the groundhog day project

The best part of Fletch is not the humor, not the one-liners, or Fletch's deliberate obnoxiousness. The best part is that the plot works, and works well. And, like many a "detective" story-- like Jonny Gossamer novels in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang , "the plots, they all have this thing, this formula that was so cool... two cases that were seemingly unrelated. One's normal, and the other' some wild shit... Then you' defined out that they're connected. That it's all one case." --the two cases/stories that Fletch is working end up more connected than just the coincidence of him hanging out at the beach to look like a junkie and Stanwyk picking him because he seems aimless and disposable. And, the connections don't feel arbitrary. SPOILERS. But really, if you haven't already seen Fletch , you should just go watch it now, come back later. Stanwyk's connection the drug trade is a pretty good reason for him to fake his death and make a run ...

The Harold Faltermeyer music gets going and I'm all in when Fletch is on. We can start there. (Even though Hollywood Reporter reviewer Duane Byrge called the "eruption of mechanical drumming and percussive bass lines, appropriate in action and triumph-type movies... Annoying and incongruous here", the music helps define this film for me in a good way.) The titular Fletch (Chevy Chase) and his sardonic, sarcastic, deadpan disdain for everybody sat well with me when I was just turned nine and it sits well with me today. (Sidenote: I know the "Pup 'N' Taco" line could be taken as racist and dismissive, but I think it is just Fletch playing unsophisticated because he doesn't trust Alan Stanwick (Tim Matheson) one bit. Hell, most of Fletch's character, and his unsophisticated, boorish, childish behavior, is deliberate.) Meanwhile, in 2007, Reihan Salam, writing for Slate , calls the film "abominably bad" and I am baffled. Salam doe...

After calling heterosexual romantic comedies cheap yesterday , today I'm watching one that I remember fondly-- Two of a Kind . My final film for 1983 in my deconstruction of my childhood experience with film. A reminder: I'm not going back to every film I saw, or the big movies I saw, but specifically the films that I watched and rewatched time and time again as a kid. Two early thoughts rewatching this film after many years: 1. We're getting a POV shot from God flying through the clouds. That might be quite meaningful later. 2. Charlie (Charles Durning) swiping Earl's (Scatman Crothers) golf ball and nothing coming of it is pretty funny. Then we're with Zack (John Travolta), because God wants proof that a regular person can be good or he's going to flood the Earth again. Zack owes some guys some money, he's an inventor (and, interestingly, a bunch of his machines in his apartment seem to be working just fine, so I guess he's a good one), Stuart (Richa...

(We interrupt the planned programming here at The Groundhog Day Project --because my VHS set of Star Wars films didn't arrive and I don't feel like skipping ahead--to bring you a brief bit about mother! --because I saw it again today, and however much it is horrifying some people, I liked it even more the second time than I did the first time.) Honestly, you probably won't like mother! . I mean, statistically, most people won't like it. Maybe, taking into account the limited scope of this blog and the side of the Venn diagram of film aficionados who might come to my blog regularly, you're one of the few who will not only like it but love it. An Aronofsky fan, perhaps. A fan of divisive, provocative, polarizing cinema, maybe. Let's get some stuff out of the way right off. You know, SPOILERS. You're gonna get overloaded with imagery of violence, of gratuitous religiosity, of Jennifer Lawrence's breasts, of a newborn baby's half eaten corpse, and ...

Ottway's father's poem is so simple as to not quite ring true, though it's understandable that a man's man like John Ottway would appreciate it. It's like the epitome of some simplistic, stereotypical version of masculinity... Once more into the fray... Into the last good fight I'll ever know. Live and die on this day... Live and die on this day... In the commentary track, director Carnahan keeps coming back to masculinity, how Hollywood's sense of what it is to be a man has gone wrong. He's never particularly specific, though. Does he think that these men, who are (eventually) able to talk about their feelings and their fears and their love--of course, Ottway never talks about his wife with these men, only his father--are real men? Is he suggesting that the usual macho men of action movies are the wrong version? What kind of men are these men? In an interview with Screen Rant , Liam Neeson talks about men and emotions. He says: I don't think ...

