the groundhog day project

"Can we get back to politics?" - Thomas Jefferson, Hamilton If we do take Mrs. Doubtfire seriously, it stops being cute. Sure, it's still got, as Saer put it yesterday, watching the movie for the first time, "the feelz" but just because Daniel (Robin Williams) is hurting doesn't mean he should get what he wants. In fact, we're shown the troubling version of Daniel in the opening scene. He's doing voices for a cartoon and he's too concerned with "I've got to do what I've got to do" to realize that what he's got to do is his damn job so he can, you know, make money, and help Miranda (Sally Field) out with their kids. That's the real world. Instead, Daniel lives in a world where he feels just fine quitting that job (and note Lydia's (Lisa Jakub) familiarity with the idea of him getting fired) then spending however many hundreds of dollars it costs to rent a mobile petting zoo for his son's birthday party (which ...

At the start of Bulworth , Senator Jay Billington Bulworth (Warren Beatty, also directing and co-writing) is in the middle of a crisis. His vote is expected by a particular lobby--something to do with an insurance bill--but he's... Well, he's over it. He's been up all night watching his campaign ads, and he's... He's depressed. Tired of lying, I suppose. He hasn't eaten or slept in three days. And, he's about to hire someone to kill him after making a $10 million deal with a lobbyist for his daughter. He doesn't get along with his wife (Christine Baranski, playing her coolest) but I suppose he cares about his daughter. We don't meet her, so we must assume. He's off to a junket in Los Angeles, starting with an African-American church, when one of those ads he was watching before was against affirmative action; I don't think we can assume that he has much support among the African-American community. For the record, I've seen this movie...