the groundhog day project

Waiter coded gay. Fritz a condescending ass pretending he's looking out for JC's interests. And that's where the sacrifice conversation begins. At the end of the film, JC insists she still doesn't want to make sacrifices, and yet she has already made most of the sacrifices that Fritz is talking about. She has a kid, has a house to look after, has a growing business. I don't remember if we see them, but she's got to have employees. Is she going to talk like Fritz later with her female employees? Steven doesn't like JC dreaming about a vacation home and sex with him takes seconds and he calls it incredible when she is clearly not at all satisfied. Feminism in the 80s still loves capitalism. JC's problem, Baby Boom would have us believe, is not her work ethic, even though 70-80 work hours a week will not fit with having a child. And JC is not satisfied with Vermont. Hughes rejects JC ostensibly because she has a child (but really because she bro...

Leia is awesome. It should go without saying. Especially after so many years. Many people have written about her (and about Carrie Fisher) over the years. And, Fisher herself has had plenty to say. For example, in Rolling Stone , 21 July 1983, she says, "There are a lot of people who don't like my character in these movies; they think I'm some kind of space bitch." She follows that up with: She has no friends, no family; her planet was blown up in seconds--along with her hairdresser--so all she has is a cause. From the first film... she was just a soldier, front line and center. The only way they knew to make the character strong was to make her angry. But, that isn't really true. 1) she may have friends. Star Wars Rebels has shown us recently that Leia was involved with the rebellion for a while before the events seen at the end of Rogue One and the opening of Star Wars , but even as a rebel, she could have friends. At home an Alderaan, maybe. Or she goes ou...

I can relate to Amos and Theodore right now because sometimes plans go awry. I was supposed to be watching the original Star Wars today. But, 1) I don't own a copy of that film anymore, 2) it costs $17.99 to buy it on Amazon Prime (and apparently isn't available for rental), 3) I actually bought the original trilogy on video on eBay a few days ago hoping it would be here in time, so I didn't really want to spend money on it anyway (and that VHS trilogy did not arrive in time; let's hope it gets her tomorrow), but then this led to a dilemma earlier, 4) I had no movie to watch today. So, I was looking up--trying to keep things chronological--movies that also came out in 1975 or that came out in 1976 that fit the bill for this month, that is, I watched them a lot as a kid. There were some good movies in those years-- Carrie , Rocky , The Godfather Part II , Jaws , One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest , Taxi Driver , and two films I've actually watched for this blog be...

That a lonely degenerate like Donavan can learn to care about three orphans or the woman he's convinced to marry him for the sake of said orphans, is a nice thought. That two incompetent fools like Amos and Theodore can not only find one another to spend time with but also manage to (somehow)... thrive seems like the wrong word, but they seem to be doing okay. And, that's a nice thought, too. Then there's the--dare I say it--gender-nonconforming stagecoach driver who... Actually this one is problematic. Over the course of the plot, she is manipulated (nicely) into a sham marriage and being a mother to three orphans because that degenerate Donavan would rather run off to gamble in New Orleans. She has to--according to the film, anyway--eventually wear a dress, and earn Donavan's appreciation, if not his love. I already suggested yesterday that one detail isn't necessarily sexist--that Donavan is a bad parent figure because he's a selfish asshole and Dusty is...

A note before I begin: tonight's dinner is burritos and there are some chips and dip. This is the kind of meal we used to serve when we'd have people over to watch movies. Of course, there's no actual meat in the burritos anymore, as I'm a vegetarian now. But, it's an echo of the stuff we'd make when folks were coming over to watch a movie like this one... Most of the people coming over to watch movies happened in the latter half of the 80s and into the 90s, I'm pretty sure. But, this "month" is bundling all of it together. (Secondary note: apparently, I’ve been misnumbering the blog days for the last couple weeks and only just noticed. Today is Day 1141 even though I called yesterday 1040 on Twitter and Facebook.) Now, on to Adventures of the Wilderness Family one last time. One scene that undermines some of what comes later in Adventures of the Wilderness Family comes just after the family meets Boomer (the mountain man who wanders into the...

You gotta wonder, actually, how detailed the script for Adventures of the Wilderness Family even was. Aside from a few scenes, there isn't much dialogue, the story turns arbitrarily--hey, look, a cougar; hey, look, a bear; hey, look, another bear; hey, look, a random mountain man; hey, look, arbitrary use of slow motion; hey, look, Jenny's sick despite our rather basic attempt to save her from urban pollution--and there isn't really much of a plot, not a formally structured one anyway. This is 1975, but as I've said before cinematic decades bleed into one another. This is more a tail-end 60s film, a family-friendly extension of the counterculture. Skip Robinson is like a shoulda-been hippie who turned establishment, maybe because he got Pat pregnant and he needed work, because that's how the man says it's supposed to be. Skip tells the pilot of the plane that drops them off, "We thought a lot more than twice" about bringing the family out there. Th...

There's an echo--or whatever the opposite of an echo is--of Joe Versus the Volcano in the much briefer opening of Snowball Express . Baxter doesn't have a terminal diagnosis, of course. Rather, his great uncle (who he apparently didn't even know) died, and this is Baxter's new lease on life. Get out of the "smudge pot" of the city, the office, and go run a hotel in Colorado. I just learned this is based on a book called Chateau Bon Vivant --a true story apparently--about newlyweds Frankie and Johnny O'Rear who "arm themselves with a four-hundred-page volume entitled Theories of Hotel Management , two cases of bourbon... and a Vermont beagle" and set about a "twelve-year comedy of errors" running a ski-lodge in Quebec" (Back Cover Description, near as I can tell). Some details have been changed, of course. Frankie is Susan. Johnny is still Johnny but he left the office instead of the navy. Instead of two cases of bourbon, they...

