the groundhog day project

I turned thirteen the year after Josh did. He got the big city fantasy, the cool job (though inside two months it's feeling less cool by the time he leaves), the girlfriend who (eventually) plays along with his childish ways, the great apartment with the high ceilings and open spaces (I wanted Josh's apartment so much when I would grow up. I mean, how could I not think about the things I would want as a grown up when I'm watching this movie. I've said in this blog time and time again before that when I was younger I didn't think too seriously about the future, because, you know, late - Cold - War World War III fears coupled with cult leanings into the end of the world meant I was bombarded regularly by the idea that I would never actually have to adult. Certainly wouldn't grow up to have some corporate job, fun or not. And, I was a sad, overweight, late - bloomer, so the idea of a girlfriend who put up with my shit or not -- that was a bigger fantasy than most...

I wasn't sure if I wanted to watch and write about Highlander another time. I felt I had little to say that wouldn't take me past some breaking point where I might have to obsess, you know, build a blog or a movies-by-minutes podcast around it, dig into each and every detail. I wanted to write more about White Nights the other day, but a) I got to that movie on the 1st of the month and on the 2nd I return to Groundhog Day , 2) it would be awkward (at least in my head) to write about White Nights , step away from it, and then come right back to it after a day away, and d) what I wanted to say about it had to do with the present; I mean, White Nights is okay, but it ain't a great film, but there was something about the dancing, especially some of the stuff Baryshnikov was doing in that cold open, serious strength moves that I was a little envious of because I'm sitting here by my couch, overweight, drinking an adult beverage and lamenting that I can't do th...

Let us start with the cynical take: love is a fantasy. But, that is exactly why the romance in Romancing the Stone works. The premise itself is Joan Wilder's life echoing her romance novels, fantastic adventure, treasure hunting, a mysterious stranger, relentless villains. If we buy into the premise, it is very easy to buy into the romance, because the one fantasy is nested quite comfortably within the other. Damon Suede, possibly a pseudonym, writing for Romance University , says: Romance authors love Romancing the Stone because it simultaneously ribs and respects the genre. [Screenwriter Diane] Thomas got romance at a visceral level, and for all the winking send ups of romantic cliché, she embraces them shamelessly... no small feat. It has remains a touchstone in Hollywood and within the Romance community for a simple reason: Romancing the Stone remains one of the only blockbuster hits in pure romance. Suede goes on to explain how classic romance films are generally melodr...

My impulse for today was to write about the so-called manic pixie dream girl . Madison in Splash is perhaps an early prototype for a such-labeled character. But, then I was looking up pieces about those stereotypical cinematic women who, according the the TV Tropes definition, exist to "come along and open [the] heart [of a "soulful, brooding male hero"] to the great, wondrous adventure of life" and I realized something interesting... And not entirely unbelievable given the patriarchy's ability to self-perpetuate: the term coined by Nathan Rabin at AV Club that implied a weakness in "the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors" turned into a way to put down female characters instead of their creators. As Zoe Kazan, who starred as an all too easily labeled manic pixie dream girl who quite literally sprung from the fevered imagination of a sensitive writer in Ruby Sparks (but that character actually came from Kazan's own imagination, a...

I have to check old reviews of movies I'm watching from years ago because, having grown up with these things, it is impossible to be entirely objective. Like, I know Staying Alive is awful but I love it anyway. Krull , on the other hand, has gained a cult following even if it was initially a box office failure. Siskel and Ebert gave the film two thumbs down and purportedly [the YouTube clip of their show is gone] called it "one of the most boring, nonsensical, illogical fantasies in a long time." I like Lawrence Watt-Evans' description from Starlog --because it sounds like a defense I might make, arguing for the good regarding a detail that is obviously bad: Krull is not a real place. Although we're told that the Slayers have been burning villages, we never see a village, burned or otherwise. We never see a farm; the White Castle is surrounded by scenic, empty landscape, not by the crowd of peasants who clustered around any real castle. Nobody ever appears o...

It's that time of the blog, that time of the year, that time of life. As Krull begins, continuing this deconstruction of my childhood with film, I'm imagining doing something else other than this blog. I imagine, perhaps a podcast or a different version of the YouTube stuff I was doing. For example, today I saw Thoroughbreds after work and I can imagine an interesting conversation to be had about that movie that might head off on multiple tangents: 1) talk of Anton Yelchin and how it's unfortunate that someone like him will never be as famous as James Dean because there are so many more films and so many more film stars today than there were when Dean died. 2) Anya Taylor-Joy uses her expressionless performance yet again but she also has actual scenes of emoting. (Though, Olivia Cooke's ability to be expressionless is exactly why she was cast in her part, and that's unfortunate.) 3) A discussion/debate about violence in film, whether or not a film that includes ...

