the groundhog day project

Ice Castles is almost necessarily cheesy and sentimental. This particular story cannot be told any other way. At the core, there are two threads to the story--young girl, Olympic hopeful on the rise, loses her sight, then fights through near-complete blindness to skate again; and same young girl separated from her longtime boyfriend, cheats on him and only though her own struggle with that other story thread can she get her shit together and be with that longtime boyfriend again. It's a basic romance with a Cinderella sort of sports story over the top of it. As for that basic romance, I love Roger Ebert's take on this film... Have we grown so desperate for vicarious cheap thrills that the simple love story is done for? Is it no longer possible to have a movie in which two young people meet in the first reel, smooch in the third, get married in the seventh, and disappear into the sunset as we disappear down the aisles? I must interrupt because any film out of Hollywood wor...

Less important than making my survey is the reasoning behind it. I've said before that I could write a memoir using movies to tell time, a la Fever Pitch . And, the "thesis" if you will for this whole blog (per Day 579 ) is: Our lives can be measured in movies and movies can be measured in our lives and profound and profane depths can be found in the intersection thereof. That is to say, if I can know your favorite movies, know what it is you look for in a movie, then I can know you. I tweeted (and then retweeted with my personal account over to Facebook) a few posts about what people's favorite movies are--their top five. But, it's more than that. For example, there's a huge difference between how I choose my favorite movies and how I might decide what are the best movies. Hell, I don't really even bother with the latter because movies are so subjective, the experience of watching a movie is subjective, and that version of a movie that is left in each ...

At one point in High Fidelity , Rob says "that what really matters is what you like, not what you are like." On the one hand, I think it's both. On the other hand, yeah, I regularly measure people based on what they like. Do they like the same movies as me? (So many.) Do they watch the same TV shows as me? (Again, so many. The highbrow HBO or Netflix originals and the nerd-friendly CW shows. And, I totally understand if you don't like Banshee because a) you haven't even heard of it or, b) you can't handle the brutality of the violence.) Listen to the same music? (Actually, music isn't such a big deal for me. I'm not a one-type-of-music person, though I do obsess about one type at any given time, for sure. I don't need someone else to like what I like, though if you've got a thing for musicals and the occasional heavy metal, the occasional folk rock, we might get along.) Read the same books? (Again, not the most important thing. I mea...

(I'm writing a thesis because my memory is not always what it used to be. Throw some movies in there and they'll stick. But, throw a communication theory and I will absolutely be able to understand it and explain it back to you but later I will have to look up the specifics again. Tonight, I wanted to start with a reference to encoding and decoding in basic communication, and I wanted to reference whoever first used the terms in the way I mean them here, but my theory book is... Well, it's either on a shelf in my office or another grad student borrowed it. Probably the latter. Instead of the book, I google it and find it's totally someone obvious--for we communication scholars, anyway, maybe not for the rest of you--Stuart Hall. 1973, he wrote a piece calls "Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse" and apparently that's where people started using the terms as I'm about to mean them.) Backtrack to The Beatles and "Eleanor Rigby"-...

The Craig Schwartz (John Cusack) does awesome puppet shows in Being John Malkovich . Like his author, Charlie Kaufman, he embraces all that his medium is capable of but uses them to tell intimate, and often very internal, stories. There's plenty of room for big stories in movies, spectacles like Mad Max Fury Road (though that certainly has its intimate moments) but sometimes my favorite films are ones like, well, any of Kaufman's. Existential. Personal. And, however much the fictional version of Kaufman in Adaptation. might want to avoid it, they find profundity in the mundane. Craig also gets inside someone else's skin, as he puts it. Which is effectively what any of us get to do when we watch a film.           I'm not sure if Kaufman could write a normal story. Being John Malkovich , before it even gets to the portal into Malkovich's head, involves an oddball reality like--I don't know-- Joe Versus the Volcano ... or a Wes Anderson movie, maybe. Cra...

Day 888. Eight eight eight. Like three infinities lined up next to one another. A good day to start in on another Charlie Kaufman film, one that deals in a fractal sort of reality, like that painting in Anomalisa . It also deals in depression and paranoia and hypochondria... But really, it deals in a universe where melancholy is the norm and walls burn incessantly and the colour of one's bowel movement is topic of everyday conversation. Synecdoche, New York is the film. Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman)--whose name exists somewhere between the alter ego of a superhero and some sad recluse of a man who barley belongs to the same notion of humanity as the rest of us... Actually, he's a bit too close to the latter to really be the former. Caden directs plays. In the first few minutes of the film, we see a production of Miller's Death of a Salesman and already we have a hint of what this is about. This is about death. In the opening sequence at home, Caden misread a h...

