the groundhog day project

I don't really want to talk about Heaven Can Wait again. If it taught me anything when I was a kid, it was bad things--that one guy can change the world with a few words, that love is magical and comes upon you out of nowhere, and it can conquer all. The film's take on reincarnation and the soul didn't fit with what church and bible class in school were teaching me, and neither take was particularly positive given I was being told regularly that the world was going to end . I mean, who cares if you go to heaven when you die, if your "soul" sits wound waiting for Christ to return and then you get to spend forever in the presence of God, or if you get a brand new body (maybe) after you die, when in a few short years this body you have right now is going to burn in a nuclear holocaust, or if by some slim chance it survives, you're going to die slowly from radiation poisoning, starvation, or some sort of post-apocalyptic factional violence? What points is romanti...

The big problem I've got with Heaven Can Wait is that so much of it plays as just too easy. Joe dies, and he's the only dead person who doesn't want to get on that Concorde at the way station? He gets to inhabit (temporarily) the body of a rich business man, and he can reverse all the bullshit corporate norms that just happen to be awful in reality with one board meeting? The first woman he meets in his new life just happens to be the love of his life? This one is really part and parcel of the point of the film, but he buys the Rams and they rush him and rush him to let him know they don't want them there and one successful pass and they're already turning around? Tony is setting up to kill Leo (Joe) a second [correction: third; I forgot about the ceiling mirror collapsing onto the bed] time and the film has set up the cannon firing when they take the flag down at the end of the day, so that detail is fine as a coverup of the gun noise, but Joe just happens to stan...

It's actually earlier in 1978, now. I neglected to get all of these movies in exact release order. Apologies. Anyway, the movie is Heaven Can Wait , a remake of Here Comes Mr. Jordan , and not a remake of the previous film called Heaven Can Wait . Warren Beatty reportedly wanted to cast Mohammad Ali and do a straighter remake--the protagonist who comes back was a boxer--but Ali wasn't willing, Beatty stepped in himself, the protagonist became a football player, and well, Heaven Can Wait happened. Now, I saw this a lot as a kid, but I don't remember liking it much until I was a a bit older. I found it kind of boring when I was really young. I think the guy's death just a few minutes in amused me, though. Riding his bike through a mountain tunnel, and some van with surfboards on the roof is trying to overtake a truck with a camper, so both lanes from the other end of the tunnel are occupied--CUT TO BLACK. At the weigh station in the clouds--which of course, has a Conc...