The real stakes of High Road to China are not in the physical adventure, the flying (though that does make for a great metaphor), the fighting (though that, too, makes for a great metaphor), the exotic locales (though that...) The parantheticals are making my point ahead of me. The voyage here is not hat exciting--there are not great stakes and the at the end of the film our heroes have not actually succeeded at what they set out to do (though Evie's father does tell O'Malley that Evie will inherit all of his formulas and patents, if not his company, if he is declared dead, so it's not all bad). Instead, what we have is two people trapped in their own freedom, and they need something else. What I mean is, look at Evie and O'Malley at the start of this story. Evie, a flapper, dances and schmoozed with wild abandon. But she can only maintain this lifestyle because she has money, her father's money. Charlie tells her that she will lose it all if she cannot pr...

As far as criticism goes, the biggest flaws in An Officer and a Gentleman come from pieces of the premise itself, pieces of 1982 American society as depicted. That there were towny women like the Puget Debs is believable. That their relationships with the men in Officer Candidate School might go like those of Mayo (Richard Gere) and Paula (Debra Winger) or of Sd (David Keith) and Lynette (Lisa Blount) is believable. Any inherent sexist bullshit, as I might term it most days, comes from the era more than the film. What I find remarkable within all that, though, is that--and obviously, Richard Gere got me thinking of this--is the differences between this and, say, Pretty Woman . An Officer and a Gentleman comes from screenwriter Douglas Day Stewart coming off of The Blue Lagoon , and director Taylor Hackford coming off of Idolmaker . A combination that seems set for romanticism of some sort, to be sure. Roger Ebert says in his review , "Love stories are among the rarest of movie...

Consider another angle. Maybe Michael isn't Laurie's id . Rather, Laurie is Michael's super-ego. Michael wasn't waiting for the opportunity to kill again. He could have done that at any time. He was waiting to be judged for having killed. This is why he follows Tommy first. He can feel a connection with Tommy. Tommy is just like him, a little boy full of imagination and potential. And, Laurie looks after Tommy. Like Judith didn't look after Michael all those years ago. This means Laurie's repression is even more important to the story than already suggested. She isn't free of Michael's violence (up to a point--and that point matters) because she doesn't have sex and do drugs (Notably, Michael probably has no idea Laurie was smoking in Annie's car. He's following them, but that doesn't mean he can see what's going on inside.) but because being that pure, virginal girl, she can pass judgment on him. He wants approval. He wants disa...

Hobgoblins is a good example for exploring why a bad movie is bad... Well, there can be many reasons, but this is a big one. Like the more (in)famous Troll 2 , Hobgoblins ' biggest mistake is not knowing what it wants to be... Or rather, failing entirely at being what it seems to want to be by not going far enough. Troll 2 , for example, leans toward serious sexual moments with Creedence but backs off before it goes too far. Instead, perhaps because it was made by Italians directing a bunch of Mormons, it aims at being quaint, being kid-friendly. Hobgoblins makes that same mistake. Phone sex worker magically shows up in person, but is there any sex? Nope. Amy secretly desires to be a stripper, apparently, but strips down to about the same amount of cloth you'd see in a Jane Fonda Workout take from this same decade. Sure, her lyrics are leaning toward explicit. Like that line about showing everyone she's not wearing any underwear, but then the hobgoblins turn everything t...

And sometimes, I take the bad movie personally. Sometimes, it's not supposed to be a bad movie at all. Sometimes it's a sequel to one of my favorite films as a kid and I'm excited, and then increasingly disappointed as I watch the horrible followup. That followup: Highlander II: The Quickening . Roger Ebert's review begins with a lovely line about the awfulness of this film: "This movie has to be seen to be believed. On the other hand, maybe that's too high a price to pay." I have paid that price twice. I saw this movie in the theater. Second run theater, actually. Didn't see it opening weekend. I cannot remember if I knew ahead of time not to rush out to it, maybe some bad things said about it in Starlog magazine. Maybe I (or my parents, though I could drive by then) was just busy. I also rented the film on VHS once. Imagine, if you will, my confusion, having loved the swordfighting and magic in the original Highlander , coming into this movie wit...