(Options for today: 1. watch Dangerous Minds to continue the teacher film theme (and because I indicated (though without specificity) I would be watching another true story today) and because today is the 20th anniversary of its release. 2. watch Good Will Hunting which I was going to throw in whenever I finish with the teacher movies because today is was the one-year anniversary of Robin Williams' suicide. So, I'm wary of the latter because it will be depressing, but I also don't want my themes to run too consistently or they might be expected; Phase Three of this blog is supposed to be mostly just winging it, whatever movie comes up comes up. I decided to go with neither, but also the second cause. I'm watching The Fisher King , a Robin Williams movie that is zany and fun, and horribly depressing on its own, without even talking about his death. I'm a glutton for punishment. Also, I've been wanting to talk about mental health at least on a personal, some...

After two new movies today-- The Gift and Southpaw --my IMDb seen it list has 4144 titles in it. And, I'm convinced there are still a whole lot of obscure movies I've seen over the years that I've neglected to add to that list. Walking home from the movie theater today, I wondered at what point I will have seen enough movies. Like there's a hole in me that I keep filling with them and at some point it will runneth over. I suppose my "edition" of each of these films (and, to be fair, a few TV series have found their way onto that list, I'm pretty sure) doesn't really take up much space. Not physical space anyway. Backtrack a moment to that "edition" line and flashback to, for example, Day 173 - who dreams of you at night , for a bit from Benesh (2011)--if you are new to this blog, Benesh wrote her doctoral dissertation on Groundhog Day and, over the course of a whole lot of days worth of blog entries, I systematically deconstructed, deba...

Joel tells Clementine when they first meet--because she takes singing "Oh My Darling, Clementine" as a joke about her name--that one of his favorite things when he was a kid was his Huckleberry Hound doll. "I think your name is magical," he says. It's a sweet moment at the end of their story and the beginning of it. A sort of cheery song about loss, and it draws a strange connection between their two meetings and his own childhood long before her--in the bathing scene, Joel as a baby, his mother sings that song. And, that moment is deleted, even though it has nothing to do with Clem. In fact, the damage already was done, I suppose. That Huckleberry Hound doll, one of his favorite things as a kid, would have indirectly been erased by the Lacuna procedure. He tells Clem when they meet (for the second time) that he doesn't know what Huckleberry Hound is. Not just his past two years with Clem but a favorite part of his childhood has been removed. And, I wond...

(I imagine that this entry will be short. In a bit of pain at the moment. Waiting for some ibuprofen to kick in. Had some thoughts in the hospital waiting room about this movie, though. Thought I would share.) It occurs to me that Lacuna cannot charge for its service. Part of the thing seems to be that you don't even remember that you went to Lacuna, so they can't have some charge or withdrawal showing up on your bank statement. Or, the procedure must be reserved only for the super rich who can spend money willy nilly. But, the movie does not suggest that this is how it works. In fact, Lacuna and its customers seem like straight working/middle class. I mean, Clem works at Barnes & Noble, not exactly a sign that she's got a lot of cash to throw around. So, I've got three options for Lacuna (not that I am assuming or suggesting that the company actually exists... not for you peons anyway). Option one: obviously, go pro bono. This is a service, get some sponsors...

(A blue bird and an orange bird. Joel wears blue pajamas. Clem has her orange jacket (and orange hair, though when they first meet (for the second time) she had blue hair... a symbolic remnant of Joel on her head, perhaps. To be fair, Joel also wears a lot of green in the movie, not just blue (and certainly not just those pajamas). Between her coat and her hair, Clem wears a whole lot of orange.) Structurally, I'm starting to wonder about the three-act structure we usually attribute to movies. Kristin Thompson, in her book Storytelling in the New Hollywood: Understanding Classical Narrative Technique (which I have not actually looked at directly, except for a few bits in Google Books ), suggests a four-act structure--setup, complicating action, development, climax and epilogue (those last two are together). These four acts are roughly equal in length. Go back to Syd Field, or most any film out of Hollywood, and the three-act structure is fairly basic--setup, confrontation, res...

"What a loss to spend that much time with someone, only to find out that she's a stranger." This comes from Joel's Lacuna tape just before he goes into the hallway to get Clem to stay at the end of the movie. I don't think it's a loss. The intervening time is worth it. I just read The Velveteen Rabbit this evening. For the first time, by the way. The original version, anyway. In case you don't know what that has to do with Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind , there was a monologue about the book. Part of the scene remains but none of the reference to The Velveteen Rabbit . Originally, Clem, in bed with Joel, asks if he knows the book. CLEMENTINE It's my favorite book. Since I was a kid. It's about these toys. There's this part where the Skin Horse tells the Rabbit what it means to be real. (crying, then laughing at herself) I can't believe I'm crying already. [That line sticks around.] (reading from a worn copy of th...