the groundhog day project

The description on STARZ for today's movie begins: "The best sports film ever?" As I tell my Speech 101 students, don't start with a question. It gets me thinking, gets me not paying attention to you speaking and, in the case of this description, has me thinking about other films. I'm not a sports film kind of guy. I mean, I like some of every kind of movie, I'm sure, but if I ranked my genres--and I recently did just that , actually, while running a bracket of my favorite films on my podcast Cock & Bull --sports film is not near the top. My top 380 has so few that would qualify that when I broke down the list for an excel sheet, there wasn't even a column for it. A couple that might qualify: Meatballs ( 1178 1179 1180 1181 1182 ) Better Off Dead... ( 772 773 ) A couple documentaries: Hoop Dreams Free Solo The Wrestler comes pretty close to what makes a "sports film", and that's on the list as well. But, the ...

It's interesting that, as a kid, the big mystery films I watched a lot were Murder by Death (watching it now) and The Private Eyes (watching it sometime in the coming weeks, months, years? Who knows how long this "month" will take). Comedies that parody and/or satirize older detective films and stories that I had less access to. My views of detective stories in film would forever be tainted by these movies.           And, I sit here watching (and being distracted by cats and people, but mostly just watching). And thinking about genres, about how we experience them based on past experience. The same way we experience every film, of course, in context of your history with every other film we've seen. And, with genre, we learn the tropes, the conventions, we learn the character archetypes, the usual plots beats and settings. And, after a while, the details become so common and well known (even outside the films (or stories) themselves) that even if you hav...

A weird thought occurs to me. First, a note: most of the following post was written early to make time for game night and a busy day that began with taking my daughter Saer to the airport to go visit her grandparents and aunt and uncle. My other daughter, Hayley, is away visiting relatives and old friends with her mother. My son is in his room watching a show on Netflix . I'm here watching Groundhog Day for (probably) somewhere over the 400th time in the 22 and a half years since it first was in the theater. And, as Larry parked the newsvan in front of the Pennsylvanian Hotel (really, the Woodstock Opera House), I found myself thinking about last year when I made my pilgrimage to Woodstock, and how it felt like home to be in this place I'd seen every day for, at that point in this blog, six months. It was entirely the opposite of how it was for Phil. He got to Woodstock, where he'd been three times before, and to him it was alien, abhorrent. For me, it was a fantastic plac...

There are too many scenes set at night in Wyatt Earp . And, I say this not even 20 minutes into the film. There's a strange back and forth between very bright daytime scenes and too dark nighttime scenes... I know this movie is long so I'm trying to just sit with it for a bit rather than start typing away and have yet another blog entry so long that no one reads it all the way through. Also, while I want to continue the discussion from yesterday about the good man with a gun , about how we automatically side with the authority, how we decide on impulse who's right and who's wrong, damn the details, I'm inclined to also get into a redefinition (again) about what the Western is because Wyatt Earp is structurally a biopic, not a Western. Not that we have movie rental stores anymore, but Westerns often had their own section, but did we separate other settings? The middle ages from the dark ages, the industrial from the enlightenment? The Western is a strange "g...

Today, Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid . (But first, a story: Meant to be home in Los Angeles tonight. Stuck in Arizona instead. Car trouble. Up until the car trouble, today was going pretty well, though. We stopped off at Meteor Crater-- --and hiked down into Walnut Canyon-- --and that was before lunch. Car was making noise and I figured I'd get back to LA tonight, get it looked at in the morning. But, the car had other plans. Instead, we are still in Arizona, about 30 yards from this: And, really that's all you need to know about that.) That this film begins with old man Pat Garrett getting gunned down and, plotwise, is much the same as the later Young Guns II makes for a nice echo of that later film, starting, as it does, with Brushy Bill Roberts, AKA (claiming to be) old man Billy the Kid. Immediate impression of the casting... Coburn is good as a "lawman" and Kristofferson seems good as the outlaw but both seem a bit old for their roles, by...

(There should have been at least one sentence at the end of the blog entry for yesterday . I think that when I switched from tablet to phone to post what I had written, it didn't load the final version of the file in Pages . There was something--after the line about Crabb's various occupations--about him being an everyman, except that the only occupation of his that seems to have any success is not an occupation at all, but rather his role within the native tribe. I said it very briefly, but not particularly cleverly, and I am glad it was lost. It was a very long day, traveling through New Mexico. (Today was long, as well, so I don't imagine too many words today, either. And certainly nothing clever.) So, as for Crabb's... Little Big Man's success, it would fit well with the anti-establishment, satire side of things. The white man, even if he is an everyman, cannot rightly exist--or at least, live successfully--in a world where "human beings" exist. On ...

