the groundhog day project

So a few pet peeves. One about something that happens in movies. One about how people react to movies. And one about life. I'll be as brief as I can. One, and this one occurred to me watching 9 to 5 , is when a conversation is split over two scenes. The example in 9 to 5 isn't even the most egregious example--Judy waits until she is at the store with Violet to ask about Doralee, when realistically she would have asked, you know, on the way there. Some movies, though, it's like midsentence, or between question and response, and that is not how people talk. It's a cheap manipulation of the medium. (To be fair, it can be used well, to suggest a conversation that happens again and again. Because one character just can't let something go, for example. But, too often it's just cheap.) Two, and this one occurred to me watching The Mummy , is about how people measure a film too much by what they wanted it to be. In this case, so many reviews referencing the 1999 The ...

For some reason, every time I watch The Exorcist , I forget that it starts with that sequence at the excavation in Iraq. Of course, the movie is not called The Possessed (though I am pretty sure that I have seen more than one movie with that title); it is not about Regan (Linda Blair) but about Father Merrin (Max von Sydow) and, even moreso, Father Karras (Jason Miller). Something Clover (1992) tries to explain "this gendered division of narrative labor--to understand what it is about the male crisis that needs harnessing to a narrative of female hysteria or indeed psychosis" (p. 70). While Regan's story drives the narrative, the narrative belongs to those two men (and primarily Karras). Man versus the devil. The girl is just their battleground. But, what kind of battleground is she? Kinder and Houston (1987) write about the "psychological interpretation" presented in the film to explain Regan's initial extraordinary behaviour--her parents' divorce ...

Let us begin with an update. Long-time readers, you should know, the piece by Michael Schulman, the reporter I met a year ago— Day 184 - it’s so beautiful —in Woodstock, has been published over at The Believer . I’m in there a bit alongside Danny Rubin. And, it’s quite good. For those of you finding this blog anew because of a) Schulman’s piece—called “That Accidental Swami” by the way—or b) it being Groundhog Day today, first of all, welcome. Second of all, the basics you should know: (Long-time readers, skip down past the image.) Yes, I watched Groundhog Day every day for a year and wrote blog entries related to and/or inspired by the film each of those days. Yes, I even went so far as to go on a pilgrimage to Woodstock, Illinois, where they filmed Groundhog Day last Groundhog Day. And, it all started because I had little going on in the summer before grad school got underway. Schulman quotes me—which is weird, quoting myself by way of an interviewer, but hey, it’s not the weird...

[EDIT: If anyone is coming to this blog from the Believer article, welcome. To find the daily pieces on Groundhog Day you've got to look at August 2013 to August 2014. And, I will be watching Groundhog Day and writing an entry related to it later today--today being February 2. The piece below was posted late last night for February 1st. For the month of January, I watched 5 action movies from the 1980s. Enjoy.] Let us get the most important item out of the way first off on this last day with Top Gun : There’s a question on Quora — In Top Gun , why was Jester allowed to fly below the “hard deck,” but Maverick and Goose were reprimanded for it? But, I’ve got a better question—if the “hard deck” was 10,000 feet and Maverick gets in trouble for flying below said altitude, what were both jets doing flying so low well before the moment in question? I mean, look at this: Does that look like they are above 10,000 feet? (It’s so low, it reminds me of the opening titles sequ...

(Before I get to Rambo tonight, there's this: earlier tonight in Media Theory and Criticism class, I got to talk about Groundhog Day . Went down a list of what our instructor calls Classic Hollywood Cinema criteria, matched up Groundhog Day to each one. Then, there were some followup questions--is it a Marxist film? is it a feminist film? something about Freudian psychoanalysis, something about class... and a few others--and the answers were easy. I told my instructor about this blog (or the first year of it, anyway) after class. He wants to read some entries. I'll have to figure out some good ones. Anyway, that's one more class I've included Groundhog Day in.) In Rambo and the Dalai Lama , Gordon Fellman (1998) calls Rambo "the personalization of war, the reduction of it to its pure elements of men facing each other in all their anger, toughness, power, confusion, and fear" (p. 108). Fellman, in writing about First Blood , details the scene in which Ram...