the groundhog day project

I was raised white. Let me just be honest about that. Born in the 70s, much of my formative development happened during the Reagan 80s and I can't change that. I can't change who I am in that regard, no matter what I do. I saw a lot of movies with hypermasculine heroes killing a lot of foreigners. I saw a lot of random women bare their breasts for a paycheck because the Internet hadn't been invented yet and that kind of thing wasn't available for free. (Weirdly, the new thing these days, in the... Twenty tens? Is showing a penis in your film because that's subversive or something. But, penises are available for free on the Internet, too, so it is a bit... Deliberate, I suppose. All those years exploiting all those young women, I supposed it's fair play that male actors have to show their penises whether they like it or not. Because fuck men, especially white men. They've had the power for far too long. Like One-Eyed Willy. I mean, who does he think he is? H...

I can forgive--fairly easily because I grew up in the 80s so I know how movies were with the casual racism and sexism and whatnot--that the Fratellis feels like Italian criminal stereotypes and Data is the quintessential Asian stereotype (minus some martial arts skills, but Ke Huy Quan had already done a bit of that in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom ) of the 1980s. Well, East Asian. If he'd been from farther west, he would have been a villain of some sort. But anyway, I can forgive that. Because, it's 1985, and America is very racist, very sexist, homophobic, and heteronormative. (Like today, only the most bigoted of us didn't have to claim so energetically how much we weren't. We just let it flow.) But, I cannot forgive Mrs. Walsh (Mary Ellen Trainor) for her racism. I mean, seriously, Mouth is a smartass little jerk, Chunk swears constantly--and Mrs. Walsh specifically dislikes swearing, mind you--but when they are both in her house, who does she notice? Whose ...

No dancing today. Not, that anyone but me knew today I intended to talk about dancing. I’ve already mentioned Rita’s dorky dancing and Debbie’s crazy dancing and there is so much more awesome and horrendous dancing in Groundhog Day . But, it will have to wait as the software I use to cut clips is busy doing something else that I did not expect to take so long. (And, isn’t it nice to see someone other than Phil Connors trapped in a time loop like that… there’s a bit in Lupoff’s “12:01 P.M.” in which Myron Castleman thinks, …philosophically, it could be worse. Hung up at a period of five minutes, he’d never get anything done. And if it were really short—say, a second or less—it would be a living hell. I think Rita and Debbie have the right idea for a tiny time loop. You just gotta dance.) And, I could have just not mentioned it. But, that wouldn’t be fair (even if it might make for a more fluid blog entry) because this blog is about life, its ups and its downs, its Bill Mu...