That painting by Frank McCarthy, which hangs at the Autry Western Heritage Museum near here, was used in some of the posters for Once Upon a Time in the West . And, I'm a good half hour into the movie before I type anything tonight. I'm just enjoying watching the ways Leone puts stuff together. He's obviously influenced by Ford, but he showed his tics with the Dollars Trilogy--the extreme closeups, the long shots. Here he makes generous use of slow pans as well, a lot more camera movement than with the Dollars Trilogy. Plus, he did some filming (at least a few establishing shots) in Ford's stomping ground of Monument Valley, not just Almeria, Spain. I can't find the original article, but I read a bit about how Leone considered his Westerns, especially The Good, the Bad and the Ugly , to be satire of the American Western. In pacing alone, that film and this one definitely deconstruct the action down the minutiae, offering us mysterious strangers--the Man with N...

If I can manage it, three movies today: Fistfull of Dollars , For a Few Dollars More and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly . "It's not really easy to like something you know nothing about," the Stranger says about a half hour into Fistfull of Dollars . He's talking about peace, but the thought is much the same for the audience. We don't know this guy, but we like him. Like many a Western hero, he rides into town an unknown. Unlike many another Western hero, he is not readily introduced thereafter through revealing dialogue. This guy's coming manipulations and his motivations are revealed in dialogue but not his identity. Who he is --that remains an unknown. Except inasmuch as he is like the classic Western hero. Function #1: "The hero enters a social group" (Wright, 1975, p. 41). We've seen men who had been away for a while (e.g. Ethan Edwards in The Searchers ) but also complete strangers (e.g. Shane in Shane ). Here we've got the Man with...

Two movies today-- The Gunfighter and High Noon . Johnny Ringo was born in 1850 and died in 1882. He was involved in the Mason County War and was a part of the Cochise County Cowboys, a group of outlaws that we will see again this month, and he was in the gunfight at the O.K. Corral. (Or he wasn't; highchapparal.com suggests that Ringo was actually in California at the time, though he would return to Tombstone soon thereafter. clantongang.com disagrees, putting Ringo in Tombstone at the time of the famous gunfight.) And, Ringo himself was inspiration for numerous Western film characters. Already, in 1939's Stagecoach and it's 1966 remake, we saw "The Ringo Kid" who said his "right name" was Henry. The real life Ringo was, of course, possibly involved in the murder of Morgan Earp and was definitely involved in a dispute with Doc Holliday, and in the 1986 TV remake of Stagecoach , the Doc was changed to be Doc Holliday, suggesting that, if we had n...

(This month, I'm doing things a little differently; I will be watching 10 films--each recommended by someone else, each one for three days.) For the equivalent of $5524.99 today, you can go to Roman World for the hedonism, Western World for the violence or Medieval World for... a different kind of violence I guess. This is a bunch of rich people. Let's get that out of the way up front. I mean, they're still humans, and it's easy enough to empathize with them when they are in danger. We learn pretty young to idealize the rich; it's no coincidence that so many of Disney's animated films are about princes and princesses. It goes right along with the whole protestant ethic... ...which I did not want to write about today. But it has to be said. This entire story is a fantasy. We have to identify with these rich people spending tons of money to play, and then we can fantasize about being them right alongside fantasizing about being at Delos, in one of those thr...

Lake Oswego, OR - It is late. Had a long day of traveling that did not go as planned, but ended up ok. Since I'm not at home, that meant watching the movie then writing this, so I'm an hour and a half or so behind my usual schedule. But, I have little to say today. I got a lot of notes today reading through a new book I found--Nowell's ( 2011) Blood Money: A History of the First Teen Slasher Film Cycle . A lot about genre, about defining what is or isn't a slasher film. But, I'll get to those notes in a couple days. For now, there is this: Today's film, Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter is one of the best Friday the 13th movies in my opinion, possibly one of the best slasher films all around. It encompasses and encapsulates so much of the tropes of the slasher film without feeling particularly arbitrary about it. But, I wanted to share something I learned about the original Friday the 13th today. Nowell (2011) deals with slasher films using terminology out...