the groundhog day project

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...

Generally speaking, there are two kinds of nightmares: the kind that you actually have, and the kind they make into movies. - Roger Ebert Great line. Of course, he also claims that Hellbound: Hellraiser II "has no plot in a conventional sense." I'm not so sure about that, but, to be fair, it has been a while since I've watched this movie. We'll see soon enough. Opening with pre-Pinhead solving the box works well. He seems to be opening it more out of boredom than some obsessive desire like Frank. And, the quick montage of the creation of Pinhead sets up the end of this film--Dr. Channard (Kenneth Cranham) becoming a Cenobite. But, the closeups on the head wounds-- --invoke some of the imagery of the labyrinth we will see later in the film, as well. On the... agreeing-with-Roger front, Annie Billson wrote in Sky Magazine , February 1989, "This is the kind of film which abandons logic for a non-stop barrage of weird goings-on and ultra-gory special eff...

For the record, I would have rather had more research and depth for yesterday 's entry. Given the short time frame I've got to research stuff for this blog, I just couldn't find a good source about queer coding in cinema. Found a few sources talking about how certain characters in, say, 1950s' films can be understood as gay even though their films could not really have them be, given the Hays Code. But, they just didn't get into details about what aspects of a character demonstrated coded homosexuality. Unfortunately, the topic proved more complicated than I had hoped. But, life--and this blog--goes on. The starting point today is a bit from Ebert's (1981) review of the film. He tells us that "the film doesn't like women [and so] its sex scenes all create fear and hostility." I got into this a bit the last two days , and I must at once both agree and disagree with Ebert's sentiment. On the one hand, I do not believe the hostility and fear t...

Freud will have to continue a little bit for a couple reasons: 1) there is bit more to say about Freud before I inject some Lacan and 2) I realized that Mulvey doesn't include Jung, so in terms of my paper not being a research paper but an analytical piece based around the supplied readings, I shall leave Jung out of it... even if there may be useful things to say; for instance, much of what Mulvey is trying to argue about how Freudian psychoanalysis connects with common cinematic representation fits with the Jungian idea of the collective unconscious . Effectively, however much a filmmaker intends to put psychoanalytic concepts into a film, they go in anyway. And, even divergent concepts, arguably, exist within film not necessarily because a filmmaker may deliberately be trying to diverge from the norm but unconsciously. But anyway, Freud... Another Freudian idea central to our experience of film, according to Mulvey, is scopophilia , looking as a source of pleasure. The voyeu...

From a psychoanalytic point of view, we can find Freudian, Lacanian and even Jungian imagery and narrative elements in Moulin Rouge! . That's an okay topic sentence, but I think I need an introduction. Most of the following entry will be part of my upcoming media theory paper if it goes well, so I've got to worry about structure and formal content a little more than usual. Still, I will interrupt if I need to, and just cut these parts later. Anyway... Figuring on maybe looking at Moulin Rouge! in terms of psychoanalysis (which I will work on during this viewing), as a populist film and... probably queer theory, since I;m working on a presentation on queer theory for performance studies, or as an auteur film (except we're not expected to do research outside the readings we had for class, so that one might not be so doable. Our class defines musical as a genre even if I do not, so I could go with that. Whatever I end up using, the following should be a bit of what I'l...