the groundhog day project

As I start writing today's entry, I'm not sure if I'm going to watch Ice Castles one more time. I've got a 48-hour rental, so I could watch it a third time, really boil down what it taught me when I was a kid, but it's mostly going to be something simple and cheesy... like It taught me about perseverance and love and the importance of having people around you . Obvious crap like that. One thing it didn't teach me was that being blind is fine because you can get right back up and... skate. Again. I don't skate. Not only was that never my calling, I rarely roller skated, and often did it wrong, and have only ice skated like twice ever. But, that's beside the point. My calling when I was young (not as young as where I still am with this deconstruction thing. Older, able to have dreams about what I wanted to do with my life.) was writing, then filmmaking. I could write without my sight, I suppose. But, filmmaking... And, more importantly, filmwatching--thi...

Ice Castles is almost necessarily cheesy and sentimental. This particular story cannot be told any other way. At the core, there are two threads to the story--young girl, Olympic hopeful on the rise, loses her sight, then fights through near-complete blindness to skate again; and same young girl separated from her longtime boyfriend, cheats on him and only though her own struggle with that other story thread can she get her shit together and be with that longtime boyfriend again. It's a basic romance with a Cinderella sort of sports story over the top of it. As for that basic romance, I love Roger Ebert's take on this film... Have we grown so desperate for vicarious cheap thrills that the simple love story is done for? Is it no longer possible to have a movie in which two young people meet in the first reel, smooch in the third, get married in the seventh, and disappear into the sunset as we disappear down the aisles? I must interrupt because any film out of Hollywood wor...

Changing gears. After watching Halloween for a week, my daughter saw the movie that's on and asked "what's this got to do with Halloween?" I think she thought I was doing horror films for October. If we're lucky, I'll get to another horror film before the month is done but, no, I'm still deconstructing my childhood, watching the movies I saw often when I was a wee lad. This may mean some abrupt turns in theme or style, like today. From the beloved Halloween to a film I actually only remember portions of, and don't really know if it's any good (it has a 6.5 on IMDb, but sometimes you can't trust IMDb voters, of course). The film is Ice Castles . Notably, it's the actual plot I don't remember. Some obvious points--ice skater, olympics hopeful, in an accident, loses her eyesight, has to learn to skate again. Meanwhile, there's a romance. Maybe there's not much more, plotwise. Plenty more story right away, though. Lexie's (L...