the groundhog day project

But nevermind the personal rambling. I am sure there will be more later. For now, what about the movie? Vincent Canby, writing for the New York Times , calls the original Broadway play "processed American cheese, smooth, infinitely spreadable and bland, with color added by the actors. The screen version... Is not much different in any superficial way." I immediately think of Homer Simpson sitting up all night eating an entire package of American cheese, not because it is particularly delicious but because it just so damn edible. Canby's choice of "smooth" is a good descriptor. To be fair, Canby suggests that the film's cast "add more than color to this pasteurized product. 'On Golden Pond' now has the bite of a good old cheddar." It's not like Canby dislikes the film. Leave that to David Kehr, writing for the Chicago Reader , who calls the film "the cinematic equivalent of shrink-wrapping, in which all of the ideas, feelings, ch...

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...