Peter Falk) theory that negates him being himself, which is funny, but ridiculous)). At best, the only things in this film that the audience might be able to figure out along the way, or more importantly, that we see the detectives figuring out, is that there are two dining rooms. Everything else is arbitrary. Which, I suppose is the point. I actually wish I had (back when I was a kid, but also now) more experience with the genre this movie is picking apart. Lionel Twain's (Truman Capote) big speech at the end of the film does however take me in a slightly different direction. But first, here's his rant: You've all been so clever fo...

The heart of Swingers is Mike, especially what I've been calling that scene . If you're with this somewhat depressed guy and can make it through that scene--my daughter was in the room the other day when that scene was on, and her "Oh, sweetie, no," was exactly the kind of response we should have--you're rooting for him, rooting for his life to get better. And, that's easy. Mike is not a jerk like Trent or Sue. He's not there to pad the rat pack esque group at the center of this movie, like Charles--though his "this place is dead, anyway" is amazing--or Rob--whose useful advice about life for Mike could have come from Trent and maybe worked a little better dramatically, structurally. Instead of the latter, we're barely offered up much that is positive about Trent. Sure, he's trying to get Mike out of his apartment but it's hard most of the time to really see Trent doing that for Mike, rather he's taking advantage--or so it seems...

Before I get to the topic I intended for this, the seventh day of The Blair Witch Project , there’s something a detail I’ve left behind. When Heather, Josh and Mike find the “cemetery” with the seven rock piles, Heather mentions a story Mary Brown told them about a pile of rocks. We were not privy to said story. As Heather explains in her journal in the Dossier , “I cannot FUCKING remember what she said about that because I was freaking out trying to keep the interview to two mags” (p. 161). Given the brief (but important ) bit we get in the movie with Mary Brown, it’s hard to believe that the interview came anywhere close to two magazines (mags). The CP-16mm took 400 foot magazines and 400 feet is 16 minutes, so that would mean Heather would have been trying to keep the Mary Brown interview shorter than 32 minutes. We only see Mary Brown for maybe 1-2 minutes total (I haven’t timed it). Gotta wonder, in the reality of the film, what else they got from Mary Brown. Anyway, a potential ...

Watching Boyhood this morning, and a few times there were things I expected might happen that didn’t. The movie—if you don’t know it—was filmed over 12 years and evokes a sense of real life more than the Hollywood-constructed life. A boy doesn’t turn into a man in a single summer that lends itself easily to film—at least not all the time. It takes years. But, anyway, those moments. For example, Mason camps out with some other teenager boys at a house under (mostly done) construction and they’re drinking beers and breaking bits of wood, kicking them while another boy holds them. And, they also throw a saw blade into a spare bit of what looks like sheetrock. So, the end of the scene, oldest boy is going to punch a board held by the one kid who doesn’t want to drink, he’s holding it right in front of his face, and that saw blade is in the wall behind him. In a scripted film—especially a Final Destination film—this is a setup for a horrible injury and a lesson learned about going out ...