There are more notes scribbled from yesterday's viewing of her . Like this line from the movie, in blue: Wha'ts it like to be alive in that room right now? And this below it in pink: Isn't this the longing of any relationship, at any distance? And, I think I'm going to ignore the rest of the scribbles because I'm in that moment as this month nears its end. Appropriately, I just finished watching the third season of 12 Monkeys . Time travel show, in case you don't know. Based on the film . Had a great line--one of the episodes of the show did--about women and what they mean: "The history I've seen is one of great women sung badly by clumsy men." Because, yeah, so much of history is told by men, smudging the details to make the men they want to be important seem more important than they actually are, or were. I mean, sure, we look at the present as having advanced the place of women, like suddenly they're more important. What we don't ...

And she has every right to be.                                                   That everyone questions it. That Bianca questions it. That is just wrong. Like an old Jeff Foxworthy routine twisted just a bit: You might be a misogynist asshole if you think Kat Stratford is wrong for being a bitch. You might be a misogynist asshole if you think Kat isn't justified in getting mad at Patrick for hiding the fact that Joey's paying him. And You might be a misogynist asshole, or just fundamentally misunderstand feminism, if you can't accept that Kat can turn right around and forgive him because (whether it's just a teenage version, or cinematic teenage version, or something more real) she loves him. Plus, even if she’s compromising her beliefs, she’s doing it for Heath Ledger. Who wouldn’t do that?

Some of the great moments in 10 Things I Hate about You are the more subtle things. Not Kat's overt antisocial behavior or her feminism but Bianca's disinterest in most of what Joey does, even as she's sort of stuck around him when he's near. As my daughter put it today, Bianca cannot be herself around Joey. But--and this is me. again--there are those moments that she's bothered by her own interest. Like when she calls his headshot "pensive" and he says he was going for "thoughtful." In that moment, she's more like her sister, smarter than the girl whose opening line is that shallow bit about liking her Skechers and loving her Prada backpack. Or when he's doing his underwear and swimsuit poses and she's got no more clue than we do what the difference is. Of course, one of the subtle moments that isn't as good is Bianca's and Joey's reaction to her accidentally shooting Mr. Chapin with a bow and arrow. The subtle non-react...

And then there’s that moment that Patrick doesn’t kiss Kat. Ostensibly because she’s been drinking and might still not be entirely in control of her faculties, and he’s a better man than Joey will ever be. But, in that moment, that isn’t how Kat experiences it. Two things are going on. On the one hand, given her shorthand history , Kat expects a guy to take advantage (and when she's the one offering, it's not even taking advantage, so much... Except inasmuch as she has been drinking, but if that's true, she's hardly in a position to judge, and if she's sober enough to judge, then she's not drunk enough for it to be) or, on the other hand, she's in that moment feeling like a "normal" teenage girl and Patrick is rejecting her. Thing is, Kat can be both. A teenage girl who wants Patrick to kiss her and a self-avowed feminist who still might not like boys in general. (And, no smart person should like boys in general, because they're awful. W...

For example , Kat Stratford, 10 Things I Hate about You --she can’t just be enlightened because she noticed that the world is unfair, that girls are not given the things that boys are, the, you know the world sucks just because you’re a teenage girl; you don’t have to had sex and regretted it and he dumped her. She can’t just be a “shrew” because the world is an awful, unfair place. No, we’ve got to have something specific, something the males in the audience can understand. Because the males in the audience are either assholes who just won’t like Kat except as much as they think she’s hot, or idiots who will just be frightened by her. As Sage Young at Bustle , puts it, “The implication is that her shame and anger drove her into becoming interested in women's issues, possibly supporting the idiotic theory that female feminists are women who aren't loved up enough to accept second-class status.” Then Young counters with another interpetation, that “a trauma leads Kat to lear...

A few complaints before I move on from Thelma & Louise : The simple ones I mentioned in brief parenthetically yesterday . When Thelma and Louise need money, Louise needs Jimmy to get some to her. The talking through of their relationship that comes after her call to Jimmy is an interesting scene, and I'm not sure how the film would really play without it. Louise needs to realize both that she has that relationship waiting, that there is a chance for her in the regular world, and that--remember, when she can't tell him what's going on, Jimmy gets angry and breaks a lamp--even this relatively healthy relationship has an obvious problem: Jimmy is still a male, in a world where men can rage with jealousy and it's accepted. She keeps something from him and, generally speaking, we're supposed to see that as wrong. Here, she's actually protecting him from getting into legal trouble. But Jimmy is still of that man's world, and you don't keep information fro...

I'm looking at the trivia section for Thelma & Louise in IMDb and I notice that it says the trailer presented the movie as a comedy. So, I watch the trailer and two things are immediately necessary to point out: 1. Yes, the trailer presents the film absolutely as a fairly light comedy, two women up to some crazy shenanigans. Police get involved, sure, but we don't really see how much. The trailer even explicitly cuts around the gun that Thelma points at the cop in his car. Shows him getting out with his hands up, but avoids showing the gun. We see an explosion, but there's no context, just more happy screaming and laughter. Like this is just a fun romp. Far more Outrageous Fortune than Kalifornia . Since Stephen Tobolowsky is in this, they should have just thrown in a shot of Ned Ryerson saying "Bing!" (Except, that footage wouldn't exist yet, obviously.) 2. What else were they going to do? 9 to 5 only worked like it did because it was a comedy, and ...