the groundhog day project

Good versus evil is easier when neither side are bumbling fools . Darth Vader is one of the great film villains despite the simplicity of his motivation--hell, in the original Star Wars , does he even have a motivation? He's evil, he's prone to choking people, he's not quite in charge but his powers mean most other imperials defer to him. But, why is he this Imperial... Tool? Weapon? Knight? His look is iconic enough--and James Earl Jones' voiceover performance as well--that he works in a film aimed at a young audience. George Lucas has a good eye for set pieces, especially when he's not free to do whatever he wants with CGI. He is good at throwing one problem after another at his heroes like we're watching some old serial in some small town theater in the 40s. And here, with The Empire Strikes Back , he's just far enough away from the production--as neither director nor screenwriter--that everything works a little better. I mean, it's not just the bett...

Taken out of the greater context to come--the slasher film as a thing-- Halloween is almost deceptively simple. Michael is given no motivation but for that Loomis puts upon him. I met him fifteen years ago. I was told there was nothing left. No reason, no conscience, no understanding... even the most rudimentary sense, of life or death, good or evil, right or wrong. I met this six-year-old child with his blank, pale, emotionless face and the blackest eyes. The devil's eyes. I spent eight years trying to reach him and then another seven trying to keep him locked up because I realized that what was living behind that boy's eyes was purely and simply evil. And... I watched him for fifteen years, sitting in a room, staring at the wall, not seeing the wall, looking past the wall, looking at this night, inhumanly patient, waiting for some secret, silent alarm to trigger him off. Death has come to your little town, Sheriff. And, of course, after Laurie calls Michael the boog...

I have already written about Halloween in this blog. In fact I wrote about every Halloween film but the Rob Zombie remakes: Halloween - day 427 - he came home Halloween II - day 431 - got angry and started beating her Halloween III: Season of the Witch - day 433 - this whole thing is a big joke Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers - day 443 - maybe nobody knows how to stop him Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers - day 446 - uncle. boogeyman Halloween [6]: The Curse of Michael Myers - day 451 - what's the boogeyman? Halloween H20 - day 453 - no musical sleeping bags, no booze, no drugs, no kidding Halloween: Resurrection - day 455 - every murderous impulse we've ever had I covered slasher films for a month, cited Carol Clover's book Men, Women and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film and Richard Nowell's book Blood Money: A History of the First Teen Slasher Film Cycle , cited numerous published essays, you know, took the genre seriou...

Right away in Cartel Land , the Oscar-nominated documentary I've got playing right now, in which a guy says in voiceover, "There's an imaginary line out there between right and wrong, good and evil. I believe what I'm doing is good. I believe what I'm going up against is evil." In the larger context, that's the idea to just about every film, every story. Not always good and evil but drama virtually requires some sort of binary for everything--with us or against us, in or out, right or wrong, black or white. The best drama, I think, is in the gray areas, the nuance. But, story structure ultimately loops back around to the binary. Even something like Tarantino's latest, The Hateful Eight , full of a lot of bad people with different reasons to be bad comes around to offering us reasons to care about a few of them, finding some to be less, well, hateful. Just before I turned on Cartel Land , though, I was watching another Oscar-nominated documentary-- ...

A few notes: 1. I don't know enough about Vatican II to really speak to the (apparent) decline of Catholicism in the late 1960s and the 1970s. Longtime reader of this blog, Mal, offered some insight in the comments on yesterday 's entry--he described the sense of it as "either lots of priests, nuns, theologians and laymen throwing off the shackles of dogma and tradition, or else a mass submission on the part of Catholics to the fashions of the surrounding culture" and there was "a sense of disorientation and anxiety." 2. I do know plenty about the counterculture, especially in America, and the impression it had on the older generations. (Brag: I'm published on the subject.) And, I can attest that many of the changes going on in America at the time--the pill giving a nice jumpstart to the sexual revolution, for example--created that same "sense of disorientation and anxiety." The Los Angeles Times , 24 November 1968, called Middle Class Ameri...

The problem with American Psycho --and there are many, of course, but one in particular that gets to me--is that Patrick Bateman is depicted as crazy. Sure, it's not entirely normal to kill people. And shouldn't be entirely normal to destroy the lives of others through mergers and acquisitions (though, to be fair, we do not see Bateman actually doing his job, taking over any companies, laying anyone off; we just kind of have to know that's what he does). But, aside from a few key moments, Bateman might as well be homicidal, yeah, but not necessarily mentally ill... He knows what he's doing. And he enjoys it. Only briefly at the end of the film does he seem to show any regret--when he calls his lawyer and confesses to the crimes we've seen and many more. Not long before that call, he has his truly (cinematically) insane moment; when he's standing at the ATM, the ATM tells him to feed it a stray cat. It's debatable (but pointless to debate) whether or not muc...

I have never actually seen the released version of Halloween: Resurrection ; saw it at a test screening. Watching it on Netflix tonight. But, really, I’m barely inclined to talk about the movie itself... Don’t get me wrong. I will still do that. But, with only another day of slasher films left, I feel like I need to try to summarize this month in addition to talking about today’s movie and tomorrow’s ( Freddy vs. Jason ). First, a couple complaints—and I had to pause the movie to rant about both of these things out loud; it’s still paused. 1. Michael Myers, as he exists in this film is not a serial killer. The nurse at the psychiatric hospital just called him one. A serial killer does not show up in a small town and kill a whole bunch of people (14 in one night back in 1978) then disappear for 20 years. A serial killer does not show up 20 years later to kill 6 more people. Keep in mind, this movie is a sequel to H20 , which ignores Return , Revenge and Curse . Now, Clover (1992)...