the groundhog day project

Look, I can appreciate this. I was young too. I felt just like you. Hated authority, hated all my bosses, thought they were full of shit. Look, it's like they say, if you're not a rebel by the age of 20, you got no heart, but if you haven't turned establishment by 30, you've got no brains. Because there are no storybook romances, no fairytale endings. So, before you run out and change the world, ask yourself, "What do you really want?" --Buddy Ackerman (Kevin Spacey), Swimming with Sharks The movie begins with lines from Lord Byron, not just because of the link to nature. Also, Chris McCandless--the fictional version, if not the real version--is a Byronic hero. A bit like an antihero, the Byronic hero doesn't fit in with society. He's got a distaste for social norms and the trappings of life as most of us know it. I don't need to deliberately be political (or avoid being so) in this blog, as I did yesterday , because the Byronic hero is inherentl...

OVERTURE Multiple directors and several parts, How the West Was Won is a big movie. So big it was filmed and projected in Cinerama, three projectors running simultaneously with one giant curved screen. I've read that eyelines and whatnot may be a little weird watching this on a flat screen... I'm sure I've seen this movie before, more than once, but that wasn't something I would have been paying much attention to, I'm guessing. Anyway, on to the movie. Oh, the music. Classic stuff, sampled or copied in many a film since. Not too long ago I watched Romancing the Stone (because I was considering it for this blog), and I swear the music over the opening novel sequence is just this music straight, no copy, no reference, just plugged in as is. (If it wasn't it might as well have been.) But, for good reason. This music is Western music. This and that theme from The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly --as iconic, or moreso than, some John Williams stuff for Star Wars ...