Honestly, though I'm a vegetarian or whatever, I don't much care, as PETA did, that the cast ate wolf stew to get into the mood for the film. Now, I don't know the status of wolves in Alaska currently, endangered or what have you. There was a bit of a controversy at the time, though. Liam Neeson, unlike his fellow cast members, went back for seconds. PETA complained: "Neeson's stance on kindness to animals is sorely out of step with the rest of the world." Out of step with PETA maybe. The rest of the world? Not so much. The rest of the world seems to be just fine with torturing animals to get some meat to eat. A couple notes: the film was shot in Smithers, British Columbia. It is legal to trap and kill wolves in British Columbia (or was at the time; maybe that's changed. I don't know). Wolf stew (or the use of wolf carcasses in the film) was not illegal. I was going to point out that Liam Neeson also is not an American citizen (while PETA is an Ameri...

I was going to talk about wolf stew today. That will wait; I'll save it for later in the week when I've run out of things to say about The Grey . Instead religion... (There is a thing about wolf stew in relation to this film, by the way, a behind-the-scenes controversy. But...) Religion... (First, I spent today at Knott's Berry Farm. It started raining while we were there, and we still managed another couple rides. Point being, it has been a long day. But, I'm not particularly tired--it's well after 10pm as The Grey begins. Rather, I'm a little energized from treading old ground on Facebook . See, I used to debate politics on there all the time, long drawn out arguments with people I knew wouldn't be changed by what I said. But, I did it anyway. I like the idea of speaking up when you think something right. I don't do it enough these days... at least, on Facebook . I link to articles without comment, I offer brief posts about topics that matter fa...

I might lament that there's no new things to notice on the blu-ray. Visual things I mean. But a) that puts me in Phil's position in a way and b) that's crazy talk, there's always new things to notice. Regarding "b" I did notice that one thing the other night when I was actively searching, the chocolate wrapper on the table. And, just tonight I discovered a new thing not in the movie but on the disc. There are two sets of subtitles for English. The first is the old, plain one, words across the bottom of the screen. Second one, though--that's more fun, slightly different font it seems (hard to compare properly because I've got to cycle through 16 different subtitle settings to loop around and there's a pause between just the one English set and the other), and it's doing that thing where dialogue from a character on one side of the screen is positioned on that side of the screen. I almost worked at a place that did subtitles several years back ...

There will not be a lot of words today. Yesterday I actually had the blog entry ready before the movie was even on (because I shared part of a paper I’m working on for grad school dealing with Phil Connors as Christ-Figure) so I was trying to watch closely, see if I could spot anything new on the blu-ray copy. The only thing I really noticed new was that at the end of god day, when Rita is asleep in Phil’s room, someone has eaten one of the chocolates that is always on the table. So, I guess they skipped dinner and the candy shop. See, I’m doing something different today. I’m labeling things. This might take a while to load. What you’ll be seeing is some labeled screencaps, with character names and some nicknames I’ve put on some extras. Enjoy. And, that’s enough of that… for now. Today’s reason to repeat a day forever: I may have mentioned this one before but I could use a frame by frame breakdown of the film. And I still haven’t finishe...

There's an interesting thing I realized in relation to yesterday's entry --for those of you who didn't read it, whose eyes glazed over when you tried to read it, or who just don't feel like clicking on that link to remember what it was, the entry included a theory that Groundhog Day is actually an extended episode of Doctor Who . The "interesting thing" is that, if we take Rita as the TARDIS and not a companion, then Phil trying to get inside her all those nights is not at all sexual... ...or the Doctor entering the TARDIS all the time is . Of course, despite some people's idea of just what Phil and Rita did before going outside on February 3rd, the movie doesn't ever actually tell us they consummated their relationship. So, maybe they didn't. Then, the relationship becomes a little Freudian or Oedipal... one of those, or both--I'll admit I haven't studied psychology enough to be sure. In his Transparency blog, Ken Sanes describes his ...

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I'll meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about. Ideas, language, even the phrase “each other” doesn't make any sense. That’s Mawlānā Jalāl ad-Dīn Muḥammad Balkhī also known as Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī , or just Rumi. He was a 13th-century Persian poet and Sufi mystic. Someone much closer to me once wrote the following: Being an atheist is the easiest thing to be. You don't have to believe in anything so you can create your own moral standards, or lack thereof. Needless to say, at some point in watching Groundhog Day I thought of moral relativism. The film doesn’t deal with God much. I mean, sure, there’s the scene I call the “god” scene, but the theological debate on screen is not very great in detail or in depth. Rita’s best argument is, “You're not a god. You can take my word for it; this is 12 years of Catholic school talking.” She doesn’t presen...